The founder of Greenpeace, Lyle Thurston, is dead and this raises the sticky question of what to do with his body. I hope that his organizations members will do their upmost to ensure that he is disposed of safely.
Lets look at the options:
Burial at Sea
In his later years, Thurston joined the Sea Sheppard Society, so this might have a strong appeal.
But theres the aforementioned sticky-ness. First there is the medication in his system - environmentalists in Toronto are demanding action be taken to prevent medication from entering the water supply - Greenpeace would not want to contribute to that problem. But even if that were not a problem, they also need to keep in mind the casket and shroud:
When preparing the body for burial, no embalming is allowed as this preservative could cause water pollution. Instead, a cotton sheet or biodegradable body bag may be employed. In fact, no materials may be included in the coffin which could present a danger to the marine environment. This includes the body itself (a certificate acknowledging that it is free from fever and infection should be obtained) and the coffin itself (which must not be made of synthetic materials, zinc, lead or copper).
Posted by: john frum ||
03/31/2008 14:31 Comments ||
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Let's cut him into tiny, tiny bits, and discreetly disperse them along hiking trails, so critters can eat them. Voilà! No pollution. And even if there is pollution as it was done with discretion, no one will know, so it's like it never happened.
The following essay, adapted from the Introduction to this booklet, shows how, as early as the 1980s, operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood, parent group for al Qaeda and Hamas, formulated a blueprint for a "jihadist process" that would ultimately sabotage the "miserable house" of the United States. These Muslim Brotherhood operatives saw that the work of undermining the U.S. could be best accomplished by the use of front groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Students Association. But while CAIR was designed to work in the legal-cultural realm, posturing as another of the minority rights groups functioning in the public square, the MSA's role was to be restricted to college campuses, where it would advance the cause of radical Islam and lead the effort to stigmatize Israel.
Over the next several days, Front Page will publish profiles of individual chapters of the MSA on a variety of campuses around the country, showing how specifically they achieve the broad goals of the organization. The Editors
As revealed in documents seized by the FBI and entered as evidence in a Texas court, the Muslim Students Association is a legacy project of the Muslim Brotherhood.[1] The Brotherhood is an organization formed by a Hitler-admiring Muslim named Hasan al-Bannain Egypt in 1928.[2] It was designed to function as the spearpoint of the Islamo-fascist movement and its crusade against the West.
Blogger "Coconut Lady" @ her site, "Liberal Rapture" h/t Instapundit
Nothing here we conservatives didn't already know about, but the intensity of feeling here is remarkable--and I think she's got a good grasp of Obama's substantive flaws.
. . . By lying overtly and covertly about who he is Obama has poisoned this campaign and this country. He has used his considerable talents as an orator to fool the chattering classes and the media. He has used skillful oratory to blur his questionable past, rewrite our recent history, and open another gash in the wound of race in America. He has taken the difficult issue of race and turned it into a Benetton commercial and wonders why Pennsylvania isn't buying it. He breathlessly compares his grandmother to the putrid Wright and wonders why his grand "speech" didn't take. He has taken the low road, while claiming the high one. He has lied about his intentions for the wars if elected. He has lied about his association with his church: Our Lady of Perpetual Resentment. He has plagiarized speeches, lied about both Clintons, lied about NAFTA, and run a dishonest, ruthless campaign. He has willfully associated with bigots, slumlords and terrorists to further his career. (Yes, William Ayres is a terrorist.) He has turned the idea of meritocracy on its head by elevating vagueness and self promotion to messianic heights. He has accomplished nothing of note in his public life and insults those who have. Finally, the clip below of the staged "woman fainting" at his revival meetings is seemingly minor but goes to the heart of the Obama ideology: Illusion over reality.
He is a fraud.
I loath his campaign for good reason.
Voters in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina can drive a stake into the heart of the Obama campaign - or Republicans, Independents, and 25-40% of the Democrats can in November.
Let me tell you: if Michigan and Florida had not been thrown overboard by Howard Dean and Donna Brazile - Obama would not matter. "God Damn, America!" is not going away. It is testimony to the willing irresponsibility of the media that Wright's bile was not shown to the nation earlier. If Wright had been known to us in January, Obama would be a footnote now. It was out there to be seen. It is only compliant, brain-dead, synchophants in the MSM that kept those tapes off the air for so long. With two candidates that cannot get a majority of the delegates we have a real monster on our hands.
Obama has never been qualified for the Presidency. But staying in a church in which your pastor screams GOD DAMN AMERICA! from the pulpit disqualifies him forever. He is responsible for his actions. His action in this case was to make excuses. All the ass kissing by all the kings men - and women - (Olbermann, Dowd, Rich, and the rest) can't put Obama back together again. Independents are falling away like Greenland glaciers. Republicans will be energized. And half the Democratic party will be angry.
Finally, when all is said and done - it is his lunatic supporters I fear most. We have gotten a small taste of that happy mob turning ugly this week. Imagine what they'd do with a President Obama (lol) stranded between his own rhetoric and reality.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/31/2008 12:10 ||
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good screed - but it seems she wants to vote for Hillary - the lying thug who thinks not only the working class is stupid but also knows how easy it is to manipulate the Harvard/Yale/Columbia set?
I'll be impressed when she realizes that her Democratic party has felt her a fool and a tool for as long as she has been alive.
#2
"Independents are falling away like Greenland glaciers. Republicans will be energized. And half the Democratic party will be angry."
What's the downside?
(Other than her Gerbil Wormening glacier remark - but ya' can't have everything.)
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/31/2008 13:13 Comments ||
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Yup, she can't stand the lunatic Obama supporters but wants the Clinton outfit back in office. I think that's called 'cognitive dissonance'.
Posted by: Steve White ||
03/31/2008 13:16 Comments ||
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good screed - but it seems she wants to vote for Hillary - the lying thug who thinks not only the working class is stupid but also knows how easy it is to manipulate the Harvard/Yale/Columbia set?
. . . she can't stand the lunatic Obama supporters but wants the Clinton outfit back in office . . .
There's an equally scathing critique of Hillary to be made, but she hasn't yet caught on to that.
Give her time. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/31/2008 13:38 Comments ||
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Wait till she starts feeling betrayed by Hilary. It will be a doozie, too. Then she can start feeling as we do, heh.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
03/31/2008 15:21 Comments ||
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*** Im Reporting For Duty, Part II: The comparisons between McCain's '08 bid and Kerry's in '04 have been unmistakable: Both men, early on, were their party's overwhelming favorites to win the nomination; then they encountered trouble and got overshadowed by other candidates; and then almost out of nowhere they locked up the nomination. Now, as McCain today embarks on his "Service to America" tour across the country, there's another comparison between the two men: the emphasis of their military experience. . . .
I hear this sort of thing a lot and I just think it's entirely unpersuasive. John Kerry's attempt to run as a war hero struck lots of people as preposterous even before the Swift Boat Vets went to work on him. Kerry made his name as a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War. He rose up within the ranks of liberalism for confirming what the left said about the war. Whether or not he gave back his medals, he was certainly happy to have lots of people think he gave them back when it was politically convenient. He came from the dovish wing of the dovish party. To the extent his military service really appealed to activist Democrats it was purely a matter of winking irony. He was the Daily Kos crowd's anti-chicken-hawk candidate. Kerry was supposed to prove that even vets could be doves. When he "reported for duty" at the Democratic convention the people who cheered the loudest were the anti-war and anti-military crowd.
Meanwhile, John McCain's entire career and political persona comes from an entirely different direction. To the extent their military-service narratives reinforce an ideological stance the two men couldn't be more different. Kerry invoked his military career as a fig leaf for his dovishness and as a means to undercut Bush's inauthenticity (in the eyes of Democrats). The important part of Kerry's life-story isn't his service but his denunciation of what he was called to service for. McCain's story arc is entirely different.
More importantly, the voters who are swayed by such things are not evenly distributed between the two parties. Even if McCain's and Kerry's stories were morally and politically equivalent, the audiences they're appealing to are very different.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/31/2008 10:53 ||
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So did I, and about 400,000 other people at the same time. Does that mean I'm qualified to run for President? My ego isn't that big. Nor are
the egos of most of my contemporaries. Big difference spending Christmas watching Bob Hope and spending it in a POW camp. McCain on points.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
03/31/2008 16:56 Comments ||
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Did not mean to upset you OP. The point of the article was "equivalence" (or lack thereof) between the two. Both spent Christmas in Vietnam? Kerry claimed he spent Christmas in Cambodia. McCain suffered in the North. No disrespect to any vet was intended.
. . . Where did the magic go? Well, the show got miscast. I wrote a decade ago that Hillary was like Margaret Dumont to Bills Groucho Marx. He goes around leering at cocktail waitresses, waggling his eyebrows and his famously unlit cigar. And Hillary would stand there seemingly oblivious to the subpoenaed dress and DNA analysis and all the rest: In double-acts, the best straight men (or women) are the ones who appear never to get the joke, and that was Hillary in the late Nineties, standing on stage alongside Bill night after night with her rictus grin and droning in the robotic cadences of that computerized voice in your car that tells you to fasten your seatbelt that I. Am. So. Proud. Of. My. Husband. And. Our. President. Bill. Clinton.
But you cant recast: You cant put Margaret Dumont in the Groucho role. In their heyday, the Clintons ran a thuggish operation fronted by an ingratiating charmer. Now the charming facades gone, and the backroom thuggery is ineffective. The Clinton campaigns letter to Nancy Pelosi suggesting that she might like to reflect (if you know what we mean) on her call for the super-delegates to support the winner of the popular vote (ie, Obama) was notable not for its menace but for its clumsiness: Few sights are more forlorn than an enforcer who can no longer enforce. The Clinton letter reminded me of Elena Ceausescu still trying to pull the dont-you-know-who-I-am routine even as the firing squad were taking aim.
But on she staggers. Even if she cant win, she can deny victory to Obama, and to her party. As they say in showbusiness, its not important for me to succeed, only for my friends to fail.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/31/2008 09:47 ||
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Ceausescu, Groucho Marx and the stained blue dress all in the same article. The man is a genius.
#3
More appropriate then you think. Groucho always said that Margaret never had a clue...
Decades later, in his one man show at New York's Carnegie Hall, Groucho mentioned Dumont's name and got a burst of applause. He informed the audience that she rarely understood the humor of their scenes together and would ask him, "Why are they laughing, Groucho?"
#4
...Groucho is the go to guy on this subject in more ways than one. Consider:
"The last guy who had hold of this place
He didn't know what to do with it -
If you think this country's bad off now, just wait till I get through with it!
The country's taxes must be fixed
And I know what to do with 'em -
If you think you're paying too much now,
Just wait till I get through with 'em!
I will not stand for anything that's crooked or unfair
I'm strictly on the up and up, so everyone beware
If anyone gets caught taking graft
And I don't get my share
We'll stand 'em up against the wall, and pop! goes the weasel!"
- Duck Soup, 1933
And if that doesn't describe Hilary!, I don't know what does.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/31/2008 18:36 Comments ||
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"Bills Groucho Marx. He goes around leering at cocktail waitresses, waggling his eyebrows and his famously unlit cigar."
Bill is was waggling a helluva lot more than his eyebrows....
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/31/2008 19:10 Comments ||
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For Canadians, Trudeaumania was a magic elixir that blotted out the troubles of the modern world. Barack Obama is now selling the United States the same poisonous political opium
Lionel Chetwynd, National Post (Canada)
MSNBC talk-show host Chris Matthews tells us that Barack Obama's victory speech on Super Tuesday sent "a thrill up his leg." Frothing on, he compares the candidate to JFK. . . . Yet those who were there in 1960 do not recall John Kennedy evoking the clamour or deep, deep visceral response Mr. Obama seems to summon at will. The infection being loosed upon the land is far more rare than anything seen in 1960, more scarce even than the false memories of the revisionist hawkers of Camelot.
But I have seen this virus before; it devastated a country I loved, a place that nurtured me and raised me up.
In that Canadian day, we called it "Trudeaumania," the suggestion of "Beatlemania" pop idol glitter being no accident. Even those of us in his Liberal party were powerless to stop the mad embrace millions of Canadians threw around Pierre Elliott Trudeau with his promise of reconciliation of the two founding peoples, a happy era when the English (more correctly, Scottish) heritage would join hands with the French legacy and take us forward into a brave new age. And he'd reforge our relationship with "The Elephant to our South."
That he was completely non-specific, avoiding policy questions in favour of depending entirely on his style and panache (and goodness knows, he had a surfeit of both) would surely undo him -- or so those of us who believed him to be a hard line leftist (because we'd read his essays in Cite Libre and studied his record) reassured ourselves.
Of course, we were wrong; his very lack of specificity was his strength. A brilliant orator, he spun webs around huge crowds, proposing big ideas in obscure terms, making it possible for the listener to impose any dream they wished upon his smiling, Savile Row-suited tabula rasa. He was all things to all people. In service to "party loyalty" and civility, we held our tongues.
And, in the meantime, the delighted English-language media, at last faced with a French-speaking Canadian they could love, dubbed him "Canada's JFK." By the time he and they were done, the damage would be staggering, even two generations later. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
03/31/2008 08:56 ||
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For a minute, I thought you meant that Michelle Obama was going to be featured in Penthouse...
#4
I heard that when Obama was making one of his political speeches, Chris Mathews took off his bra and threw it on stage. But, I wasn't there, so I'm not sure.
Jonathan Alter Politicians by nature construct personal narratives about themselves that make them seem shinier, if not larger than life.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/31/2008 00:00 ||
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lol! Such a typical Clinton defense: Everyone does it! No Jonathan, everyone does not make up stories about sniper fire that can easily be verified. It shows just how freaking crazy this woman is. Those who are out defending her on this very serious problem in her campaign only make themselves look even more pathetic than she.
By FRANK RICH MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clintons Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?
I love it when they eat their own.
In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of sniper fire into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldnt be true because by the time of the first ladys visit in March 1996, the war was over. Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the Today show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: I think the only red phone moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?
Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a comedian and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patricks Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of four Pinocchios, her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to Morning Joe on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was possible she misspoke in the most recent instance of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.
Clinton campaign in a nutshell.
Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obamas relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clintons Bosnian bridge too far.
Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?
Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle a watershed event for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with misstatements and elisions, from the health-care task force fiasco onward.
But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clintons character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.
Whats been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clintons Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.
Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tuzla, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bushs flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during Mission Accomplished.
That Mrs. Clintons campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton though surely knowing her story was false thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first ladys foreign trip as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.
I'm just guessing but I think they were counting on CBS to keep their mouths shut ...
The Drudge Reports link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news programs nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest comeback on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of sleep deprivation and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.
The Clinton campaigns cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web chats and Hillcasts, the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.
Notice the Hildebeast never once offered to meet with some big-time political bloggers, left right or center, for a conversation. That would have generated some big hits and press for her, but she isn't willing to do anything unscripted ...
Senator Obama, for all his campaigns Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, were learning, can outdraw videos of a candidates fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obamas speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.
But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web. For all the economic anxiety roiling Americans, they have not forgotten Iraq. The anger can rise again in a flash when stoked by events on the ground or politicians at home, as it has throughout the rites surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion and 4,000th American combat death. This will keep happening as it becomes more apparent that the surge is a stalemate according to the NYT, bringing neither lower troop levels nor anything more than a fragile temporary stability to Iraq. John McCains apparent obliviousness to this fact remains a boon to the Democrats.
Except that about 60% of the public agrees with John and is willing to hang in there as long as events don't go to hell in Iraq. 60% will win the election.
The war is certainly a bigger issue in 2008 than race. Yet it remains a persistent Beltway refrain that race will hinder Mr. Obama at every turn, no matter how often reality contradicts the thesis. Whites wouldnt vote for a black man in states like Iowa and New Hampshire; whites wouldnt vote for blacks in South Carolina; blacks wouldnt vote for a black man who wasnt black enough. The newest incessantly repeated scenario has it that Mr. Obamas fate now all depends on a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/31/2008 00:00 ||
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Politicians and Car Dealers are the only people left on the planet that are unaware of the coming of the digital age. Curious coincidence wouldn't you say?
You can sit there in front of the car dealer with the Edmunds papers in your hands in plain view of them and listen to them lie with a straight face. Same with politicians.
#4
Senator Clintons problem is not that she has a difficulty telling the truth. Face it, the Clinton legacy will always be about complete disregard for raw facts that dont support their narrative. Her problem is that even her fellow Democrats have started to take notice that she doesnt have the ability to spread the bullshit like her husband.
#5
Frank Rich's column is verbose but its an indicator that the NYTimes has turned on Hillary.
Not only is she about done for 2008, but with the media elite hitting her like this it will make fundraising way more difficult both for this year and if she wants to try for a Prez bid in 2012.
Of course, by 2016, Chelsea will be eligible to be elected President.
#6
They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first ladys foreign trip...
I doubt it. They are a) pros, and b) Team Clinton. They calculated the likelihood as near-zero based on their prior experience with factor (b) being Teflon-like with the media between 1993 and 2000.
Posted by: Grenter Protector of the Geats4975 ||
03/31/2008 16:02 Comments ||
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But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web
poor dems. Frank Rich and friends are so deranged that think they can write off Hillary's lie by using 6 billion words to say that it is understandable she would be compelled to lie because of her "misvoting on Iraq".
Yeah, right Frank. Who were you saying was gettin old and out of it?
#8
Her problem is that even her fellow Democrats have started to take notice that she doesnt have the ability to spread the bullshit like her husband.
More like that she doesn't have the power to break kneecaps and careers like her husband did...
#9
The Democrats have been nurturing and fertilizing the politics of division. They have fostered cultural wars. They have tried to Balkanize America. They have tried to split this great country into factions. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and they don't seem to have a clue that they have fouled their own nest.
#1
Amazing how this man can evoke so much atmosphere with just a few words and pictures. I almost feel like I've just flown a patrol out in western Iraq in a Blackhawk.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/31/2008 8:52 Comments ||
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I read Yon it takes me back. Only thing missing is the stink.
#3
#2 I read Yon it takes me back. Only thing missing is the stink.
Nuoc mom, rice paddies in the harsh sun, open-air latrines, dung fires, and red dirt and sweat. Plus jungles in and of themselves have a unique smell that can't be forgotten. Frankly, I'll be happy to sit this one out. War is for young(er) men these days.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
03/31/2008 17:06 Comments ||
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War is for young(er) men these days.
Always has been. My uncle who served in WWII said the same thing after his first tour to Nam.
More background on Vatican-Muslim "dialogue", including talks in Indonesia. The Holy See seems to be putting a greater emphasis on conversion as part of its "reciprocity" argument.
#1
This Pope has a habit of surprising those who listen to the lefty leaners that serve as underlings in the Vatican's "state department". The Pope is far more orthodox and evangelical than anyone suspected.
#2
Nature abhors a vacuum and power hates being shared.
So you can bet your bottom dollar that the Saud family have been scheming just as long and just as hard against the Wahabbis as the Wahabbis have been scheming against the Saud family.
I just hope that when the Sauds make their move, it breaks the back of the Wahabbis in Arabia.
Spengler gets what Pope Benedict and the new convert Magdi Cristiano Allam are doing.
by Spengler
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 September 2006 address at Regensburg was "undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert". Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more threatening: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. Before Benedict's election, I summarized his position as "I have a mustard seed and I'm not afraid to use it." Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.
Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy's newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of "moderate Islam" in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be "moderate".
Since September 2001, the would-be wizards of Western strategy have tried to conjure an "Islamic reformation", or a "moderate Islam", or "Islamic democracy". None of this matters now, for as Magdi Allam tells us, the matter on the agenda is not to persuade Muslims to act like liberal Westerners, but instead to convince them to cease to be Muslims. The use of the world "revolution" is Magdi Allam's:
His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.
There is no deference to mutual respect and multi-culturalism. Magdi Allam forsook Islam because he considers it to be "inherently evil". As he wrote to his editor at the Corriere della Sera:
My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy ...
I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a "moderate Islam", assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive [emphasis added].
Far more important than denouncing the evils of Islam, though, is Magdi Allam's embrace of what he calls the God of faith and reason:
The miracle of the Resurrection of Christ has reverberated through my soul, liberating it from the darkness of a tendency where hate and intolerance in before the "other", condemning it uncritically as an "enemy", and ascending to love and respect for one's "neighbor", who is always and in any case a person; thus my mind has been released from the obscurantism of an ideology which legitimates lying and dissimulation, the violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission and tyranny - permitting me to adhere to the authentic religion of Truth, of Life, and freedom. Upon my first Easter as a Christian I have not only discovered Jesus, but I have discovered for the first time the true and only God, which is the God of Faith and Reason ...
Magdi Allam presents an existential threat to Muslim life, whereas other prominent dissidents, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offer only an annoyance. Much as I admire Hirsi Ali, she will persuade few Muslims to reconsider their religion. She came to the world's attention in 2004 after a Muslim terrorist murdered Theo van Gogh, with whom she had produced a brief film protesting the treatment of women under Islam. As an outspoken critic of Islam, Hirsi Ali has lived under constant threat, and I have deplored the failure of Western governments to accord her adequate protection.
Yet the spiritual emptiness of a libertine and cynic like Theo van Gogh can only repel Muslims. Muslims suffer from a stultifying spiritual emptiness, depicted most poignantly by the Syrian Arab poet Adonis (see Are the Arabs already extinct?, Asia Times Online, May 8, 2007). Muslim traditional society cannot withstand the depredations of globalized culture, and radical Islam arises from a despairing nostalgia for the disappearing past. Why would Muslims trade the spiritual vacuum of Islam for the spiritual sewer of Dutch hedonism? The souls of Muslims are in agony. The blandishments of the decadent West offer them nothing but shame and deracination. Magdi Allam agrees with his former co-religionists in repudiating the degraded culture of the modern West, and offers them something quite different: a religion founded upon love.
Only a few months ago it seemed fanciful to hail Benedict XVI as the leader of the West. I wrote late last year (The inside story of the Western mind, Asia Times Online, November 6, 2007):
The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West. None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehends this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address.
One does not fight a religion with guns (at least not only with guns) but with love, although sometimes it is sadly necessary to love one's enemies only after they are dead. The Church has lacked both the will to evangelize Muslims as well as the missionaries to undertake the task. Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, has thought about the conversion of the Muslims for years, as I reported just before his election in 2005 (The crescent and the conclave, Asia Times Online, April 19, 2005). Where will the Pope find the sandals on the ground in this new religious war? From the ranks of the Muslims themselves, evidently. Magdi Allam is just one convert, but he has a big voice. If the Church fights for the safety of converts, they will emerge from the nooks and crannies of Muslim communities in Europe.
The Pope also has in reserve the European youth movement "Communione e Liberazione", which he has nurtured for decades. Forty-thousand members turned out in 2005 when the then Cardinal Ratzinger addressed a memorial service in Milan for the movement's founder. European Christianity may be reduced to a few coals glowing in the ashes, but it is not dead, only marginalized. If the Catholic youth of Europe are offered a great task - to evangelize the Muslims whose restlessness threatens to push Europe into social chaos - many of them may heed the call.
As I wrote in 2005, "Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity." Today's Europeans stem from the melting-pot of the barbarian invasions that replaced the vanishing population of the Roman Empire. The genius of the Catholic Church was to absorb them. If Benedict XVI can convert this new wave of invaders from North Africa and the Middle East, history will place him on a par with his great namesake, the founder of the monastic order the bears his name.
As Magdi Allam enjoins his new Church:
For my part, I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who lurk among us. By one of those "fortuitous events" that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriere on September 3, 2003, was entitled "The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts". It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself. Well, I hope that the Pope's historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves.
What the outcome will be of the evangelization of Muslims lies beyond all speculation: that is a matter of every soul's relationship to God. But the global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict's Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.
Posted by: Steve White ||
03/31/2008 00:00 ||
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I sadly suspect there will be some future Italian martyrs.
Not just Italian, but Turkish, Jewish, and no few "Canaanites". The New Testament is filled with them. There have been quite a few recent martyrs, too, especially in Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, Mali, and Sierra Leone. In fact, wherever there are Christians, there have been martyrs. Remember the nuns killed in South America in the 1970's, or the ones killed in the Philippines in the 1980's? Those unfortunately weren't isolated events. The young lady in Afghanistan that tried to "follow all the rules" was still kidnapped and is probably dead, simply for NOT being Muslim.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
03/31/2008 21:10 Comments ||
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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.
The following essay, adapted from the Introduction to this booklet, shows how, as early as the 1980s, operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood, parent group for al Qaeda and Hamas, formulated a blueprint for a "jihadist process" that would ultimately sabotage the "miserable house" of the United States. These Muslim Brotherhood operatives saw that the work of undermining the U.S. could be best accomplished by the use of front groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Students Association. But while CAIR was designed to work in the legal-cultural realm, posturing as another of the minority rights groups functioning in the public square, the MSA's role was to be restricted to college campuses, where it would advance the cause of radical Islam and lead the effort to stigmatize Israel. 
MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clintons Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses? 
