Hat tip OutlawDaughter.
Hans Zimmer's Like a dog chasing cars.
From the soundtrack of The Dark Knight.
MFBB.
"Say what you like about Afghans, but they’re admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn’t put it any plainer:
“Die, die, foreigners!”
And foreigners do die. USAF Lieutenant Colonel John Loftis, 44, and Army Major Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a “secure room” that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan “intelligence officer.” Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.
Some news outlets reported the event as a “security breach.” But what exactly was breached? The murderer was by all accounts an employee of the Afghan government, with legitimate rights of access to the building and its secure room, and “liaising” with his U.S. advisers and “mentors” was part of the job. In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands of the locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners, paid by Westerners, and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have the easiest opportunity to kill them. It is sufficiently non-unusual that the Pentagon, as is the wont with bureaucracies, already has a term for it: “green-on-blue incidents,” in which a uniformed Afghan turns his gun on his Western “allies".
So we have a convenient label for what’s happening; what we don’t have is a strategy to stop it — other than more money, more “hearts and minds” for people who seem notably lacking in both, and more bulk orders of the bestselling book Three Cups of Tea, an Oprahfied heap of drivel extensively exposed as an utter fraud but which a delusional Washington insists on sticking in the kit bag of its Afghan-bound officer class.
Don’t fancy the tea? A U.S. base in southern Afghanistan was recently stricken by food poisoning due to mysteriously high amounts of chlorine in the coffee. As Navy Captain John Kirby explained, “We don’t know if it was deliberate or something in the cleaning process.”
Oh, dear. You could chisel that on the tombstones of any number of expeditionary forces over the centuries: “Afghanistan. It’s something in the cleaning process.”
In the last couple of months, two prominent politicians of different nations visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to me for Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the fortifications, a mini-West has been built in a cheerless land: There are Coke machines and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the gates, a man can climb out of the full RoboCop and stop pretending he enjoys three cups of tea with the duplicitous warlords, drug barons, and pederasts who pass for Afghanistan’s ruling class. The visiting Western dignitary is cautiously shuttled through outer and inner perimeters, and reminded that even here there are areas he would be ill-advised to venture unaccompanied, and tries to banish memories of his first tour all those years ago when aides still twittered optimistically about the possibility of a photo op at a girls’ schoolroom in Jalalabad or an Internet start-up in Kabul."
"Brad Pitt's spouse once again stole the show. She wore a Versace dress in black velvet with a gigantic split to the right side. This gave some insight in one of the world's most attractive people...
The 36-year old actress appeared on the podium to receive the trophy for the best adapted scenario. As a diva with tons of experience - which she IS of course - she assumed a challenging pose making fools of a lot of men..."
"An Antwerp judge has convicted father Sayhood E.H.(69), mother Resmieh F. (58) and their two sons Mohamed (40) and Ali to three years in jail, of which eighteen months effective, because of the inhuman treatment they inflicted upon their daughter and sister. They had beaten en kicked her and used a hammer on her because she wanted to marry a Belgian who was not a muslim.
The Iraqi family had moved to Belgium in 2002. Daughter Aseel (26) learned to know Peter on the job and they developed a romantic relationship, very much against the will of her parents. They had already chosen a spouse for her. Aseel refused to give Peter up and in 2008 broke all contact with her family.
Rapprochement.
One year and a half later she sought contact again. She was engaged and hoped for her parents' blessing. Her mother convinced her to come live into their house in Mortsel again temporarily. They kept trying to persuade her though to dump Peter.
Locked up, beaten and kicked.
On August 30, 2010, she was locked up at home and beaten and kicked. Her mother even beat her with a hammer. Only one day later she could be freed by police. Her family members denied her story and claimed that she herself had inflicted her own wounds, amongst which was a concussion.
Obligatory Dutch lessons.
The muslim family have to pay Aseel 3,412 and Peter 1,637 EUR in damage pay. The court also ordered the muslim family to take Dutch lessons, as well as an integration course and courses in agression management. They are also forbidden to contact the victims."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali:THE GLOBAL WAR ON CHRISTIANS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
Feb 6, 2012 12:00 AM EST
From one end of the muslim world to the other, Christians are being murdered for their faith.
"We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.
The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.
The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.
But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.
From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many nations live in fear. In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war. Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege.” Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the country.
In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens. They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem. While they started out by using crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in 2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group’s recent attacks show a new level of potency and sophistication.
The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian and animist minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained persecution of religious minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which charged him with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted the semi-independence he grant-ed to South Sudan in July of last year, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject-ed to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnap-ping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that between 53,000 and 75,000 innocent civilians have been displaced from their resi-dences and that houses and buildings have been looted and destroyed...."
BLACKLIST
Written by Oliver North and Tom Kilgannon
Friday, 03 February 2012
Blacklist (n): a list of persons who are disapproved of or are to be punished or boycotted.
Washington, DC – The definition above, from an old Webster’s dictionary, was common parlance in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated subversive activity, Soviet espionage and pro-communist propaganda. The committee unearthed spies and traitors – Alger Hiss among them. But when the HUAC turned its attention to Hollywood writers, directors and actors, civil libertarians cried foul. The American Civil Liberties Union and others insist those on the “Hollywood blacklist” were unfairly persecuted for exercising their constitutionally protected rights to freedom of assembly and speech.
oln2.jpgNow, there’s a new-millennium blacklist for American patriots who fail today’s political correctness test. Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin U.S. Army (Ret.), a highly decorated special operations soldier with 36 years of service in uniform, is the newest name on the roster. The silence from the “civil liberties lobby” is deafening.
It’s often said that our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Guardsmen and Marines serve to “protect our freedoms” and “defend our liberties.” All true. Now consider what took place this week at the United States Military Academy at West Point – an institution responsible for training young men and women to protect America from those who mean us harm. West Point cadets take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Many West Point graduates will deploy to fight radical Islamists who commit acts of terror against Americans and our allies.
Yet when the West Point National Prayer Breakfast convenes February 8, the cadets will be deprived of hearing from a world-renowned expert on counterterrorism. General Boykin was a founding member of the elite Delta Force. He commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and served as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. But this week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations put General Boykin on the new blacklist. He won’t be at West Point next week.
CAIR lobbied the academy’s superintendent, Lieutenant General David Huntoon, to rescind General Boykin’s invitation. Apparently the self-esteem of Muslim cadets and Allah’s adherents elsewhere would suffer lasting damage if General Boykin – who is unashamed of his Christian faith, an expert on radical Islam and one of the planet’s foremost practitioners of unconventional warfare – were to speak on these matters.
This isn’t the first time Islamists and leftists have intimidated military leaders here at home and demanded the silencing of Christian voices. In 2010, the Pentagon issued – and subsequently withdrew – an invitation for Franklin Graham to speak at the DoD National Day of Prayer. Earlier that year, Tony Perkins, a former Marine and head of Family Research Council, was invited to speak at a prayer luncheon at Andrews Air Force Base. But when Barack Obama subjected our military to open homosexuals, Perkins was deemed too controversial.
Officials at CAIR claim that their opposition to appearances by people like Boykin or Graham is well-intentioned and argue that remarks deemed critical of Islam can precipitate violence. They do have a point.
Last week, author Salman Rushdie withdrew from a “virtual” appearance at India’s Jaipur Literature Festival because Muslim organizations threatened bloodshed. Since publishing “Satanic Verses” in 1988, Rushdie has received numerous death threats, including a fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Since then, Rushdie has rarely appeared in public.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders lives under constant threats against his life because of his outspoken views on Islam and his cautions about “Islamification in the Netherlands.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another Dutch political figure who grew up in Somalia, once practiced Islam before renouncing it. Now in the United States, she authored the screen play for Theo van Gogh’s film Submission, a documentary on abuses women suffer in Islamic societies. The movie brought death threats against Ali. Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004 by, in writer Theodore Dalrymple’s words, “a young man of Moroccan origin bent on jihad.”
The Bush and Obama administrations both have stressed America is not at war with Islam. That’s understandable. But it makes no sense to deny radical Islamists are at war with us.
Major Nidal Malik Hasan didn’t commit “workplace violence” at Fort Hood when he, according to authorities, killed 13 and wounded dozens of others in 2009. Hasan was tutored by radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki – credited with “guiding” the attacker. Yet the official report on the murderous rampage ignores the connection and is silent about Hasan’s alleged motivation.
This is political correctness run amok. That’s why Mr. Obama bans the term “war on terror” in favor of “overseas contingency operation.” It’s why the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that returning U.S. veterans present a greater danger to America’s security than Islamic terrorists. And that’s why CAIR and the hard-core left in this country can put names like Boykin, Graham and Perkins on their new blacklist.
Apparently, we can’t expect the U.S. government and the ACLU to defend the First Amendment rights of men such as these from outfits such as CAIR. If that’s the case, it’s time for the American people to demand it – before more patriots like General Jerry Boykin get thrown under the Humvee.
Last Updated ( Friday, 03 February 2012 )
"...A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"
In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere."