On the day before a crude car bomb was defused in Times Square, the NY Daily News ran an article describing the increasing frequency of homegrown Islamic terrorist attempts. These include:
- Najibullah Zazi, a US permanent resident accused of attempting a 2009 suicide bombing of the New York subway system in 2009, together with Bryant Neal Vinas, a Muslim American, who also trained for the same attack.
- The cases of Wesam El-Hanafi and Sabirhan Hasanoff, both US citizens, who were tasked with providing technical assistance to al-Qaeda via Yemen.
- Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, an illegal alien from Jordan arrested on suspicion of planning to blow up the Fountain Place in Dallas.
The Daily News lists many others, including the Lackawanna Six, the Sears Tower plot and about a dozen more cases, all involving either US citizens or permanent residents. Its inference is simple. Islamic extremism can no longer be stopped at the borders. It’s here. The Daily News writes, “Al Qaeda no longer needs a command center. Its foot soldiers are everywhere. They need only to win once, while the good guys have to win every time. How long can a winning streak go? Forever, one prays.”
That winning streak is unlikely to continue forever. That it has lasted so long is an achievement for which everyone owes a debt of gratitude to the police, the intelligence services and the military. But whether the sought after success is another car bomb, the destruction of a high rise building, an attack on a school, the demolition of a courthouse or a public building, or the assassination of a prominent figure, it is only a matter of time. Sooner or later a leaker will get through.
Whether or not one believes that Islam as a whole is inherently a militant force, bent on world conquest, certain militant factions within it undoubtedly have that as their aim. At a talk I attended recently, Dr. Mark Durie, an Anglican clergyman who had visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities examined the modern ideological basis for the jihad in his book The Third Choice. His conclusion was similar to the Daily News. They’re in Australia, but more importantly, Dr. Durie concluded that the political authorities were absolutely determined not to see it.
Which is a pity. The necessary precondition for successfully coexisting with the bulk of Muslims (many of whom simply want to live ordinary lives) is to recognize the existence and wellspring of Islamic militancy. The militant strains within Islam cannot be managed until they are at last admitted to exist. You can’t separate the sheep from the goats by referring to them all as “gheep”. Nearly all major Western leaders, including GWB, are bent on muddling the situation in the interests of political correctness. Reflexive Western self-loathing mandates a pre-apology before even the most timid inquiries. Every public utterance requires copious references to Islam as the ‘religion of peace’; a lengthy acknowledgement of its scientific and cultural achievements and fulsome praise of its enlightened doctrines, none of which the speaker may even have heard of, before anyone gets to the point: “and by the way, do you know who left the car bomb at the school?” Having raised something to such an exalted pedestal by preface it is more than awkward to utter what follows, like asking to borrow money from a woman right after you’ve proposed.
The inability to see certain Islamic traditions and doctrines as malevolent to avoid giving offense leads to a disastrous split level approach. It makes subversion excellent by one’s own admission in the hope the damage done by hypocrisy can be undone by espionage and pre-emption. And by this means Western society hopes to win the respect of Muslims. It undoes with the left hand what what it permits to happen with the right because politics will not abide the truth, and we tell lies through clenched smiles. A dysfunctional public policy is allowed to continue on the understanding that the consequences can be managed. But this is nothing new; it simply the domestic equivalent of the foreign policy practice of letting certain dictators get nuclear weapons so that we can later quarantine them. It’s a process also known as kicking the can down the road.
Official attempts to intellectually engage extremist Islam have been confined to half-hearted and symbolic attempts to ban articles of clothing, like face coverings in public or promoting hip Islamic public figures as if the establishment of a Mohammedan Mod Squad could ever sufficiently counteract the endless burrowing, tunneling and patient undermining of the foreign-funded preachers. Unfortunately the Times Square car bomb attempt suggests the can cannot be kicked any further. Sooner or later a terrible day will dawn, when the ultimate effect of toxic prison ministries and Saudi funded mosques will make itself felt. Even then, as after September 11, as after Fort Hood, the first reaction of the politicians will be to say anything but the truth. That would be hurtful, divisive, unfair, inappropriate and non-inclusive. Consequently, they’ll make the same old excuses thereby lumping the innocent with the guilty, for the blind do not distinguish, and make the next attack even more certain than the first.
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There’s a story, I think from Michael Ledeen (??The Terror Masters??)
During the Clinton administration there was a White House ceremony involving some Middle Easterners. They wanted an appropriate quote from the Koran about peace so they went to the expert in the U.S. on things Arabic and Islamic: Bernard Lewis. Lewis said “sure” and gave them a quote.
Some time later there was another ceremony involving more people from the Middle East and they wanted another quote from the Koran about peace. They went back to Lewis who gave them a quote. They left but came back and said, “You gave us this quote before. We need another.” Lewis answered, “I cannot, there is no other.”
I lay the blame squarely on the Big Zero’s soft stance. And, the MFM will cover his @ss on this one just as they did with the Fort Hood shooter. For all we know the MFM will blame the Tea Party.
The recent tightening of the ROEs in Afghanistan, the Iran military aircraft circling to gather information on a US Carrier, the South Korean warship Cheonan sunk by a torpedo, the oil rig built by Hyundai Heavy Industries set ablaze by a mysterious explosion – all just an odd coincidence. And, now the failed car bombing of Times Square in which a “man” was seen fleeing the scene.
The MFM would not want to categorize that “man” as middle-Eastern. There is nothing to see here. Just move along. It’s not the Big Zero’s fault.
/sarc
Wretchard, your point here is very like the one in “N Commandments.” Namely, the political and cultural system has detached from reality. The software is so corrupted by errors that it cannot run. And so it won’t. As Adam Smith said, there is a deal of ruin in a country; the crash is accretive, ongoing. Every so often we get a “big one” like 9/11 or Fort Hood or the Knickerbomber, that both damages us and should alert us to the worsening catastrophe; but the old software keeps running.
This will not end well. The system has destroyed a whole range of potential options between tolerance and blind obliteration of the threat. So, like the teacher and the dumbbell, we are likely to go from apparent cowed indifference to categorical murder. The jihadists may not know or care; there are so many of them, operating in largely-uncoordinated ways (and under no central intelligence or control), that their ranks probably include every degree of ambition and ignorance about the ultimate effect of their many depredations and raids on the infidel. Likewise I doubt that “we” (our political and military leadership, our social consensus) have arrived at a clear picture or plan. But the day will come when we lose a city, or two or four; and whoever holds the football will either use it or be summarily replaced by someone who will.
And that, my friends, will be that.
What is the source of Islamic aggression’s success? The greater the disconnect from reality the more reluctant people are to confront it. If a trained professional is doing something in the West any man feels on some level free to observe and kibitz. He is liable to admire the work of the surgeon or house painter and point out “I think you missed spot.” The professional will probably just laugh and say buzz off or even thanks or possibly say they charge to train an apprentice, but they will rarely become hostile. The maniac ranting on the corner and demanding submission to their vision of a Supreme Being will only get a tight smile and an encouraging “Nice shoes.” This is largely based in fear but there is more to it. In New York City 8 million people manage to live and work in close proximity with people they do not particularly like. The only way to do this is to not point out everyone’s mistakes. In fact the most polite attitude is to not really care to much about the errors and problems of strangers. If people want help they ask. Big liberal government may gain support because it is seen as an impersonal shield that provides services without demanding the scrutiny and social interaction that comes with helpful neighbors or local entrepreneurs. The sincere busybody looking for old ladies crossing the street so they can grab their elbows is considered an intrusive pest.
The second problem, to turn whiskey‘s misogyny around, is that to many in the West have exhausted themselves in pointless cultural battles over gender and other issues. They all know that bickering over the insecurities of men and women and the roles of law and property and objective reality is as pointless now as a spat over whether the toilet seat should be up or down and whether the Captain’s beard indicates he is secretly asking to be identified with the homosexual pirate tradition of the 17th century, when the toilet is in a 2nd class cabin and the Captain’s name is Edward Smith. There is an iceberg ahead of the Titanic.
The key to future of Islam is in the hands of Muslims. Adherents to the religion get to define what it is. There are Muslims who will gladly moderate some of the vitriol in the Koran, just as virtually all Talmudic scholars avoid some of the harsher penalties outlined in the original text. It is possible…but I fear not likely.
There is a struggle over what Islam means, but the violent supremecist elements are winning it handily. They have the ‘moral’ high ground, and can in fact base their views more firmly in the writings of their prophet than the moderates can. But perhaps more importantly, in addition, the radicals offer relevance, importance and hope for power. After all, if Islam is moderated…who cares about Islam anymore? Right now the whole world cares about the various factions of Islam…Islam has global relevance because we don’t want their radicals destroying our buildings, our school children seized as hostages and our subways blown up. So we care about radical Islam, and we really wouldn’t care about a moderate Islam. The struggle between moderate and radical in Islam is so one sided, it is barely a struggle.
The moderates cannot promise a return of Al Andalus to the Dar al-Islam. The radicals can. The moderates cannot promise global relevance. The radicals can. The moderates cannot propose a path to global domination. The radicals can. The moderates promise a crappy status quo, and the radicals a glorious future, within reach.
Of what use is this to westerners? If Islam is doomed to its violent 7th Century interpretation, we are doomed to the three conjectures. It is worth a struggle to avoid that. And the definition of what it means is to be a Muslim is the only place we can fight it. A mighty, perhaps even hopeless struggle. But it is worth trying. Despite the remote chances. But we are doing it wrong.
In our appeals to moderate Muslims, we are strengthening the radicals. Why? Because we wouldn’t even be appealing to moderates if there were not radicals. Moderates would be irrelevant. It is far too much carrot, and not enough stick. The moderates have learned that the way to get carrots is to have the radicals jump around a little. Free carrots!
Radicals make life very uncomfortable, and often very short, for prostelytizing moderates. There is a real, immediate, cost to opposing the radicals. So the moderates don’t really. It is not worth it. Merely sitting by quietly gets them carrots. So they sit quietly. Carrots are important, but there needs to be some stick. There needs to be a cost to those quietly sitting by, allowing radicals to define Islam. I don’t know what that cost should be yet, but there needs to be one. Until there is one significant enough for the moderates to fight for control and actively oppose the radicals…there will be a continuous slippage towards the three conjectures.
It was nothing we did that caused the moderate Sunnis to rise in the Anbar uprising…it was the perceived cost of living under the radicals. When the costs of not opposing the radicals became too immenant, too obvious and too high, the moderates rose and threw them out with relative ease. The question is how do we make the costs to immanent, too obvious and too high for the rest of the moderates on a global scale?
What winning streak?
I think every one is jumping to conclusions way too early. Maybe I have too good an imagination, but I can think of a whole host of groups/ideological “warriors” who could and might try to pull something like this off with widely divergent goals. And, of course, it is highly likely the current administration, with the help of a tame, fawning media will be able to hide any real leads, if any are found.
The best news sources are the blogs, tweets, etc. before officialdom clamps down on the flow of information.
Good hunting for reality, friends.
And for those who care, God is on our side, but He is playing His cards close to His Celestial Chest.
What is it about radical Muslims that makes them hate us so? When we examine, for example, bin Laden’s tirades against the West, we find an exegesis that constantly shifts to meet the needs of the moment: It’s American troops on Saudi soil, it’s Israel, it’s colonialism, and on and on. I suspect the lack of a consistent message means that the terrorists lack a coherent philosophy. It’s all ad hoc. They’re angry all right, but why?
Looking again at bin Laden we see the pampered son of a Saudi billionaire. He had everything for the asking, but his life lacked meaning (not unlike a lot of trust fund babies), and he enjoyed no social status as a minor son from a large family. His career became one long saga of staging attacks for no other purpose than to declare “look at me, me, me, me!” He wanted recognition, but he probably lacked the self-awareness to understand his own motivations.
Islamic terrorism in many and perhaps most cases is based in personal resentment. If you’re on the dole with no prospect for meaningful work or marriage, what can you do to earn some sort of social status? Underlying most terrorist attacks, I think, is the need to lash out in nihilistic rage. The justification for the act comes as an afterthought. Some will say that the 9/11 attackers were educated and middle class. True enough, but they were still deeply alienated individuals. Do not underestimate the power of shame in Arab culture.
If my hypothesis is correct, or even partly correct, then we have no way to address the fundamental causes. We’re stuck with it until the disease runs its course. T. E. Lawrence once remarked that Islam periodically erupts in messianic movements only to burn itself out in short-lived spasms of violence. His explanation, I think, is better than most.
No matter who parked that explosive-laden car, if it had gone off Al Qaeda would have taken credit. F
The weird official reaction to Islamist terrorism is unfortunately typical of the intellectual incoherence of liberalism’s Best & Brightest.
Big rallies on Saturday about “immigration” — all fudging the distinction between legal immigration and illegal immigration. Or take the emotive subject of abortion — a “woman’s right to choose what to do with her body”, but not if she wants to choose to sell her body for sex, or trade her kidney for money.
We have raised the ability to hold contradictory views simultaneously to a high art. Logic has been expelled from the public arena. It took decades of a corrupted educational system to get to this point. It may take 40 years in the wilderness and a whole new generation to return to sanity.
Unless there’s been a fundamental shift in their tactics I would not blame this particular misfire on Al Qaida. They’re known for going for the big, multi-target strike often with secondary attacks. A single car bomb? Not them. A new but potentially more dangerous player….
I wonder how long it is going to be before someone connects the dots from such things as the Ft. Hood massacre and 9-11 and says…you know, maybe it would be a good idea to encourage all the local Muslims to leave. Said thinker will then provide that encouragement a la Baruch Goldstein.
I think there are lots of people out there in the U.S. that would say, “payback is a bitch” and think, “I’m going to make those bastards who killed my loved one pay ten or twenty for one if I can. Plus, I’m going to take out as many of the government bastards who let them come here as I can also, just because if they had done their job I wouldn’t have had to be dealing with this situation.”
I think there is a tremendous amount of anger in the white population of the U.S. and that they’ve had it up to here with the PC and Obama and being treated like second-class citizens in their own country. What has made that thinking exponentially more volatile is the realization that, with Obama in the WH and an anti-white Democrat majority in Congress, the country is in the hands of people who truly hate the ethnic majority.
Consequently, the old thinking of, “well, the government will deal with it” doesn’t work when white people can clearly see that anything the government does will definitely be something to their detriment. Those people can see that they and their children are being dispossessed in their own country by foreign invaders and those who aid and abet those invaders for their own enrichment and aggrandizement.
The old paradigm is broken and I don’t think there is any way to fix it. This is going to end badly and America is going to be a different country when it is over. My guess is that the Left and their ethnic supporters are going to be bloodily purged to the point where they can never be considered a threat again, but that completing such a purge is going to be something that makes the little unpleasantness between 1861 and 1865 look like a schoolyard dust-up by comparison.
Regardless of who left this device in Time Square we need to control the little things like the border. New York’s illegal population is not Mexican, it is Irish,European, Russian, Middle Eastern and South American. It might be a little more up scale then the southern border, but they are still illegal and a potential risk to national security.These people need to be removed from the country if for no other reason than is reduces the number of potential suspects. If the Federal Government chose an America First position it would also drain support for our homegrown radicals.
The Federal Government does not have the stomach the enforce Immigration Laws. Some stated have no choice but to pick up the slack and without amnesty. Mark my word if amnesty is part of any new Federal law regarding immigration it will fail to solve the problem it will only kick it down the road again.
If his name is Ali be Bubba, a General in the Army of Muhammad who just stoned his wife to death because of some slight, the FBI will assure us that terror was not involved, he was just misunderstood. A nice fellow actually.
But if we can tie this incident to Christianity, no matter how tenuous, by all that is holy we have TERROR.
I believe we can create a clear policy that deters attacks by Islamist extremists. We should a clear, credible statement that retaliation for Islamist attacks in the US will be firebombing or General Sherman style campaigns in Arabia or Persia. We have to make Islam responsible for its extremists.
“We’re stuck with it until the disease runs its course.”
The disease is Islam. It is as its founder created. Peaceful “versions” of Islam cannot change the fundamental Islam founded by Mohammed. It has more authority then any derivative version. To think otherwise is like writing “improvements” to Bach. That can be done, but to then claim that the “improvements” are the real Bach, and that players of Bach as Bach wrote it are attempting to “subvert” Bach, or “steal” Bach from the players of the “real” Bach would be intellectual folly.
“Intellectual folly” – the words go together well do they not?
“Islamophobia” – there is no such thing, because fear of Islam is not irrational. Anyone who accuses with the word “Islamophobia” is an enemy of the free West which was my home.
Let us suppose I am wrong. Islam is a nice peaceful religion which has been hijacked by political ideologues. Well then, whose job is it to clean up Islam from the foreign to Islam disease that is trying to hijack it? Westerners of non Islamic Western tradition? Not according to Edward Said and all the rest. We must not “colonize” Islam. Islam must do it itself.
Do we have any right to participate in benign Islam’s fight with its alien disease? What do we do when we feel that, say, the government is not doing a very good job of protecting us from, say, its own corruption? Do we sit patiently and say, “Nice government is fundamentally good, and anyone who says bad things about government is ‘governmentophobic’ and should be silenced”?
Do we? No, we get up and denounce, denounce, denounce. We rage. It is what is done in a free, Western, nation. It functions to make the government move its lazy ass and either clean up or prepare to be defeated at election time.
Now, if Islam is benign, it is still responsible more than anyone else to clean itself from the alien filth within. And it is very American, very Western, very right for the rest of us to rage and denounce. That is the way it works in free countries.
Intellectual folly and intellectual malice will not see or admit this.
Anyone who denounces with the word “Islamophobic” or uses the word “racist” in connection with denunciation of Islam for its disease is no friend in any way to the free West that was my home.
A tyrant attempts to shut up those who denounce his government for its wrongs. A government acting within the traditions of the free West does not do these things. If Islam is not what I believe that it is, an inherently violent force that has always and always will be an enemy of free people everywhere, then it has a worse problem then the denunciations of people like me. Its problem is the disease which believers of a benign Islam claim infects it. Denunciations of this benign Islam are the traditional Western way of forcing it to get busy and clean up its act.
I am a demonstrator.
Damn Islam, and damn its defenders, and damn the lying cowards of non Islamic tradition who say that it is I who needs to be corrected. I can see you manning the water cannons and the rifles and the insane asylums against demonstrators for freedom in the old Soviet Union.
Denounce Islam! Denounce anyone who denounces the denouncers. We are not the problem.
Clearly a desperate but misguided cry for help in response to the new Arizona immigration law!
If only NYC would announce a boycott of Arizona, this sort of thing would not happen.
Also, take notice that an SUV was used. An obvious statement on the dangers of AGW.
By the way, when are those NYC terror trials going to start?
As terrorist attacks go, in some ways the Ft. Hood attack was more effective than the 9/11 attacks. Sure, the latter killed more people, but at the same time it provoked a retaliatory chain of events that made various enemies from Al Qaida to Saddam Hussein suffer. Who has suffered the consequences of Major Nidal’s murder of his own soldiers? He killed 14 people and was shot himself, but he’s expendable. And what happened to the guy who shot those two soldiers in Missouri? Come to think of it, why isn’t Sergeant Hassan Akhbar resting under six feet of dirt for rolling grenades into the tents of his fellow soldiers in Kuwait?
I think we know the answer to those questions but we’re afraid of it–and within reason we should be. In order to answer those questions we need to completely rethink our PC, multi-culti view of Islam and readjust our attitudes accordingly. And that will mean waging a real war against an identified enemy ideology. We’ve done that before–just ask any German or Japanese how that worked out for them.
This is how we work our way to Wretchard’s Third Conjecture–we blind and bind ourselves until there is no other option for our own survival. And it didn’t have to be that way….
w (post)
“The necessary precondition for successfully coexisting with the bulk of Muslims (many of whom simply want to live ordinary lives) is to recognize the existence and wellspring of Islamic militancy. The militant strains within Islam cannot be managed until they are at last admitted to exist. You can’t separate the sheep from the goats by referring to them all as “gheep”.”
I assume that you are referring to [the bulk of Muslims] what in the west is called: “Moderate Muslims”
Well, “A Moderate Muslim…” in my opinion and in the opinion of people that have rejected Islam, really doesn’t exist unless he is one who does not practice nor really believe in Islam. But is just one in “name”, not unlike millions of “Christians” who are not christian in anything other than name.
So actually the moderate Christian or Muslim is not actually either. Oh they can be won back, either by something that happens in their lives or in Islam’s case by threat of death from “True Believers”.
I could go on for hours and pages (and have) but it is like pissing in the wind, all I would do is sully your blog. You know, PC and racism and all that and as we know we can’t have that.
But I will give a warning (One more time… again).
There is no such thing as a Moderate Muslim. There is only a Muslim in waiting.
And that Islam is the most evil cult ever to exist.
Papa Ray
P.S. BTW…I think I was born I was born way too late…
For a great Sun. Morning refresher:
Axis of Awesome – 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles)
wretchard, I was going to say what a great essay this was, but then, I had to stop, and consider, and ask if you aren’t doing the very same thing you write about.
Whether or not one believes that Islam as a whole is inherently a militant force, bent on world conquest, certain militant factions within it undoubtedly have that as their aim.
The “faction” that takes seriously the words, the attitudes, of the Koran, are the problem. Effectively, a peaceful Muslim is a bad Muslim. And that does not even count the intra-Islamic terror. We have all discussed this too many times right here on BC.
But screw all this meta-analysis and ask instead, so, when we all learn to call a goat a goat, what do we DO about it? Yes, the language is an indicator, and important, but what then? Are we already doing what we would do, except for an adjustment in language? Or if we would do something else, is the language a necessary and/or sufficient enabler for that, or can we do whatever it is we should do, while continuing our doubletalk? For all Dubya’s maddening use of the phrase, “religion of peace”, for the most part he did do what needed to be done. Or did he?
Whether Islam is fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, we, in the great, democratic, tradition of the West have a right and a duty to denounce Islam and make it feel withering pressure until it cleans up its act.
No one does wrong who participates in creating pressure on Islam.
mac,
That was a to damn cute by half use of the passive voice to propose a Baruch Goldstein assault while attempting to lay it off as a hypothetical. Doing so puts the blog and everyone connected with it at risk. If you want to sincerely discuss possible responses that threatened groups or small dysfunctional groups made up of people like Baruch Goldstein of Tim McVeigh acting in the name of a larger community, that rejects them, then the way you worded this was exactly the wrong way to do it. The difference between the Judeo-Christian, or Buddhist or Hindu etc, communities and the Ummah is that the Islamists are not shamed and repudiated by the majority of their community in their internal conversations. For the other groups the extremists are a rejected and vilified fringe. The two are not equivalent and by acting as if they were or should be you weaken the case for those opposed to the terrorists. We are fighting not only against something but for something.
I accept only to a point, the trademarked “vast majority of Muslims want to live in peace(tm)” meme… Until we make MUSLIMS responsible for the reprehensible behavior of their more devoted fellows, until we make THEM pay more for the depredations of Islam, we are doomed to repeat this hideous cycle of Jihad terror, followed by their subsequent endless and obscene claims of victimhood, which in turn supposedly breeds more terror.
Often analysts will point out that the Muslims are the primary sufferers for the extremists among them. But turn the tables — if Methodists were spread to the corners of the globe, and found to be fomenting treason and beheadings from their beachheads, funded primarily from American soil — WE would take responsibility for their heinous atrocities – WE would put a stop to it — and if they turned their murderous rage against US, we certainly would not obscenely claim to be the victims of the Muslims.
Compare this to Muslims. To a man, woman, and child, they congenitally blame everyone but Muslims, everything but Islam, when their fellow Muslims slaughter. They must be forced to account for the heinousness of their so-called religion. Until that time, the terrorism of Islam will perpetuate.
Finally, I’ve often pointed out that Jihad would pose very little/no threat at all if Muslims didn’t reside on our soil. It’s heinousness would be limited to Muslim on Muslim Jihad. Muslims in the West, violent or otherwise, are nevertheless the force multipliers which make Jihad an effective terror weapon against the rest. We didn’t set about defeating German or Japanese supremacist Nazism by inviting tens of millions of Japanese and German supremacists to our soil, did we. And we didn’t defeat them by making nice with the vast majority of Germans and Japanese who, no doubt, wanted to live in peace. We bombed the shit out of them and forced them to swallow their supremacist BS until they choked to death on it. The Muslims too must be made to choak on their vile ideology until they turn their backs on it forever. Allowing them to practice Islam in peace on our soil guarantees an endless future of Beiruts, Khashmirs, 9/11s, Beslans and worse — much much worse.
Re LOTM #4
Calling WHISKEY a misogynist (or racist) is neither accurate nor useful; he does not need anyone to defend him but he is always an interesting and intelligent voice.
Calling LOTM’s posts fussy, verbose and squeamish might be somewhat more accurate but no more useful.
There’s speculation now that the bomb was placed in retaliation for the recent Mohammed depiction in the cartoon, South Park. Apparently the bomb was placed outside the offices of Viacom, the parent company of the Cartoon Channel, the host of the South Park show.
If this is the case, the rationale behind the bombing itself serves both political correctness and intimidation. Outsiders would be less inclined to criticize Islam, Islamic moderates would be less inclined to criticize the radicals.
On the upside, if this were the case, it does reveal the thuggery that lurks just below the surface of political correctness.
Another slightly off topic. I have been waiting for a suitabe place to post this small series of an interview of Mark Steyn about his new book. Well it appears that that suitable place might not come…so here it is:
“Interview – The End of World As We Know It” (five parts)
Please watch and listen to it. It is straight forward (as Steyn is) and might just give you some insight to not only our present situation but to our future and what we must to to not only survive but persevere.
There are other interesting and important interviews at this link. I would suggest you make time for them.
Even if your a leftist, liberal progressive you might find some knowledge or a chuckle here or there.
Papa Ray
BTW I tend to agree with some above who cast doubt that this car bomb is necessarily Islamic terror. It sounds awfully rickety, and maybe was a bizarre elaborate hoax. Given the unhinged Left’s zealotry to depict militias and the Right as the true terrorists, it may even be a May Day feint to target and smear the Right by some nut ball on the Left. Their media enablers, not to mention the Leftist Radical in the White House are primed and waiting to run with a story like this. It somehow doesn’t smell like the real Jihad deal to me…
That histrionic raid in Michigan looks more and more like a “Justice Department” op designed to coincide with the “Right Wingers are Real Terrorists!” campaign launched by Team Obama. I’m seriously beginning to question the entire Janet Reno/Bill Clinton Waco affair. Eerie similarities — and that creepy Napolitano HSD report (immediately after Obama’s elevation in early ’09) identifying returning war vets and rightwing extremists as potential terror threats now looks like a leaked strategy to retain power by the Left and their King.
Daedalus M,
That is an outstanding examination of the relationship between Radicals and Moderated, And not only in Islam but in general. The same dynamic could be applied to Black activists, environmentalists, Gay activists, and other leftist factions. There were even “moderate Nazis”, those who thought Hitler too extreme, and who supposedly would have removed him if only the French and British had resisted in the Rhineland or Austria, or someplace else. But every time audacity worked, the “Sleepwalker through History” was again proven correct. Strangely, this dynamic does not seem to work on the Right, at least not yet, as we always tamp down our intransigents.
Kinuachdrach @ 10,
You have found one of my favorite ironies. A woman’s “choice” extends only to whether to carry to full term. From the moment of birth all further choice ceases. Where to send the ex-fetus to school, whether to smoke, what sort of light bulb to use, and so much more, no longer an option.
Mac @12 and Forgotten Man @13
A lot of us extend “honorary White” status to wide swaths of the population who functionally behave like Whites. How groups might align in the coming trouble would depend on the specific situation. If it starts over the Muslim issue, the Blacks will be against us, if it begins on the border, Blacks will join us against the Beaners who have been ethnically cleansing their neighborhoods in LA. Either way, Korean-Americans will be Honorary Whites. As for the illegals from Europe, Israel, Ireland, they generally assimilate to the dominant American culture and are unnoticed. As long as they are few in number, they are unlikely to make a difference. Hispanics and other Turd Worlders generally do not assimilate, and that is why they are noticed.
6 guys with box cutters couldn’t possibly fly jets into the WTC and Pentagon and kill thousands. No major would go into an army building and shoot people. The unimaginable is unimaginable. Until it happens. With the pantie bomber and the shoe bomber and last night, these disasters were averted by common citizens standing up (Bless you, Vietnam Vet/tee-shirt salesman) and doing something. You would not be so glib about this “failed” attempt if a couple thousand New Yorkers had been injured last night. Or would you? Is it okay for New Yorkers to die if you’re in some safe and remote part of the country? Is it okay with Americans to have this going on in our country? Is it okay for people to have a grievance or vendetta against us and try to kill civilians? Do you like this? Why do some of you dismiss it so casually?
Our leadership has determined that it is better to go with the flow and learn to live with the few personal disasters that will occur from time to time. We have a large population and can tolerate the losses. Resistance is futile. The leadership will, however, take full advantage of these opportunities to transform the nation into the progressive, totalitarian state that they are birthing.
The British model is illustrative. Resisting criminal acts can put victims at risk of jail and financial ruin. Only the rights of the state are of consequence and victims of crime are just unfortunate collateral damage. Our leadership has embraced this model.
Whiskey is correct in that this is feminine dogma, suffer and sacrifice. If you get beaten up on the playground, go tell the teacher. Resistance is worse than getting beaten up. Our culture is thoroughly feminized now and only a few alpha males have license for mayhem. Everyone else must find and embrace the woman inside them.
So it’s not important who tried to detonate a VBIED in Times Square or why they did it. It is only important that our leadership not let this opportunity go to waste and get those pesky betas on Ritalin. Then we can all discuss our feelings in a nurturing cacoon.
For all Dubya’s maddening use of the phrase, “religion of peace”, for the most part he did do what needed to be done. Or did he?
I don’t know if he did. Or, maybe he tried, but was stymied.
The “go shopping” invitation to the American public in response to 9/11 (after the hot rage had boiled off, at any rate) was terribly misguided IMO, and IIRC others here on BC have stated as much also. It’s true that the economy took a hit and needed boosting.
But “go shopping” is like telling a woman in labor to “think of pretty ponies” when what she really needs to do is PUSH.
I can’t have been the only American after 9/11 looking for a way to do something for the country & the military. With me that desire to do something turned into a series of care package drives for the troops. But if I were to take an assessment that it has been nearly 9 years since that day, I would have to say I don’t feel like I’ve done nearly enough given all the time that has passed. And most Americans have done far less than I have. Which is to say, most Americans have done squat.
Nothing was asked of us. Properly motivated and properly led, most people will rise to meet challenges to a degree that will surprise. But again, nothing was asked of us. Therefore it’s not surprising that most Americans have done squat. GWB could have led the charge in asking the public to do something (or, more precisely, one of a number of somethings) so people would feel like they were contributing, and then handed off the baton to any number of civilian organizations. But what we got was “go shopping” and some insipid, irregular lip service to “write a letter to a soldier.”
I give Bush a lot of credit for responding to 9/11 with the big stick overseas, and for sticking it out in Iraq. But he lost the home front. True, he was opposed by a disgusting amount of demoralizing propaganda in the other direction … but I don’t feel like he fought back. In some ways he was worse than passive. He went politically quid pro quo on Congress by letting Teddy Kennedy shove through his social welfare boondoggles, the spending of which hacked off conservatives and led to a Dem takeover of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008.
But back to Muslims, specifically those living in America. Just as nothing was asked of the American population at large, nothing was asked of the Muslim population in particular. What *should* have been done was to organize visible efforts in which Muslims of good will could show their good will to America (such as, Red Crescent visits to soldiers in hospitals, Muslim neighborhood organizations sending care packages and cards to the troops, raising scholarship funds for soldiers’ orphans, art festivals with American themes, etc). What was done, instead, was that American officials and American media bent over backwards to show *their* good will to Muslims.
Entirely bass-ackwards, IOW.
Nothing was asked of Muslims and therefore anyone who was inclined to do anything good, ended up doing squat. Worse, the radical elements were emboldened by the dhimmi scraping of American officials. Their emboldening = further driving into the shadows any Muslim who wanted to do good.
None of this absolves individuals of their individual responsibility, and that goes for Americans non-Muslim and Muslim, and Muslim residents of the U.S. But the lesson is, when leadership is absent, or when leaders wimp out, the chances of individuals stepping up go down exponentially. That’s just human nature.
“Moderate Muslim”, or “Blue Dog Dem”, just evil trying to cloak itself!
The bottom line is “You’re either with us or against us”.
For the working patriotic American, the lines have never been clearer.
“No better friend, no worse enemy!”
It’s always written that “this will not end well”.
I disagree, it will end very well, very very well, if we do not allow an early end to the “operation” or “evolution”, or whatever we call the coming storm.
Let’s make sure that “it” goes all the way to the desired and natural conclusion.
Lucy, Lucy, Lucy…
“You would not be so glib about this “failed” attempt if a couple thousand New Yorkers had been injured last night. Or would you? Is it okay for New Yorkers to die if you’re in some safe and remote part of the country? Is it okay with Americans to have this going on in our country? Is it okay for people to have a grievance or vendetta against us and try to kill civilians? Do you like this? Why do some of you dismiss it so casually?”
I guess it is kinda like the Soldier or Marine or Swabbie that has been subjected to shell fire, glazing rounds, explosions, blood, guts and gore for months and months.
You just have to either find humor, ridicule or black black terrible hatred and/or dispair…and that leads to insanity in the end or even something worse.
A destroyed soul, capable of feeling nothing but bitterness and hate. I’ve lived/been there it is not something I would wish on my worse enemy. I still slide once in a while into the pit. But my grand daughters always pull me out.
Most here have opted for the lighter, more nucented and humorous aproach. And preserving sanity and usefulness.
Since we are already as insane as we want to be.
Come join us.
Papa Ray
There is an excellent article on American Thinker that explains the wackiness of Postmodernism as well as I’ve seen.
For those of us with a grounding in the Judeo-Christian tradition (irrespective of religious belief) the world often does not make sense. The reason for that goes much, much deeper than differences of opinion about political and social outcomes – there are a great number of people, most especially including those in positions of influence, who do not even think the same way that we do.
Barack Obama and the NYT editorial board, to name but two visible examples, have absolutely no compunction about making public policy decisions or recommendations based on “facts” they know to a certainty are untrue. Others who are in a position to dispute those untrue facts let them go entirely or make only a feeble protest. Truth does not matter.
One could make the argument that humanity as a whole has proven itself incapable of handling the societal changes caused by the technological innovations of the last 200 years. Marxism and progressivism are the best evidence. A quote from the American Thinker articles says it best. “Postmodernism is a progressive virus that negates reason, objectivity, and truth.”
It seems that half the world, or more, is operating in a separate reality. When the wackiness was limited to a few nutty professors it was entertaining and often amusing. It’s not fumy anymore.
Islam is the most harmful institution to ever befall humanity because it deprives people of their free will in subservience to an arbitrary god. Islam could only raise itself from the backwater in a world that voluntarily chooses to ignore its darkest heart. Maybe it’s going to take a generation or two of getting rolled over by pure but purposeful evil to burn off the haze of postmodern thought.
The key point is that so long as we play defense, we have to get lucky every time. Our enemy only has to get lucky once.
So a bit of logic dictates that the solution is to carry the war to them. Or surrender.
That is something the Anti-Iraq crowd doesn’t understand. Where we fight terrorism doesn’t matter so long as it’s not here. Iraq, Afghanistan fine. The Sudan or Somalia would have worked too. So long as it’s not here.
Totally off topic – I mean way off topic!
What has happened to Nahncee lately? Haven’t seen any posts from N in a while,…or am I just not reading all the posts?
Rurik @ 28
Through the years my neighborhood, formerly a sleepy little whitebread community, has been taken over by Koreans who have set it up as their own little ethnic enclave. You cannot tell what have the stores on Main Street are about, because all the signage is in Korean. When I walk into one, they are noticably surprised that a white guy has come. We’ve got only 4 “American” restaurants left in town, whereas you can’t turn around without finding a Korean restaurant. They have their own financial network that exists outside our commerical banking one, and it’s seemingly larger around here, as their business keep popping up every day and ours, of late, keep closing. People do live here who go through their whole day speaking nothing but Korean, dealing only with Koreans, frequenting everything from a grocery store, to a doctor, lawyer or accountant, to a cell phone dealer or computer specialist, to an auto trader or mechanic, to a Baptist congregation, to a school.
I say all this not by way of complaint against Koreans, with whom I have no beef other than I’d like to see them try to assimilate more. What I find happening is the opposite – the natives “assimilating” to Korean ways rather than the reverse. This town has, for all practical purposes, become two towns within one, with two distinct communities that don’t overlap or interact very well. It’s clear which one is dominant, as our Little League is dying, our Boy Scouts are dying, etc. — these folks are not cultural “Americans” and they aren’t trying to be.
I fantasize about getting out sometimes, about finding an “expatriate” community somewhere, ironically, around these stateside environs. Someplace where we still have, you know, baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet.
programmer – I posed that question a month or two ago. Nobody seemed to know.
Cowboy – Back when I lived in SoCal, my church in Glendale was a facility shared by five congregations: “American Presbyterians” (for lack of a better term), Korean Christians, Armenian Christians, a Hispanic Protestant congregation, and Arab Christians. Every now & then all the pastors & congregations would get together and have one humongous multi-lingual service (and the different music sure was interesting), but for the most part it was rather shadowland-ish … you’d occasionally pass members of the other congregations in the hall if you stayed “after hours” (ie past noon on a Sunday), or you’d hear their music through the walls. In the end I don’t think the self-segregation is how Christ wants His Church to relate, and while it certainly won’t be that way in heaven, that appears to be the default mode here on earth.
That said, re: Koreans, Korean Christians are some of the most on-fire Christians you could meet. I don’t know whether the majority of those in your community are Christian, Buddhist, or something else. If Christians you probably don’t have anything to worry about other than, well, exactly what you pointed out. It is mighty strange to find oneself an expat on what is, map-wise, one’s own terra firma. The reason so few immigrants assimilate anymore is, to put it in relation to my post above, we are not asking them to. The idjits in high offices think a salad bowl is just fine … while at the same time washing their hands of the consequences of having 180 languages spoken in a school district and no English immersion classes.
Over at Blackfive is an article pointing towards the Pakistani Taliban for the attempted VBIED at Times Square last night.
Okay, they just announced they found another bomb, this time along the route of a Marathon run in Philadelphia. People are clearly really pissed about theta new law in Arizona, unless it’s about the oil spill in the Gulf.
You think I am kidding, but in reality Muslims and the Left offer similar explanations on a daily basis. We are supposed to believe that Al Queda is upset over all those Vietnamese we killed in the 60’s and 70’s – when in fact even the Vietnamese don’t seem to be upset over it.
The only Moderate Muslim is a Scared to Death of Christians, Jews, and Westerners in General Muslim.
Cowboy #37: I wonder about such immigrant enclaves and their real impact. Living next door to me at times is a snowbird from Conn. who emigrated from Italy in the early 70′s. His accent is difficult to penetrate and his wife’s almost undecipherable. They speak Italian in their home and live in a community of like-minded people in Conn. His daughter lives on the other side of my house and is as American as can be, although she ends up explaining many things to them in Italian.
I worked with a USAF officer of Korean extraction, and he told me of the Korean community in LA literally manning the barricades to protect their homes and businesses during the Rodney King riots. Sounded pretty American to me, downright Dodge City.
So I don’t know if such immigrants who stick to their enclaves are short changing the country as a whole or just themselves. Both, I would guess.
Lucy @ 29
The answer to your question is found in the response of the entire country for the past eight years, ever since three thousand New Yorkers were killed. Isn’t it a touch ironic that much of the recent anti-war movement seems to be based in that very same New York? Along with The Frisco-Berkeley-Oakland nexus. I wonder what would be the New York engagement in the event of an act of Muslim terrorism in Des Moines, or somewhere in Arkansas … or Fort Hood?
Ya’ll think Arizona profiling is bad just what till a successful mass casualty attack succeeds anywhere in this country and watch LEO go militant about “profiling” it will not matter what your color, creed or religion we all will be under the system then.
“HALT, your papers please?”
#7 programmer
While there are a number of possible perpetrators that can be conceived [and some that to many are inconceivable]; if you use the traditional investigative filters of motive, means, and opportunity the size of the group of suspects gets somewhat smaller.
Motive: There is an obvious Islamic motivation. We have a continuous, related stream of examples, statements, etc. that goes back far before 9/11 and indeed back to a certain journey by a former merchant from Mecca to Medina.
They are not the only one, however. We have other enemies. It is not inconceivable that there are other entities, both national and ideological, who seek to do us harm. And there is the matter of domestic politics. There are those on the Left for which the current regime is too timid in imposing their version of a peoples’ paradise, or an ecological paradise without the intrusions of man, etc. And there are those who are tacitly and at times openly threatening violence if they do not get the privileged status of being above the law that we discussed in a previous thread. The same day that the bomb was found, there were, for instance massive demonstrations by thousands of foreign nationals in our country who insist that they are not subject to American law.
There are dangerous souls on the “Right” also, but any rational analysis of numbers and of incidents in the last generation indicate that they are relatively few and far between. There are more stock pseudo-Nazi caricature villians committing violent politically based crimes on the big 3 networks’ shows in any given year than there are in real life. One cannot say the same for the Left.
Let me add one of the “inconceivable” suspects. Given the actions of the current regime, and their open hostility to both the rule of law and the Constitution; one has to include the concept of a “Reichstag Fire” scenario into the mix. How that possibility is weighted will vary according to the beliefs of the evaluator.
Thus we have a fairly wide net to cast for possible suspects.
Let us move to means.
We have a car bomb/IED. It is based, apparently from the information that we have [and we most definitely do NOT have the full forensic details] on the idea of exploding compressed propane gas, ignited by liquid gasoline, and from some reports it was to be detonated by a command transmitted through a cell phone. It was apparently placed to detonate amongst civilians who are not being targeted personally [this does not rule out knowledge that a certain target was to pass by at the time of detonation, but we have no data indicating such at this time], and the explosive force was to be augmented by a jacket of nails to act as shrapnel. Do these means match any previous acts of a similar type, and by whom?
As has been noted in several forums, the use of a car bomb, parked in a public place, with propane gas main charge ignited by gasoline does match the bombings in London in June of 2007. What has not been widely noted is that the London bombs were apparently to be triggered by cell phones. One thing to watch for in New York, is to see of the NYPD started to search the area desperately for companion car bombs nearby. If they did, they were thinking along the same line as I am.
The London bombing attempts involved two car bombs. The first one found was just outside a nightclub that would have been packed with customers. The second bomb, if it had not been towed away for parking violations, would have been right where the survivors of the first blast would have fled to.
This bombing attack was part of a conspiracy that also reached up to Glasgow, Scotland. The day after the London bombs were found, a Jeep Cherokee car bomb was driven into the terminal of Glasgow Airport [this was during the peak school holiday travel period and while the airport was packed with families with children]. The explosive charge was to be, once again, propane gas in tanks set off by burning gasoline, jacketed in nails. There was no cell phone detonator as the driver and passenger intended to set it off themselves. Local police, a baggage handler, and a cab driver proceeded to beat the living dog feces out of the two in the Jeep [granted that they were on fire, but that did not inhibit their resistance or continuing to try to set off the main charge] and they were taken into custody, eventually convicted, and are in prison. Fortunately, there was no main charge detonation. There was also a fallback bomb for survivors. The nearest equivalent to a trauma center to the airport is the Royal Alexandra Hospital. At least one [and there are reports (unconfirmed) of a second] car bomb, with propane tanks, nails, gasoline ignition, and cell phone detonator were found in a parking lot next to the hospital building.
Similar bombs have been used against civilians in Israel, I think in India against Hindus, and against civilians in Iraq. The use of cell phones as detonators for IED’s used against our troops in Iraq is so common that our convoys are routinely equipped with cell phone jammers that prevent the signal from setting off bombs in the vicinity of our forces.
There are common threads here. Car bombs, propane, nails as jackets, gasoline, cell phones as detonators. Not all threads are present in all cases, but the Venn Diagram of the overlap is highly significant statistically. One other common thread: All of these bombs were made by Muslim terrorists. The bombers in the UK were Muslims, led by a group of doctors who everyone assumed from appearances were loyal Brits. The bombs in Israel were made by Hamas or Hezbollah terrorists. The bombs in India were made by Muslim terrorists supported by the Muslim state of Pakistan. The bombs in Iraq, whether targeted against civilians [actually most of them were] or against our troops, were made by Muslim terrorists. I think there is enough of a common thread here to create a higher index of suspicion.
Consider it looking the other way. There are those who may remember a little concept from the Vietnam War called ARC LIGHT. Short form, load B-52′s with every dumb bomb you can find. Fly them in tight formation to a pre-determined location. Fly so high that you cannot be seen or heard from the ground. Drop all the bombs at once. There is going to be an area on the ground where to anyone there it will seem like G-d himself has smote them without any warning.
Now let us consider if by some strange circumstances a solution to the Somali pirate problem I have proposed was carried out. The pirates base at certain ports on the Somali coast. What if in the middle of the night, ARC LIGHT hit the waterfront of one of the ports? And again at another the next night, and another the night after that? In the remaining ports, how many of the locals would stay in the pirate business, or supporting the pirate business? How many would get out of Dodge and as far away from the ocean as they could?
Now let us assume that in the mud of the harbors they find unexploded bombs. They are US Mk. 82 500 lb. general purpose bombs. Now, what would the international community rationally [and correctly] conclude? That the US had made a deliberate strike, or that one of the many countries who have bought that bomb over the years for use by their air forces [or someone they had sold them to] somehow pulled off the strike and left the duds to deliberately and falsely implicate the US?
Further in the matter of means, some have postulated that Islamic terrorists prefer detailed conspiracies and mass deaths. An examination of any of the extent databases of Muslim terrorist acts in the world show that 9/11 was an aberration. Most attacks worldwide and especially in this country since 9/11 have involved individuals or very small groups and are akin to “Sudden Jihadi Syndrome” without direction from any higher authority. We have way too many examples ranging from the Beltway Snipers, to Major Hassan at Ft. Hood with a lot of stops in between. An Islamic terrorist attack via car bomb in Times Square would be well within the pattern.
Finally, you have to add in the immediate reaction of the government and their kept media. If any incident is Muslim related, there is an immediate denial that it is “terrorism”, or that it had anything to do with Muslims, and then silence. If there is even the slightest way that things can be twisted to accuse the evil, racist, Conservatives; that will be all over the news. It has been awful quiet.
As far as opportunity, that is a wash. The materials and access to the Times Square area are wide open to anyone.
Overall, using the civil court standard of “preponderance of evidence” by a “reasonable man”; the working assumption has to be that it was most likely Muslim terrorism.
But, we use “beyond a reasonable doubt” for criminal cases. With what is available now, we are awful close to that standard, it seems to me.
Leaving aside the “Reichstag Fire” scenario [and likely it would have gone off and the car would have been plastered with TEA Party stickers in that case], you have to look back at the actual level of violence of Conservative groups in our lifetimes. The primary examples date back to the Civil Rights Act era. The perpetrators of that violence were KKK and allied groups. Don’t look now, but they [like George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, Sheriff "Bull" Conner, and today's Robert Byrd who was a KKK Grand Dragon] were all Democrats.
The modern “Unabomber” was a Leftist who worshipped Al Gore. Eric Robert Rudolf, who bombed the Atlanta Olympics [and was the first of only two who targeted abortion doctors for murder] stated he did so in part to oppose multi-national corporations. The person who flew his plane into the IRS offices was a Leftist. Despite all the media uproar about the “dangerous”, “violent”, and “seditious” Conservatives out there, one would be very hard pressed to find a documentable incident of political physical violence by them in the last couple of years. Incidents of violence by the Left are almost daily occurences.
I am not saying it is impossible for there to be a change in behaviour and tactics by Conservatives. But people operate according to set patterns. In the absence of evidence otherwise, even investigators start with that basic assumption. From the evidence we have and the context of the times; I will assume that we got lucky and a Muslim terrorist attack failed.
Subotai Bahadur
Okay, they just announced they found another bomb, this time along the route of a Marathon run in Philadelphia.
RWE, did you mean Pittsburgh instead of Philadelphia?
We had our Marathon today, and yes, the race was disrupted by what they are calling a “suspicious explosive device” inside a microwave oven at a point along the final segment of the race route. The police detonated the oven/device.
Local paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has this:
After the leaders had finished, Pittsburgh police detoured the final segment of the race course because of an explosive device found in a small microwave oven on the sidewalk at 11th Street and Penn Avenue.
They were forced to cordon off several blocks near the original finish lines for the marathon and half-marathon. The bomb squad was on scene and used a robot to detonate the device.
Police for a time ordered all runners and pedestrians out of an area bounded by Ninth and 13th streets, the Allegheny River and Liberty Avenue.
Police Sgt. James Kohnen said the microwave had a “suspicious explosive device” inside and that a robot was used to render it harmless. People in the area heard an explosion at about 10:45 a.m.
The bomb squad gave the all-clear shortly before 11 a.m. and police then turned toward squelching a rumor circulating through some race checkpoints that the marathon had been called off.
The finish line for the full marathon was moved to 13th and Smallman streets; for the half-marathon, Ninth and Fort Duquesne Boulevard, after the bomb threat.
The threat prompted marathon officials to call off the awards ceremony that customarily follows completion of the race.
At a briefing this afternoon, city police Chief Nathan Harper said he would not discuss what was in the microwave. He said police would review surveillance camera tapes from the area to try to determine who left it on the sidewalk.
Acting police Cmdr. Kevin Kraus said the bomb squad X-rayed the oven and saw contents “that were definitely questionable and highly suspicious.”
Local TV station, KDKA, has this:
Runners in the Pittsburgh Marathon were detoured as they approached the finish due to a suspected pipe bomb near a bus station near the end of the course.
KDKA’s Bob Allen observed the bomb squad at the Greyhound bus station at 11th Street and Liberty Avenue.
Allen observed bomb squad personnel getting into their special made suits and a robot being moved into position.
One officer at the scene said that the device was a microwave with a pipe bomb inside. The microwave was in a white box near the entrance of the building.
However, Police Chief Nate Harper would only confirm that there were suspicious contents inside the microwave.
The device has been detonated and Liberty Avenue and Grant Street are currently blocked off.
Police are looking for who left the device at the location, but police are going to review the surveillance video from security cameras in the area.
The KDKA story has a smallish photo of the microwave & the bomb squad robot.
FWIW, as the KDKA story notes, this was right outside the Greyhound station downtown. I am making no connections other than to note that the passenger demographic at the Greyhound station is, er, not your average yacht-club demographic.
Pakistani Taliban claims responsibility for New York car bomb attempt. http://bit.ly/cZEiv5
I would not assume that a bomb placed on May 1 was set by Jihadis without further evidence. Mayday has been a traditional day for leftist celebrations and violence. The fact that the bomb was amaturish and failed seems to argue for incompetent but vicious anarchist slackers like the ones who broke the leg of that woman on Bobby Jindal’s staff.
What to they teach in a madrassah? Nothing scientific or practical. What they do learn is to recite the 7th Century oriented Koran backward and forward (which freezes the serious student into the 7th Century), they pick up an inclination toward suicidal agression, and they learn how to pull a trigger or light a fuze. Big deal. Not enough.
As the GWOT has proceeded, their technical performance has sagged and ours is getting results. Yes, IEDs hurt, but they are taught monkey-see, monkey-do, using western technology and employed in the safety of their backyards. Once they leave their backyards they become disoriented and they can’t adjust They can’t improvise very well. They’ve been taught to disregard all thought outside the Koran, it is hard to reverse that kind of lesson.
All those first rate Arab-born western educated smart kids they used originally, are now wise to the usual end result. Yes, they can get help from the sophisticated countries, but those countries are drawing a few conclusions of their own.
By all reports the Times Square car bomb is as pathetic as the Reed’s shoe bomb or the undy-bomber’s briefs.
James Bond’s Q would just chuckle. A propane bomb in Times Square will not alter the national will, at least not the way they want.
Bogie Wheel #44:
Isn’t Pittsburgh in the state of Philadelphia?
So perhaps the target was the bus station and not the Marathon itself. Or maybe they were looking for a twofer.
As previously noted some time back, the Islamic bombs in Europe often appear to be directed at Islamic areas. The message appears to be “Don’t assimilate. You can’t out run the long arm of Sharia Law. And these people whose ways you are adopting are pushovers, see?”
One could argue that the Hispanic immigrant May Day and other protests are directed at the same goal: “We are strong, we are Mexican, hear us roar. So don’t assimilate.”
But the Islamic bombs and shootings and running over pedestrians with cars in the USA seem to be different, to be directed at sending a message to non-Islamic people. Any ideas out there about this folks?
They slink and they slither
They creep and they crawl
They live in the sewers
Awaiting the call
They answer to allah
The wise and the pure
To infidel evil
They have now the cure
The pipe bomb, the fire
The car bomb, the gun
Muhammad commands it
And so must be done
A grade school in Russia
Schoolgirls in Afghan
They kill and they slaughter
Wherever they can
And now they are here
In our midst, smiling nice
They know with PC
That we’ll soon pay the price
The question is when
Will the muslim threat cease
The answer: When rid
The religion of peace
36. programmer
What has happened to Nahncee lately? Haven’t seen any posts from N in a while,…or am I just not reading all the posts?
Nahncee posted in the Ed Driscoll thread today:
Failed Car Bomb in Times Square
There are reports of a street-vendor flagging down a horse-mounted policeman. Army of Davids indeed.
Isn’t Pittsburgh in the state of Philadelphia?
We punch above our weight in sports, below it in state politics. Then again, would I rather boast of being the home of Ed Rendell or six Lombardi trophies? Ffffft. No contest.
Update for the morbidly curious:
http://tinyurl.com/2wyz4mh
This is from WTAE, the local ABC news station. They are saying there was *pasta* in the microwave, in addition to the “suspected explosive device.” If you look at the pic of the detonated microwave on the WTAE site, there does appear to be some kind of red/tomato sauce ‘sploded all over a portion of the ex-oven.
Frankly I’m not reading too much into this at this point. I’m glad the police adopted the better safe than sorry stance. (And BTW, WTAE says it was a citizen who alerted the police to the box containing the microwave.) But this may be just a case of someone not wanting to eat their rigatoni. Don’t ask me why. Stranger items have been discarded onto busy city streets by persons unknown.
Will definitely let you guys know if any nefarious details come to light.
NYC is the real story for now, IMO.
If this was the work of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, it’s a testimony to the effectiveness of our military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. If it was our Sunni Islamist friends instead of some other group, it’s also a testimony to the effectiveness of shutting down funds and specifically targeting, technically skilled bomb makers and trainers across the globe.
Propane and gasoline bomb???? In a small SUV as opposed to a tanker truck????? That’s a glorified Molotov cocktail. What happened to the PETN bombs we’ve seen so much of in Saudi, on airliners, London buses, Spanish trains, and suicide vests in Iraq? What happened to the fuel / fertilizer bombs the Taliban and AQ have used so effectively in IEDs in Afghanistan?
Don’t tell me a small network can’t get those ingredients here in the U.S. That’s a joke!
Whoever did this, it was a sad show, strictly amateur hour. A real old school Al Qaeda operative would’ve driven a rented van loaded with a couple tons of fuel / fertilizer explosive, and another 1000lbs of scrap metal through a flimsy gate and / or door and into a church, or shopping mall, or high school basketball game, or any rock / rap concert and taken out hundreds as he was transported to paradise to receive his 72 raisins, or Virginians, or whatever they think they’re due in the afterlife.
If this is the best they can throw at us, which I don’t believe for a minute, then we’ve truly won. We can declare victory, and finish mopping up during the next year.
If they don’t have any better results to show than this, it’ll be a huge loss of face for the Talibs, or whoever did it.
Let’s work to, and pray that we’ve stopped this wave successfully. Even crappy amateurish VBIEDs like this can cause considerable carnage if we’re unlucky.
“Pakistani Taliban claims responsibility for New York car bomb attempt. ”
Most Pakistani/Taliban bombs explode–they generally know how to make them work. I’m leaning toward this being the work of some Abbott and Costello homegrown leftists–the Marinus Van Der Lubbe International Firebombing Society, perhaps…?
supposedly ther is a celephone call stating that this was just a diversion and the big attack is yet to come.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/02/local_nyc_channel_reports_failed_bomb_at_times_square_was_a_diversion_for_massive_explosion.html
Is this real or a lame excuse for a failed effort?
Rurik @55:
Sounds like loss of face blathering to me! NYPD and FDNY have some of the best benches in the emergency response business on earth at the moment. Even if the city’s primo bomb squad and terrorist investigating team are tied up at one site, there are plenty of well trained cops, technicians, analysts, and firefighters to handle another 3 or 4 worse incidents simultaneously. After 9-11, NYC was one place that didn’t go back to 9-10 thinking only a couple years later.
That’s part of the problem from the terrorist perspective. We’re spread out, so it provides lot’s of showy high profile targets, but…we’re spread out, so there’s lots of redundancy, and an enormous and talented bench of local, state, and federal law enforcement, firefighters, and other rescue workers, backed up by our military.
If only we put all our eggs in one basket with the scientific, cultural, business, and political centers all in one convenient city. Damned those Amrikki Infidels! They’ve thwarted Allah’s will again!!!
RWE @ 40: The only Moderate Muslim is a Scared to Death of Christians, Jews, and Westerners in General Muslim.
Oh, now, that isn’t accurate. There are “muslims” with a small m, who are just plain citizens and muslim, not interested in blowing up infidels – but one has to ask, are they really “good” Muslims (with a capital M)? They don’t have a reform branch like Judaism (for whatever that is worth), but then, neither does the Catholic Church. OTOH, there are a dozen or fifty Protestant denominations that serve the same purpose. Islam doesn’t allow that, our friends the Saudis declare the effort heretical and punishable by death, even before that of the infidels.
So, the moderate Muslim is a Moderate muslim. Or something like that. But they do exist, in some theologically and politically confused purgatory.
OTOH, we also have the “sudden jihad syndrome”, so even we the infidel are trained to suspect our very eyes.
OT: The Decline of Middle Class
In both the Times Square, underwear and shoebomber incidents, the key to quick action was profiling. But not “profiling” as some liberal publications would have us understand it; as simple minded bias and stupidity personified. Race, language, etc are part of the cognition process, but only a very small part of it. Most of the data comes from the situation and known behavioral patterns. The process cannot be described and only human beings can efficiently profile.
A street vendor possesses, though he may never be able to describe it himself, a sense of how a scene flows. Who belongs, who doesn’t. What fits, what doesn’t. It comes from his daily experience with the street itself. People from all descriptions pass through Times Square. Asians, blacks, Slavs, midgets, gays, lesbians, Mexicans, Cubans, animal, vegetable and mineral. He ignores them. He sees the ethnic data along with all the rest and normally nothing alarms him. But something he saw that day in Times Square made him recognize the threat at once; and it probably includes ethnic or culture data, but only to a 1% extent. The 99% was other stuff.
But the vendor was psychologically unconstrained, probably unschooled in all the sensitivity training official people are bombarded with. That may have been an advantage.
Political correctness imposes two handicaps on cognition. The first is it subtracts data which legitimately should be in the model. About 85% of all serial killers are white males; that doesn’t mean that any investigation of serial killers should see every white male hauled off to the station, but not being able to use that fact distorts the model; but second and worse, it distorts its coefficient, which may have been small to start with. Other factors (psychological profile, forensic evidence) may loom much larger. In the underwear and shoe bomber cases, ethnicity may have made the perps worth an extra glance from their fellow passengers, but no more. It was the smoke rising from their clothing that provided the tipping point. What political correctness does is delay the moment when the smoke is recognized as a threat because we are held back momentarily by the fear of making a “racist” mistake. In the extreme PC causes complete blindness as in the case of that white woman writing in Alternet who described her brutal rape by a Haitian and who identified her skin color as the the culpable party. If the street vendor had been a brilliant but exquisitely educated leftist, would he have have raised the alarm? Chances are a suspicion would have gone through his head, only to be immediately suppressed.
Maybe that’s why ordinary people have proved so effective at stopping acts of terror. They haven’t been lobotomized by PC. Unlike the professionals they’ve no career at risk to the race baiters. What’s anyone going to do to a street vendor? Sue for his t-shirt stand? In this case the suspect is said to be a while male. But that fact did not allow him to be profiled out of the reckoning.
Making the use of certain data synonymous with bigotry is actually the bigotry in itself. It exaggerates the importance of a single factor to the exclusion of all others. What the KKK and the PC crowd have in common is that a person of ethnicity who may be any number of other things is still always just a person of that ethnicity.
Mark Steyn had it right. The West is weak. Because it believes in nothing. Contra Life of the Mind, the West is weak and believes in nothing because of the extra-ordinary changes in how women act. This is hardly misogynist, and indeed women want generally, a total freedom, and a Victorian pedestal, where upon the men Sandra Tsing Loh called “Kitchen B*****s” grovel disgustingly in total agreement. A situation guaranteed to produce no belief in anything.
The West has had horrific Wars before, and not had a loss of belief in itself. A third of German speakers were wiped out in the Thirty Years War, and no loss of civilization confidence was experienced. Heresies abounded in Europe, including Calvinism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and no loss of confidence was experienced. Hard line, actual card carrying Communists, not poseurs like Steven Gagham, spouting Marxism while having three Porsches in his Malibu Mansion Driveway, created the most pro-American people, pro-Working Man movies in existence. While taking orders from the Comintern.
FAILURE TO FORM NUCLEAR FAMILIES MAKES THE WEST WEAK. A nation of Sex and the City, aspiring PUAs, and beta nerds working in cubicles ala “the Office” is a nation that does not believe in anything but consumer goods to mask the emptiness of lives and is over-run by PC. PC after all, a post-Christian Heresy, can only take place when no one believes anything about one’s history, culture, patrimony, or anything else.
Look at LifeoftheMind — A clarion call to PC milquetoastism. A feminine demand for “nicety” and the typical shaming language of being offended in Victorian terms. The bomb was placed near Comedy Central for a show that did not even depict Mohammed nor Muslims. LifeofTheMind’s response seems to be ever more PC milquetoast weakness. That only invites attack, and then shaming language depending on “White Knights” to save him/her.
The larger question is … is this approach which GWB, Obama, Dems, many Reps, and the media share sustainable? When as Wretchard notes the Jihadi Muslims who seek to kill lots people over a cartoon … of a bear suit … need be lucky only once?
I would say no. No one will fight and die to defend PC Milquetoastism. No one will risk death … for the dubious honor of being a “White Knight.” The only reliable way to get masses of ordinary men to fight on their own accord, harder and deeper and longer, is through formation of the Nuclear Family. All else is bunk, proven by history to be a massive failure. The life of Sex and the City only creates and invites, through civilizational weakness, Muslim attack like a wounded fish draws sharks.
This doesn’t pass the “Muslim” smell test because the bomb did not explode–it fizzled out.
Now, here’s where we get into some truely interesting territory–if this bomb wasn’t placed by Muslim terrorists then who did place it? Who would have benefitted from a bunch of dead and wounded civilians in Times Square, and how would they have benefitted? The obvious answer would be the hard left, known for incompetent handling of explosives but sheer bloody-mindedness. Were they able to set the bomb off they would have focused the blame on the Tea Partiers, and would have done so with the other bombs they set off.
Fortunately, the Left is generally incompetent even at terrorism–and that will save more than a few lives. Unfortunately we cannot take action against them as they enjoy the full protection of the US government. At least not legally. But what really is legal or illegal to a government that has openly abandoned the people it was elected to represent…?
Wretchard:
I don’t expect this to happen while Obama is in the White House, but perhaps the next president would be willing to take a page from the great liberal hero, FDR, and consider doing to US muslims what was done to Japanese Americans during the war, that is, to “drain the lake” of terrorist support by putting the population where terrorists “swim” in into internment camps. I am sure I am not the only one to notice how often members of the “religion of peace” try to get non-muslims to submit to Islamic policies via fear.
I do not think internments will be a good thing for anyone, but can we consider that the current policy of PC uber alles will lead to successful terrorism, and that in turn will lead to pressure on our political class (one need only imagine a successful Beslen-style attack say, on Sidwell Friends school) to act forcefully. Perhaps that is a greater danger than todays car bomb. By acting as though not offending Muslims is more important than protecting the lives of the American public, our feckless political class is hastening the day when truly draconian actions will not only be deemed necessary, but demanded by a public that has had enough.
5 DM
“t was nothing we did that caused the moderate Sunnis to rise in the Anbar uprising…it was the perceived cost of living under the radicals. When the costs of not opposing the radicals became too immanent, too obvious and too high, the moderates rose and threw them out with relative ease. The question is how do we make the costs to immanent, too obvious and too high for the rest of the moderates on a global scale?”
Well if it wasn’t for the west’s exposure to increased terrorism and murder foul (sorry those are the correct terms) I would suggest that we just let them kill each other and draw back from the fight into a defensive posture. But of course to do that we would have to have really (in fact and in reality) closed borders and secure shipping. Which of course because of the immense amount of both is practically impossible and would cost as much or more than fighting the evil cult of Islam abroad.
Plus as an American and a Texan the thought of leaving innocent people (Muslim or not) at the lack of mercy of these murdering savages just goes against everything I believe and against my religious teachings also.
So what to do?
If we declare total war against them we guarantee many civilian deaths. But lets look at that for a minute. Would the number of deaths equal what the murdering bastards inflict? Would the civilian population finally learn that they had better run when they saw us coming no matter if the terrorists in their midst said or did? Would the civilian population join the terrorists against us, making it easier to just kill them all and let Allah sort them out?
These are questions we and our Military have been trying to sort through for over twenty years.
So what is the answer? Are the methods being used now by our Military correct? One sure result is higher casualties for our Military and a long drawn out war that could last for decades or maybe forever.
I don’t see how we can print that much money for that period of time and it still be worth enough to do the job. Also with the declining health and increasing welfare mindset of over half of our youth, where are these Warriors going to come from?
Of course the slick answer is that we will have Robot Warriors and that they will solve our problems. Really?
Who believes that? Certainly not anyone I know that has been in the military.
We are bound by Our Constitution and by moral standards and of course the law of PC to not kick out the thousands of Muslims in our nation. We can’t even sit them down and question them without threats of lawsuits. We can’t go on their property to discover if they are building bombs or hording weapons even when we know they are undergoing military style training right here in our Republic. All of that is prohibited just as it should have been prohibited when white Americans did so.
But of course, the FBI infiltrated the American group and then had them arrested. No matter if now that same infiltrator can’t seem to remember many specifics and has no real proof that they are what the FBI and our Justice Dept. says and “believes”.
So should the same apply to the Muslims here? Sure, but getting an infiltrator into those groups would be almost impossible. Why because they are not the same as us and they trust no one outside of theirs.
I’m sorry, I’m just rambling now. I guess my main point is to agree with DM, in that I really don’t have the answer either and don’t know of anyone that does.
And that is the problem…isn’t it?
Papa Ray
That street vendor is a T-shirt salesman. When Rudy Guliani cleaned up NYC Times Square became a safer and nicer place, one much more suitable for his lien of business. People like Jimmy Breslin complained that the place got “Disneyfied” and they liked the old tawdry and more hazardous version better. But it was the new safety and respectability in the place that stopped the bombing. Think a drug pusher or prostitute would have reported a suspicious vehicle?
The other thing that stopped the bombing was a public relations program that emphasized people keeping their eyes open and opening their mouths when they saw something that did not look right. The T-shirt vendor cited the catchwords of that program when asked why he did it. Now, I have heard experienced veterans, Viet Nam combat vets, complain that the Bush Admin spent too much effort on scaring people with their terrorist threat color levels and all the rest of that. “America is not like that. We should not be scared at home.” they said. But we have reason to be scared.
Josh #57: The big problem is that the “little m” Muslims just shut up and go along when the terrorists show up. They do their best Sgt. Schultz impression, whether it is reporting something funny going on or actively opposing the bad guys. Their religion seems to teach them to be submissive and the experience of their religion tells them to go with the flow. They only develop a backbone when someone shows them how. They are Part Of The Problem.
Bogie– the yinzer joke over at Ace of Spades is that the Pittsburgh bomb was a pierogie soaked in Iron City beer. Or an Italian Edible Delicacy (IED)– a pasta bomb.
Let me add that the US and the West is not the only civilization to feel Jihad and Muslims killing masses of innocent people.
India and Israel are well known. But China and Russia have historically and currently faced this problem as well. Neither regime is known for its PC predilections, though that may be changing, but each in the past and recently has been weak and thus faced lots of Muslim violence.
No one is as ruthless as Putin, as willing to kill lots of people, cut deals with Iran. What has he got? Jihad still. China too, has jihad cropping up all the time. They have been tough and ruthless, and still got it.
Moreover, Europe is already Muslim. As Steyn points out, even 10% of the population being Muslim, when they have six kids and natives have but one, will produce a future that is rapidly and irrevocably Muslim. Already the future of England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, is irrevocably Muslim. The kids born in those nations are almost all … Muslim. Mohammed being the most popular boy’s name. In forty years time they will be as Muslim as Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan.
Europe is Muslim ruled already. This was set when European leaders let Muslims in the first place.
Killing lots of Muslims and police state repression does not work. It hasn’t in China or Russia. Being “nice” like Europe has not worked — Muslims find Western culture repulsive and have lots of kids, while remaining on Welfare, for the most part. Muslims want Sharia, not Western culture — 40% of British Muslims wanted it in a recent poll. American style assimilation has not worked — Muslim men have voted with Jihad to tell us what they think of America: Major Hassan, the Lackawanna group, and so on — none of which btw were turned in by Muslim friends or neighbors, acting patriotically.
Nor can isolation work. If America expelled all Muslims tomorrow, and kept a rigid police state, Muslim men world-wide, connected by Western technology, would find a reason to infiltrate and kill masses of Americans. South Park with (Santa not Mohammed) in a bear suit. Ice Cream swirls. It will always be something.
We have a culture that is “strong” in at least one dimension: Muslims believe in Islam, in Sharia, in Polygamy, in all the things that make Islam well, Islam. Including Jihad. They feel they can and will conquer the world, which is weak and believes in nothing. They know the future belongs to them because they are the ones having kids, not Westerners. They know Europe is already theirs, already Muslim, and they will use it conquer Russia, China, and the Americas. Since polygamy makes them aggressive and unstable, and their rulers know it and use Jihad to point Muslim men outward not inward.
Thus, SOMEONE will decide that there is no problem, if all Muslims are dead. IMHO, that will not be Putin’s Russia but China. Which itself is embarked on a massive overseas expansion for resources in Africa and elsewhere, and faces its own massive Bachelor problem from single-sex abortion, and unfettered Jihad only controlled not solved by periodic riots both Han and Uighur, and repressive police state jailings/killings. China’s expansion brings it smack into conflict with Muslims globally. China desperately fears internal rivals playing on Han populist resentment, and the seething mass of young Han men who have no hope of marriage and kids.
Meanwhile the US is rapidly retreating, permanently, like the Roman legions from Britain, never to return. Itself facing sack and ruin, from Muslim “nuclear car bombs” for which the US cannot and is forbidden to retaliate (by Obama, himself Muslim in sympathy) and unfettered Mexican immigration with overtones of La Raza and racial Reconquista, with subordination of the “original sin Whites” as second class citizens, save existing White elites.
Into this power-vacuum comes a new phenomena, a Global China, seeking global dominance, against Islam, an old one, seeking the same. With America as a failed Rome bystander sinking into Mexico Norte irrelevance, and a Europe already Islamicized, with Christianity a forbidden religion (detested by both Muslims and younger women).
Bet on the more organized, more ruthless, more productive Chinese seeking colonial dominance in a new form. It is a small, globalized world, with everyone right up against everyone else thanks to modern Western technology.
PA Cat -
Yes, it appears we did indeed blow up rigatoni, or some similarly sauced cousin. The Post-Gazette is now reporting that the police think there was nothing explosive in the microwave. I wonder just what the one police officer saw that made him think there was a pipe bomb in there. Hoagie? Italian sausage sammich? (Delish here, BTW.)
Pittsburghers consume 11x the pierogies as other Americans. Washed down by AHRN City beer. (note correct pronunciation)
I’m not jealous that NYC is getting all the attention. Really.
Note to terrorists: There is nothing to blow up in Pittsburgh. Honest. Our sewer system is so outdated that water mains go ka-blooey all on their own. No assistance needed, thankyouverymuch. Move along now, Ahmed.
Whiskey:
As usual, you paint a grim but in my opinion accurate picture. An interesting question is: What happens after the first (or second, or third) nuclear car bombs go off? That they will go off is I think a given. Obama wants a nuclear attack on the US so he can surrender and become an American Islamic Vizer. Once Iran tests a bomb we will enter the age of nuclear terrorism, with Iranian backed Hamas, Al-Qaida and Hezbollah having ready access to nuclear weapons via Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Why not? Iran has been killing US troops openly for years with no hint of retaliation. The US has proved itself to be a paper tiger, as Mao put it.
However, I think an Obama who refuses to retaliate with nuclear weapons will (eventually) be replaced by…whom? An American Stalin or Franco, perhaps? (Its a measure of how bad I think things will get that I actually believe an American Stalin, that is, an utterly ruthless despot who will do ANYTHING to make the US safe, is an optimistic scenario at this point).
As bad as that would be, there are worse things that could happen. How well would be US be able to sustain the stress of such an attack? Not well, I think. A general collapse of the economy followed by the de facto collapse of the federal government is a possibility. Other scenarios where the US is crippled by EMP attacks are at least plausible.
“If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting” –General Curtis LeMay.
Has PC killed common wisdom?
#67 bogie wheel
Rumor is that the cop saw a tinfoil hat inside the microwave. Apropos of food-based terrorism– never underestimate the ability of an alienated Amish cook to add mysterious extra ingredients to the molasses filling of a shoofly pie. The crumb topping will cover a multitude of politico-culinary sins.
Note to terrorists: There is nothing to blow up in Pittsburgh. Honest. Well, the Bucs are in process of self-destructing this season too– only one rung above the basement-dwelling Disastros in the NL Central. Actually, if Ahmed wants to cause serious blowback from ordinary citizens, a bomb explosion at an MLB game just might do it.
whiskey @ 60: Mark Steyn had it right. The West is weak. Because it believes in nothing.
Oh, well, isn’t that what the Japanese thought in 1941? What bin Laden thought in 2001? So, the accusation is nothing new.
A lot of the situation is that the West has trouble taking a bunch of goat-herds seriously. We don’t know them. They don’t seem worth knowing. Or perhaps they are cute. Or perhaps they are noble savages? But that’s an even older fallacy.
So, I’m skeptical of your skepticism.
The part of the West that believes in anything, believes in the right things, mostly. The effete intellectual snobs, the pointy-headed multi-culti Marxist academy, are not the West.
Obama is an abomination, but given an event, even the likes of him would consult with Bob Gates, and I have no idea what would happen next.
Trying to score a pretty woman like ‘jumping from a plane’ for men
For all you alpha/beta types.
Does not correspond to my experience, not that I have much experience in the category.
#72 Josh
The article that you linked says that the study was conducted on Spanish guys– specifically, students at the University of Valencia. Paging Don Quixote– reminds me of the song that the village padre sings in Man of La Mancha:
To each his Dulcinea
That he alone can name…
To each a secret hiding place
Where he can find the haunting face
To light his secret flame.
For with his Dulcinea
Beside him so to stand,
A man can do quite anything,
Outfly the bird upon the wing,
Hold moonlight in his hand.
Yet if you build your life on dreams
It’s prudent to recall,
A man with moonlight in his hand
Has nothing there at all.
There is no Dulcinea,
She’s made of flame and air,
And yet how lovely life would seem
If ev’ry man could weave a dream
To keep him from despair.
To each his Dulcinea…
Though she’s naught but flame and air!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8Fvhdx8uM
PA Cat -
Well, the Bucs are in process of self-destructing this season too–
Vrai! I forgot about the masters of horsehide disaster at PNC Park. That 20-0 clobbering the other week was just more misery mustard on the humiliation hoagie. Poor feckless buccos. Maybe by 2050 we will turn things around? Say, where’s that Roy Hobbs when you need him?
On the brighter side, we *do* have hockey still going on in May!
OT: First thing I’ve seen speculating North Korea was behind the oil well blast.
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1367.htm
You need to scroll down a bit to get to it.
Warning: this site seems like a bunch of lunatic anti-Christian cultists, so take it for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing. But sometimes these screwballs have hooks into alternate info sources, so who knows.
#74 bogie wheel
On the brighter side, we *do* have hockey still going on in May!
And how many of the Penguins are undocumented immigrants from Canada? (Looks like the Pens had their troubles with the Canadiens this afternoon, BTW).
Speaking of hockey– I had a science teacher in high school who routinely threatened kids with grade deflation if they made the mistake of calling him at home during a Hershey Bears game. Back in the good old days before PC . . .
Well…here is first hand info. True or not, how he got permission to talk (or maybe he didn’t ask, it appears that way) here is what he said on a radio interview with Mark Levin.
“The Cementing had not started“. The BOP was closed and when opened to commence cementing “a huge gas bubble “Kicked” and pushed water and gas all the way past the top of an over two hundred feet rig tower.
“Mother nature now and then kicks up”
“Your dealing with 30 to 40 thousand pounds per square inch” “It was more than the safety and controls we had could handle.” Then “the gas spilled out rapidly and within a minute of it, and something ignited it.”
So…listen to the whole thing (two parts) from a guy that was there when the accident happened.. And it was verified that this guy was who he said he was. (according to Levin)
http://www.marklevinshow.com/Article.asp?id=1790422&spid=32364
“Every now and then you can’t win against Mother Nature”
“Terrorism needs to leave everyone’s mind and lets focus on the eleven men that are dead and the survivors, that is where the focus of this country needs to be right now”
Papa Ray
Habu is either gone or hiding under false flags but his brethren are striving to hold the flag for him. Yesterday there was a brave rally by many against whiskey‘s lame one note war on women, although I thought the outraged distaff voice was a little strident also. Today, while I was risking heat stroke to earn a buck, the defense of race loyalty brigades were out again. Wretchard has tried to refute them, as have L3, Starling, Dr Irons and others but they are fortified by their tone deafness. RWE and Subatoi demonstrate how to take a strong realist position without degenerating into hate speech that can put the Club in jeopardy.
My choice is not to role in the mud with them but I do think it needs to be made clear that whiskey has absorbed the entire Islamist mindset regarding men and women and violence, as do his defenders. The only difference I can find between whiskey and al-Zahari etc may be in aesthetics. If whiskey wears a burlap suit he is in.
To those who claim that anyone not lining up with the Baruch Goldsteins and the Tim McVeighs are really pansy apologists for the enemy, I say, well there is I presume a lady present. Militias and the 2nd Amendment do exist as a doomsday provision but they in no zero nada way replace or repudiate the legitimate organs of government.
If the Islamists attack the US I demand the US responds, not lone vigilantes hunting anybody with a beard and their shirt tails out. If the US ever isolates, coerces or expels people of a given ancestry or faith that may or may not be a good or terrible idea but it it is done as an act of the government that depends on the consent of the governed then it may be legitimate. Until after the US ceases to exist there is no excuse for some guy in a chat room or blog comment thread to say that it is ok to go hunting as a private citizen.
“Youknowwho” said “No one does wrong who participates in creating pressure on Islam.” That is the kind of talk that needs to be challenged as soon as it is uttered. It is exactly the same as the Leftists who said “No enemy to the left.” There is right and there is wrong and I will not allow someone to say they can do wrong in my name just because they claim to share my skin tone. The Islamists say they can do anything in the name of the Ummah because there can be no disagreement within the Ummah. Those who want that kind of submission to a vision that justifies unending violence and is entirely trapped within its own circle of arbitrary and self serving excuses would be better off joining the House of Islam.
There are people here who are serious professionals who know violence, how to organize it apply it and survive it. If the day comes I hope I get to serve with them, and I hope and will work to see that day does not come. Those are serious sober people who I can trust and whose trust I would want to earn. Violence enthusiasts, who are not the same as military or law enforcement professionals or experienced hunters, but to my ear more resemble people in extended adolescence, are undisciplined threats to any unit they join. If that dreaded day comes and somebody shows up who was calling back in April of 2010 or earlier for people to go off hunting like Baruch Goldstein did then I will stop that person from joining my community by any means necessary.
To the one who finds my posts to prolix I regret the turgidity of my prose. If a set of one line repartees are what you are seeking may I recommend one of many chat rooms that have not built a reputation for thoughtful analysis as our host has achieved here. If the strain of typing is to much then I would think that the corner bar could offer a warm place for those seeking only to curse our evil days to the approval of old associates and strangers. Here hopefully we consider specific simple questions. Those include; What is wrong, Why it is wrong, and How if at all it might be made better? Perhaps instead of just asking for reassurance that the End is Nigh you might contribute to these simple efforts, and correct my prose.
To be blogged under the title “Who do you want in your foxhole?”
Just caught a Napolitano press conference. She answered the question, “Is this terrorism?” by saying, “It surely looks this way. At least it was intended to be terrorism.” I take this as something of a breakthrough, regarding the terms of this debate. PC forces have always in the past sucked us down into this absurd questioning over whether the mayhem we witness before us is terrorism or not. I was living in the DC area during the sniper episode, and in fact one woman was gunned down a couple miles from my place and in the parking lot of the Home Depot I was likely to found any given weekend. During those dark days officals would come on to say, essentially, “Let’s not jump to conclusions, everybody. There’s no evidence this is terrorism.” Ditto regarding the anthrax packages that were showing up on Capitol Hill. This same line was trotted out recently after the Ft. Hood massacre.
How surreal it was during the days of the snipers in particular. Those two monsters paralyzed the city for a few weeks, instilling a palpable level of fear far and wide. Word on the street was don’t go outside; don’t go to the gas station; fear every white van or truck (do you realize how many white vans and trucks there are?). Still we’d have been judged irresponsible by calling it terrorism, despite the bleeding obvious.
I take it as a positive step forward, a cut through the PC fog and lies, if we can call a duck a duck here, as the likes of Napolitano has so improbably done.
Papa ray, I used to work on rigs – that sounds very believable, in fact him saying that the cementing hadn’t started yet makes more sense than anything – heavy cement in the wellbore should have neutralized any pressure.
When that much gas decompresses, the expansion itself can generate enough static electricity to ignite the mixture. Remember all you need is a single spark, and boom.
On that rig, you would have had a nature-made fuel air bomb. The only surprise is that so many men were able to escape.
WUWT has a series of pictures from a .pdf file I’d been sent earlier in the week. It will give everyone an idea of the scope of this fire.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/01/the-gulf-oil-rig-explosion-on-the-scene-photos/
The final factor that convinces me that this report really was on that rig was his closing explanation:
“Every now and then you can’t win against Mother Nature”
Anyone who’s ever struggled with nature knows that’s the absolute truth. Only people who’ve never matched themselves against her think that they can win every time.
LoTM says “Youknowwho” said “No one does wrong who participates in creating pressure on Islam.” That is the kind of talk that needs to be challenged as soon as it is uttered. It is exactly the same as the Leftists who said “No enemy to the left.” There is right and there is wrong and I will not allow someone to say they can do wrong in my name just because they claim to share my skin tone.”
OK, sounds fair enough except… what do you mean (or how do you know what he/she meant) by that kind of talk? I see no call to violence in that statement.
Pressure could be anything from making sure that Islam doesn’t get a free ride on wanting something as simple as foot baths installed in all gyms to pressure to keep any more Muslims from becoming Senators or Representatives of this Nation.
I certainly apply pressure in writing that Islam is the most evil cult on this planet, or at least I hope I am applying “pressure” to get the average American Citizen to understand what Islam is and what it represents.
And I really could care less if you don’t like my words or pressure to bring understanding to those who have not studied Islam other than bytes on the net or words in the newspaper or on some TV news program.
Sorry, but between Islam and the Obama wrecking crew and the Illegals it is time to speak up and out about the dangers we face.
When it is time for violence you can be sure that call will go out also. For now it is not the time, but it is the time for educating those that don’t know or don’t care to know about these dangers, no matter if they want to know or not.
Papa Ray
“80 wws
Obama’s idiot Napolitano has shot her ignorant mouth off at a press conference. She doesn’t know anything and you can depend on that.
If she did she would have been told to keep her mouth shut, then of course she is so stupid that she might not be able to follow orders.
And if this another Obama “misdirection” we will soon be able to figure that out.
I’ve directed some of my Oil Field friends to the Levin interview. I want to hear their reactions to it.
Papa Ray
Every dark cloud has some silver lining, and the failed times square mass terror bombing has one too
Hello Mr. Holder..
Lets see if you still plan on having your politically correct show trial of the terrorist scum in NY City civilian court rooms after this one. Lets see if you still maintain they have the rights of a US citizen criminal defendant.
Even the social justice and ACLU libs in NYC will be too terrified..not about the potential harm to NYC, but of the political suicide that this policy is certain to bring.
#77 Papa Ray
Perhaps–but these days I take nearly everything with a big grain of salt. And then I looked at my Indicator–Wikipedia. It indicated that such a thing could happen. It just coincidently has been updated on oil well blow outs today.
Its not conclusive, but it is something I look at. When somebody “important” has something to hide and/or obscure, the Wikipedia pages dealing with the subject are miraculously updated that very same day.
I don’t really know about the real details of the oil drilling business, but when the man says 30 to 40 thousand pounds per square inch of pressure I am astounded. It may well be true but I have a hard time imagining it.
#80 wws
Thanks for the link to WUWT. May the souls of the men lost on that rig rest in peace.
Papa Ray,
I see a world of difference between saying “No one who criticizes the double standards that have been exploited to weaken the West and advance the cause of the Islamists is totally wrong” and saying “No one does wrong who participates in creating pressure …” The second is a blank check, you do not know if it will be used to excuse violence. Even the former is questionable, it is possible that someone will criticize in terms that you do not approve of. I am always careful about giving a stranger the ability to use and abuse my good name. My point here is to try and make a divide between, well really you and others who I generally agree with on many but not all issues, and those who I fear are using our concern over one threat to our Constitutional freedoms to advance interests that are in fact also repugnant to that same Constitutional order. You speak often and movingly of how you teach your family about our history and the liberty our system nurtures. We need more people doing that and honestly we need to do it in a way that will reassure and not alienate the majority of the people whose country this is as much as it is mine or yours.
On the narrow issue I hope that if you consider the quote that I reacted to you will conclude that I may not have been to sensitive. On the larger issue we do need to create a space for criticizing the oppression, deceit and violence that accompanies Islamism in a manner that exalts and does not disparage our greatest asset, our heritage of freedom. We need to reject despair and renew our strength.
Thank you for the information about the oil rig.
LOTM is a self righteous hypocrite. His equating what I said with racism, implicit in his reference to ‘skin tone’ is a simple lie.
It is a lie that can appeal only to a simpleton, because it equates race with religion. I never said, nor did I hint one single word about race. Only a simpleton or a dishonest person with an ulterior motive could equate religion and race.
The PC brigade routinely makes this exact equation, because it knows that the TV watching, intellectually stunted, fraction of the population will swallow it without thought.
LOTM, if you want to challenge what I say, try some intellectual honesty instead of calling out stupid PC rot.
It is not Islam that needs defending, it is the West. I am not part of your PC brigade, LOTM, and I have just written you off as a serious person.
Well, Tcobb, you may have a hard time imagining it but they build instruments/tools to measure it.
Oil pressure sensing, high temerature
Papa Ray
I agree that some groups assimilate, but the point is they are illegal. There are people from these countries that have followed our law, waited in line and paid the costs to come legally and they should not be taken advantage of by criminals be they from Mexico, Ireland or any other country.
#86 Lifeofthemind
I don’t mean to insult you, but sometimes “blank checks” on behavior is what is required. Would we have won World War II if we would have had the same PC attitude we have today and had the Germans been “colored?” Probably not. Would we have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan if the important people would have been concerned that doing so might have been construed as how “racism” is currently considered in our society today? No way.
That which does not defend itself dies. We are getting there fast.
Here’s my question regarding the BP blowout: Why did they put the fire out? Once the rig burnt to the water level and sank there was no reason that I can see to put the fire out. If all that oil and gas is allowed to burn up 80 miles off shore, you might have a bit of an air pollution problem, but you don’t have a bunch of tarred beaches and birds. Why not relight it at this point? I haven’t heard anyone discuss this.
88. Papa Ray
Yes Papa Ray, I have had relatives in the oil business (now departed). I know they can measure such things. What I want to know is if the ranges as to pounds to square inch that this source quotes are realistic.
Because if they are not it stirs up another kettle of worms.
What is Hate Speech? Really, what is it? Rev. Wright? Nope, he’s an honored scholar. Rashid Khalidi? Nope, a pal of the President. Louis Farrakhan? Nope, a friend and neighbor of Obama.
So Hate Speech and Racism and Misogyny are meaningless words. Quite literally content free.
Website City Limits reports that high Black unemployment warrants referral of the US to the UN Human Rights Commission. Meanwhile Iran is a Member of the UN Council on Women. The UN Human Rights Commission includes Syria and China.
As a practical matter, nothing means anything but basically, extended family. That’s all that works in a farce coupled with real, not fantasy, violence.
Battle — I think Obama will be replaced, if he becomes an American Vizier intent on punishing White America which he, most Blacks and Hispanics, and the White Elite desperately want to do, by some military figure we have not heard of yet. Because the military will be the only functioning institution left. The only one trans-States which can get things done. There will be some Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and basically White Socialism. Not what I wanted but inevitable once Obama was elected.
Josh — PUA charge (to me astonishingly) 5K a weekend to teach guys how to pick up women. The experienced guys have no problem with the ladies, no anxiety at approach. Call them the Charlie Sheens. What’s changed is women don’t have a hold of their own reins, so to speak. Not just giving in to but celebrating their worst rather than best impulses. Western men don’t want to be womanizers (they’re unfit for it) or masters (they would rather have a supportive partner than a room filled with spiteful, dominated harems). However, Ed Driscoll (regarding the media) got it right.
He noted that Ferris Bueller (the late John Hughes knew a lot about men and women) predicted that pal “Cameron” would marry the first girl who had sex with him. Who would in turn despise him, because who can respect someone who worships you all day? This is why guys who treat women like dirt have to fight them off. Something our feminized and deeply chivalrous society creates.
No one in the West believes in anything however. Bin Laden WAS RIGHT. The Japanese were wrong, because America was still mostly (90%) White. It is now only 66% White. Therefore, we don’t believe in the Flag. Dallas Mavericks Josh Howard encapsulated the attitude Black (and Hispanic) people feel about the national anthem. Quote:”I don’t celebrate that sh**. I’m Black.” Something anyone can see at any baseball or football game or basketball game for themselves. In 1942, we had no movies made depicting the troops as cannon fodder losers who were abusive to their wives/girlfriends and serving a corrupt nation. We had no movies depicting war crimes against enemy combatants. We had no celebrities encouraging the enemy and predicting their victory. We had no equivalent to Will Smith saying he felt “nothing” about 9/11, because “no one who died was Black.” (False, btw). At least 34% of the nation, right off the bat, holds that America is irredeemably racist and therefore not worth fighting for, or even supporting. Another 10% of the White population holds those views, which predominate in the Media, Law, politics, Universities, and so on.
In 1942, most of the classes of Yale and Harvard and Columbia and University of Chicago left for the military. Today, the Military cannot even set foot on campus. In 1942, Gays were firmly in the closet, today, gay-vs.-military makes half of society take the side of the military’s enemy, in a vast and never-ending cultural war.
Really, who loves the National Anthem? The Flag? America? The Constitution (which is now a meaningless document that means whatever the courts and pols and media says it means, which mostly is institutional anti-White discrimination)? English? Heck about 22% of the nation does not even SPEAK English. Or want to. Who loves the military, the Marine Corps, the Army, the Navy? Could you imagine a movie like “Stop-Loss” or “Green Zone” (the latter wants you to cheer for the deaths of American troops) in 1942? Can you imagine a movie like “the Fighting Sea-bees” or “Guadalcanal Diary” today? Heck not even Tom Hanks can make a mini-series about the Pacific without calling America racist and basically taking the side of the Japanese (at length in the Mini-series). EVEN CLINT EASTWOOD made the Marines into savage war criminals and the Japanese into noble warriors in “Letters from Home” and “Flags of Our Fathers.”
So no, America by and large does not believe in anything. Josh Howard was just being honest. Being what most if not all Black people believe and act every day. His moment of honesty and candid opinion, punished. For Kausian candor.
This is why America has already lost. It lost the moment it elected the Manchurian President. Barack Hussein Obama. Because most of America does not believe in anything. Just ask Mr. Howard. He’ll set you straight. Here is Mr. Howard on YouTube. NSF (profanity). But see for yourself.
LOTM: “I see a world of difference between saying ‘No one who criticizes the double standards that have been exploited to weaken the West and advance the cause of the Islamists is totally wrong’ and saying ‘No one does wrong who participates in creating pressure …’ The second is a blank check, you do not know if it will be used to excuse violence.”
I’m sorry there fuzzy brains, but I did not write a blank cheque. “Creating pressure” is “creating pressure”. It is categorically different from “murdering people”, “setting off nuclear devices”, and “making facetious comments confusing race and religion”.
As a “stranger”, of course, I find myself subjected to bigotted questioning from you about my motives and what I would permit. You have no information about what I would permit because I have given none other than that pressuring Moslems is fine by me.
“Stranger” is a much larger category than “Moslem”. You are the bigot, because “stranger” in general has not earned the mistrust you express. Islam, OTOH, has earned pressure, and no one who loves what the West does wrong who pressures Islam without regard to whether feelings are being hurt, because that is the traditional way in the West to get a group to clean up its act. Islam, evil or benign, has to clean up its act.
If, in that, you read an endorsement for murder or burning down mosques, I pity you for a weak mind.
Tcobb,
Not insulted at all. Nothing I have said would hold against the standards that prevailed in WW-II. It is that level of clarity that I am hoping we restore. Remember that I am the guy who wanted to level Fallujah. I want our country united and supporting the Constitution, against all enemies. We do not even give the POTUS a completely blank check but we sure do give him a lot of rope and we need to get someone in there who will not use the rope to hang us. Most of this school-yard fighting is ridiculous because most regulars here now well that those accusing me of being some lefty troll are often recent arrivals and the ones unclear about what our conservative values really mean. The only way to stop racism is to stop racism. That includes the entire racist spoils apparatus set up by the Left. When people who claim to be conservatives talk the way whiskey does about race they are playing the Left’s game, they have internalized it. Similarly when people who claim to be conservatives reduce human beings to helpless automatons in some sexual pin ball game they buy into the Left’s paradigm. It is a mug’s game to go that way. Sure it was interesting and entertaining to consider once or twice in passing but it is what Weber called Marxism, an “iron cage.”
Keeping people motivated for the Long War and educating the people about our heritage and how rare and precious it is, as we must do each day as if it is a new discovery, in terms that include and enthuse the vast majority of Americans and avoid resorting to the easy emotional bonds of race baiting, and most generalized as opposed to specific religious criticism will be worse than useless because it will be seen as effectively self serving or biased, no matter how unfair that is, will be incredibly hard but still essential. That isn’t my record for a run on sentence but I was pushing it and having fun.
TCobb – I’ve personally seen 15,000 surface psi on an East Texas gas well, and this area doesn’t have anywhere near as steep a pressure gradient as the offshore gulf basin does, and it wasn’t as deep. So yeah, 30,000 – 40,000 psi is extreme, but believable. It may help when you can visualize the source of that energy – the source is the weight of the entire earth trying to squash that deep fluid, and when you stick a long steel straw into it it comes out with an incredible force.
Now visualize 30,000 psi decompressing to atmospheric pressure – that’s a big, big boom. Then ignite it. bigger boom. And then give it a nearly endless supply source, powered by the earth itself, and you can see how things can get out of hand so quickly – when things go wrong in the oilfield, they go real, real wrong real, real fast.
79/Cowboy:
I was waiting all day for Napolitano to come out and tell us that “the system worked” in regard to the Time Square bombing attempt.
Pendejo grande wrote: “Here’s my question regarding the BP blowout: Why did they put the fire out?”
No one put the fire out – slicks like that are very thin on the surface, although they spread out to cover a large area. This means they get broken up by wave action, and unless someone does something like deploying booms on the surface to make the oil essentially pile up, it’s almost impossible to maintain ignition on the open ocean. Last report I saw said there were 2 meter swells in the area, which is probably making the booms uncontrollable. Not to mention that they’re trying to contain several hundred square miles by now – impossible.
This is the best thing I’ve seen on the oil rig disaster. The bulk of the goodness is in the comments. Kind of a Belmont Club for the Gulf disaster.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/01/the-gulf-oil-rig-explosion-on-the-scene-photos/
And our own Papa Ray just posted on the thread.
LOTM: “we do need to create a space for criticizing the oppression, deceit and violence that accompanies Islamism in a manner that exalts and does not disparage our greatest asset”
Doesn’t sound like something a believer in freedom of speech would say. Sounds like something someone would say who wants to define what speech is allowed. “Oh, we’ll have to allow this speech now”.
Freedom of speech needs to be vigorously defended, not “spaces created”.
LOTM: “I am the guy who wanted to level Fallujah.”
That’s about as impressive as “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”
I tire of all the infighting of late. At times it becomes like a smackdown between teenage girls.
To answer LOTM’s question about who I’d want in my foxhole, I’d say that I’ll take everyone here in mine. For one thing, if it comes down to foxholes you really can’t be that discerning, and for another, that fact ought to give you pause that your “discernment” might actually be a luxury. Yes, I’d take you all in my foxhole, yet I’d reserve the right to knock sense into my mates when the melodrama ramps up and detracts us from the enemy.
So, here’s my appeal: give.it.a.rest.
C’mon, folks, focus. Focus!
LOTM @95: That includes the entire racist spoils apparatus set up by the Left. When people who claim to be conservatives talk the way whiskey does about race they are playing the Left’s game, they have internalized it. Similarly when people who claim to be conservatives reduce human beings to helpless automatons in some sexual pin ball game they buy into the Left’s paradigm.
I understand what you’re trying to say, but I think you misdiagnose. I don’t see Whiskey as playing the Left’s game here. I see him as pointing out what that game is, and saying that the Left’s game has won. It’s like Whittaker Chambers saying he felt he was on the losing side of history (and probably right about that too). Whiskey is giving us the point of view of many people, like an anthropologist would. I feel his views on women are somewhat too broad brushed (it’s not quite as wide spread as he thinks) but his views on race are largely correct in my experience.
It’s not “buying into the Left’s paradigm” to point out that OTHER people have bought into the Left’s paradigm.
Please accept my humble correction. In 1940, the White population was 89.4%, and the Black population was 10.1%. Meanwhile, everyone else was 0.5% or so. Hispanics were neglible.
We’d like to think “A Wizard Did it” or “An Alien Wizard did it” (comic book continuity, and South Park riffing on that, respectively) but in fact, guys like Eddie Albert, Henry Fonda, and Jimmy Stewart left lucrative acting careers for dangerous, front-line service in the military, because the society was nearly all White, and quite ethnically unified. America was for all intents and purposes an ethnic mono-state. Facing other ethnic mono states, in massive resource battles.
Now, America is about 66% White. Facing a multi-ethnic distributed globally religous group based … nowhere in particular, and everywhere. With a fraction of the nation fighting. With most of our weaponry and electronics made in Japan, South Korea, or China. Fighting with just a few, highly trained, but tiny few, Americans.
The Grandchildren of the Greatest Generation did not just suddenly IMHO fall prey to moral failings. Or become subject to Svengalis mesmerizing them. Mr. Howard above was honest. A proud Black man, among other proud Black men, honestly stating what he feels, with his fellows not rebuking him but laughing with him, because they agree. When Obama pointedly AS PRESIDENT, refuses to respect the National Anthem, on Memorial Day, and cradles his crotch, he is merely being like Mr. Howard. A proud Black man, open and honest about how he really feels.
I understand this. I really do. I have yet to see any multi-racial society inspire in its people a deep and abiding love of country, national symbols, and so on. Particularly from groups historically on the outs, with legitimate historical grievances against other groups. You found relatively few Bosniaks, or Croats, willing to die for a united Yugoslavia against the Wehrmacht. Mostly they fought on the other side, entirely understandable. Yes, America made Mr. Howard rich beyond his dreams, and Obama President. I would not expect either to have a drop of patriotism, or love of America. Human nature being what it is.
The Britain of 1940 could stand alone, against Hitler, for a year, because it was made up of people who looked and acted like extended family and for whom extended trust was easy. The England of today, has rejected that, with as Mark Steyn notes, a future that is irretrievably Muslim and Pakistani, and Caribbean Black. No wonder they are what they are. Japan has many, many problems. Including “herbivore men” and Otaku and the rest. But they don’t have the future of Japan belonging to another people.
Surrender is therefore inevitable for the West. Because the West lacks the will. Eventually the Jihadis will succeed. And America will … surrender. Mr. Howard prophesying the way.
O/T For Papa Ray, Habu, any other Viet Nam veterans here, I am reading a novel called “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes. He is a decorated Marine officer in the war who took 30 years to write this novel. While the Marine exploits on the DMZ are not at all like my lowland village war; the novel has my hair on edge. It has to be largely autobiographical and like Melville’s Ishmael crying out in a prophetic voice, Marlantes captures the incompetence of some field grade officers, brave junior officers, racial tension of the time and above all the indomitable will and courage of our greatest warriors, the USMC. Please read it anyone who is still puzzled, haunted or curious about the Viet Nam war.
How quickly things happen! Friday, hanging a door, a router suddenly and unexpectedly went on( plugged it in w/switch on) It took a huge chunk out of my leg just above the knee . I feel like an old man who don’t heal so quick. Ouch.
novanglus @ 97
Yeah, no joke. Papa Ray broached the possiblity that Napolitano might have been talking off-script here, and he’s right that she’s foolish and incompetent enough to have done so. You observe her “The system worked” comments, which were actually vetted. In fact, they were the White House line previously, as Gibbs and a few others had said so before Napolitano’s infamous conference. In that case, she was toting the line, for disastrous personal cost. In this case, has she got out in front of that scenario?
Who can tell, but, she did get out there and pretty much pin this down as terrorism as firmly as any Potomac Two-Stepper will do. That’s always a good thing when somebody from Washington steps up and calls a spade a spade. My God, how troubling is that observation? How troubling is it that, a bomb having been placed in Times Square, Washington officials might actually deign it “terrorism”?
We live in weird times.
Josh @ 72:
Josh, in my experience the pretty women are just women. Come prepared with honesty, a good sense of humor and an open heart and guess what? They are just as easy to date as the rest. In fact, most “men” (the true scared little boys), are intimidated by the good looking girls and they sense that. I married a babe and treat her like a special girl. She treats me like her special man. And I am no great looker – 4 years her senior, slightly pudgy, not tall – just a normal guy who is not scared of much.
Papa Ray @ 77: Yeah, I heard that guy and he seemed like the real deal. And Levin did vet him as who he said he was. Sometimes nature is the stronger one. IOW, sometimes you are the bug and sometimes you are the windshield. This time the humans lost the battle and nature won.
whiskey @ whatever:
whiskey, M’boy, you have officially gone over the edge. The answer to the above? Lots and lots of us. You REALLY must get out more.
LOTM: You are a wordy bugger but you think okay. Not correctly sometimes but okay. The problem is that the very events we are describing could very well be a false flag op OR Mooseslime terrorism OR internal idiots OR …. OR ….
Truth is, we do not know. Only what the official state organs are telling us and I trust them as far as I can throw .. well, whiskey.
I subscribe to the Papa Ray dictum. Buy staples and ammo. Oh, wait, that was redundant. Went to the FW gun show yesterday and stocked up on some items. I also bought raffle tickets from two Vietnam Vets in wheelchairs and a pretty cool knife from them for cheap. They were genuine crusty old guys and gems, for sure.
It is not its multiracial character that disunifies society. It is its multicultural character.
whiskey (#103): “In 1940, the White population was 89.4%”
The trouble is that in 1940, the people like you who went on about “Whites” most certainly did not believe so. After all, those teeming hordes of W0ps, M1cks, K1kes etc were categorically not part of us Whites.
Lifeofthemind:
If I may provide you with a shorter version: Collectivism is the tool of the Left, and he who adopts it is lost.
Regarding your question “Who do you want in your foxhole?”, you’ll find that most soldiers would rather not share a foxhole with someone who is gung-ho about being in one.
Whiskey, my grandmother had 10 kids. That wasn’t so unusual in her time. I remember talking to the woman about her memories of the Spanish-American War – she might as well have been a creature from another planet.
My family’s presence in America predates the United States. My forefathers came over here with a charter from the English king that gave them a huge swath of Virginia. We predate the Mayflower. My ancestor founded the port town of Alexandria, VA, which, during that day, was the largest and busiest port in the colonies. In the context of this old family and all its characters, I always related to Quentin Compson, having been caught up in this grand southern familial legacy that was going to steamroll me and everything.
One day, however, I looked at the huge scroll that is the family tree, and checked out the entries of the family bible, and came to the realization that, in what seemed surely impossible to my whole experience as a youth, we were finished. Taking my grandmother’s 10 children contribution and 300 years on this continent, we’re done. I’ll probably live to the day when I can close the covers on that family bible for good, and punctuate our run in this world. I’ve got two sons, a cousin has 2 more. That’s all that’s left.
It’s demographics, Whiskey. You are right about identifying our inability to make the nuclear family model successful. I imagine that the 66% number of white Americans you mention will continue to fall off the cliff.
I suspect this trend to continue for a while, then folks will rally around the old forms of patriarchy and who knows what will happen after that. But by that time, we’ll all be dead.
67/bogie wheel
The only thing in Pittsburgh needing blowing up is the Pirates.
Signed
A long suffering Phillies fan
Youknowwho (#94):
I would love to follow your advice, but I am a Bob of very little brain. Could you explain to me just what it is I can do to “participate in creating pressure”?
if someone’s taking foxhole applications: our town had a nice little gun and ammo show this weekend, it’s always amazing to see what kind of variety comes out for sale. Even saw a couple 50 caliber heavy duty sniper rifles. (those were expensive!) I didn’t go intending to buy anything, but there was one gun that had such a beautiful feel and balance to it that I couldn’t resist it when I picked it up. Wonderfully smooth and short stroke on the pump action! I was comparing it to a Mossberg nearby which was more expensive, but I swear this felt like the better gun. Picked up a few packs of one oz. solid slugs to go with it, you know, to drop some of those wild hogs with.
http://www.ableammo.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=112313
limitation – only 5 shots at a time, but then again there’s nothing you would ever need to hit more than once with it. Anyway, that’s what’s going to the foxhole with me. And then I can say “say hello to my leetle friend.”
peterike @ 99: great link.
Amazing pics.
I wait for evidence.
#110 Cowboy
The ugly little secret is that for the working class having children became expensive. For the ones living on the public dole having another child adds to their income.
And the more that is taken away from you to feed someone else’s family, the less you are inclined to want to expand your own because your existing children’s standard of living will go down as well as your ability to provide things like a college education for them.
Cancer, as a disease, is not just a biological phenomenon, it applies to societies as well.
#111 Walt
Signed
A long suffering Phillies fan
Well, that makes two of us. On the other hand, the Phils had themselves a nice little fourth inning tonight.
LotM: Today, while I was risking heat stroke to earn a buck
I suggest a bigger hat! But I don’t understand why you buttress your argument by appeal to sympathy. A word pops into mind… but will keep it to myself.
There are often heated debates in BC, we live in “interesting times”. But why is it that it needs your post to turn the thread into an invective shouting match?
Please think about it.
Tcobb, scroll up to:
58. twobyfour
OT: The Decline of Middle Class
The lady in that clip has some interesting figures, and since her presentation, it did not get any better.
Bob of very little brain: I already did give a pretty good idea as far back as message #16.
I will rehash it.
We don’t worry about hurting feelings when protesting the government. We rage and denounce. The tradition goes back a long way. America was founded this way.
Islam, benign or malevolent, has earned rage and denunciation in this same tradition. We denounce the Demonrats or the Rethuglicans without worrying too much about whether these denunciations are fair to every demon or thug.
OK?
Now spectacular harm has been done to us in the name of Islam, and spectacular violence is done around the world in the name of Islam. Almost as much damage has been done in the name of Islam as has been done by the government … eh? Almost as much?
Now I personally think that Islam is malevolent in its very heart and core, but even if it isn’t, who is supposed to clean up Islam?
OK, assuming that I am wrong and Islam is benign, then unless the rest of us are going to ‘colonize’ Islam and impose our will, the job of getting rid of the ‘infection’ belongs to Islam. In that case, because harm has been and is being done to the rest of us in the name of Islam, we have the right and duty to put pressure on Islam, exactly the way we do with government, when there is some corruption that needs to be cleaned up. We don’t attempt a coup, for it is government’s job to clean itself up (until election time). So we rage and denounce impolitely, and with a broad, not very accurate brush. It makes anyone who has anything remotely to do with government feel uncomfortable. If politicians don’t get this kind of pressure, they take it easy and feel they are doing a good job.
OK?
In the same way, under this assumption that Islam is just a nice bunny, we still have the right and duty to make the bunny feel the heat until it coughs up the bad worm that is making it eat our babies, because if we don’t, the nice bunny won’t care and the babies will still get eaten by the bunny that the worms have hijacked.
Get it?
We don’t run around wrist slapping people for hurting the feelings of Moslems. If someone says, “we have to put pressure on Islam”, we don’t say, “Oh you racist” (unless we are Islamists ourselves or TV watching idiots).
Just imagine how we talk when we think the government is doing something wrong (if you can believe such a thing possible). OK, now imagine that we can talk about Islam as roughly, as unfairly, as contemptfully, as we do about the bad side in government.
There’s nothing wrong with it, and if you’ve let someone convince you there is, you’ve been bamboozled. This is the way the West operated when it was free. If you believe in the West, dump on Islam. That’s in our best and very ancient tradition going back at least as far as free born Lilburn (ca 1637 – actually it goes way further back then that). We are still allowed to do it WRT the government, but the same anti Western forces that have made it a big sin to say anything bad about the bunny of peace would like to make it a big bad sin to say bad things about the bunny of government.
It has been called the rough and tumble of participatory democracy. If Islam belongs in the West at all (I don’t believe that it does, but who am I), then it doesn’t get some special protection from the heat.
Turn it up.
(Oh, I’m such a Nazi)
O/T but apropos:
‘On Becoming an Un-Hyphenated American’
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/on_becoming_an_unhyphenated_am.html
Youknowwho (#119):
If what you are arguing for is uninhibited free speech, I got no problem. In principle. In practice, I would think it wise to calibrate our speech so as not to drive away potential supporters, but I’d say mainstream public discourse still has a substantial margin until we get to that point.
(And to avoid any possible misunderstandings, I fully support your right to say whatever the hell you want, however unwise I may consider it. (Keeping in mind that pajamasmedia != Congress.))
Youknowwho (#120):
Putting it another way, I agree that we’ve strayed from “the rough and tumble of participatory democracy,” and deplore the fact that some (ahem) seem to be granted immunity.
On the other hand, unreasoned “rage and denunciation” seems more like the specialty of the infamous “Arab Street,” one which I don’t quite admire.
(You can now tell me that you never said “unreasoned,” I can reply that we are then in agreement, we can share a hug and sing Kumbaya, and get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
)
PapaRay, regarding footbaths in gyms: The trouble about this small point is that it is actually a damned good idea. There is a reason why athlete’s foot has the name it has, and there are also veruccas to contend with. Perhaps a disinfectant foot bath at the entrance to the showers would help.
As a matter of fact, public swimming pools in Britain (and as far as I know also in such places as gyms and hotels) have such baths at the entrances/exits to the changing rooms and for just this reason. I believe that it’s a legal requirement.
Of course, the Moslem requirement for footbaths has nothing to do with hygiene. Or at least now it doesn’t. Right idea, wrong reason. On this subject, Islam and Judaism have one unreasonable (IMHO) thing in common; the elevation of what were, when they were first invented, eminently sensible hygienic rules (no pork or shellfish for example) to the status of a religious duty. Note that I don’t know whether halal and kosher food have essentially the same restrictions, although I’m quite sure there are differences.
A video is just on TV where we can see the guy who supposely set the car bomb is unclothing, he puts his shirt into a bag… well looks like it’s an amateur !
Unfortunately, America’s pecificity, a far away country bordered by seas, will not make you safe from the kind of terrorist attacks anymore, internet is well masterised by muslim terrorists, they can recruit anywhere. The problem is that you weren’t in use with such threats until the last years, when we are since the beginnings of the eighties (even since Algeria war).
Anti-terrorism watch in big cities must be a priority, especially cities that are world famous, because what terrorists want, it’s the largest possible audience in the medias, in order to impress the mobs and to set paranoia. Then for them it’s easier to install their rules into scared herds.
A few years ago, I read an article from an Algerian, in relation with our suburbs riots and terrorist attacks in Paris center, he was saying that we must treat these “people” with a iron glove, because, it’s what they only respect, otherwise they spit on weak populations who want to behave with empathy with their cause or problematical situations. Slowly, but surely our country is advancing into that severe repression agenda, but it will take us quite some time to repear what our former so “generous” politicians left as mess.
@ Whiskey 93: “We had no celebrities encouraging the enemy and predicting their victory. We had no equivalent to Will Smith saying he felt “nothing” about 9/11, because “no one who died was Black.” (False, btw).”
What’s false about that statement is that it wasn’t said by Will Smith. Please don’t take this as me defending Smith or the many stupid things he has said about the US, both pre- and post-9/11. He and his remarks are beneath contempt. I’m just stating that the quote you attribute to him is beyond inaccurate. The interview to which you you presumably refer is one he gave to a German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine, in August 2004. http://tinyurl.com/26vr6h7 My German isn’t great but it’s good enough to see that translations of the paragraph in question (the interview’s last paragraph) say nothing like what you suggest. You put the words in quotes as if this is a direct quotation, but again, it isn’t. The only person who keeps saying it is you and a guy who posts anonymously at Tigerhawk and whose rhetorical style and fondness capitalization is a lot like yours. Perhaps you both want it to be true.
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-mos-def-babbling-idiot-part-deux.html#4296160435603252028
[W] At least 34% of the nation, right off the bat, holds that America is irredeemably racist and therefore not worth fighting for, or even supporting. Another 10% of the White population holds those views, which predominate in the Media, Law, politics, Universities, and so on.
[S] Do you care to enlighten us as to the composition of that 34%? Do you include Black Americans that are now or were formerly members of the US Armed Forces? And if you do include the bulk of them, then how about the ones who won medals of honor? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_American_Medal_of_Honor_recipients
Papa Ray 63,
I agree that we haven’t found the answer yet…but it is a question that needs an answer. We have already spent the lives of thousands of our best and brightest, the blood and limbs of tens of thousands, and near countless sums of less valuable treasure. We cannot afford to do for the rest of the benighted place what we have done for Iraq and are trying to do for Afghanistan. They are, quite simply, not worth it.
I wonder, (and do not know) if part of the problem is that the cost to the ‘moderate’ muslims has been pretty mild, if any. Most Iraqis are far better off than they were…and they know it. Most extended families probably have suffered a loss, but it was most likely at the hands of terrorists. They certainly have more clean water and electricity, and more freedom, wealth and opportunity. They paid part of the frieight, but no where near full cost. Iraq threatening American safety was, for the average Iraqi on the street, a net positive.
I am trying to think like a ‘moderate’ pakistani. I don’t want the radicals to entirely go away, because I slip back into irrelevance. I don’t want them to win…I have a wife and daughters. And as long as the pot is simmering, I am getting showered with aid and verbal/diplomatic support. And if the pot tips over to a rolling boil (the Amis invade), there is a decent chance someone I know is collateral damage, but you know the Amis will do their best to avoid it, there is a very small chance someone close (or I) will be in the wrong place at the wrong time and be killed by the Amis accidentally, or the radicals deliberately. And after that, they will ‘rebuild’ the infrastructure better than it ever was, hand me a bunch of rights, and pour money into the country. Not heaven…but the present situation is a positive(aid/relevance), and the downside ain’t too bad. A pretty good bet.
The downside is pretty limited. At least they think so. Maybe the change to the equation is the way we deal with the next problem state, most likely Iran or maybe Syria, is to not invade. Simply destroy. To use a phrase I learned here despite my time in the army, “Make the rubble bounce.” Destroy all the infrastructure. Make everything, from oil refineries to rail heads to water treatment plants to grain silos to gas stations to enrichment cascades go boom. And blockade everything. No help. No rebuilding. Make the victims live and die in the wreckage. And when they try to fix something…blow it up again. Brutal. Disgusting. Horrible. Soul wrenching. Mass starvation, mass dehydration, mass death, reversion to the most base animal man for the survivors. And leaving them in their pitiful wretched state.
But devastating one place may be the only thing (short of the third conjecture) to convince the ‘moderates’ in all the other places that the radicals are too dangerous a threat to have around…to dangerous to tolerate. It is, in essence, an attempt to make the moderates understand the three conjectures. Right now, there is not a lot of visible downside, and a lot of visible upside. Maybe they need both sides of the equation shown a little more vividly.
But maybe it just is not worth it. Maybe doing so destroys us more fully than they ever could. Maybe if we ever get to that point…we are already dead or deserving of being so. Who knows…maybe it would bring the return of the twelfth imam, or the antichrist or Shiva simply romping around the world. Or maybe having the alien who set up our universe as a game push the reset button. Or maybe damaging our western ideals is the only way to pass them on at all. Is destroying one country and killing tens of millions of relatively innocents less wrong than just letting the three conjectures run their course? I am generally an optomist, and despise emotions as a tool of cognition, but I find myself feeling impending doom. I can’t figure out if it is the doom of what is done to us, or the doom of what we are pushed into doing.
Maybe Frank Fleming was right, and we should nuke the moon.
(for the record…I am not advocating this course of action, at least not yet, I am just exploring it.)
Daedalus Mugged
# 126 Starling
For the record, the paragraph below is my translation of the last question in the FAZ.NET article you linked to..
Will Smith
George W. Bush hat mich angelogen
Interview Johanna Adorján
Text: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 08.08.2004, Nr. 32 / Seite 29
Bildmaterial: AP, dpa/dpaweb, Fox, REUTERS
Last question.
It will be almost 3 zears since terrorists attacked America and the world trade center. Has anything changed for you personally since September 11?
No, not at all. Anyone who grew up as a black in America has a completely different view of the world as a white American. We blacks live with a constant feeling of nausea. Whether you’re attacked and wounded by a racist cop or by a attack from terrorists, excuse me, it doesn’t make any difference. In the 60’s blacks were the uninterrupted targets of terrorist attacks. Of course it was civil terrorism, but terrorism is terrorism. We’re used to being attacked. As far as there being a constant state of alert, a defensive stance, that you just live through, nothing has changed there. No, for me personally, for my day to day life nothing has changed because of the tragedy of September 11. I live in a 100% state of alert anyway, I didn’t have to become more nervous, more afraid or more cautious after 9/11.
This morning on Fox News Channel Secretary Janet Napolitano responded to an assertion that the attempted Times Sq bombing clearly was an act of terrorism with what amounted to “Well, I don’t know. Could be. We’ll see.”
I guess it could be a “harmless college prank,” like the hacking of Sara Palin’s Internet account by a Democratic Party operative.
And as for “It can’t be a professional job because it did not go off”… Need I remind you of the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, about half the bombs in the attack in London, and Flight 93.
Longjack, thanks I got something pretty similar. But I didn’t get “We blacks live with a constant feeling of NAUSEA.” I got “malaise” wqhen I let Google translate it. But that’s not a good fit either. I took two years of German in high school so it’s been a while but when I translated the word in question, “Unwohlsein”, I broke it down to un- (not), Das Wohl (welfare, well-being), and das Sein (being, existence). I translated loosely as “ill-at-ease.”
But on a more important note, remarks like the ones Smith made are just beyond the pale. They are just shameful. While he doesn’t speak for me, it’s an open question as to how many black Americans he does speak for. My 46 and 1/2 years as one suggests that it’s a lot fewer than Whiskey claims. And while I still think Whiskey’s wrong about attributing these exact words to Smith, I understand (but firmly resist) the desire to put words like this in his mouth.
Just so you guys understand where Whiskey is coming from. The hispanics put on a Mayday show of strength. In southern california. Judging by Whiskey’s tone, what he heard was the hispanics believe they have already won. He weighs that against what he hears on this board and he believes them.
Just a quick comment that I think the Club is doing itself proud here. Even for those of us who have gotten frustrated with each other for wandering into the dead ends of blaming groups rather than behaviors I see a general desire to refocus. Marie Claude in her comment on the need to protect the cities and the different expectations the French had coming out of Algeria as compared to the more insular Americans offers what could be a good thread topic that brings us together. Youknowwho, and yes we do, is drawing a line between race, which is both undefined and immutable, and culture, which is learned and changeable. Yes he should have taken advantage of my proffered distinction between a defined expectation of support for some forms of pressure and undefined and open ended statements offering support to any 3rd parties acts in the name of pressure rather than resorting to personal criticism. That was especially true given a prior evocation of Baruch Goldstein that had prompted the issue. However it is best that we “Move on” and civilly debate how we can restore the great engine of cultural assimilation that did absorb millions of Chinese, Filipinos, Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans. None of them would have been considered as “white” as the English, Scots and Germans who came to America. Also while I have I believe justifiably criticized peterike for defending a racial identifier, that is I think inimical to what most of us believe in, his current position @102 is even if one I disagree with expressed in terms that can be debated.
Finally 2×4 I am certainly open to criticism. My “flame on” was prompted by what I saw as an effort to hijack the blog for a racial perspective by an evocation of violence, the Goldstein reference, that is not only reprehensible on its face but which also could subject all of us to criticism and hurt our ability to effect the kinds of inquiry and change we desire. A gentleman should not be unintentionally rude but I thought the effort was justified in this case. That decision is of course debatable. The subsequent efforts by yourself, RWE, Bob and others are what I was hoping for.
To be blogged under the title “Capping a Flame.”
I find Unwohlsein hard to translate. Nausea is probably too strong, but I thought the options were clunkier.
The problem is that the translation has already been done from English to German, and now we have to translate back to the original English and try to figure out what was lost in the translation.
Unwohlsein isn’t that current, I don’t believe. Usually you would hear “Ich fuehle mich Unwohl”, meaning “I don’t feel right”, “I feel sick”, along those lines.
Without trying to make the translation literal for the text that’s given, I think he probably said something along the lines of ‘blacks are constantly uneasy’.
In a day or so the right translation will pop up. Usually that happens in the middle of the night.
American prison systems pretty much zone themselves off into white black and Hispanic groups. Out west they further subdivide into northern mexican and southern mexican.
Does anyone know what the pecking order in American prison system is these days.
(My impression is that blacks are top dog in the east and the mexicans in prison are top dog in the west–as well you hear that a lot of the gang leaders run their businesses from prison.)
LOTM @ 132: Also while I have I believe justifiably criticized peterike for defending a racial identifier,
Racial identifier? Ahhh, ya crazy academic you. I thought I’d left that kind of language behind in the 80s after getting my lit degree at NYU. Who’s buying into the Left’s paradigm now?
If you start talking about “the Other” and “hegemony” and the “prison/industrial complex,” then I’m going to cancel your Nation subscription!
Anyway, this is all in jest. I for one am very glad you are part of this community. We don’t see eye to eye on everything, but you bring a lot of good thinking to the table.
Bob: “I would think it wise to calibrate our speech so as not to drive away potential supporters”
The government, being relatively unified and directed, can triangulate, Byzantine and disgusting though such behaviour is. It’s pretty hard to see how the rest of us could. If the governments of our age weren’t so hopelessly PC, we could count on signals from them, but let’s see now, the current government here will not refer to Islam in any sense any more, internally or externally, in the “war on terrorism”? I don’t think we can count on a government that wants to play Chamberlain’s role, bow to Arab heads of state, etc.
Part of your disadmiration for Arab “rage and denunciation” is that it is displayed for reasons that don’t warrant it. If a cartoonist draws a picture of Mohammed wearing a bomb turban, rage and denunciation in response are disgusting. If, in the name of Islam, 3000 people are murdered in a single day, and this act is celebrated in the Arab street, rage and denunciation are appropriate. That doesn’t necessarily mean going out and parading in front of TV cameras waving placards with “Death to Islam”, although I wouldn’t try to stop anyone who wanted to do that.
As far as potential allies go, a real friend would be ashamed of the behaviour of people wearing his identity doing to us what has been done in the name of Islam (done to us by Islam in my own blunt belief). A real friend with a fair mind would react against the “hijackers of Islam” in response to our denunciation of his religion for the extreme violence (and the threats) perpetrated in its name. He would not attack us, the victims, using the illogical, postmodern, PC category of “Islamophobe” (“Islamophobe” is newspeak – remember “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery”?). He would be horrified, not that we are angry, but that his religion appears to be playing the role of a monster.
Playing too much in fear of offending “friends” is playing the appeasement game. A natural, outraged, traditionally Western, reaction to Islam would give us feedback on who our friends really are. Remember, according to the PC brigade and the pro Islam followers of Eric Said himself, it’s not up to us to sort out what is ‘real’ Islam and what is an alien disease that has infected Islam. That’s Islam’s business.
Well OK, but that’s a two way street. Islam can figure out what it is. For me and the rest of us non PC players in this world, if it looks like a POS, and it smells like a POS, then I’m going to believe and act like it’s a POS.
It is our business to express this.
As far as Southern California goes, I would give it to the Hispanics and say good riddance. Let them try to figure out how to save that basket case.
57 Josh:
They don’t have a reform branch like Judaism (for whatever that is worth), but then, neither does the Catholic Church.
Read up on Opus Dei.
tom
Why do Saudi-funded mosques have any attendees?
A moderate Muslim is a Muslim who is moderately Muslim. Between the fanatics and whatever the Muslim version of Easter-Christmas Christians might be.
Whether that means “moderate” in any other sense is a separate question.
Those who condemn the internment of Japanese-Americans frequently say something like. “And they never did anything.”, meaning no microscopic proportion of Japanese Americans did anything against the US or the war effort.
Say “And they never did anything” three time fast and you sound as if you’re saying that the bad actions of a microscopic proportion of a population would justify rounding up the whole bunch. And we do have such actions wrt Muslims in the US. IMO, condemning the WW II internment needs another mantra stat.
It has been noted that Muslims do not riot over the mass slaughter of Muslims by other Muslims in another country. But a fake Koran-desecrating story in Newsweek…. If you don’t ask why the difference, you’re missing the point.
LOTM: “Yes he should have taken advantage of my proffered distinction between a defined expectation of support for some forms of pressure and undefined and open ended statements offering support to any 3rd parties acts in the name of pressure rather than resorting to personal criticism.”
(That could have been written in Greek without much loss of clarity.)
I did not “support” “any 3rd parties [sic] acts”. You just read that in. That I do not speak specific disapproval of wrong behavior does not mean that I approve of it. Such a claim is illogical, unfair, and, connected with the suggestion of racism, it is offensive.
(Per your expressed thinking, I haven’t heard your disapproval of mugging, so maybe you should clear that up, otherwise you are lending support to mugging little old ladies.)
OK, I forgive you, but understand that I am not going to bridle my words in order to clarify for you that I do not mean things that I have neither said nor implied. I don’t believe in that kind of wishy washy speech in this situation.
You might try studying a little logic. Maybe read Plato’s Meno and a few other of the dialogues where categories are analyzed.
Looks like the Pakistanese connection is becoming more evident, AQ needs to regolden its face and to refocuse its “troops” on its global jihad (where America is the main enemi that is likely to massively retaliate) since the Afghan Talibani are getting away from it for only fighting to regain their country back
https://www.siteintelgroup.com/Pages/Default.aspx
explanation in this french article
http://www.rue89.com/2010/05/02/lombre-dal-qaeda-derriere-la-revendication-pakistanaise-149911
Youknowwho ,
The parsing of the term “No one does harm ..,” which is not a personal attack by me against you, is something that can be done to craft responses that serve all of our purposes. We all need editors in life. My original reaction to mac evoking Goldstein is also something that can be considered and either supported or criticized without disparaging my intent in raising the issue. We all communicate for a purpose. If the speech is likely to have results that are not desired then we need to shape the message better. If your goal is, as I believe in fairness to you it is, to raise in the public mind the idea that certain practices and beliefs are inimical to the free tolerant and creative culture that we cherish then it is very important that message be delivered in a way that does not result in those who have been raised in the majority culture and subject to decades of manipulation by the Left through the media and educational systems rejecting the message. This requires what I admittedly often lack in my own speech, precision and clarity.
We are I think much better off if someone reacts to a phrase that can be used to marginalize this community in the public mind by raising a flag and then debating the merits of doing so rather than ignoring it and waiting to see if some troll from LGF or Kos Kiddie etc either planted the offensive item or simply spots it and then goes elsewhere and begins using it to discredit us to the larger community. Now the worst that can happen if someone sees the phrases that set me off is they find a following debate about what a reference to Baruch Goldstein or the words “No one” means. That will bore most, reassure a couple who may choose to read further, and will probably do us no harm.
When I was a grad student we had a couple of ongoing workshops in International Relations theory. Famous visiting senior academics, as well as eager junior faculty on Job Talks and graduate students, would offer first drafts of their work. We snotty students would destroy them. It was like being part of the piranha pool. After a withering 40 minutes of being asked “What did you mean by …?” and “Have you considered the work of … that seems to contradict you?” our guests would always say one thing, “Thank you.” Then we would retire to wine and cheese. Obama reacts to criticism by doubling down and attacking the critic. He is not only a poor POTUS but a lousy academic. We should I think see the Belmont Club as a place to fine tune our arguments.
Amazing that the Meno does translate into lucid English when so much written in English to start with resists explication. Those with a philological background might be able to provide a technical explanation. For the record I am all in favor of shoving little old ladies away from the path of oncoming buses, when needed.
Do you really expect me to take the time to read my stuff twice and rewrite it? I am providing fodder for everyone to riff off of. If I was an overweight Chinese peasant with a penchant for very young girls, mass murder, and mangled prose, I would get a huge public portrait and millions of devoted if befuddled acolytes.
COSMEAU (24),
Hold on a moment. Whiskey is often interesting (though IMO too predictable, and thus often flirts with being boring), but not misogynist? Really, have you actually read any of his stuff? He takes the admittedly-ridiculous world view and lifestyle of the Hollywood glitterati and their wannabes (where the women think and act deplorably, though hardly any more so than the men) and attributes them to Woman™.
Whiskey (60),
Thanks for referencing Sandra Tsing Loh and proving my point. When I survey my wife, my daughter, my daughters-in-law, my cousins, my friends, and my church, business, and community associates, I basically come up with not a single woman who thinks or acts like that. It’s only because of the media I’m even aware that such people exist. I still say you’re looking at a toenail and trying to describe the entire elephant. Let me repeat RagnerD’s advice to get out of SoCal for a while and see what the rest of the country really thinks.
So what is happening in Pakistan?
We had the war of the cities there.
The Taliban bombed major Pakistani cities and the Pakistani military bombed and invaded Waziristan.
This had not happened during the preceding 8 years.
The Pakistanis would pretend, but the Taliban laughed in their mountains.
Watch the status of ‘peace’ between Pakistan and India.
Despite everything Pakistan has a civilian government and the economy is booming. They know that terrorism is not the way to the future.
One way of seeing things is that this is the end of the game, not the beginning. Radical Islam has burned itself out and made itself unwelcome in many places. They need a big media event to boost their cred.
That’s why Times Square. The media is their co-enabler.
The only bigger event would be to hold terrorist show-trials there.
It seems to me that using suicide bombers has raised the collective Islamic IQ by a few points. It has done so by exhausting the pool of low IQ social misfits who are technically competent.
Now the strategists are consigned to dipping into the pool of social misfits who are NOT technically competent. This will have a neutral effect on the gene pool, since not only don’t they kill others, they can’t quite kill themselves either.
There came a point when Castro ran out of Marielitos.
#138 – “They don’t have a reform branch like Judaism (for whatever that is worth), but then, neither does the Catholic Church.”
You never heard of Protestants?
LOTM: “The parsing of the term ‘No one does harm ..,’ which [...]”
You are not careful enough. The first place in this thread where the words “No one does harm” appear is in msg #142. My words were “No one does wrong …”. This is not an irrelevant quibble. It illustrates that you are careless. This is further implied in your rhetorical “Do you really expect me to take the time to read my stuff twice and rewrite it?”
It might surprise you, but, yes … yes I do expect you to read your stuff twice and rewrite it where necessary.
I do that with my stuff.
If you are actually worried about what is posted here being used by a KOS troll, the first thing to do is look after your own words (have you heard about getting the beam out of your own eye before you worry about a mote in someone else’s?). Through carelessness, you could actually put down something harmful, which you don’t mean, but you have actually expressed. This would be real harm, whereas using my words dishonestly cannot so easily cause harm because the dishonesty can be demonstrated from the record.
Any words can be used dishonestly, so speaking with fear that you must not create an opportunity for dishonest interpretation means that your words will sound like you have a mouth full of cornmeal – like this:
“If your goal is, as I believe in fairness to you it is, to raise in the public mind the idea that certain practices and beliefs are inimical to the free tolerant and creative culture that we cherish then it is very important that message be delivered in a way that does not result in those who have been raised in the majority culture and subject to decades of manipulation by the Left through the media and educational systems rejecting the message.”
Now let us look at what I said. I said, “No one does wrong who participates in creating pressure on Islam.” That phrase neither condones nor condemns any specific act. It does not condone murder. Murder is wrong, not because it creates pressure, but because it is murder. The person who murders to create pressure is not wrong because he created pressure. He is wrong because he murdered. Creating pressure is not wrong. No one is wrong for creating pressure. Murder might create pressure, but it does something else. It murders someone. It is wrong for being murder, not for creating pressure.
You are right that Meno and other dialogues are easy to read in translation. That’s why I suggested them. I don’t know how much more clearly than in the previous paragraph I could express the categorical error you made in your reaction to my statement, but I was very serious when I suggested you read (or reread) Meno, because it, and other similar dialogues address this kind of error you made in the straightforward style that made Socrates immortal.
There is no defense against the left using against truth the ease of misleading into this kind of error, except to stand firm against such misdirection, to point it out, and to take it to the deliberate perpetrator of the false news to make him pay for his false posture. Backing up, explaining, modifying, apologizing … this is just what he wants. He wants you on the defensive. He wants you retreating.
I am explaining now, because I accept that you are a friend, but the aggressive defense I made earlier is exactly the right way to deal with KOS lies.
Mealy mouthed expression, apology, fear … are not.
[this post was reread and corrected - for error and correct expression - style and entertainment value were of secondary consideration only
]
“#109 bob
Regarding your question “Who do you want in your foxhole?”, you’ll find that most soldiers would rather not share a foxhole with someone who is gung-ho about being in one.”
Indeed bob. It’s not about wanting to be in that foxhole, it’s about understanding that your country needs you to be in that foxhole.
Who’s responsible for Saturday’s failed Times Square bomb? The Y! News blog rounds up all the theories: http://bit.ly/97Xxwm
uh, looks like none found the rue motive for this bomb !
and some say that it is a fraud forged by SITE
Youknowwho: this post was reread and corrected – for error and correct expression
Aaaaah, lemme object!
This reads like generated by chomskybot: There is no defense against the left using against truth the ease of misleading into this kind of error
How’bout: There is no defense against the left that uses, against truth, the ease of misleading into this kind of error…
Or: There is no defense against the left using the ease of misleading into this kind of error against truth …
(Yes, I know, as an English-is-my-third-language speaker, I am fully capable of the most convoluted sentences the world has ever seen.
)
Michelle Obama says Kenya is Barack Obama’s homeland!
Barak Obama jokes that “I happen to know that my approval ratings are very high in the country of my birth.” Later he jokes. “There are few things harder in life to find and more important to keep than love. well love and a birth certificate.” obama looks at Michelle–and then quickly looks away.
Here is Gov (commerce secretary elect)Bill Richardson saying in Spanish that Obama is an “immigrant.” (So he understands understands “immigrant” issues.)
I DO NOT think that LOTM early in his career got his academic credentials by working in the KGB sponsored Institute of the U.S.A. & Canada in the former Soviet Union — NOR do I think that LOTM was kicked out of the KGB sponsored Institute of the U.S.A. & Canada “officially” for being Jewish.
Nor do I think that Obama was born in Kenya.
But really one doesn’t know. This stuff all looks like shadows after awhile– and we are all poor saps tied to the wall of Plato’s cave–watching the shadows dance.
But what I have said from time to time is that likely LOTM like Obama (his flacks at factcheck.org even acknowledge this at the bottom of the page.) at one time was dual citizen.
This is ok. Wretchard is an Australian citizen originally from the Philippines. We have guys from a bunch of different countries on this board. LOTM is the only one who is reflexively censorious. This reflex is communist.
LOTM absolutely needs Habu to shoot him between the eyes every day of his life.(This is a Flannery O’conner reference from a short story called a “good man is hard to find.”) That way when LOTM visits Israel — the Israelis won’t burn LOTM at the stake.(attention this is holocaust hyperbole so as to frame properly for non orthodox– the next paragraph.)
What Goldstein and McVeigh have in commen is that they were both revenge attacks; That is, they come from weakness. Goldstein for Kahane; McVeigh for Waco. You can ascribe other motives to them like Abu Sayyaf to McVeigh or a Purim reenactment for Goldstein but the natural order of events is that waco and the assasination of Kahane came first — followed by these events in the same time frame.
To bring you guys up to speed, within a couple years the Israelis set up a Christian Allies Caucus in the Knessett.
The Russians for their part currently are courting the Israelis to get them to manufacture their UAV’s in Russia because the designs are too complicated to merely steal.
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137. wws
As far as Southern California goes, I would give it to the Hispanics and say good riddance. Let them try to figure out how to save that basket case.
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The problem with this scenario is that the USA doesn’t have a homeland like the Soviet Union had a homeland in Russia. After the Mexicans got the southwest, other parts of the country would break apart as well.
The monied internationalists were in cahoots with the Mexican nationalists after 1986 when Reagan gave the last amnesty. Mexican nationalists figured the USA had surrendered on 19th century border issues–so they were free to create Mexico norte byo immigration. (attention some americans on this board come from families who came to the new world before WWI or even the civil war–so they understand viscerally where the Mexicans are coming from–as, Say, the russians might understand chechans.)
The monied internationalists wanted to create a North American Union modeled after the EU. This was the de facto position of both republicans and democrats until the election of Obama. Now its just a de facto democrat position abetted by the reconquistas. The NAU republicans like McCain are going into deep cover. Big money is confused as monetary problems assault both Europe and America.
Twobyfour: “This reads like generated by chomskybot: There is no defense against the left using against truth the ease of misleading into this kind of error”
OK. I plead guilty. I knew I’d get into trouble for putting that little remark at the end of my post.
Charles, thanks for trying to restore peace by trying to convince Lifeofthemind that the rest of the commenters are paragons of sense and sensibility.
May I propose the 1st annual “write as badly as LoTM” contest? Let us see who can produce 1,000 words in a single sentence. Extra credit if it refers to the Meno.
“If Islam belongs in the West at all (I don’t believe that it does, but who am I), then it doesn’t get some special protection from the heat.
Turn it up.”
Sure. Turn up the heat. Twenty million degrees sounds about right.
One theory being given serious consideration is that the Times Sq bombing was in retaliation for the Southpark episode that featured Mohammed.
If this turns out ot be the case, we really do need an “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day.” In fact, we need to have one every month. The sooner the ones so inclined go crazy the sooner we will be rid of them. And the sooner the Left will be forced to admit what we are dealing with.
Uh LOTM speaks German, not Russian, so I’m going to flame him for being the cause of the money crisis in EU, too ! Habu won’t fire at German speaking people, cuz Germany Ubermenshheit, it’s what he reverres the most, ya know industriousety, meticulousety, money prosperousety, disipline ach ya, they won’t cross at a green light even if there isn’t a car in the aeras… Scheiss !
me thinks he is a New Yorker, and this is determining ! New Yorkers love only New York, like Parisians only love Paris, it’s the capital syndrome !
OK, maybe there was a leftover of a turd… but why oh why MC you have to step in it??!!
Next time someone would insist on a heightened nuance sensitivity of Europeans, I’ll ask for a solid scientific proof, because my anecdotal evidence shows it is a very dubious claim. (Yah, am from dere, so what?!)
Lifeofthemind/154
LOL! I think I’d be a serious contender.
Funny, I was revising some articles I wrote 15 years ago and wondered what the hell happened. I could write a semi-decent stuff.
(Will be blogged under “Unrelenting decline of twobyfour”)[maybe
]
MC: capital syndrome ?
Nuyawk is not a capital! Despite 85% Nuyawke’s may think it is.
2=4,
uh english is your third language when I ment third sense, so the probability that you would miss the right wave are numerous
The Obama’s again call it terrorism.
Separately, the White House also characterized the incident for the first time as an attempted act of terrorism. “I would say that was intended to terrorize, and I would say that whomever did that would be categorized as a terrorist,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said, sharpening the administration’s tone.
Of course, they can get away with this, because the nattering nabobs that would haul Bush over the coals for such talk won’t utter a squeek against the O.
They are also hinting at foreign involvement.
Another U.S. official, recounting a conversation with intelligence officials, said: “Don’t be surprised if you find a foreign nexus. . . . They’re looking at some telltale signs and they’re saying it’s pointing in that direction.”
Interesting to see how it unwinds.
MC, not all things are about me!
You say sense… utterly puzzled… as if you make any!
Peterike, ahm… who… what… a wild guess… buddhists?
not more than most of the intervenants, you included, so where are the scientific proofs that you claim to worship as being born from dere (such a long time ago) ?
On the Mark Levine show, a caller said that the vehicle used in the bombing was bought in Connecticut by a naturalized US citizen of Pakistani descent. He reportedly recently returned from Pakistan. Caller had ties to ABC, but I DIDN’T get in on the start of the interview.
More on the bombing at Business Week.
Fox News is confirming Pakistani connection!
American Who Recently Visited Pakistan Eyed in Times Square Bomb Plot
“The investigation into the Times Square car bomb has started to reveal information that suggests the failed attack was the work of an international plot, a senior administration official told Fox News.”
Fox News also pointed out that the bomb vehicle was parked directly in front of the HQ for the outfit that puts out Southpark.
The vehicle was bought for cash.
Both of the street vendors who spotted the vehicle are black. One of them is a Vietnam vet.
147. Youknowwho
“Mealy mouthed expression, apology, fear … are not.”
Hee…I don’t think any one could accuse you of that and definitely not me or a whole slew of others here.
But LoTM has a point, even if I don’t agree with him totally. This is Richards Blog. We are guests here. We should try and stay within the bounds of…what? Civility, Civilization, those whats?
Is it not to say anything that you wouldn’t want your mother to hear coming from your sweet smiling lips?
Ha…if my Mama was alive, you would have to muzzle her because she would be badmouthing Islam, democrats, Obama, Obama’s witch, (and anything and everything she could think of to protect and preserve our Republic and get people off their asses and to use their brains) and she would be appalled, no.. seriously pissed at anyone who defended or excused mealy mouth speech or actions in the defense of our Nation.
I’m sure she is pissed now, looking down at our sorry state of affairs. She would say..(and I can hear her clearly in my mind)
“You idiots better get your ducks in a row before they are all served up for supper!”
Papa Ray
Here’s an INTERVIEW with an obviously mentally deranged person suggesting the the perp could be a mentally deranged person or someone opposed to the “health care reform bill”.
In another interview, in his Captain Obvious persona, hizzoner stated that this was done by a MINIMUM of one person. Obviously discounting the possibility of an intelligent robot doing this all by itself!
Remembering something… Whiskey, your prediction… how did it pan out?