The Washington Post reports that authorities are closing in on a US citizen of Pakistani extraction for questioning in connection with failed Times Square car bomb. And now, the NYT reports, they have him.
Authorities were closing in on a man who they said was a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan, according to a senior Obama administration official. … Investigators and agents also were scouring international phone records showing calls “between some of the people who might be associated with this and folks overseas,” according to a U.S. official who has discussed the case with intelligence officers.
The growing evidence of terrorist connections in the Times Square case led the New York-based terrorism task force to become the lead agency in the investigation, which had been overseen by the New York Police Department, a senior U.S. law enforcement official said. That indicates that the failed bombing is being investigated as a terrorist incident with international connections, the official said.
FBI Supervisory Special Agent Richard Kolko of the New York field division said in a statement Monday night that the “FBI JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] and NYPD are working this case jointly and have been since the beginning.” The New York police force, known for its expertise in terrorism matters, is represented on the task force and will remain heavily involved in the probe, officials said.
According to the New York Times, Faisal Shahzad was arrested at a New York-area airport “apparently trying to flee”. “Charges against Mr. Shahzad, who had returned recently from a trip to Pakistan, were not announced.” Shahzad was connected to the purchase of the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder which was parked in Times Square with a load of explosive.
Keith Johnson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, believes that even if links are found they are likely to be looser than those which bound the 9/11 attackers to al-Qaeda. The era of the superattack may now have been superseded by an emphasis on numerous smaller attacks, like a swarm.
“No one would think of New York as a soft target, with the world’s biggest police force, and some of the best counterterrorism units,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst at Georgetown University. “And yet, in the past few years, terrorists are continuously targeting New York, which shows there’s no such thing as complete security.” …
But not only are the threats getting more numerous, they are at least in the public mind, becoming more diffuse. Mentioned among the threats are “the Austin, Texas man who flew a small plane into the local office of the Internal Revenue Service in February, killing himself and one other person, and the March arrest of the Christian militia members in Michigan, who allegedly planned to murder U.S. law-enforcement officials.”
The “War on Terror”, if that word may still be used, is suddenly with everybody. Speculation about the identity of the perpetrators has run the gamut. Robert Dreyfuss writing in the Nation said “it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone nut job or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right.” Election Ink said that “Anonymous sources have reported that a suspect is currently being questioned in the Bridgeport / New Haven CT area. The suspect is a middle age white male, has a history of strong political views, and considers himself a Tea Party activist. An arrest is expected within days. In a strange twist, the suspect worked in the past as an informant with law enforcement agencies.”
Quotes from NY Magazine captured the wide range of thoughts going through the minds of public officials. Mayor Bloomberg said the motive “could be anything”. The White House actually managed to utter the “T” word though in this case it primarily meant “terrorize”.
Attorney General Eric Holder said investigators have some good leads, though he wouldn’t elaborate. Bloomberg told Katie Couric he thinks it could have been a domestic terrorist acting alone: “If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.” Kelly said it is too early to tell if this was the act of an individual or a larger network. Whoever it was, the White House used the T-word to describe the bomber: “I would say that was intended to terrorize, and I would say that whomever did that would be categorized as a terrorist,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
America is a country with a considerable number of enemies nearly all of whom would sue it for defation should it mention their names. One of the fundamental problems with this investigation — and concerns over who is handling it — revolves around the problem of who the perpetrator will turn out to be. Unless it happens to be an alien from another dimension, an arrest will explode one of several cherished political world views. If the perpetrator turns out to be a Tea Party male that will be one thing; if it turns out to be an American of Pakistani origin, that will be another. Nobody will be happy. And being happy is the whole point of things today. As Lee Smith pointed out in his essay The Trouble With Proxy Wars, every action and perception is judged in the scales of “the political effects in Washington”. That balance beam drove actions in Iraq; it is driving actions in Afghanistan and to some extent, it will shape the direction of the Times Square investigation. Wars are no longer fought with victory on the battlefield in mind. Rather they are waged with victory in Washington as the foremost consideration. Smith writes:
How did this come to pass? How did it happen that adversaries like Iran and Syria are able to shape US strategy, so that we have failed to win in Iraq and will fail in Afghanistan and have deterred ourselves from taking action against the Iranian nuclear program, and have jammed up our strategic alliance with Israel? It is because American leadership of the last two administrations failed to act against those states that have attacked our troops, allies and interests. We did we not win in Iraq because states like Syria and Iran did not pay a price for the acts of force they used to shape political effects to their own advantage; when we failed to do so we abandoned our Middle East policy to the mercy of our enemies, who, as we are repeatedly told, can ruin Iraq and Afghanistan whenever they decide to take off their gloves. We did not win because our leadership, abetted by Washington policy intellectuals, is more interested in political effects in Washington than strategic victories in the Middle East. Seen in this light, the only American victory in the region is a pyrrhic one, the bitter harvest of which we may well be reaping for many years to come.
A wide range of actions is precluded because “we don’t want to go there”. Whether it is the question of retaliating against Syria or Iran, using the “T” or “TP” word, or questioning the legitimacy of certain religions and agendas, finding the solution becomes driven less by the facts than by allowable political space. Public policy freezes up when it comes face to face with what it cannot abide; the mighty Federal Bureaucracy turns into the stone at the first glimpse of the Gorgon’s Stare.
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They nabbed him, on Long Island. His name is Shahzad Faisal, a US citizen of Pakistani descent who just got back from a 5 month sojourn in Pakistan.
Hakeemullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader in Pakistan the US thought it took out, apparently escaped the attack and is thought to be the mastermind.
The guy used a car that he had bought more-or-less legally from someone. Not too bright. The bomb didn’t go off. Not too bright. Maybe he thought if it went off the evidence would be destroyed. Doesn’t he watch CSI? Those guys solve cases like this in less than an hour every week.
We’ll see if it’s really solved but this guy is dumber than the underwear bomber. Well at least he didn’t try to set off the gasoline with a match.
It seems that jihadists are drawn to NYC like a moth to flame. Other cities are relegated to the status of secondary targets. Anybody got any ideas as to why this might be so?
As to these swarms of smaller attacks: Are these like banzai charges or like kamikaze attacks? Or are they a combination of the two?
If we can get some hard data on these two subjects we just might get a breakthrough as to what might persuade them to surrender to western civilization and stay surrendered to boot.
C’mon fellas. Get to work.
I love my Tea Party, Mahmoud said with glee
Islamabad loves us as well
We’ve signs in real English the whole world to see
We have a bright story to tell
You see we’re against everything you love dear
We wish that you rot long in hell
But that doesn’t mean you should all live in fear
We’re peaceful till god rings the bell
We like to make noises in Times Square New York
‘Cause that’s where our newspaper is
Car bombs don’t go off we don’t know how they work
But bombing’s not really our biz
Our brother Barack is in trouble you know
The bad guys might win in Novem
So now I’m Tea Party and when things go blow
The Times will blame all things on them
Dave: “It seems that jihadists are drawn to NYC like a moth to flame. Other cities are relegated to the status of secondary targets. Anybody got any ideas as to why this might be so?”
Anything that happens in NCY gets world wide publicity, automatically. It’s a financial center, a city where the media flutter “like moths to the flame” to borrow Dave’s well turned phrase. For jihadists, I think it is the symbol for everything that they despise about America. (that it has a large Jewish population is probably not irrelevant either).
What’s really interesting about the persistent targeting of New York is it presents a way of testing the proposition that thinking conservative thoughts make ‘them’ “hate us” and invites attacks. Logically if you’re liberal you should be safer. After all, what’s the use of marching around Berkeley or demonstrating against Bush if it doesn’t get you any special protection?
So why isn’t NYC, a liberal city, passed over by the ministers of destruction? Because … The counter-argument is that since New York City has a lot of Jewish people and is a center of finance then these two attractive forces outweigh the protective armor of liberalism.
It would seem from the evidence that the “J” factor outweighs any amount of liberalism. Bending over backwards doesn’t work, at least not if you’re Jewish. NYC still a target. And they’ll keep at it until someday, somehow they destroy it completely as an object lesson. The Bali Bomber at his sentencing uttered a cryptic threat. “Jews, remember Khaibar. The army of Muhammad is coming back to defeat you.”
Khaibar? Well here’s the background of that utterance.
In other words New York City is doomed in the original sense of the word. Its fate has been pronounced. Nothing can alter it. And there are thousands on thousands of guys out there all lined up to carry it out that sentence of death. Some will come by hijacked airplane, others by ship, still more by automobile. Others will walk. Some may actually swim. Whatever. Most, perhaps nearly all, will be defeated. But one day the leaker will get through. The power of the sentence lies not in the effectiveness of a single attacker but by the eternity of the sentence.
What would happen, one wonders, if someone pronounced a similar doom any one who tried it? This practice was once called deterrence. But that’s another subject.
As to the question, can being liberal save you? The answer is ‘probably not’.
Obama should strengthen relations with Delhi–Jerusalem, Washington & Delhi can end this, like WWII.
RaviT, shoulda woulda coulda.
Won’t happen. It is not in Obozo’s interest to win a war, it is in his interest to lose it.
“It seems that jihadists are drawn to NYC like a moth to flame. Other cities are relegated to the status of secondary targets. Anybody got any ideas as to why this might be so?”
Try this. Having the UN there makes New York the closest thing to a world capital there is. Throw in Wall Street, all the Media and Madison Ave. and you what a terr would consider a target rich environment.
Or maybe they are extreme Yankee haters.
As far as the rest, War is always a matter of will.
“There is no point in having the capacity if you haven’t got the will to use it.”*
*
_Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
Or as Lt. Bethune said;
Special Orders to No.1 Section 13/3/18
(1) This position will be held, and the section will remain here until relieved.
(2) The enemy cannot be allowed to interfere with this programme.
(3) If the section cannot remain here alive,
it will remain here dead, but in any case it will remain here.
(4) Should any man, through shell shock or other cause, attempt to surrender, he will remain here dead.
(5) Should all guns be blown out, the section will use Mills grenades and other novelties.
(6) Finally, the position as stated, will be held.
F.P. Bethune Lt
O/C No.1 Section
War is about will. Weapons are things men use to impose their will on other men. Better weapons just make the job simpler.
Americans are seen as wishy washy in most places. Always concerned with being liked.
I had an Ethopian tell me Americans had too much money. If we were poor, we wouldn’t be so concerned with people liking us. He might be right. A very small percentage of Americans are worried about eating tomorrow. It’s not like that at all in North Korea.
OMG! Now the west wingers will be tied up for weeks trying to explain away the bit about the primary suspect turning out to be a Pakistani Muslim. Whodathunkit? It’s got something to do with the evil BushCheney, doesn’t it? Or there’s some other reasonable explanation? “Baghdad Bob” Gibbs will have to blink even faster, now.
Wretchard: “So why isn’t NYC, a liberal city, passed over by the ministers of destruction?”
I think really you answered your own question. It is because it is liberal–culturally, not in the political sense–that it is a target. A Muslim friend of mine argues that no amount of liberal contortions or concessions will ever pacify the Jihadists. Jihadists, she says, are implacably opposed to decadence. They make no distinction between liberal and conservative in this sense. Both are, for want of a better analogy, “to the left” of your average Jihadist.
twobyfour,
Sadly I think you’re correct.
Thanks, folks. Good start. Keep it up.
Also: any thoughts on difference between “banzai” and “kamikaze”? Right now jihadists are looking like the latter but if they ever act like the former, then there will be innumerable pinpricks in multiple locations. Or so it seems to me at the moment.
My mind is trying to come up with a complete picture but it is also telling me that I need to “sleep on it” for eight hours or so.
At any rate, I surmise that their apparent strength of durability will actually prove their undoing. Exactly how remains to be seen.
Again, thanks to all who replied so far and what the heck is the matter with the rest of you?
Dave: “Again, thanks to all who replied so far and what the heck is the matter with the rest of you?”
More benefits of living in the central Pacific, mate. Cut those who need their beauty sleep some slack!
As someone who lived her formative years in a country where evacuating public buildings, train stations, high street stores, was a way of life, I am very much afraid that jihadists will, eventually, look to history for their models. 9/11s are not necessary. Creating a constant state of uncertainty will do. I know little about the accused suspect at the moment. But I fear that his status as a naturalized US citizen points towards an ominous future for the U.S. I don’t think it is unreasonable to suppose that, since 9/11 sleeper agents have been perculating here. Neither do I think it is unreasonable for individuals, completely unsupported by a wider network, to be future harbingers of trouble. This is the IRA model that I grew up under.
If the Brits are to be admired for anything, and lord knows that country is a lost cause, it is the stoicism with which ordinary Brits stood up to the chaos created by the IRA. Unfortunately, that spirit of the Blitz has been lost on the other side of the Atlantic. Will it survive over here?
My proposal:
I. US Special Forces seize Pakistani nukes
II.
A. India takes out Pakistan
B. US takes out Iran
C. Israel takes out Syria/Hezbollah
III. Take breath, and same coalition takes out Saudi/Gulf States. No silly attempt to put in “democracy”–instead, first 20 years of oil revenue pay for reparations (including to NYC for 9/11, various Indian/Sri Lankan/Filipino abused workers in Saudi over past 60 years, Darfur victims of Wahhabism, etc.)
It’s not all that complicated why NYC is a target:
1. Denser population (bomb has bigger effect physically and psychologically)
2. More Jews (no explanation needed)
3. More media (see no. 2)
As for “why to they target a ‘liberal’ city like NYC” they don’t think that way. We’re all just one big Great Satan to them.
For the taliban, like the imperial japanese, they cannot comprehend what they are pushing against.
Like Hitler, Stalin, Mao — these clowns never left home.
That latest broadcast looked like the Big Man On Campus.
ie there are NO seasoned, worldly players in the taliban ranks.
WRT Wretchard’s Comment #6:
For some years now I have believed that consciously choosing to live in Manhattan or environs is a weird twist on Pascal’s Wager.
It should be apparent to all by now that it’s not a matter of ‘if’, but most assuredly *when*. With the best will in the world (and the West seems to have lost its will) the bomber will eventually get through.
Liberals can talk until doomsday (literally) about whys and wherefores and ifs and buts and maybes… but ultimately the answer to the question ‘why do they do this to us?’ is the same as that to the following great Australian Zen Koan:
Q: Why does a dog lick its balls?
A: Because it can.
They will car bomb us, dirty bomb us, bio bomb us, subway bomb us, yes nuke us – Because They Can.
And they will.
Then we will have to see.
There is a reason why politics in Washington matter more than victory in Iraq and Afghanistan or keeping Iran from nukes. Or why Dems/Liberals/Media all look like idiots proclaiming Tea Party folks when it was a Pakistani recently naturalized.
[So much for the melting pot, or Muslims in the US. Is this a fair statement? I think yes, because the same in reverse was assumed for the Tea Party. We can draw the appropriate conclusion from this incident -- Muslims in America cannot be trusted, because inevitably they will try things like this, their pals will keep quiet in agreement. Again I think this a completely fair statement in keeping with the furor over supposed Tea Party involvement by Bloomberg, the Nation, Bob Beckel on Fox, and others. It has the same logic, and people will draw upon it, be assured of that.]
The reason is simple. America went from 89.4% White, and 10.1% Black and about 0.5% other, to around 66% White, and 12.5% Black, and 22% or Hispanic. Mexicans have loyalty to Mexico. That was seen amply on May 1, with “Si Si Puede!” Che Guevara in massive evidence, and the usual threats: Whites out, go back to Europe, “we will keep killing” etc. “until we free!” and so on.
Mono ethnic states are the necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for political unity facing dangerous opponents.
Eventually one of these guys will use a nuclear car-bomb, and say good bye to NYC. Probably also DC, and Chicago, and perhaps Atlanta or Dallas.
What will America do then? Why surrender! Because at least 34% right off the bat would celebrate wildly at the incineration of America’s biggest cities, don’t kid yourself. Another 10% of the James Cameron crowd would be like say, Virginia Woolf, who saw no difference between the Third Reich and the UK, and urged surrender.
The difference was, most of Britain then was about oh, say 99% British. That is to say, the native stock that had always been there since the paleolithic, give or take a few Romans, and Vikings, and Normans. That allowed enough social cohesion to keep fighting when they were already to all intents and purposes beaten, and beaten soundly.
Wealthy Western societies ALWAYS produced Virginia Woolfs and James Camerons. Folks who are fabulously wealthy who hate the society that gives them wealth. They can survive as long as the safety margin of an ethnic monostate is behind them, ready to toss them out and create new elites. They can’t survive with a disparate, ethnically fractured population because major portions will be rooting for the states annihilation. This was the case with the weak North African kingdoms of the Vandals and Visigoths, over-run by only a few thousand Arab warriors in a few weeks.
Western Civilization just doesn’t work. It’s gone already, we’re just seeing it die, little by little. Western Civilization does not work because it does not reproduce itself. Take Western Fertility, among the richest, the lowest ever. Basically around 1 or so for most of Western European natives, and most Middle/Upper Class Whites in America.
Create Group A and Group B. Make A 90%, and Group B 10% of the imaginary population of 2,000 people. [Yes, its imaginary, but hold on.] Make Group A, the larger group, have a fertility rate of 1 child over 20 child bearing years (16-36, lets call it), and Group B have the rate of 4 kids over 20 child bearing years (16-36) for its women. At the end of 20 years, with no immigration whatsoever, Group A is only 70%, and Group B is 30% of the population of kids produced (i.e. the future). Go forty years out, it reverses, Group A is only 36% of the population, and Group B is 64%, of the kids produced during that period. By Sixty years out, it is only 12% for Group A, and 88% for Group B. Assuming an even split among the kids between men and women. This does not take into account different mortality rates, life expectancy, and so on. But you get the idea.
Muslims move into Western places, and have a LOT more kids than Westerners. They don’t have Yemeni amounts (TFR of around 8), and Muslims in places like Algeria, Tunisia, and Iran have about 1.7, below replacement rate of the current population. But it’s last man standing. Muslims in Europe (and Mexicans in America) have about 3-4 kids per woman, over her child bearing years. Whites have about 1 per woman. Which means the White population halves, basically, every generation, effectively, and the non-White doubles, triples, or quadruples. Note, while Muslims in Europe and Mexicans in America DO have lower fertility rates than back at home*, they do have more kids than Whites. A lot more, comparatively speaking.
This has profound implications for the Wests inevitable defeat in the Jihad. The West is … OLD. At least in the people who are White, and could be relied upon to fight for it. [Muslims view themselves rightly as Europe's conquerors, walking into an empty Continent devoid of native children.] America’s White population is also old, and wants nothing more than as much peace and quiet as it can before it dies. Pensioners and the like don’t fight thugs. They just give in, and wonder where it went wrong that they were abandoned into the mercies of people who don’t look like them and view them as prey.
*There is some evidence to suggest that Mexican fertility inside Mexico is dropping, quite rapidly, under economic and criminal stress. That also, Mexicans in the US have a weird pattern of fertility poorly understood — the first generation has about 4 kids, these being people who walked across the border. The second generation, born in the US, have only 2 kids or so, but the third generation has back up to 4. Also, illegitimacy seems to rise generation by generation. Which is in itself a poverty generator.
Nevertheless, I understand the chaotic, surrender-prone response to Jihad, over and over again, in the West. The same in Paris, and in London, as in New York and DC. The West is a bunch of old, vulnerable pensioners, mostly, who facing a Mike Tyson preying upon them for Social Security Checks (Tyson’s favorite past-time when he was 16-17 years old, his favorite targets old White ladies in their 80s) understandably want to avoid provoking him any further.
We’ve fed ourselves a lot of fantasies. Waify, 90 pound women don’t manhandle bad guys. Heck women like “Chyna” a hulking female professional wrestler cannot. Contra Joe Scalizi, old people don’t fight — they surrender. Diversity and multiculturalism merely accelerates the rate at which the surrender occurs. Japan is equally as old, but has managed to keep the bad guys out of its home islands. By the simple fact of not letting masses of non-Japanese move there. The West wasn’t as smart.
You could argue that NYC is merely geriatric central. What young people live there? That could be relied upon to defend it, effectively? The T shirt vendor who spotted the smoking SUV was a … VIETNAM VET. Making him in his sixties or thereabouts, at least. The other young people there have no interest or stake in that capital city of commerce, no more than Greek or Armenian or Venetian merchants would die for the Sultan’s Istanbul.
Old people are the preferred targets for thugs. You don’t see AQ making a huge play for Beijing now do you? Imagine China’s response to AQ flying a plane into Shanghai skyscrapers. Pakistan and Iran would be nuked out existence on general principals, and China would annex the radioactive remnants and pump out the oil.
The suspect nearly made it out. CNN reports that Faisal Shahzad had already boarded the plane to Dubai when the order came to stop the flight.
Meanwhile, the infamous “white guy” seen taking off his shirt may no longer be the focus of investigation, according to the Washington Post. “It looks like he was just taking off his shirt because he was hot,” said one law enforcement official.”
“They just caught him at the last second,” according to the source, who said Shahzad was on board the flight to Dubai and the jetway had been pulled back when the plane was called to return to the gate.”
Maybe. I suspect they were waiting to see if he had accomplices on the plane. It is unlikely that he acted alone.
RaviT @ 15: You have to factor in Russia and China, somehow.
‘Bloomberg told Katie Couric he thinks it could have been a domestic terrorist acting alone: “If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.”’
Bloomberg is a postmodernist Christian-hating asshole. God forbid his narrative of “devout Christians are the root of all evil” be contradicted by the facts. So important is his hatred (and the hatred of most of his class) to his worldview that he has no free will or logic to his thought process, he MUST believe first and foremost that this was the work of a center/right devout Christian because in his little pretend universe that sort of person must be more evil than anything, even a jihadist.
It’s a measure of how screwed up our elite class has become that he would utter anything so ridiculous. Or that the chattering classes and their minions in the MSM would lap it up, hoping upon hope that the bomber is a Christian conservative and not a Muslim in order to validate their precious, precious narrative about where REAL evil lies in the world.
Whiskey-
I’m compelled to ask – why do you still live here?
This isn’t meant as a flippant comment. It’s not a “love it or leave it” type of thing. I’m genuinely interested. If it’s so godawful a man of your intellect and grasp and action should logically split for the next best place. But you haven’t. Why?
If it’s as bad as all that, and China is the place of ass-kicking, why haven’t you gone there?
Your point about disparate reproductive rates is a good one but that conversation happened eight or ten years ago. This isn’t anything new, and the numbers I’ve seen have white and assimilated foreign reproductive rates statistically much higher than what you posted. The rates of reproduction in Euroland vs here are significantly different, I’m not sure it makes sense to conflate the two. Perhaps in the U.S. the more elite will simply non-breed themselves out of existence and the conservative population will simply take over in a mini-scenario of the one you described involving Muslims. It’s too early to tell.
Also, black American reproductive rates have fallen off a cliff. How does that factor into things?
I think you are spot on about young people being more in the hinterlands these days than in the cities. I’m not talking about college kids or people right out of college, I’m talking about people 25-40. Yeah, there are some living in NYC or Boston, but most people that age flee to exurbs or suburbs, possibly even to rural areas, in order to do the thing we need – have children. Urbanites simply seem to have lost the will and patience to breed, it’s true, but I can tell you that outside of cities, in the places where I mostly roam, child bearing is real, and it’s spectacular.
Dave: “It seems that jihadists are drawn to NYC like a moth to flame. Other cities are relegated to the status of secondary targets. Anybody got any ideas as to why this might be so?”
Maybe they share the legendary New Yorker’s delusion that New York comprises most of the known universe?
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/02/07/72-the-world-as-seen-from-new-yorks-9th-avenue/
Maybe. I suspect they were waiting to see if he had accomplices on the plane. It is unlikely that he acted alone.
Presume (!!!!) that if he just got back from Pakistan, he was on a List.
Maybe not a no-fly list, but known to authorities, and with known associates, etc.
@ no mo uro (24): If you haven’t yet seen it, Steve Sailer wrote a superb set of articles in for the American Conservative back in late 2004 and 2005. In two articles–”The Baby Gap”, “The Dirt Gap”, and “The Marriage Gap”–Sailer addresses the questions you pose. Here’s a very interesting excerpt from the Baby Gap:
“[In the 2004 Election] Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility (just as he did in 2000), and 25 out of the top 26, with highly unionized Michigan being the one blue exception to the rule… In sharp contrast, Kerry won the 16 states at the bottom of the list, with the Democrats’ anchor states of California (1.65) and New York (1.72) having quite infertile whites.”
http://www.isteve.com/BabyGap.htm
http://www.isteve.com/2005_Dirt_Gap.htm
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/041212_secret.htm [The Marriage Gap]
RaviT @ 15:
Bush should have been in New Delhi eating chicken vindaloo before October 1, 2001.
The enemy is, and always has been, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We will never have peace until the unruly Muslim populations of those lands have proper government.
What would happen, one wonders, if someone pronounced a similar doom any one who tried it? This practice was once called deterrence. But that’s another subject.
A subject which will not see the light of day while PC rules out doing anything even vaguely “wrong” for the greater good.
When the Spanish government reflexively blamed the Madrid train bombing on the Basques the people reacted with revulsion at their self serving incompetence and threw them out. Unfortunately that let in the Socialists who promptly surrendered to the Islamists. The Republicans should beat Holder like a drum for trying to link this to opposition to the Health Care Bill and smear the Tea Party movement. Everyone like Robert Dreyfus who has advanced such a position should be held up to public contempt and ridicule until they are driven off the public stage and forced to earn their bread by changing oil at Jiffy Lube.
Jesse Jackson once referred to New York as “Hymie Town.” Holder is from New York but his contempt for the city and his sense of grievance against Jews and Whites, I list them separately because Black racists have internalized the racial map of the KKK, is palpable. The bigotry that was allowed to fester within the urban black community was deemed as harmless, with the hope that education and social integration people like Barack Hussain Obama, Eric Himpton Holder, Jr. and Michelle LaVaughn Robinson would serve as examples of success and leaders for other members of the Black community. Over time it was hoped that the destructive effects of internalized prejudice would be reduced to an attribute of a shrinking subset. Three things worked against that;
1. the mechanism and psychological grip of bigotry is not well understood,
2. the sense of victimology and isolation was encouraged by Left wing whites,
3. the memes of grievance and eternal struggle against the Jews resonated with those of Islam like vibrations transmitted by a tuning fork. The encounter of the radicalized elements of the American Black community with with a resurgent Islamist movement fueled by oil money moved both from the margins within their societies to prominence.
Can this cat be walked back? To do so will require the defeat and repudiation of the Islamists, Salafist or Khomeinist, within the repudiation of the Socialists controlling the education system within the West. Bush started the process of forcing a conversation within the Arab Islamic community. That painful process may bare fruit over time. The process of regaining control over the domestic educational system that perpetuated the ideologies and prejudices of Obama, Holder and Robinson may prove equally or more difficult. The demonstrable failure of the products of the Socialist racial spoils project when in office, combined with the public exposure of another shibboleth of the Left in the Global Warming fraud, may help efforts to reassert control over academia.
I work in Manhattan. After 9/11, one of the people I worked with, a volunteer fireman from Long Island, moved away upstate, saying he did not want to be anywhere around NYC going forward when the next attack hit.
I was scornful of him at the time, partly because he always made a big deal of being a fireman, and I thought he was tucking tail and running, basically. I thought, “We can’t be running away from these schmucks!”
Of course, now I realize the wisdom of what he did, and rarely a day goes by that I don’t think of going elsewhere, almost anywhere else in the country, because of the inevitability of what is coming.
Don’t get me wrong, I would not think of leaving and would stick it out in defiance if I saw the same amount of defiance in the majority of Americans, but particularly in our leaders.
However, I see precious little of any of that.
I have seen over the course of 9 years how reality itself has been twisted and contorted to such an ubelievable degree, just to sustain a certain narrative, culminating in the replacement of the word “terrorism” with “man-made disaster”, and the idea that US citizens disagreeing with legislation are a bigger security threat than jihadists.
Bottom line, I have no confidence that we are trying to address the threat seriously anymore, and thus the idea of living in an area which has the biggest target in the world painted on it now seems incredibly stupid or reckless. I suppose having children now has made that feeling all the more acute.
What keeps my up at night sometimes is the idea that when TSHTF, my child would be trapped in a nightmare and by my failure to acknowledge and act to move in time, I will have doomed them.
If that happens, there are a whole lot of people who should hope I also don’t make it, because I will be looking pay for my errors by making others pay for theirs.
New York, if I can make it there I can make it anywhere!
What irks me is that the authorities/media told the world what this terrorist did wrong. Nothing like giving them a checklist for their next action! Shade of Clinton and the Chinese missiles.
The Bali Bomber at his sentencing uttered a cryptic threat. “Jews, remember Khaibar. The army of Muhammad is coming back to defeat you.”
Khaibar?…
Khaibar indeed, for all those fantasizing fetishists of beheaded Jews (and/or others).
And lest one think that it’s only the jolly Bali Bomber who fantasizes about Khaibar, keeps it alive in fresh and fervant memory, clings to its glorious aura:
well, think again…..
When I first heard about this, I said, “What else is new? They can’t shoot straight, and we’re screwed.”
The problem here is that we have two enemies, and the most dangerous one is ourselves. That’s the essence of Whiskey’s nihilism and why it’s so compelling. He outlines the deterioration in materialistic terms, tribes and skin color, but the broader way to see it is as a cultural regression, an attack on Americanism that has been largely perpetrated by the left.
There is no longer any assumption that there is an “ascent of man” and that we are at the forefront of that effort. Going, going, someday potentially gone are realistic notions of a higher truth and of aspirations to produce and revere what is good and beautiful. Instead we get reverence for the mundane and the primitive, and that’s the world in which tribes and skin color supersede humanity as primary concerns. And in that world, Whiskey is spot on. The bitter, mournful quality of his arguments make sense if we acquiesce to the world view that, ultimately, is that of the Aztecs and the bulk of mankind that survived in the past through a reliance on self-justifying, ritualized slaughter.
If we still believe that we can be, are, better than that; if we once again capture a sense of American exceptionalism — which, after all, is a belief in humanity proper — then this Muslim pathology will shrink to nothing, like mold in the air and the sunshine. These guys are like weeds when compared to the huge forests of evil that dominated the first half of the last century, and even they were no match for a belief in ourselves.
But right now, we are trying to keep a culture of death on life support, which makes us easy pickings for the locusts. We feed ourselves the phony fruits of narcissism to get by, and that’s what makes the face in the mirror the Gorgon’s stare. The narcissist gets by on denial, rationalization, and externalization to combat the underlying feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing. The Democratic party has become the party of self-loathing, the party of death, and nothing could be clearer. But about half of us are no longer grounded in reality but rather dwell in the land of such narcissistic defenses, projecting our own dark, nihilistic preoccupations onto the rest: the whites, blacks, Jews, Catholics, rednecks, all those who still believe that we, America, can lead the way to something much, much better
glitch in Ajax Edit box.
Faisal’s condo maybe up for sale. I wonder why (link to come later).
{editing device not working!}
[Long Wars Journal]
Faisal reportedly purchased the dark Nissan Pathfinder from an unidentified woman in Connecticut several weeks ago, using cash. The Pathfinder was found smoldering at Times Square on the evening of May 1. The Pathfinder was packed with three propane tanks, two five-gallon containers of gasoline, fireworks, and bags of fertilizer. The bomb appears to have been a crude fuel-air explosive device that was to be triggered by fireworks ignited by a timing device.
Officials tracked Faisal down based on information gathered from the upload of the videotape of Qari Hussain Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban master trainer of suicide bombers, according to ABC. On the video, Qari Hussain lauded the bombing, which he characterized as successful, and said further attacks against the US would follow.
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2010/05/fbi_arrests_pakistan.php
Weary G, come to Maine. We just need an influx of BC types to combat the moonbats that have overrun the state in the last 20 years. If we can do that, it should be pretty close to heaven on earth, like it was while I raised my kids here in the 80s and 90s.
Whiskey 19
As much as I love reading your comments, your comment about NY as being geriatric is absolute crap. So much so, that I doubt you have ever been here. The folks in NY who would stand up and fight are the same folks who were here on 9/11. Not just the firemen and policeman who ran into the twin towers, but those who helped complete strangers down countless flights of stairs.
You criticize wall street, and yes, there are a lot of effeminate Wharton MBA’s here. But that is only a thin sliver of those who work here. The vast majority are the folks you see commuting to work from neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, or the Bronx. These are the guys you see on the train reading the NY Post or Daily News, as opposed to the NY Times. I have lived here all my life, so when you comment on NY, I wonder if you have ever been to any of the other 4 boroughs?
Even outsiders who have moved to NY would fight. It used to be that once you started a family, you moved to the suburbs. Not anymore. There are more and more couples who are raising families in all of the boroughs, including Manhattan. I meet these families all of the time as I have 2 small children, and I can tell you, if someone were to threaten our children, any one of us would gladly pick up a flame thrower and torch the bastard(s), making sure they didn’t die outright, and then would rub bacon grease on them.
How dare the Police ask a naturalized alien for his papers! Racists! They might as well have waved the Nazi Flag right there! We all know it was one of those violence-prone teabaggers who did it!!!
Obama will be on the air soon to say “The Police acted Stupidly!”
Whiskey does not need a defender. In fact, since, in many ways he and i probably view the world in widely divergent ways, he may not appreciate my occasional forays into pointing out that, in my opinion, he is not a nihilist or racist or sexist,…or whatever ‘ist we are calling him today. He is simply observing and reporting what he sees occurring.
There are times when he taps into the same vein of “almost despair” that I have when I consider this wonderful nation; the wonderful people that live and work in it; the people that enjoy the fruits of their labors, that innovate, build, create new and wonderful things; and then I consider the “death merchants” who wish to stop the innovation, the building, the creation; those who advocate “throwing the infants into the belly of Moloch”; those who wish to abase themselves (and all others in this nation) before the thrones of death and self immolation. I shake my head sadly and drink my tea.
Whiskey is an optimist.
“No one would think of New York as a soft target,…”
Oh please! What an idiot! It’s the ultimate soft target. A Wal Mart in Wichita may not have all those cops and cameras, but not many would know or care if it blew up. Besides, them Red Staters got guns and ain’t askeered to use ‘em,
This brings us back to the issue of Counter Force versus Counter Value. We have gone with Counter Force and beefing up out defenses to stop the attackers. And it ain’t working too good. What would deter these nutjobs from attacking us? One option would be for every paper to publish cartoons of Mohammed, for us to have news reports and TV shows and kid’s cartoons and comic books that show the terrorists as vile disgusting and idiotic nutjobs and to increase that effort every time they try something. The other would be to pick out a village of devout Muslims somewhere in the world and wipe it out to the last microbe every time they try something. In other words, let them get all lathered up, rinse, repeat.
Neither option is politically possible, so we have no deterrence. It’s just us out in this here foxhole, guys; pass the ammo – and learn to love it.
New York is an international symbol of American Power and Wealth. That is why it is targeted over and over again. Blue State/Red State? Jewish Population? That doesn’t even register on most Jihadis’ radar.
Blert:
There are no seasoned players in Obama’s White House either. Ought to be an even match. F
RaviT: you’re absolutely right. India ought to be the cornerstone of US foreign policy in Asia.
But don’t exepect anything from Obama. He can’t stand India: because it opposes Pakistani-driven Islamism; because it abandoned central economic planning and is proving (yet again) the power of free markets; and because he inherited his father’s hatred of Indian expats in Kenya.
I believe that NYC is the target, not solely because of it’s Jewish population, but because the Jihadists know it is weak in a way they can exploit. The more they punish NYC, the shriller are the voices at the epicenter of American Media to lay off the Jihadists and to blame the West, lending endless pretexts to the eternal Jihad. The Muslims are using Madison Avenue in the most diabolical way, and Madison Avenue is happy to comply.
NYC is the epicenter of American self-loathing. It is ground zero for the disease of self doubt which cripples the West and convinces the Muslim scum of the planet that the entire West is effete and ripe for conquest.
I’m ashamed to admit it, and don’t wish to see any Americans targeted by Jihad. But I also view the Liberal edifice in America as my enemy in fighting the Jihad, a movement bent on the destruction of all we hold dear. NYC is the face of that structure. It is sometimes difficult for me to tell who is worse, the Muslims who intend to annihilate us from without, or the self-loathing sorts who are doing a splendid job from within. I also hate to admit it, but I really will not ever be as sympathetic to NYC if/when they are met with a devastating attack in the future as I was on 9/11. There is a certain bitter justice that the epicenter of self-hatred in America is also the prime target of Jihad.
In the end, the strong presence of liberal Jews in NY, the pinnacle of finance, the epicenter of Media, all of these play a role in NYC targeting by the Muslim beast. This also begs the question: are these factors related to the disease of self-loathing harming our civilization. Not a PC question, but there it is.
We on this site have talked a lot about engaging our enemies with all our force at our disposal (turning Saudi Arabia into a glass wasteland and similar comments), but I think the likelihood of America pursuing such a policy is slim or less. It occurs to me what she would really be doing is pushing in our own neighborhood and in our own way to get the USG to accept the fact that Muslim extremists, whether working for a central power or independently, are really out to kill Americans, and to call for an end to that. I think it is time to throw out the PC nonsense and acknowledge that there are Imams calling for jihad against Americans every week, that Muslim communities know this is going on and are not speaking out against it, that even if they do NOT plant bombs themselves there are far too many Muslims in America who keep quiet while their co-religionists are planing attacks against the country they have adopted as their own. If there is no way we can work against this fifth column then we are seen as toothless, which only encourages others to imitate the undie bomber or the Times Square bomber or others. How much longer can we allow political correctness to disarm us? Isn’t it time for the President and AG to say “enough is enough — if you want to live in America peacefully you are welcome, but if you are going to shoot soldiers in Ft. Hood or plant bombs in Times Square or any other type of terrorist action, we will take up arms against you.”
Isn’t it time for everyone to say Pakistanis are welcome to immigrate, but if they plot against the USG and fellow Americans we will arrest them and charge them with sedition or worse. Why should any group be given a pass on this? Why not expect Pakistanis to turn in co-religionists who they know are planning acts of terror? Why not tell imams who call for terror acts to change their tune or lose their congregation and be asked to leave the country? Why not expect Pakistanis and other Muslims to support the country they have taken out citizenship in? Why not expect our president to call for this? I think it is time for Americans to call for this kind of action from our elected leaders, including Mayor Bloomberg and Obama. F
#41 Programmer
“Whiskey is an optimist.’
P, how do you figure?
I read and enjoy him as much as you do. I enjoy his simple eloquence and clear mindedness, which often gets labeled as monomania or worse. He is a diagnostician of social ills and their roots like no other. I’ve defended him numerous times.
But an optimist? I don’t think so. Anyone who claims that Western Civ is dead and that the best world we can hope for going into eternity is a race based socialism isn’t an optimist. Despite the fact that other worse things than that could happen.
Sometimes the doctor who excels at finding out the problem is a different one than the guy who has a solution. Whiskey is certainly the former. The latter?
With all the respect I have for him – we’ll see.
Time for some William Tecumseh Sherman
“Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
“War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say give them all they want.”
“This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”
And then an updated one:
“My aim, then, is to whip these Islamofacists, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
And let’s not forget the 7th President of the United States:
“Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms.”
“War is a blessing compared with national degradation.”
Time we Americans start channeling our inner Andrew Jacksons and William Tecumseh Shermans and teach those who dare provoke us just who they are messing with. And despite what Whiskey thinks there are plenty of young white men ready to visit the vengeance of the American people upon their enemies. I would spare the women and children. My 20 year old son wouldn’t. He would salt their earth too.
no mo uro:48,
Please forgive my feeble attempt at humor. When I say Whiskey is an optimist, i am being a pessimist.
We are blessed both by the IQ of the terrorist, and his imagination.
The Saudis have placed Ergodan, the Turkish PM, in the Wahabbi hall of fame. Ergodan in turn tips his hat to Hamas, sucks up to Assad in Syria, and has proclaimed that the new Ottomans will not participate in any sanctions against Iran. Best of all the new Ottomans have stated their intention to expand their influence and reassert their obligation to fix things (whatever that means) in the Middle East, Balkans and Caucasus. Turkey is now as much an Islamist nation as Iran and the prospects of the secularized military affecting that outcome have come to nothing. Obama has tacitly if not openly given his blessings to Ergodan.
The ability of Islamist countries to influence outcomes outside their borders is increasing without opposition, or sometimes even with the assistance, of Western governments. One would have to be cerebrally rectally inverted to not understand that Islam is detrimental to all living things, but this is the Age of Idiocy and reality is anything you wish it to be.
It is easy enough to extend trendlines to infinity, whether for demographics or for national debt, which is in itself a shaping of reality, but a trend remains in effect until it has reversed. It is becoming very difficult to envision a good outcome a generation or two down the road for Western Civ as we have known it.
All is not lost, however. I do believe that even as national identity deteriorates that people will move out of harms way and congregate into communities of character whether that be a city, state or region. I reject Whiskey’s theory of ethnic solidarity, at least for America, because despite the many bumps in the road Americans tend to identify based more on values than the country of origin of their ancestors. I have much more in common with an Hispanic or a black man who shares my Judeo-Christian value system than I do with some white guy in Manhattan who embraces abortion and gay marriage as human rights. I think that most 3rd, 4th and 5th generation Americans have family trees that span the seven continents anyway.
Mainemen,
Thanks for the invite. I am looking for a summer vacation site, so maybe I will go back to Maine and check it out from a living standpoint.
Whiskey,
I get a lot of what you are saying, and demographics are a powerful force on a civilization, but I think you are confusing race with culture in making your argument in the first part.
The changing demographics in the country do not explain the systemic rot in the culture of the country. What explains it is the spreading idea that there is no “American Culture”, and if there is, it is one of racism, sexism, stupidity, greed, etc.
Bottom line, pride in the country, and its accomplishments have been systematically destroyed. Much of what the Western world has done for the advancement for humankind is ignored or denigrated.
I know you know the above, but my point is that it is not really “White Culture” that fights against this, or “Black Culture” or “Latino Culture” that pushes for this disintegration. That is all camouflage for the real battle going on, in order to confuse the issue and make gains from that confusion.
Al Gore, Van Jones, Bill Clinton, Barak Obama are not of the “White” or “Black” culture, but members of the “Red Culture”. They are part of the crowd which assumes they know best, best for everyone, best for society and they are both entitled and chosen to enforce their “solutions” on everyone.
Van Jones, to take one example, does not really give a damn about racial issues, except that they make a nice wedge and cudgel for political purposes. They are things to be wielded on the path of power, and if you are a fellow member of the Reds, you are the right color. If you are not the correct political hue, you are an enemy, one more profoundly despised than race could foster.
That’s why we see such hypocrisy in regards to issues of race, sex, etc., on the part of the Left. It’s not about ANY of those things, really, when it comes down to it. It is about who gets to remake society according to their specifications. If you are down with the Revolution, you are in. If not, you are fair game in any way, shape, or form.
I think what you are lamenting the loss of is best described as the “Freedom Culture” of this nation. While this culture may have been in large part created by white men at the founding, the reason why it so resonated was its universal appeal and application. It is also why it is so damn threatening to those looking to control others, and why they have sought to marginalize both them and the ideals they put forth.
Its ALSO why those of the non-white, female persuasion are given such a vicious treatment by the Red factions. It undercuts this whole idea of a “White Male Culture” promoted solely to benefits whites narrative.
NYC is an international city, and a mecca for all different sorts. It’s not at all surprising that one of the world’s busiest travel hubs would be a convenient target for terrorist acts.
As to the “white man” spotted taking of his shirt, define “white.” It’s bizzarre, but we seem to have redefined “white” back down to the narrow confines of almost a century ago, at least in the minds of many (like those jerks at The Nation). Many a Pakistani could be defined as white in a swarthy, Mediterranean kind of way. Most Lebanese Arabs are white. Note the conflation of “white” and “Tea Party,” and the ignorant, bigoted assumption by the left-wing writer.
It’s more simple, New-York is the ever symbol of the western culture, the American dream” made the poor people from the whole planet to buy a ticket for a cheap liners seat, arriving in the grandiose harbour of New York, the door of the Eldorado. It’s this symbol of richness and “luxure” that the jihadists (or whatever alter-mondialist fanatics) want to hit. And yes, it’s a war, barbarics from everywhere are knocking at our doors, the problem is that we aren’t able to absorb them anymore, and to transform them, not enough work, or richnesses for all, or even a mere war to defend our borders, army is where cohesion happened, there, you aren’t a person with origin or religion, just a human with brothers in arms. Also the problem is that people became lazy with a wealthier life, they worship peace above all. Also, in this wealthy western world, there isn’t anymore a far west, far est, a far-south, or a far north to explore and to domesticate. We’re screwed as a finishing civilisation, new geopolitical shemes will be redesigned in the following decades. Surviving will become the motto, I’m not worried for the richests, they will become our next noble leaders, under new rules, like the richest roman patricians adopted the invadors rules in Europe, and the “little populo” will be serf again, and will have to fight for its freedom again, in a new history cycle.
Team 44′s statement…: “…the attempted attack has been……..failed.”
The trend that is breaking down is wide-open western acceptance of low-skill, low-IQ, aliens from far-off lands — and even those right next door.
We have reached economic super-saturation.
The new-wave military is a fountain of robotics: they are leaving the factory and are marching into battle.
The next wave will assault all of the repetitive motion jobs. The SEIU is likely to be fighting for its labor market as robots start to clean the commodes — AND certify their status, logged into the Building Automation Database.
Robotics/Biometric Databases have already transformed the dairy farm.
The bottom rungs on the ladder of immigrant transition are being cut away.
——-
How many times must the obvious be stated:
The welfare state cannot exist with opportunistic immigration.
Even legal immigration is going to have to be cut back drastically.
Unless done in a timely manner this result will be achieved in the most harmful way: Civil War Redux.
As the Romans demonstrated in Anatolia you really can lose the whole ball of wax in short order.
—-
The loss of Turkey to islamism is of great import. Obviously, she will never be allowed into the EC until France practices Sharia.
Further, it demonstrates that there is no shifting the flow of islamism. You can dam it, or dry it up… but you can’t deflect it into moderation.
——-
Peak islam is likely to coincide with peak wahhabi oil.
One must note that the MOST aggressive islamists are ever the wahhabists. THEY should be the long term focus for counter-action.
And it that vein bio-researchers are claiming success in creating algae that DIRECTLY produces Diesel at remarkably high yields. Their numbers put corn-to-ethanol to shame.
MC, the good news is that the oligarchs-to-be have no idea what they’re playing with. Their “vision” will not come to pass, trying as they may. I hope that you are satisfied with that and don’t want to know what the bad news is. Thanks, I wouldn’t want to know either.
It will be “interesting,” in that Chinese way, to watch as the white people that make Europe run increasingly fade away. The Arabs and North Africans that will take over have never evidenced an ability to do anything well. Who will keep the trains running? Who will provide electricity and heat? Who will farm the land? (I’m not worried about the vineyards, because most of those will be torn up by the roots when Islam takes over, a legacy of centuries destroyed in a day.) It’s not going to be easy to turn a bunch of welfare bums with zero work ethic into productive “citizens,” especially when the concept of a nation state disappears into a miasma of competing imams and mosques.
On the other hand, an Islamic Europe will be an incredibly weak one in most ways, as they are generally incompetent militarily, even after inheriting the guns from the dead Euros. Who will fill the vacuum? The Russians? They have their own problems.
I would expect at some point the Chinese and perhaps the Indians will divvy the place up, with the teeming Islamic masses held in check through brutal force and serving the purpose of a serf class to their Asian overlords. 32 million Chinese boys gotta go somewhere. Life in Europe will again be very cheap.
I just wonder if the Chinese will get there before the architectural legacy of Europe is torn down and replaced with mosques.
2=4, you speak with enigmas, are you imagining “global governance ? if so, it will fail in term in front of islamist finance, chinese finance… or russian oligarcy, Russia is having the same attacks as us.
Of course race is culture. It is not the only thing that makes culture (the Greeks are roughly continuous from Aristotle to the present, and have nothing like Aristotle’s culture) but it is connected.
Are the vast numbers of Nigerians Western in culture? Nope. A few might adopt Bach, Mozart, and Shakespeare, but the vast majority are culturally alien. Note: Different is not “better” or “worse.” I make no value judgment on my culture or race being “better” or my own self being “better” than anyone else. But in West Africa, governments are asking their citizens to “please do NOT EAT THE PYGMIES.” Being that most West Africans believe killing and eating Pygmies will give them magical powers. The same holds true for Albinos, who are murdered for body parts consumed to give magical powers.
There has been an epidemic of murders of children by their parents in the Congo. Done to banish “evil spirits” and such like. Despite a good deal of Western contact and colonialism, Africans remain Africans. In Europe, Muslim men reject most of the Western culture’s values, particularly when it comes to women. Muslim women too, reject it for the most part, despite being treated inside Islam as not animals, but inanimate property, mostly.
I think Van Jones certainly does give a damn about racial issues, not the least of which is his obvious hatred for White people. When the police left Florence and Normandy, what did ordinary Black men do? For the most part they did not content themselves with looting, instead they sought to beat to death White and Asian motorists they encountered, memorably Reginald Denny. A man does not celebrate (as Damien Williams did) the bloody near beating to death of another, without a good deal of racial hatred.
In the aftermath, David Duke lives deservedly in a trailer park in Monroe LA, while Louis Farrakhan has a mansion bigger than Oprah’s.
It would be nice to think that race does not matter, but it does. Particularly given Robert Putnam’s research (against interest — he was a big proponent of diversity and found to his horror it decreased trust EVERYWHERE, even among racial groups themselves). Trust and sacrifice shared is obviously only achievable in mono-ethnic groups. Torpedo Squadron 9 would not have taken off at all, if the US Navy had been half Black, and filled with perhaps, justifiable racial hatred against Whites.
I certainly don’t want Jim Crow, but neither do I want to be the reverse of it, as Whites in South Africa or Chinese in Indonesia experience (violent purges by the majority). I don’t want to “dominate” anyone, neither women nor non-Whites (because I am lazy, not moral superiority). But I don’t want to be dominated either. Regardless, it seems human nature allows only one or the other.
I have been to NYC. I stood briefly on top of the WTC in 1997, and consider myself blessed to have done so.
As for having stuff in common, that is demonstrably false in recent US history. The Rodney King Riots, and the responses, show that what happens in crisis modes is cleaving along racial lines. A tree-hugging pro-abortionist may not be most folks here cup of tea, but he is extremely unlikely (as in about zero probability) to give anyone the Reginald Denny treatment. As a matter of probability, neither is say, Colonel Alan West (who is undeniably a better man than myself). But Col West is not representative of most Blacks. Who are 60% Urban Core (Ghetto) and the rest, never denounce say Louis Farrakhan or Rev. Wright (who remains a civil rights activist beloved by the Congressional Black Caucus, NAACP, Urban League, etc.) As far as the LA Riots showed the response of Mexicans, it was urgent looting. LA currently has ethnic cleansing as Mexican gangs push out Blacks from historic neighborhoods.
The reality of race (we can’t all get along in a Colors of Benneton Ad, Blacks and Hispanics are filled with, perhaps justifiable, perhaps not, hatred and loathing for Whites, race forms the only necessary but not SUFFICIENT grouping around shared sacrifice and action) is depressing. I will give you that.
Certainly because it shows we will lose. That we’ve lost already. Black men are among the most elite athletes in the World. The Olympic FINALS Qualifiers, in the 100 Meter Dash, are all of West African descent. Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world. The NFL and the NBA are mostly Black, and the positions requiring speed, strength, and leaping ability in the NFL are nearly all Black (Wide Receiver, Corner, Safety, Linebacker). Yet despite the obvious physical superiority of Black athletes, over White ones, undeniable and visible every day in sports, the Special Forces are almost entirely White. There is a smattering of Mexican-ancestry soldiers and sailors and Marines and Airmen, in the Armed forces and the tragic casualty lists. But nothing in proportion to their general population representation.
No Mo Uro: Not being Han Chinese, China would offer at best, a marginal place as disposable labor. China belongs to the Han (and the elite Red Princes of the Han). I am sadly stuck here, being White, and male, and straight. I also find many aspects of Chinese culture distasteful. Essentially I am a Roman, seeing the Visigoths sacking Rome, and the end of my way of life, heritage, culture, all the things that defined me and offered continuity, beyond my small existence, come to an end.
Let me be clear: the future does not belong to people who look like me. Indeed Blondes and Redheads will be gone, as in not existing any more, in a century or so. Along with White skin. The future does not belong to my culture. The ideas of freedom, and liberty, and representative federal democracy, and companionaite marriage, and the nuclear family, are effectively dead, as is Shakespeare, Mozart, Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, Branford Marsalis, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sherlock Holmes. Replaced by Greater Han Chauvinism, and Islam, and the eternal Latin American Hacienda (in narco-state form). It does not belong to me or people like me, because people like me don’t have children.
I recall hearing some major leftist plead with the Islamo-terrorists to target Texas instead of bastions of liberal governance and thought. After all, W, the man the whole world hates comes from Texas and not New York City. Of course, it would not occur to this person to the Islamo-terrorists W & this fellow are just one undifferentiated mass of kaffirs. I can not locate a source for that quote so I leave it unattributed.
As is pointed out NYC is the financial center of the US and as such the existing modern world. In addition, population is highly concentrated which makes NYC target rich as well as an easy place to hide and act, this is zero ground for the media too. Also, despite the large number of law enforcement assets present, there are even larger amounts of people and ways to hide and go unnoticed.
In any event, Sayyid Quttb was not scandalized by homo-erotic theater in New York City but by church socials in the heartland, where men and women mixed freely. Much was made of Dinesh D’Souza’s book from a few years ago where he put forth the idea of the encroachment of leftist ideals of society in the Islamic world is behind the Islamio-terrorism. I heard Mr. D’Souza speak some years prior to this book, and he touched upon that thesis, but once again we go back to Quttb’s motivations for radicalizing.
I was in the Middle East when I got word of the OK City bombing and immediately thought Islamo-terrorism. We all know that was wrong. Jonah Goldberg over at NRO put up some thoughts about how we all are quick to jump to the most politically convenient perpetrator profile in such events. How many people immediately jumped to the Tea Party movement? His conclusion is such tendencies do nothing but cloud one’s vision of reality, and yes he investigates the tendency of the right to do this too. Problem of course is sans attacks few bother to try to cut through the haze of their prejudices.
“2=4, you speak with enigmas, are you imagining “global governance ? if so, it will fail in term in front of islamist finance, chinese finance… or russian oligarcy, Russia is having the same attacks as us.”
Exactly. And the question presented to Whiskey @ 24 is quite relevant. If only the Chinese are left standing with balls enough to resist the Islamists/’Third World invasion’ then why shouldn’t Whiskey find himself a publically compliant (but privately ass kicking) Chinese wife?
Peterike @ “On the other hand, an Islamic Europe will be an incredibly weak one in most ways, as they are generally incompetent militarily, even after inheriting the guns from the dead Euros. Who will fill the vacuum? The Russians? They have their own problems.”
At least at Belmont Club, if not at the American Enterprise Institute or some of the other D.C. ‘conservative’ think tanks that used to play footsie with the ‘American Council for Peace in Chechnya’ and other Soros front groups, there is some willingness to admit that Russia is never going to join Eurabia. Won’t happen. Steyn keeps projecting into the future from numbers that were valid maybe ten years ago, and has ignored signs that Russia might have staunched the bleeding because then he would be seen as giving some credit to ‘Czar Vlad’ in the circles in which he moves, and that would be socially unacceptable and perhaps bad for his career as a declinist pundit.
In fact the tendency to look to Russia, even as weakened as it has been, as a protector in Europe has already started. Post bailout Greece may turn to an Orthodox revival when formerly pampered public servants cease striking while the unempoyed youth get hungry, and give Russkies visa free travel plus ownership stakes in their energy industries in a quiet quid pro quo. Call it the Neo-Orthodox-union.
Ditto for Serbia, Bulgaria and whatever else is left of Orthodox Europe. The Russky Orthodox nationalist Stanislav Mishin that had his fifteen minutes on the Glenn Beck show a year ago is crowing about how the Moscow Patriarchate built its first church in Paris since 1917 – with some taxpayer support from the Russian government, on a site that allegedly had previously been slated for a mosque!
Even the Vatican seems to be reaching out more to Moscow, whether that’s the influence of a German Pope and the old Bismarck dictum (you can’t love Germany and loathe Russia, since their elites are now joined at the hip as surely as all the Beamers and Mercedes took over Moscow’s streets) or just a sense that the Continent’s remaining Christians have to unite to survive the coming generations remains to be seen.
The game is changing in Europe. Marie Claude seems to sense it well from France but some BCers are still slow to catch on to that with the Cold War legacy.
MC, not imagining global governance. You think that would be a good news?
I actually heard of this attempt from Liberal Democrat lady friends who were rather quick to identify it with Militia groups and the Tea Party — yes, it’s OK to profile white males! (It was a Whiskey moment.) My own comment: Let’s not be quick to guess the motives involved since logic and reason were probably not the perps strong suit — and we would know soon enough because the guy no doubt left all kinds of evidence (right up to his proof of insurance card in the glove compartment).
But my own guess — though I did not mention it at the time — was a low level Jihadi. This was based on a “scarcity of resources” for AQ rather than its abundance.
Last fall I speculated in the comments that if AQ had resident sleepers cells, those would be activated for attacks in the lead up to the 2010 election — call it a terror offensive. AQ and the Taliban would only have a limited number cells available and communication and coordination would be done well in advance — probably by courier. (Hezbollah might be a different story.) Since AQ would like to create a “force multiplier,” they would look for an anchoring event they could plan around well in advance.
If it looks like the Democrats will suffer a loss at the polls, a few attacks would enable the Terrorist to take credit for their defeat. They could also point to a previous “success” in Spain. Also, with the US looking for a way out of Afghanistan, a few “attacks” would allow the terrorist to take credit for “the win.”
The story of the attacks influencing the election would work in the Islamic world but might even apply in the US — where the political Left would be looking for an excuse for losing the election that has nothing to do with their own policy failures (they will blame the existence of “sleeper cells” on Bush). Of course, in the run-up to the election the media would accuse the Republicans of “politicizing” the attacks. It is a potential “big win” for terrorism no matter how the election turns out.
This prognostication is based on pure speculation, but I would expect a series of “lone wolf” attacks up through summer followed by a short, but intense, “terror offensive” starting around Labor Day. I do hope I’m wrong.
Whiskey, why aren’t you having children?
No mo uro, whiskey would, but he is a male.
OK, levity aside, a good question.
oolala, Ahmadinejad is following me:
http://twitter.com/TheAhmadinejad
dunno yet if it is a fake, gotta love to be a twitt interest for Iranian leaders after being one for Russian’s
Though I’m not gentle with t’em, or with any islamist or political propagandist, even with the French elite, and of course, with the German’s !
WSJ is reporting that the suspect in custody has admitted to taking terrorist bomb making classes in Warizistan.
Some people are making something of the fact his house was foreclosed. But the real question is whether he is a terrorist because of the foreclosure or the foreclosure happened because he is a terrorist.
I don’t imagine it is all that cheap to fly to and from Pakistan and I doubt the terrorist training camps pay apprentices very much.
North Korea allegedly sinks a South Korean warship, an oil rig explodes in the gulf and now a VIED attempt in NYC.
Amahdinijad speaks at the UN and America walks out.
“Looks like the show’s about to begin.”
The underlying theme here seems to be whether we’re actually going somewhere or are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Maybe it’s true that history is just a never-ending series of cycles in which one top dog takes over from another and humanity just manages to poke its head above the water for a few centuries before sinking back to the default position of scapegoating and tribal conflict. Maybe, as that position implies, we are just the product of a bunch of stuff that serendipitously coagulated, a happy or unhappy accident depending upon your perspective.
On the other hand, that’s pretty hard to square with what we know about ourselves, which is that, seemingly against all odds, humanity keeps moving forward. We are BETTER than people who eat albinos, and that implies directionality, not random, stagnant cycles.
And most Americans still believe that this country is the tip of the spear, the way that all of us become better, more human. It’s true that history is full of examples of how advanced cultures can devolve in the space of a day to tribal warfare and the associated “solution” of human sacrifice. And most of us at BC sense that such a regression is potentially just around the corner, here or elsewhere or everywhere.
But most of us believe in such a thing as the truth or we wouldn’t read and discuss and argue in pursuit of it. That’s the same thing as saying we don’t really believe that history is just a snake eating its own tail.
I’m thinking about your last comment, Whiskey, and up here we have a lot of African refugees, many of them Catholics, like I have recently become. On Easter, the Cathedral was out the door and 3/4 jet black. There were 21 baptisms, one Asian, the rest apparently African (and those were some FINE clothes). The fellow next to me in the choir came here from Rwanda in 2006. I don’t know all these people, but I feel a much greater affinity for them than I do most of my white, liberal friends of 30 to 50 years. I have NOTHING in common with those people anymore. We live in different realities and I struggle to feel more positive than negative about them, whereas I feel a deep bond with anyone who believes and understands Christianity and its close cousin, Americanism.
I was channel surfing one night years ago and saw Anthony Quinn receiving some Latino Lifetime Achievement Award. To his credit, the first thing he said was that he had always considered himself to be an American, not a Latino.
That’s the way it’s been in the past, and that’s the way it can be again. If not, we’re cooked.
Whiskey (61): “the future does not belong to people who look like me”
Like him or not, agree with him or not, most of us, I think, must admit that Whiskey’s comments are interesting. And therefore the future is doomed to be less interesting.
The far Left, longing for the days when they could Hate Bush Beyond All Reason, once again shows it’s anti-America attitude. HBBAR syndrome literally blinds some liberals – so they instinctively lash out at their political opponents. They are afraid to acknowledge that there are people who just want to kill them – people who don’t care about politics. I wonder how they will soft sell yet another Muslim terror attack? I note that they conveniently forgot Ft. Hood. I knew that we would be attacked under Obama, but I’m still confident that GWB’s heavy lifting will carry us through to the next real president.
Russia is an interesting case, indeed.
I too do not see Russia and those Eastern European countries closely associated by ethnic and language roots, and Orthodoxy caving in to the Islamists. For us this is all very new but in that part of the world the war with Islam is measured in centuries.
History also tells us that the Western Europeans are not too adverse to teaming up with Mohamed from time to time to take a whack at the Slavs. Why would tomorrow’s history be any different?
Shepard Smith laid it in the line on Fox News a few minutes ago.
He said “This bombing was not stopped. The terrorist was not intercepted. The bomb just failed to go off.”
And he has a point. Like Hassan and like the Underwear Bomber, and like the recruiting shooting, it was a case of “everything worked perfectly” AFTER the attack was launched and had succeeded or failed on its own.
Whiskey, don’t listen to the “go to China” advice–they are in demographic free-fall too. What you should do is move to Delhi. I will put you up for membership at my club, where you can sip whiskey in the library and read up on the Indo-Europeans and their perfection of the chariot! I can get you some speaking gigs with the RSS and VHP, where you can warn us about not following the Europeans into decline!
(I’m only half-kidding.)
MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer is disappointed that the Times Square bomber was not an “angry White man” from the Tea Party.
Quote:
BREWER: I mean the thing is is that and I get frustrated and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.
And so there was part of me was really hoping this would not be the case that here would be somebody who is not the defined. I mean he’s accused he’s arrested you know I don’t want to convict him before it’s time to do so. He’s the guy authorities say is involved. But that being said I mean we know even in recent history you have the Hutaree militia from Michigan who have plans to let’s face it create terror.
That’s what they were planning to do and they were doing so from far different backgrounds then what this guy is coming from. So, the threat is not just coming from people who decide that America is the place to be and you know come here and want to become citizens. Obviously this guy did.
—————————-
A lot of the disgust against “White guys” is from women like Contessa Brewer. I understand her. Beta White guys truly revolt her. She’s far more friendly to a “tough non-White guy” like Shahzad than some beta guy whose entire existence revolts her. Shahzad had the benefit of not being a “White guy” but rather Pakistani, and a Muslim. And someone who really tried to kill lots of Americans. A feminized media will always act and feel like this. Most of their politics comes at pure disgust that most White men are not like Charlie Sheen.
Maineman — Africa is big place with many people. You will find utter, astonishing genuises and Christians in Africa. However, we are not concerned with the Yao Mings and Verne Troyers of the world, the outliers. We are concerned with most of the people, most of the time, and what they do. In Africa, they mostly create misery. A few Christians coupled with many eaters of Albinos and Pygmies is not IMHO a good trade-off. Since we observe far more of the latter than the former.
Civilizational success is based on mostly, showing up and doing drudge work, not a few brilliant breakthroughs. Africa, and Latin America, and the Muslim world have all failed in that regards. People think that with just enough “extra coaching” this will change …
But its like expecting White guys to get faster at Wide Receiver, it will never happen. Black guys dominate that position in the NFL because they are faster, much faster, and leap higher. Its genetics, working its way on the vast masses of different populations, where marginal differences in means makes the pool of the best much bigger or smaller in size.
You can’t coach fast, or tall (as Coach Wooden observed). You are either tall or not. No amount of “trying” will make it different.
Also, we don’t have this alpha/beta male thing here. If you want a nice, fair-skinned Indian girl to marry and have babies with–your Uncle Ravi will arrange!
And you can set up a consulting company to advice Indian military on its purchase of Israeli weapons-systems. We already are getting drones.
I used to worry about US fertility, back when it was around 1.8. Then a journalist let slip an important datum. One woman in five wasn’t having any kids at all.
I did the math. The fertility rate for the 80% of women who were having kids was 2.25, slightly above replacement. I stopped worrying.
James Taranto calls it the Roe Effect. America is not culturally homogeneous, and attitudes, beliefs affect behavior (contrary to what “progressives” proclaim). Confirming the hypotheses, census data shows fertility correlates, the blue states have the lowest fertility, the purple states have higher fertility, and the red states have the highest fertility.
Oh, and the US’s overall fertility level is now just back above replacement.
David P Goldman (AKA Spengler) did a worldwide analysis, the two factors he found that strongly correlate with fertility are literacy (negative) and religion (positive). Progressives are secular, and US conservatives tend to be religious, with dovetails with the above results.
I enjoy your posts Whiskey, they make me think (it hurts), but you need to snap out of this defeatist trench you’ve slipped into. America, or at least the concept I hold of it, won’t be gone until the likes of Subotai, Habu, Papa Ray, OldSalt, me, and about 100 million others have removed.
Your talk about being defeated is a little premature. The fight, the real fight, hasn’t even started yet. Last time we had one of these real fights the very people you’re consigning to defeat turned every major city of some misguided nations into ashtrays. That spirit, those values gone you say? I’ll echo Shivermetimbers here… you need to visit some other spots in the nation to get a better feel of what the going attitudes are. Here in the midwest, I get the vibe that a lot of people are just watching. They’re fed up, some are speaking out, but for now they all are really just watching. Stored, potential energy to be released when the threshold of the capacitor is reached.
From your writings I’m assuming you live in some greater metro gehenna, not close enough for a lethal dose but where it just makes you sick. You’ve got to realize that you’re just far behind enemy lines, too deep in the valley to take advantage of all the sunlight. It’s not so bad here in the real parts of America… just get ready to fight your way free, friend.
I don’t think Belmont-clubbers fully realize how much India and US are aligned on this. Yes, the past relationship was rocky (during Cold War) but even the Congress party is now more free-market oriented. BJP party (my party, now in opposition) is very pro-West. (Although for a few years a few years ago Congress party tried to block pajamasmedia in India to “preserve feelings” of Muslim minority. I could always get through to read it though.) We are “old-fashioned” too–in India, a conservative will list his caste in his daughter’s matrimonial ad. A “progressive” will write “caste no bar (no Muslims).”
whiskey
Contessa Brewer certainly proves that we are deep into the Age of Idiocy. There have always been idiots but today they get television shows and elected to high office.
Whether Brewer is an exemplar of your theories or not I do not know. Her idiocy is entirely consistent with the standard Leftist rhetoric that would welcome slaughter on the streets of NYC if it gave them a chance to malign their domestic political opponents. Harry Reid would say the same thing if given the opportunity.
Part of the demoralization comes from a sense of disappointment and betrayal as we discover that people and institutions we thought would behave in a certain way have acted in precisely the opposite way. But this is par for the course. It’s always been true.
Two of the most important attitudes to acquire going forward may be one, a sense of faith in the power of effort and two, a kind of resigned recklessness. Things are going to work out. The catch is that we can’t anticipate what exactly that good outcome will be. All happy endings contain surprises. They are also tinged with a kind of loss. Like growing out of childhood to manhood, or going from pre-war to post-War, nobody could see how it would end, but when the change occurred everyone accepted and prospered thereby. Maybe the one phrase that captures the correct attitude is: “do you want to live forever?”
Overall, the most important thing to acquire is the determination to survive and to preserve what is most precious. Consider how the Islamists can accept defeat after defeat, humiliation after humiliation, loss after loss and keep trying. That is their only strength, the conviction that they are the drop of water and we are the rock. But since we are also people, ideas can flow in the other direction.
How to get your terrorist membership card pulled. (Hint: Use your real e-mail address when buying your car bomb.) http://bit.ly/985BFD
look like the “terrorist” was really an amateur
“the infamous white guy” wretchard@20.
The Left so wants to find White-wing extremists, lots and lots of White-wing extremists.
The Left so wants to find White-wing extremists, lots and lots of White-wing extremists.
Shouldn’t that be “extWemists?”
Oh, believe me, Whiskey, you’re (literally) preaching to the choir on Africa. Sometimes my heart breaks when I think of what is endured there.
But I must not have been clear. My point was that my affiliation lies with those who share my view of reality, regardless of race. Maybe that’s just a Christian thing, I don’t know, but I think that’s what makes the difference in the long run and allows us to rise above the tribalism.
“It is sometimes difficult for me to tell who is worse, the Muslims who intend to annihilate us from without, or the self-loathing sorts who are doing a splendid job from within”. Morton Doodslag@46.
The Left in the West has hitched it’s wagon to Islam’s strong horse, in the hope that it will carry the Left to it’s final victory. As is painfully obvious in the UK, Islam will do the violence, and the Left will do the undermining, but when they arrive at their final destination the horse will be hungry for something other than hay.
“extWemists?” Don Rodrigo@86.
yes, weally…
Shouldn’t that be “extWemists?”
Yeth!
“The Left in the West has hitched it’s wagon to Islam’s strong horse, in the hope that it will carry the Left to it’s final victory.”
They’re joined at the hip, but not because of any hope on the part of the Left, I think. It’s the multiculturalism (i.e. relativism) of the Left that makes it unfailingly embrace policies and causes that are doomed to failure.
When you aren’t allowed to say one culture or viewpoint is better than another (except the viewpoint that no culture or viewpoint is better than another, of course), then you can’t recognize evil or good for what they are and actually end up defending the evil against the good, assuming the good has been deemed so due to its tradition of success.
Ravi, I think most informed and non-delusional Americans see alliance with India as a likely key to an American resurgence. Unfortunately, we’re in a period of purging the poison from our system at the moment, and it’s looking like a real mess.
But how open is that invitation? I don’t need a wife, but the sipping whiskey in a library part sounds great.
Whiskey,
You mentioned something earlier that you’ve failed, in my opinion, to take into sufficient account. You mentioned that the U.S. military’s most elite, most militarily capable, soldiers are overwhelmingly white. You know one thing white people have proven themselves to be damned good at when given full opportunity? Killing their enemies. The ghosts of the Imperial Japanese Navy could tell you all about it. If it comes to that type of situation, where it’s a fight of group against ethnic group, I’m not worried about whites’ chances.
What has you in a quandary is the fact that we’re fighting an invasion with our hands self-tied behind our backs. We’ve got foreign invaders running our government. I remember feeling the same way back under Jimmy Carter in 1976-80. It made me mad as Hell then, just as Obama makes me mad as Hell now. Well, what’s happening now is what happened then, too. People started talking very straightforwardly about what was really happening, and they started electing people like Reagan who weren’t in any mood to cede any more ground. We stood up to the Communists and faced them down to the point where they collapsed.
Now we’re facing the threat of anti-white racism turning white Americans into second-class citizens in their own country. What I see happening now is that people are beginning to do the same things that they did under Carter: discuss the issues frankly, openly, and without any regard for the old rules that prohibited being really blunt about the truth. PC is a despised joke among a huge class of Americans. Obama has provided the clearest possible example of both Democrat contempt for America and affirmative action’s utter failure. In the past the argument from the left on race was that the minorities wanted to assimilate and that whites were evil not to let them join the majority and “fit in.” Now it’s very clear that many of them not only don’t want to “fit in,” they actually hate the majority culture and people and see them only as a despised source of danegeld. The American people, particularly white ones, are very generous and free to give. However, just as their forefathers under Jefferson had, they have a real antipathy toward paying tribute and they damned well won’t be subservient. There is very definitely a line beyond which they won’t be pushed.
Now, what can’t go on won’t go on. The U.S. military at its best would not be able to suppress the American people, and I’d bet my bottom dollar they would never consent to be used in the attempt. That means Obama and his accomplices have to try to bluff and intimidate us into complying with edicts most of us strongly object to obeying, because the force to bludgeon us into doing so isn’t there.
It won’t work. There are too many angry people and too many guns. The country would devolve into anarchy before it devolved into a leftist dictatorship. If it gets to that point, there will probably be a lot of ethnic cleansing, both active and passive (starvation in the ghettoes). Whites, and their natural East Asian allies, will be the victors in that scenario due to higher overall intelligence and better organizational skills. Remember: when it comes to war, amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.
However, I don’t see it coming to that point. What I see is the American people, of all colors except American black, rising up, as they did in 1980, to kick the crap out of their clear enemies and make them rue the day they woke the sleeping giant. I’d bet that the Democrats are rudely and contemptuously ejected from Congress in 2010 and Obama gets his sorry communist butt handed to him in 2012, if he even dares to run again.
Here’s an observation: in my lifetime I’ve worked with a lot of Mexican-Americans, generally of the Texas variety, and they’ve been as fine as they come. They don’t like illegals either and clearly knew Mexico was a garbage dump they were lucky to have escaped. I’ve also worked with a lot of blacks, mostly American and some foreign. The foreign were almost invariably pretty solid workers, and the ones from ex-British possessions were very good. It was American blacks, usually carrying a chip on their shoulder the size of a log, that always caused problems. Interestingly enough, the foreign blacks and the American blacks did not get on well together at all, with the foreigners thinking the Americans were lazy, degenerate and thuggish. Color of skin is much less important than cultural influence, and black American culture is depraved, despicable and deeply damaging to all who are influenced by it.
In short, there are lots of reasons for optimism. The absolute first rule of problem-solving is to openly admit the problem. Well, that’s one thing that I now see is being done. The real problems of American society are now being discussed at high volume, and the bastards who used to keep certain subjects “beyond the pale” have lost that ability. We’re also facing tough economic times, and that also tends to make people concentrate on real solutions since they no longer have the luxury of ignoring difficulties or throwing money at them to make them go away.
Don’t let being behind enemy lines bring you down. What you’re seeing in California is not representative of the rest of the country. We, as a nation, will get through this, we’ll be better off for the experience, and there will be yet another generation inoculated against socialist idiocy, just as there was after the peanut farmer.
So how did this jihadist hunk of crap become a citizen? I understand there are plenty of dynamics involved on the border issues here in the southwest, but I’d gladly let 10 Mexican
gardeners into the country for every Islamist goofball we kicked to the curb.
We are concerned with most of the people, most of the time, and what they do. In Africa, they mostly create misery.
In that respect, whiskey, how are they different from many of the people who landed at Ellis Island? The mainly illiterate southern Italian peasants who immigrated to the US were not Medicis. The Renaissance was mostly a northern Italian creation and to this day, the northern Italians view southern Italy as a backward, poverty-stricken, Mafia-cursed burden the northerners are saddled with. And yes, some of those immigrants recreated the Mafia here in the States (Prohibition gave them a big boost), but most became productive and law-abiding Americans.
I don’t mean to offend those with Irish blood, but the lawlessness and violence of Irish neighborhoods was infamous in the 19th century. Indeed, the Irish urban areas were the equivalent of the inner city hoods today, places non-Irish immigrants feared to venture, because the Irish fought with everybody. In my city, the once largely Irish 3rd Ward was nicknamed “the bloody 3rd” because of the high murder rate. (Thomas Sowell gives an unvarnished account of the early Irish immigrants in his book, “Ethnic America.”) Needless to say, their descendants cleaned up their act considerably, so when one mentions the Irish to a non-Irish American, the first thing they’re apt to think of is a rather benign image of corned beef and cabbage and (yuck) green beer on St. Patrick’s Day.
The rich and brilliant “outliers” that create the culture of a society have not been, traditionally, the ones who came here. They were comfortable in their own country, they didn’t have to. It was the poor and desperate who got on the boats, the people with nothing to lose.
I continue to believe the real problem is not with the ones who want to come here (unless they are jihadists who want to terrorize us and force their way of life down our throats), it is with the self-loathing multi-cultie elites who have lost pride and belief in this country and don’t want to impart traditional “American values” to the immigrants.
The Left so wants to find White-wing extremists, lots and lots of White-wing extremists.
And if they won’t find them, they will invent them.
You can’t imagine how this confuses some people. For example, a person who studied the subject claimed that the Chinese assimilate “upwards” and consequently resist become like the Malays in Southeast Asia, but show a great enthusiasm for sending their kids to Harvard, Oxford, etc. Then when they get there they are told to loathe all the things they have spent their lives aspiring towards.
A friend of mine from New Zealand asked his new neighbors, who were British immigrants of Jamaican extraction, why they had come to Auckland. Their answer was “too many black people in Britain”. Those particular Jamaicans left their home country because they preferred another way of life, only to discover that way of life was annihilating itself. So they moved on, staying ahead of the PC wave.
Their problem is that they’ve made, in PC terms, an illegtimate choice. Now that’s not to say that they made a good choice. Perhaps they were wrong to leave Jamaica to begin with. Perhaps it is always wrong to try to become something you aren’t born into. But given that they wanted to start in the “new country” it seemed unfair to them that it was being remade exactly into the Old. But nope. PC decrees you can’t escape the confines of its categories, because you can’t create personas that don’t exist in their cheesy little list.
One of the most condescending things you can encounter, as a person from the Third World, are the oblique suggestions from the PC people that you are trying to “rise above your station”.
‘Oh, you speak English so well?’
The reason why Michelle Malkin is considered a ‘race traitor’ is that she doesn’t conform to their little stereotypes. It’s so ingrained they never notice it. One half-Chinese, half-Caucasian American doctor Harvard grad who was a Colonel in the US Air Force I knew once smoothly replied to the “oh you speak English so well” gambit with “would you prefer that I swing from a tree?” What he would have to explain that some people never can get is that America is his country; and he loves it; that Western civilization is his civilization. He chose it for himself. And therefore he would be an enigma to someone like Al Sharpton or the La Raza people.
Today the more you reject the culture into which you immigrate the more “authentic” you are! But authentic according to whom? According to the PC bwanas, in whose little minds “people of color” are forever capering around in costume, mincing, jumping, leaping with wild abandon, jabbering, rolling their eyes. What do you call a non-white who’s found the cure for cancer, won an Olympic gold medal and started a billion dollar company? You call him a “person of color”. You can take the man out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the man. In some strange circular way, the KKK Grand Wizard and the high priest of PC have exactly the same outlook.
I’ve never gotten the difference between a “person of color” and a “colored person”.
The Canadians are even further into PC hell than we are. They have the concept of ‘visible minority’, and you see it in advertisements for PC (guvmint) jobs. It’s not enough to have minorities on your staff, dammit, they have to look like the minorities they really are, so everyone can see what a diverse organization you run. I find it laughable, though I would find it deadly serious if I lived there.
2) I always read Whiskey’s posts. There is no denying that the increased participation of women is society has feminized it and moved our political center leftwards. Women are especially vulnerable to the liberal siren song that we -can- create a ‘safe’ and ‘nice’ world if only enough people in government ‘care’ and we pass the right laws. A lovely idea, but one not backed up by history.
92. trangbang68
So how did this jihadist hunk of crap become a citizen?
_________________________________________________________
In my view, it is too much “equality” in the American system of immigration. I have three children. Two daughters have married Americans and live in NY. I will go there in two weeks to spend the summer with them, outside of sweltering Delhi. Funny that if I am killed in Delhi, probably by some Pakistani terrorist. Same if I am killed in NY. How ironic (?!) My son is equally well-educated, but can’t get permanent residence in USA (so far). Too much “equality” is causing America to prefer this bomber to my son. I know it is just an anecdote, but you hear similar stories anywhere in educated class in India.
Whiskey, as point out by others, is forgetting one thing: war is the white man’s sport and passion. No other tribe, to use his phraseology, does it quite as “well”. No one. And in some cases it is not even close. White Europeans, and later us Americans (their descendants), have been showing the world how it is done since the Hoplites of Greece. It is why Western civilization came to dominate the world. It is a terrible truth but the course and outcome of history is determined by the sword. And if the victorious sword is wielded in cause of an idea, then that idea flourishes and takes root. Maybe there will come a day when this won’t be true, but that day is not today or for foreseeable future. Nor is it likely that Western way of battle will fall victim to another any time soon. Perhaps our will is just not what it use to be, but one or more of our cities go up in nuclear, chemical or biological flames and trust me the will come back with a vengeance. We will channel our inner Andrew Jackson, William T. Sherman and the other merciless, give no quarter warriors of our heritage. Whiskey’s supposed tribal victors will find themselve quickly shut out as the demand for action/vengeance takes root. Wretchard’s Three Conjectures will be visited upon our enemies. Our dead might be counted in the tens of thousands, theirs in the millions. Whiskey may despair, I don’t. In fact, I pity the poor fools that believe that some how the fate of the Japanese for one surprise attack on a remote US military base one quiet December morning will not be visited on them tenfold for the loss of one of our cities. As I stated before there are plenty of young white men ready, willing and able to bring down the vengeance of the American people upon their enemies, and do so in a fashion that would make Curtis LeMay proud.
Yeah, Wretchard, I hear ya, because you don’t have to be a third worlder to experience that. When I moved from my birthplace in po-dunk Texas to Newe Yahwk back in the 1970′s I got that “Wow! You don’t sound like a Texan!” everytime my origins got revealed. It still happens to this day. People seemed to be amazed I wasn’t walking around in a ten-gallon hat, wrassling rattlesnakes, lassoing things. How little do they know me; such things are only good for Sundays.
And on why New York is the main target as opposed to, say, DC, it’s because you can kill New Yorkers with a bomb. To kill the politicians and lawyers in DC, you’d need a boatload of wooden stakes! The crazy little thing is, you can nuke DC tomorrow and America might be better off for it. Just look at the town and see that it’s such a lie. How can you respect a city that doesn’t even have a skyline, except for a monument to itself? DC is a false, phoney place, a self-absorbed parasite, a tick on the American body, whereas New York is Gotham, the heart of the beast, where real life happens. Remember the jihadists are playing out a fantasy of domination and power here. Their acts are scripted not for us, but for themselves. They want the Big Apple, Gotham, the American muscle, the King of Hustle, the Shattered Lady who sings “bring me your poor, your huddled …” and somehow makes good on that against all odds.
DC can’t hold a candle to that. There was a time, sadly, when Americans all knew that, too. America rises or falls with the likes of New York, never DC, and it’s time to really worry if that ever changes.
Having said that, hang the Yankees! Go Rangers!
Re the phenomenon Lee Smith describes, that is the true Vietnam War parallel/legacy.
Don’t tell me you people actually believe that propaganda about this attack being carried out by an adherent to the religion of peace. Don’t you understand that it must have been committed by an Amish enraged by the President using a teleprompter?
Why NY? Well, the exploding bombs are bright on Broadway.
Why NY when it’s so Liberal? I am reminded of one of Mark Steyn’s favorite Jihadist quotes: “No problem. They are all infidels.”
re India: Unfortunately, India is finally kinda sorta getting its act together just when the US is… well, let’s leave it at “voting for Obama.”
jW@97: Women are especially vulnerable to the liberal siren song that we -can- create a ’safe’ and ‘nice’ world if only enough people in government ‘care’ and we pass the right laws.
If I may condense the rebuttal position into a soundbite, the more narrow issue is not government, let alone a government that cares, but the issue is the “free” market system, which, in reality is a mixed market, but, be that as it may, the issue is “modulating” market extremes (Black Swans anyone?). Should we? And who’s that royal “We” Kimosabe?
The most apt analogy that I have heard is that of building a containment structure for the nuclear reactions that comprise market forces.
So the old question is still on the table – what does woman want**: free markets, centrally planned economies (which make boring markets), or something in between?
Interesting. Another question of balance.
**I joke of course.
99. Tarnsman “…. there are plenty of young white men ready, willing and able to bring down the vengeance of the American people upon their enemies, and do so in a fashion that would make Curtis LeMay proud”.
Absolutely, and there are plenty of old white guys like me who be willing to do whatever we could to help bring it about. I still get really p***ed every time I think about those WTC jumpers and the fact that not too many of our then and now enemies, especially the Saudis, have paid very much of a price for that atrocity. They are damn lucky Dubya was in charge and not me, because I believe in revenge.
A couple of things that might be of interest to some BC observers of current affairs:
First, with my emphasis:
————————————-
http://wcbstv.com/local/times.square.car.2.1674692.html
May 4, 2010 5:34 pm US/Eastern
Army Intelligence Planes Led To Suspect’s Arrest
Call To Emirates Airlines Intercepted By Military Jets, Helped Investigators Track Faisal Shahzad Down
Total Time Of Investigation: 53 Hours, 20 Minutes
CBS News Interactive: America On Guard
Reporting
Marcia Kramer
NEW YORK (CBS)
The arraignment of Times Square terror suspect Faisal Shahzad has been postponed until Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said Shahzad confessed to receiving explosives training in Pakistan and is being held by federal agents in lower Manhattan.
Charges against Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan, were contained in a criminal complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. Shahzad was arrested overnight as he attempted to leave the country on a flight.
The complaint says he confessed to buying an SUV, rigging it with a homemade bomb and driving it Saturday night into Times Square, where he tried to detonate it. It also says he admitted to receiving bomb-making training in Waziristan, Pakistan, but there is no mention of al-Qaida.
Officials said Tuesday that Shahzad, 30, is providing “useful” information in his interrogation. When they detained him, they found a gun in his car and other incriminating evidence.
“It is clear that this was a terrorist act aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in our country,” Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday.
Shahzad, 30, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, has been in custody since shortly after midnight. He was hauled off a plane in the nick of time as it was about to fly to the Middle East. CBS 2 obtained air traffic control recording intended to stop the pilots from taking off. The controller alerts pilots to “immediately” return to the gate.
In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The charges he’ll faces for allegedly planting the explosive-laden SUV in Times Square include an act of terrorism transcending national borders; attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction; use of a destructive device during the commission of another crime; and assorted explosive charges.
There were many developments in the fast-paced investigation, but sources told CBS 2 how the operation went down. Spooked by reports that authorities were looking for a Pakistani-American, Shahzad rushed out of his Bridgeport, Conn. Home and headed for the airport. He made the reservations on the way, paying cash for his ticket.
Agents raiding his Bridgeport home found components for the bomb device, including firecrackers and the boxes for the alarm clocks. They also reportedly found a hand-drawn map of potential targets, including the 4, 5, and 6 trains and the Staten Island ferry. There was also evidence of his ties to Pakistan, including a Karachi ID and residency papers.
Pakistan officials have reportedly made arrests in connection with the case. One of the suspects, Tausif Ahmed, is believed to have traveled to American two months ago to meet with Shahzad.
“We are working with our law enforcement and intelligence partners to uncover all possible ties this particular individual has to radical extremism terrorist organizations, both at home and overseas,” said FBI Director John Pistole.
In the end, it took officials just 53 hours and 20 minutes to solve the case.
————————————–
It adds confirmation of certain MILITARY capabilities that were suspected. I thought that some of the BC-ers might find it of interest.
Second, there is a new name for a possibly terrorist-caused explosion in airline luggage. The new term is “NON-EVENT”.
———————————————
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0412674020100504
Luggage explosion causes scare at Houston airport
Tue May 4, 2010 4:40pm EDT
HOUSTON, May 4 (Reuters) – Baggage handlers at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston dropped a piece of luggage that caused a small explosion that was a “nonevent,” an airport spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
The noise prompted jitters at the airport after the failed bomb attempt Saturday night in a crowded Times Square, New York. (Reporting by Chris Baltimore, editing by Philip Barbara)
———————————————-
From the comments about the explosion:
May 04, 2010 5:20pm EDT
Pfft, non-event my hiney!
I was watching the live feed as the bomb technicians were looking at the suitcase, thing had a 1 foot hole blown in it, they zoomed for closeup shots of it multiple times.
There were about 25 emergency vehicles on the scene and the bomb squad was unloading bags, donning gear and about to move in on it when they cut the feed… 4 minutes after the live feed was cut, this story was up about a “non-event”
*cough*cough* *bullstuff* A non-event doesn’t blow a 1 foot hole in a suitcase.
Buffmuffin Report As Abusive
It may be something totally non-terrorist related. Or it may be a partial detonation of something that was supposed to make a much larger than 1 foot diameter blast. I’m glad it happened on the ground instead of at 20k + feet. But it is self-serving propaganda worthy of the White House’s Paid Liar Gibbs for someone after 9/11, the attempts on Brit airliners with liquid binary explosives, the “shoe bomber”, the “undies bomber”, and the past attempts to blow up trans-Pacific airliners; to blatantly state that a freaking explosion in airline luggage is a freaking “non-event”.
One wonders which should anger us most; the blatant lie or the implied contempt for us. Let’s go for both.
Subotai Bahadur
New York really isn’t any more liberal than almost every other American city. Let’s branch out from it. Boston. Philadelphia. Pittsburg. Baltimore. Washington. Richmond. Cincy. Cleveland. Detroit. Chicago. Minneapolis. De Moines. Memphis. Birmingham. Knoxville. Charlotte. Raleigh. Charleston. Atlanta. Tampa. Miami. Mobile. Jackson. New Orleans. Houston. San Antonio. Dallas. Oklahoma City. etc until you get out west. Everywhere the city halls vary in flamboyance and degrees, but not very much in direction or philosophical constitution. They’re all pointed left.
Whether you live in a blue area or a red area is mostly dependent on one factor, and that’s population density. That’s the strongest correlation, and also the most improbable. Why should your outlook depend on how many neighbors you have? What does that have to do with which tribe you subscribe to? It seems insane and not based on reason at all, yet look at a voting map. “What constitutes a human right?” Answer: it depends on how close your neighbors are. Isn’t that rather stupid and disappointing? Urban areas are blue, blue, blue. They fuel socialistic bents and spoils fights. Rural areas are red, red, red. They fuel individualistic bents and freedom fights.
Off-topic, I know, and thoughts for another day, perhaps.
Ravi, Welcome to the USA brother. You sound like you understand the threat the sane world faces from the Hitlers in Headscarves. I’m all for closer ties between the US, India and Israel.
peterike (#59): “Who will keep the trains running?”
I doubt the IslamoFascists will make the trains run on time.
Ignominious (#72):
You do realize that for your syllogism, as stated, to be true, one must agree with Whiskey, and that you are therefore begging the question?
RaviT (#78):
Hey, I wanna sign up for your basket of goodies!
In order to qualify, here’s some short-sighted advice: Due to its position of influence over Israel, the US pretty much has veto power over Israel’s military exports. It has used this power to prevent Israel from selling the really top-flight stuff to India. Therefore, India should somehow attempt to increase the current strain in US-Israel relationships to the breaking point.
jWarrior (#97): “The Canadians are even further into PC hell than we are. They have the concept of ‘visible minority’”
For laughs, y’all can explore the absurdities of just which ethnic groups are considered visible.
RaviT @98
In my view, it is too much “equality” in the American system of immigration…Too much “equality” is causing America to prefer this bomber to my son. I know it is just an anecdote”.
Not just anectdotal. Check out Wildavsky’s book, The Great Brain Race, on how the US turns away high performing graduate students in science and math in particular with the “too equal” immigration laws. (He does not consider how student visas have been used as entrees for terrorists, but most students who wish to stay, IMHO as one who came from elsewhere and was lucky and persistent enough to be able to stay, through legal channels, after a long 15 year process, do not pose a threat but offer assets)
Wretchard @95
“A friend of mine from New Zealand asked his new neighbors, who were British immigrants of Jamaican extraction, why they had come to Auckland. Their answer was “too many black people in Britain”. Those particular Jamaicans left their home country because they preferred another way of life, only to discover that way of life was annihilating itself. So they moved on, staying ahead of the PC wave.”
Yes. However “racist” the BNP still is, and to whatever degree the change in their constitution to allow non-white members was motivated by fear of reprisals by EU’ers, note that first and second generation Asian and Caribbean immigrants in Britain now want to join the BNP! It’s largely on anti-Muslim grounds, but also because those immigrants wanted to escape their homeland and swap their identity for a “British” one.
Trangbang68 #92:
Turns out the POS is from a wealthy family, his father is a retired Vice Air Marshall in the Pakistani Air Force, and he got a degree in computer science.
Obviously a fine upstanding young man who would make a great citizen.
David Horowitz observed that the 60′s protestors were really focusing themsleves, not the USA. They were turning their own personal problems into National ones.
I think the Times Sq bomber is a lot like Bin Laden. He started out with every advantage but can’t hack it. His wife left him and went back to Pakistan. His house was foreclosed on. This all can’t be HIS fault. It must be the Great Satan causing his problems. He’ll stike back at THEM and head back home.
I think Bin Laden realized that no matter how successful he was in the construction business that he was still only one son of many, and even though he was from a very wealthy familiy he was still never going to be a Saudi Royal.
So these guys decide that they if they can’t play cards very well they’ll just kick over the table. Push a big Reset button. One man’s loser – or not big enough winner – is another man’s brilliant terrorist mastermind.
Tarnsman (#99): “war is the white man’s sport and passion”
Yes and no.
This quote is from Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Western Way of War. Western, not White. Culture, not race.
1. Gee, I wonder why he included this phrase.
Cowboy (#105):
To the contrary. In brief: The tighter you’re packed in with your neighbors, the more tolerant you have to be of them, and the more conforming you have to be in your opinions. Atoms of solids vs gases.
I’m sure someone can point to an essay expounding on this.
To follow up on the subject of regulated markets I raised in #102:
I don’t know how many of the BC audience have followed, in an even cursory manner, the CNBC series American Greed, consisting of 36 or so 1-hr episodes.
I haven’t watched many, but last night I caught episode 36 about a dermatologist in Grand Rapids MI who was put away for 10 years for insurance fraud that involved billing insurance companies for unnecessary procedures, typically mole removal.
The stories comprising much of this episode were black, in the sense of brutally sad bordering on hysterically funny.
To get to the point, the good doctor got ten years for fraud but the prosecutors were unable to increase his sentence for exposing thousands of patients to HIV and hepatitis by reusing sutures – the surgical thread that is sewn through another patient’s skin.
Sutures are cheap, as was the dermatologist. Thousands of patients were interviewed during the course of the prosecution and tested for infectious disease. Six, IIRC, were treated for hepatitis, but the origins of the infection could not be legally established.
As a result of this case, Michigan passed a law criminalizing reuse of sutures.
Some obvious venue and procedural distinctions can be made between public health and safety, and market and finance regulatory compliance, not to even mention the failure of specific professions to self-regulate, the medical community being especially bad, but little more than background noise after the recent failure of financial services.
But to force the blame squarely on a “feminized” society is I think a bit of an intellectual squeeze. We used to call them brain farts.
Geeze (#112):
It’s called “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I’d rather keep it, even if I don’t always like its results.
Civil proceedings have a lower burden of proof, and I’d be shocked if the good doctor left prison with a single penny to his name.
Look at it this way, folks.
Socialism is the philosophy of the militantly mediocre.
Jihadism is the philosophy of the mediocre who are militantly looking for someone to blame for their own shortcomings.
No wonder the Left and the Jihadist get along so well. It’s Them Against Competence.
Subotai (#104):
Borrowing Lifeofthemind‘s reference, the UK is about to have elections. There can be no events.
If the wannabe bomber was naturalized as a US citizen someone sponsored his application. Whose name is on it? Inspect out to the 4th degree.
Bob,
Thanks I think, which reference was that? I have been swallowed and lost the thread.
Gees, Geeze Louise — I’m trying hard to figure out what you’re talking about today. ( OK – not trying too hard … ) usually your posts make a lot more sense!
Turns out the POS (the failed bomber) is from a wealthy family, his father is a retired Vice Air Marshall in the Pakistani Air Force, and he got a degree in computer science.
Think that will stop the MSM from squawking about “root causes?” Osama, Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers were manifestly not from disadvantaged backgrounds and yet the same preprogramed cliches about the dire poverty of the Islamic world (all caused by us, of course )were dusted off and trotted out.
b@57: And it that vein bio-researchers are claiming success in creating algae that DIRECTLY produces Diesel at remarkably high yields. Their numbers put corn-to-ethanol to shame.
I have read that the problem is scale. Researchers can’t even get enough algae to do their laboratory work. What kind of “scalar disruptions” will be evoked by the kind of large-scale algae production required to generate liquid fuel at future consumption rates. I am guessing that someone has penciled out these numbers.
How do these numbers compare with coal-to-liquid technologies?
Nice tale, Geeze Louise, but it’s framed against the debate in the formulaic way. Therefore, you miss the bird in hand.
Okay, we have this debate over free market vs. regulation, and line up along those lines. Why on earth do we do that? You’d be amazed at Adam Smith’s version of a “free market”, that phrase has never meant a Hobbesian War of All Against All, a Wild West, ever, until recent times, and only then when hurled from leftists.
In the midst of the current crisis, battles rage back and forth according to these same terms, free market vs. regulation.
You do realize what really happened to cause the current crisis, though, don’t you? We had a real estate bubble, which means, classically, that we had a huge ton of money thrown at real estate. We had easy credit, financed principly on the expectation ever upward real estate prices coupled with not a little hubris by quants who thought they’d licked the problem of risk.
Our problems today were authored, they were engineered, they were built into our financial system by some folks who thought they’d be warriors for social justice and by others who thought they’d be Masters of the Financial Universe.
Yes, it went kapoop. But, does that sound like a free market? Adam Smith would not recognize it as such. And, most importantly, was the government’s failure really a lack of regulation, or was it one of throwing money hand over fist into feeding the bubble?
I think you should rightly recognize that government’s efforts to create and to abet this bubble is far more troublesome and far more damaging than any regulatory failure, and that it also might explain why we had any kind of regulatory failure.
Bob@111
You’ve not pointed out anything contrary to the thesis, rather you’ve made a post in support of the thesis.
The Gulf Blow is Obama’s Katrina. Start calling him “Slick Barry the oily pol from Chicago.”
Lifeofthemind (#116):
Reference to your comment (#30) bringing up the infamous Spanish elections.
And now for some entertainment, albeit of the animalistic jungle kind
, from Broadway.
RaviT: I am sorry your son is having problems staying here. Unfortunately, the policy of our present government is to bow to our enemies and kick our allies in the teeth.
I’m not entirely kidding when I say your son might have a better chance if he flew to Tijuana and headed north, without papers. The people who do the paperwork and obey the laws have to wait for years. You’re better off being an illegal – at least in California and Texas.
LotM, too long. Shorter moniker is catchier. “Oil Slick Barry”.
121. Cowboy
If you live in the crowded inner city, is it truly “insane and not based on reason at all” to have a less expansive conception of rights? (Particulars re second amendment, public nuisance laws, welfare, etc left as an exercise to the reader.) I share your disappointment at that effect, but your “puzzlement” seems too disingenuous.
(Btw, the only “thesis” you bring forward is, perhaps, that urban living drives a leftward shift in opinions. Why shouldn’t it be the reverse?)
Auschwitz was open from about 1941 or so up through January 1945. During that time, with many expansions, it killed between 800K and 1.1 million people, depending on Western (lower) or Soviet (higher) estimates.
Between April 1994, and June 1994, a mere three months, ordinary Rwandans killed, almost always with stones and machetes, about 900K people.
Let it never be said that Black Africans cannot compete with the best of industrialized, “banality of evil,” mass-produced slaughter, using nothing but rocks and machetes. Neighbor cutting apart neighbor, bashing their heads in. Killing up close and personal.
The Gauls of course were Europeans before there was much of Europe. The Romans did not think much of Gauls or other Europeans, and held themselves different, as did the Greeks before them. Nevertheless, the Romans CERTAINLY held themselves out as a separate and unique race.
Romans, at the time of Caesar, or earlier in the time of Scipio and Fabius, did not trust say, Gauls nor Numidians nor Carthaginians nor Greeks. Legions died by the hundreds of thousands, or slaughtered by them, based on being all the same people, distantly related, and all credible distant cousins.
The West’s safety margin, was always this. People who all looked and acted like distant cousins. Culture, in the form of the mish-mash of the late Roman Empire, of the Byzantine Empire, of the Crusader states, of the Holy League, has never been enough. Ever. Losses occur. Generals make bad decisions. Luck turns for the enemy. Incompetents rise and talented generals fall. But having a robust, greatly extended kin network far vaster than the cousin-only network of Arabs, or other peoples, allows the West to take losses other societies could not and would not.
Shock battle can be defeated by simply never turning out to be annihilated. Or over-running the Legions with sheer numbers. The late Roman legions were well disciplined. But there were never enough of them, and the equalized spread of technology allowed barbarians to conquer the Romans. To sack Rome. We just disclosed how many nukes we have: around 5,000 or so, with 800 active at any one time, per Obama.
America’s First Black President. A man who like Mavericks Forward Josh Howard, does not care about the National Anthem — he’s Black. I understand it. I might feel the same way had I been born Obama. But that changes nothing.
The enemy knows what we have and what it will take to simply overwhelm us.
C@120: government’s efforts to create and to abet this bubble is far more troublesome and far more damaging than any regulatory failure, and that it also might explain why we had any kind of regulatory failure. [emphasis added]
(1) I will not dispute that the government “erred” in applying pressure to banks to reduce their lending standards vis a vis CRA.
(2) I disagree that this failure is more egregious than the introduction of synthetic derivatives as financial instruments to hedge risk in increasingly risky markets.
(3) And I disagree that market performance reflects economic performance reflects societal advancement. It’s more complicated.
I understand this board’s majority position on the subject – social justice via government policy inevitably leads to economic dysfunction. My position is that “social policy” needs to be refined.
“The Commons” as we speak is a large intellectual area. It can – and needs to be – be broken down.
“Because at least 34% right off the bat would celebrate wildly at the incineration of America’s biggest cities,”
Actually, incineration of the Biggest American cities would considerably reduce the number of celebrants. Down to under 25% probably. Look at the demographics. Where do most of the 4th worlders live? In the biggest cities.
If the Islamic nutters kill off the American left, then we will have an opportunity to reduce our nuclear stockpile from 5,113 to 4500 by dropping 613 nukes on Muslims. That would go a long way towards solving the problem. I think we would have to send in the gunships to finish the process.
There is bound to be 1 or 2 survivors and the gunships would lower that to zero, which is the optimal number.
So I see Islam as a self correcting system. They kill off the Americans that prevent the rest of us from slaughtering Muslims. Eventually the only Americans left will be those that want to slaughter Muslims.
Shortly thereafter there will be no more Muslims. Problem solved.
Muslims think we will surrender. They need to read up on the Alamo and consider that the Americans they are killing are the ones that want to surrender.
So many words wasted here. BC was always a refreshing place to recharge…now its hyperbole and rant. We are losing the US along with the western worlds vaulted superiority. Yes we are white and we made for a great world that despite world wars that were economically and politically driven, we have generally chosen peace, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness over conflict FOR ALL. That’s all gone now.The great unwashed led by the likes of Barak Obama will soon govern us all. Get in line with your food bowl and bow appropriately…its coming soon.
I agree with Wretchard about identities, save that the future is not one that belongs to those who have always lived in England. Shakespeare will die, soon, along with Sherlock Holmes, and Robin Hood, and King Arthur. Because the children being born are Muslims from Pakistan, or of that descent, or Jamaicans. What do either care, en-masse, about Robin Hood? Or King Arthur?
HOW COULD THEY CARE? Mozart and Shakespeare, even, are a stretch because neither are Black nor Pakistani Muslim. THAT identity will always win out. After all, I find Gamelan music mildly interesting. But not enough to listen to it for more than a minute or two — I’m not Indonesian. I don’t really care. I suspect the relative unpopularity of Gamelan music, of Japanese Noh theater, or Chinese Operas, in the West with Western peoples makes this fairly universal.
I am grateful to Jamaicans. They created a great and delicious cuisine. I am grateful to Pakistanis. I have no doubt that they have done something (I am serious, not sarcastic) interesting and delightful. But why do either have to make up the future of the British Isles? Why does Scotland have to be Jamaican and Muslim/Pakistani? Why does Ireland, which never colonized anyone, have to become entirely un-Irish and nearly all Muslim? Why do the native peoples of the British Isles have to be turned into discriminated minorities in their own lands, overnight?
Wretchard, and the rest, have never answered WHY the White natives of Europe have to be minorities. Why Jamaicans belong in the UK in the first place, in large numbers. Why great masses of Pakistanis have to move to the UK. WHY half of Mexico needs to move to the US, and why should a nation that 70 years ago was 81% White is not only 66% White, and dropping?
Why does America have to be Mexico Norte? Because White people have no value, no inherent right, to maintain their own ethnic/demographic makeup? MEXICO, and JAMAICA, and PAKISTAN all maintain the right to be as they are. None of them would accept, say, en-masse migration from Harbin China, or St. Petersburg Russia, to pick two random cities. No Pakistani, or Jamaican, or Mexican, would dare utter the words that their own nations should be transformed to make the natives dispossessed minorities in their own lands.
Only Whites are supposed to accept this. Because, Whites are uniquely evil or something.
[The answer is, most White women really loathe, with a passion of a thousand suns, most White men, whom they see as far too much Jon Cryer, and not enough Charlie Sheen. Feminized men in the media simply repeat what their female audience and colleagues want to hear. A phenomena very familiar. One I have been guilty of myself in the past.]
Why can’t Mexicans and others assimilate?
Because this is not 1850, or the 1880′s, when one of my Irish ancestors jumped ship. There is no open frontier. Nor is it the 1900′s, when factories were gearing up and needed cheap labor. Nor is it the 1920′s, when no real international communication and such meant that Pakistan was about three weeks away at best, and only major news was flashed through relatively primitive radio/telegraphic networks from Mexico and Pakistan and Jamaica. No Mexican in the US in 1920 (and there were damn few) could listen to Spanish language radio all day, read Spanish language newspapers, and watch Spanish language TV, all from Mexico, in New York City, and never speak a word of English, or need to, all day.
Will America fall apart if we have “A Day Without A Mexican?” Does the UK desperately need Jamaicans, in massive numbers?
I don’t mind small numbers of Jamaicans in the US, or New Zealand, or the UK. Or small numbers of Mexicans, or Nigerians, or Pakistanis. What I mind is 30 million Mexicans in the US, with the prospect of 50 million more. I find it sad that the Ireland, and Scotland, of my ancestors will be nothing more than a place where alien people, who don’t give a damn about King Arthur, or Robert Burns, or the Bruce, or bagpipes, will live and wonder perhaps idly why the people who were there before them were so weak they did not immediately embrace Islam.
I have never read (maybe I missed it) an explanation from Wretchard or anyone why the UK needed to be “fixed” by making it Muslim and/or Jamaican. Why the US had to be “fixed” from Anglo/Celtic/African, which was perfectly fine, to Mexican majority. Why New Zealand has to be “improved” by making Whites a discriminated minority.
I get why almost all non-Whites hate Whites. That’s just the way it is. Because they can. I get why many White women hate White men (too much Cryer, not enough Sheen). I just don’t see why from a policy standpoint the societies that won the Battle of Britain and created Torpedo Squadron #9 had to be destroyed.
Thought experiment Wretchard: imagine that the Filipino people were replaced by … Finns. Imagine an alternate universe filled with say, 200 million Finns. Of which, about 100 million were moving right straight to the Philippines. And would have four or five kids, to each Filipino woman’s one. That within sixty years, there would be almost no Filipinos left. No more Tagalog (or other languages spoken). No more kids with black hair, darker skin, and dark eyes. EVERYONE in the Philippines will have blonde hair, and blue eyes, or perhaps red hair. They will all be fair skinned. They’ll eat Finnish food, and construct indooor ski slopes, and turn say, Manila, into Helsinki on the Pacific. No more Kali, no more Escrima, no more Arnis. Just nerdy Finnish engineers awkwardly looking at your shoes when they want to talk to you. All the stories, legends, history, food, culture, all of it, gone into a giant morass of Finnishness.
Would this make you happy? Would you like it? Would most ordinary Filipinos be happy to contemplate the cultural death, of their own people? Their replacement by Finns from an alternate universe?
Would you be interested, at all, of hearing of ordinary Finns who wanted to learn a few phrases of Tagalog? Of a Finnish boy who was interested in Arnis?
The Filipino people have a long and proud history. Their contribution to the Martial Arts is unquestioned. The deeds of Lapu Lapu are not forgotten, still. Nor his astonishing bravery. Do they deserve to go into the dustbin of history? If not, why does Robin Hood and King Arthur and Sherlock Holmes have to be thrown away?
#110 Bob
We think of French slaughter in terms of Agincourt and Verdun, but the true holocaust occurred in the mostly unknown battles of the two-century encounter with the Romans, who cut down more Gauls than at any time before or after. Roman steel, not disease or hunger [1], doomed an autonomous ancient France, whose manhood was systematically destroyed in battle as no other people would be in the entire history of Western colonial subjugation.
Mr Hanson has a curious way of seing Gallics as the ever slaughtered populations for not saying because they were surrender monkeys !
don’t remember that he had a fair discourse on us, any time I read his articles, misinformed or partisan !
if he just had check about Vercingetorix, but I guess this wouldn’t have served his purpose, and BTW the Picts were originated from Poitiers aeras !
Rome has been sacked many times by the Gallics before. The true roman genocide were against Helvetian and German tribes, (and of course Carthagena too)
During 53-50 Caesar was engaged in suppressing a Gallic revolt led by Vercingetorix. He treated the Gauls generously, leaving their cities with a significant measure of autonomy, and thus secured the allegiance of Gallic soldiers in his civil wars against Pompey in 49-45. A former religious center of Gallic society, Lugdunum (Lyon) became the capital of Roman Gaul. The country was divided into four provinces: Narbonensis, Aquitania to the west and south of the Loire, Celtica (or Lugdunensis) in central France between the Loire and the Seine, and Belgica in the north and east. The Romans built towns and roads throughout Gaul and taxed the old Gallic landowning class while promoting the development of a middle class of merchants and tradesmen. The emperor Tiberius was obliged to suppress a rebellion of the nobles in 21 CE, and the assimilation of the Gallic aristocracy was secured when the emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) made them eligible for seats in the Roman Senate and appointed them to governing posts in Gaul. He also ordered the suppression of the druids, the Celtic priests. Native deities were amalgamated with Roman counterparts, and emperor worship was encouraged.
http://www.unrv.com/provinces/gallia.php
[The Gauls' and Celts'] white, muscular physiques and great size were favorite topics of Roman historians, who were quick to imply that smaller tanned Italian legionaries used training, order, and discipline to butcher such wild tribesmen in the thousands.
smaller tanned Italian legionaries ? one more falsh statment:
Many of Caesar’s troops were themselves Gallic, so the conflict was not simply a war between Romans and Gauls. Indeed, his army was an extremely cosmopolitan entity. Its core consisted of six (later ten) legions of heavy infantry, supported by the equivalent of two more in later campaigns. He relied on foreign allies for his cavalry and light infantry, recruiting from the Numidians, Cretan, Hispanians, Germanics, and Gaulish tribes. Caesar made very effective use of these forces, using individual units’ pride to spur them to greater efforts.
For years, the general wisdom concerning Caesar’s Gallic opponents was that they were considerably less capable militarily than the Romans. They could field large armies but suffered from a lack of flexibility and discipline. Gallic warriors were ferocious opponents and were much admired for this by the Romans, but they are said to have lacked discipline in the field by Classical historians. It is also argued, however, that certain Gallic tribes were in possession of small professional warbands, whose warriors were at least as disciplined as their Roman counterparts. The overall military organization and hierarchy of the Gauls may not have been quite as complex as the Roman Army, but it would be naive to consider that the members of the professional Celtic warrior caste were fundamentally incapable of keeping good order and remaining cohesive in the heat of battle. Celts from Gaul, Iberia, eastern Europe, and Galatia were widely sought as mercenaries by recruiting agents from Carthage, Greece, Syracuse, and the Hellenistic kingdoms, due to their military prowess. It is rather unlikely that they would be considered for employment by such a diverse range of civilized states if they were lacking in tactical knowledge. Not to mention that both the Romans and the Greeks from the Third Century BC onward had eagerly adopted Celtic military equipment, such as Chainmail armour, Shortswords, and Scutum/Thereos shields. The general problem with the Gauls would have been the centuries long political rivalries among the main tribes, the individual forces of which would have been worn down over generations of intermittent warfare. And Caesar commanded the largest pool of professional soldiers in Gaul; the Roman Legions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Wars
Therefore, India should somehow attempt to increase the current strain in US-Israel relationships to the breaking point.
_____________________________________
I don’t really understand your point. Strains in US-Israel relationship is due to Obama. India wants closer ties to both US and Israel–we have no interest in causing tensions between US and Israel. Maybe you are making an inside joke–sorry if I am missing it. I hope that this Pakistani “American” bomber gets the death penalty.
Bob, the thesis I brought forth was that one’s philosophy is determined by surrounding population density. That, to me, is absurd, yet it nevertheless is the one with the strongest correlation according to electoral data.
Yes, I agree with you that you might go left if you are crowded, but you also might go right. Population density ought to not matter.
I would expect Thomas Jefferson to have come up with the same ideas either in the solitude of Monticello or in under the busy crush of the Philadelphia pup. His ideas are timeless, and not situational, and removed from the mundane. They are, in short, philosophical, and not emotively reactive to this or that various condition regaring the current state of relations with the neighbors.
What is it about our cities that poison this philosophical attitude, if the data can be trusted that, “damn the ideas, it’s the neighbors!”
If it does become about the neighbors, then what Whiskey writes so eloquently has renewed force in my opinion. What we tend toward is tribalism, patronage, strongmen and tyranny.
The Founders, and today’s Tea Party, place more weight on ideation and the rational justification of natural rights. These sublime county lines; I believe they are the backbone of the American experiment’s success and also the key for its renewal.
LOTM
“If the wannabe bomber was naturalized as a US citizen someone sponsored his application. Whose name is on it? Inspect out to the 4th degree.”
Nope. No sponsorship is necessary for naturalization. As long as you have met the criteria–five years as a permanent resident or a reduced time as such if you marry a US citizen, no one need sponsor you.
It is my understanding that he entered orignally on an F-1 visa (stucent) which would have required sponsorship–check the name on that if you believe he was a sleeper. He received an H-1B visa (work) which would have also required sponsorship. He then married a US citizen and was naturalized as a result.
I believe he would have been permitted to retain his original citizenship and passport even after being naturalized.
Is it time to go back to the old days when one had to surrender one’s original passport and nationality upon receipt of US citizenship?
Maryj is correct. We have to look at it from the enemy perspective. NYC is rich, loud, in-your-face rich. And decadent. Women dance nekkid, and muslims are not given proper respect. The mayor’s a Jew!
And New York is a tolerant, diverse place, and it thrives. This makes it the Antithesis of Islam, which teaches that people will thrive best in an intolerant, undiverse place.
Yes, to a Jihadi, a conservative christian American and a leftist secular American are both the enemy. In fact, the secular leftist might be worse. We all know how tolerant Islam is for the very things the secular left loves the most. But the secular leftist only rarely gets it.
Sometimes they do. I recall, in NYC’s west village, shortly after 9-11, a conversation between two young, sophisticated and very gay New Yorkers. One was of the opinion that the fundamentalist muslisms were just “too different.” Imagine.
Whisky
“I agree with Wretchard about identities, save that the future is not one that belongs to those who have always lived in England. Shakespeare will die, soon, along with Sherlock Holmes, and Robin Hood, and King Arthur. Because the children being born are Muslims from Pakistan, or of that descent, or Jamaicans. What do either care, en-masse, about Robin Hood? Or King Arthur?”
Just FYI: Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, King Arthur, all Hollywood movies within the last few years.
Cowboy, the obvious solution to the dilemma is that people self-select with respect to where they feel most comfortable. Those with a more self-reliant philosophy will tend to leave the cities and head out toward areas with a lower population density, while those with the need for intense social interaction will concentrate themselves in the city.
End result – areas with different pop. densities have widely different philosophies.
MD@117:I’m trying hard to figure out what you’re talking about today.
I was disputing the allegation that “feminization” led to Big Government in US which is completely OT but brought up by jW@97 and Whiskey on innumerable occasions. I reject the reduction of an influence to a causation.
“I have no doubt that they have done something (I am serious, not sarcastic) interesting and delightful.”
I have my doubts.
wws@138
I disagree, that’s not obvious at all. Very few people can self-select in this way. What kid from Plano would dare try to make it in Papa Ray’s neck of the woods, unless Papa takes him under his wings?
Damn few, I’d wager.
#110. Bob RE: “Tarnsman (#99): ‘war is the white man’s sport and passion’”
Though I think you did not intend to do so, you have only strengthened Tarnsman’s premise, which explicitly included the Greeks. “White men” anymore includes the Romans, Greeks, Spanish (European, that is), and everyone north of them. A scant review of history reveals an astonishing array of efficient military actions by these peoples–often against each other.
Only Chinese history can compare (we’ll give them the Mongols as well), and that because they went through many periods of similarly competing states, with large populations and efficient agricultural practices. In other words, plenty of people to grind up on a whim. Japan follows in third place, as their military efficiency and inventiveness was primarily turned inwards toward containing and controlling large populations on relatively small islands. Widespread Japanese civil wars took place over a much more condensed period of time.
As for “us” today, I can only say this: everyone I grew up around knows how to at least think about what to do for survival and disassembling a body of enemy. Many of them know how to shoot, hunt, etc. Others are suffused in modern cultural tidbits exemplified by things like “World War Z”, films, comics, games, etc–all of which teach at minimum the skills for thinking outside the box. This is the younger set of middle-America, now. During WW2 one of the key factors in making American soldiers superior to German (or Japanese) ones turned out to be the nearly universal skill of driving. I dread what will happen when America today becomes sufficiently enraged to put to use their nearly universal imagination.
–JC
mac @ 91
Thank you for the shot of optimism; we need that here as much as we need whiskey’s blunt pessimism.
But we didn’t face up to the Communists and make them collapse — they retrenched, kept working, and got stronger. Now they’re so firmly in control of our schools we won’t be able to get rid of them without abolishing public education. They run the U.S. Catholic and so-called mainline Protestant churches. America has elected a Communist President. This is taking place today because there were not enough people innoculated against socialist idiocy after the peanut farmer.
We failed to turn back the Communist tide in 1980 (we merely slowed its advance a little). If we fail again this November or in 2012, we probably will not have another chance.
Marie Claude (#132):
Not only that, but based on contemporary accounts, Romans suffered from significantly lower levels of mental health than the Gauls (see Prof Stanislas d’Agostini’s groundbreaking research).
RaviT (#133):
I was engaging in tongue-in-cheek humor. I’m obviously rooting for close ties between the three countries.
Cowboy (#134):
Re the actual thesis, without expressing a preference, I wouldn’t discount the possibility that one’s philosophy has a strong influence on where one lives, and that this is the explanation for the urban-left phenomena.
If this is so, it vitiates the remainder of my comment. Otherwise:
Sure, I like to think that my ideas are not overly determined by my environment. It is certainly an ideal worth aspiring to, as some ideas are capital-t True, regardless of anything. I simply consider the effect described by your thesis to be far from absurd and indeed entirely natural, if unfortunate, given our probable political commonalities.
Swami (#136): “Women dance nekkid, and muslims are not given proper respect. The mayor’s a Jew!”
Not only that, but I’ve heard that Mayor Bloomberg dances nekkid, while balancing a Quran on his head!
It appears that this is a continuation of the conflict begun on 9/11. In response to 9/11 we went over there to kill them. In response to us killing their terrorist leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan they’re trying to come over here and kill us.
Pretty much everyone in the world has been to Times Square or knows someone who has been there. My mother likes to use the bathroom in the Marriot Marquis hotel, next to the site of the bombing, on 45th St when she’s in the neighborhood. She says they have a nice bathroom. NYC is a target because everyone has heard of it. Everyone knows someone who’s been there. Muslim verbiage about targets does often mention the fact that NYC is a Joo-town (I think it has the largest Jewish population of any city outside of Israel) but I don’t think that’s the main reason it’s a target. To paraphrase Old blue-eyes “If I can kill them there, I can kill them anywhere.” You get the picture. Attacking the west in its heart lets them really count coup. A major attack in Atlanta or Dallas wouldn’t really have the same kick. Liberalism or decadence has little to do with it. NYC is the big target so that’s the one they go for.
This is low-cost but low-success terrorism. If the guy really wanted to guarantee success he would have stayed in the SUV and made sure the bomb went off.
Thank Crom for incompetent terrorists.
#25 Michael Mac Guinness, what do you mean “delusion?”
According to an article on the NYT site NYC is the only city in the US with its own counter-terrorism task force. OTOH, like the underwear bomber, we only got out of this with no casualties because of the terrorist’s incompetence. I’ll give the cops credit though for catching him in just over 48 hours. Wonder if the Justice dept can screw up the prosecution. Maybe they’ll want to have the trial in Times square.
#6 Wretchard, to the guy who mentions Khaibar you can tell him to remember Amalek.
RaviT @ 98:
Many try to make sense of immigration by considering race and country. That isn’t the point.
The point is that the people running the asylum do not want your son because he is well-educated — he is competition for them, and that isn’t allowed. My last college roommate was a petroleum engineering student from Malaysia; his father was the Malaysian national swimming coach. He wanted to stay in the United States after graduation, but he expected to be sent back to Malaysia (I don’t know what became of him).
The people running the asylum want only illiterate unskilled immigrants, because they drive down wages and do not adopt Western cultural values. They are easier to manipulate.
In some strange circular way, the KKK Grand Wizard and the high priest of PC have exactly the same outlook.
Perhaps, but only one of them wants to see a jihadi succeed at blowing up a bomb in Times Square, the lib. And you know why? Because he knows, he’s been baaaaaad and mommy should spank.
Re:91. mac
I think that Carter and Obama are representing historical trend, and Reagan was an outlier.
Bob, you’re talking of the author of “Asterix the Gallic”, René Goscinny
Buck up, grrr.
Man I like Fred Thompson, check out his activity as of late, and don’t miss his biting and side-splitting Facebook page. He’s a natural born Reagan-type guy, but unfortunately with George Washington’s reluctance. That’s not a bad thing.
If not Teh Fred, somebody else will emerge, somebody we don’t see on our radar right now. Petraeus?
You can count on this: the next opponent to Obama will not be John McCain, but rather a vigorous conservative wanting to argue fundamentals.
Don’t quit quite yet.
The problem with a religion (most of ‘em) is that ‘death’ is ‘better’. Is that our way of coping with death? Or, is ‘religion’ a lie and GOD the truth? Religions divide people. God is universal and Jesus is all forgiving if only you accept his blood for our sins (easier said than done for most folks though, go fugger)…
O/T Side note:
People like Whiskey don’t have any children because no woman in her right mind would have him…
Oh wait…
I take that back! Halt the presses! Whiskey has a female [Muslim] FAN:
White Women and Political Correctness
She’s quite beautiful too (gorgeous full lips and very kindly eyes):
Andromeda
Profile info:
Claire Khaw AKA Andromeda
Could this be ♥?
Whiskey needs to ignore this tripe he visits:
Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology … and go for the hot Muslim Babe!
I bet Whiskey & Andromeda would make some wicked smart, cute, Muslim kids!
Go for it, dude! DAYUM! She’s BEGGIN’!
The blood of Jesus takes ‘death’ away.
Wow, Delia, you’ve put on quite the disgusting and revolting display of cruelty. Frankly, I’m appalled at you.
@ Whiskey 131: “Why does Scotland have to be Jamaican and Muslim/Pakistani?”…”I find it sad that the Ireland, and Scotland, of my ancestors will be nothing more than a place where alien people, who don’t give a damn about King Arthur, or Robert Burns, or the Bruce, or bagpipes, will live and wonder perhaps idly why the people who were there before them were so weak they did not immediately embrace Islam.”
I doubt John “We’ll Set About You” Smeaton agrees with your dire prediction. He doesn’t strike me as either weak or as the embracing kind. Does he you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCqprbH7mrg , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smeaton_(born_1976)
@Cowboy 152. I agree re Delia. Those punches are way below the belt and do nothing but lower the level of discourse.
Marie Claude (#149): “Bob, you’re talking of the author of ‘Asterix the Gallic’, René Goscinny”
Asterix the Gallic? What the heck are you talking about?! I though it was those Eyties that were inordinately fond of gallic! Who is this “René” Goscinny fellow who is spreading these vile lies about our ancestors? Undoubtedly one of them race-blurring “cosmopolitans”, neh?
“In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.”
RC-12 aircraft equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system?
http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/military/Intelligence-Upgrade_30732.html
152. Cowboy,
You missed the irony of a Muslim woman being of ‘like-mind’ with Whiskey?
Really?
Or is this some sort of reverse PC now?
What? Men can call women’s breasts ‘hooters’ and even make a whole restaurant touting women’s boobage even though men have breasts and can even lactate too? We ain’t called ‘mammals’ for nuttin’, sweetie.
Now you men whine like the women you abhor for PC by doing reverse PC. It’s getting crowded in this damned echo-chamber of stupid.
Ball tapping anyone?
ANYONE?
And, those of you men who pander after every word of ‘Whiskey’ are the perfect Beta males after the Alpha who is Whiskey whilst you dolts don’t even ‘get it’. You are being played by the biggest HOMO on here. lmao
What do you think ‘Whiskey’ is? Alpha or Masta-Beta? Has he EVER clarified if he’s a Beta or Alpha? EVER?
Riddle me that answer.
Bob
Eyties = Aliens ?
Delia, my wife’s Indonesian, i.e., Muslim. Her mother, a Haj, lives with us. Both of them are of like mind with me, who says, “Fight the jihadists.” They won’t step foot in an Arab mosque, which means any mosque around here, because of how they treat women.
Yes, there are many, many Muslim women who have a like mind with Whiskey in many ways, regarding the opinion of Western women. Most Muslim women have a very dim opinion of feminists, and frankly, who could blame them? Last year NOW’s national campaign was all about how to have an ice-cream sleep over and not feel guilted, meanwhile, proverbially, Rome burns. Guaranteed, my wife hates you, as does my mother-in-law, as do most of my Indonesian female relatives. Don’t worry, they’re not going to strap on a suicide belt and blow you to bits, rather they’ll rightly tag you as a flippant, obnoxious, disrespecting Western woman and chalk it down as par for the course. To the detriment of Western women everywhere.
For what you’ve done. Making that horrible, out of bounds, personal attack on Whiskey that sucks us all down into what is really none of our business.
Cowboy/158
Don’t worry. I think Whiskey can take it. Mainly because Delia’s post is not actually about Whiskey, but it’s about her, though she may have not realized that when she wrote it.
Maybe she was having return-to-high-school kind of flashback.
GL 119…
The effort to resolve insulin after first success took years. In retrospect the researchers admitted that the first successful extraction was odds-on astounding.
———
In things biological, if they work, they scale.
The puzzlement is just what are the right inputs…
What in hell did we do right, EVER !
Subsequenty, astounding things are possible.
Biology scales up like no other, ANYTHING.
Stare at a mirror.
Were YOU possible?
Marie Claude (#157):
Aren’t you grateful that I am aiding in your education? (Note alternative spelling: eyeties)
PS I wish to sincerely and humbly apologize to inhabitants of the Boot and their descendants, especially those named Guido who are homocidal procurers.
158. Cowboy,
Don’t be so ‘pc’ right?
159. twobyfour,
Of course every post I make is from ‘my perspective’ or ‘about/from me’. DUH much?
Just like, you having to play hall-monitor says something about ‘you’.
Awwww *pets your head* (No, not THAT one, and yes, that too says something about ME).
Wait a minute? You he-men are whining about civil-discourse? After the venom Whiskey spews with a few nuts and loose bolts of truth in them to even make sense and you PRAISE that pile of spew?
Good on ya. Keep that going.
I’m going to feel mighty bad for you men when whiskey:
A. Admits he’s gay
or
B. Admits he’s an alpha male who’s been using up all the ‘good’ women and throwing them away like trash while you poor suckers buy every ‘alpha-beta’ theory he touts.
Whiskey ain’t no Beta male. Most of you men following him ARE and he revels in it.
JUSSSSSSSSt sayin’.
Delia, one word… no make it two: Stop digging.
You’re welcome.
163. twobyfour,
I’m still trying to figure out why some people who believe in a ‘god/allah/higher-power’ think they have the right to take innocent lives?
I’ve never understood ‘organized’ religion.
What came first? The religion or the platypus?
uh Bob, I can’t decide if you’re really worshipping the Gallic or rather the homocidal latin lovers
#157 Marie Claude
“Eyties” is British slang for Italians. (Cockney accent and all that).
No, Delia, the key is not “don’t be so pc”, rather, it’s “don’t be so much of a clueless ”
I’m not whining about anything, even though, yes, just yesterday I did put out a call for civility regarding some trends on this board. That was never a whine, it was an attempt to shape forthcoming debate in more positive direction.
That’s obviously failed. Instead you’ve hatched a new dimension of craptasticness.
So, to be concise, goodbye. This is the last post I’ll address to you, and your latest is the last one I’ll read.
When you get up to the candy bar, try the root-beer canes. They’re tasty. That’s my advice to you.
And ‘Cowboy’ I take it you are blind to most other posts here on PJM about Islam? Seriously? You just come to BC?
Dude, WOW!
GOOD GOD! Open your eyes, man!
http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/
Speaking of PC gone awry:
http://gawker.com/5529322/racist-harvard-law-email-the-cat-fight-that-turned-into-a-national-scandal
Pat Cat, thanks, though it was explained in Bob’s link
I understand it. I might feel the same way had I been born Obama.
I wouldn’t worry too much, though. In all likelihood you’d have been born Thomas Sowell (or Clarence Thomas).
Delia, first…I have a density grade for people, it has a gauge from 1 to 5 (5 being most dense). Can you guess where you are at the moment?
Organized religion… Not my cup of coffee, but it has its function. Depends on the religion–history shows that mileage may vary. Especially when a religion is a replacement for a political system. To a degree happened to Christianity, though it does not seem to be its original intent. The separation of church (or faith rather) and state is rather clearly expressed in the New Testament.
One thing, Christianity is of course a continuation of Jewish religious tradition. And if one goes back to times of Moses, it is interesting that in opposition to many religions of the time, Judaism was one of the few that forbade human sacrifice. A great majority of religions that were at their inception in the same period went in the opposite direction.
I don’t know why Judaism is the exception.
As Islam is concerned, its “Abrahamic” roots are rather superficial. It is a syncretic religion, that has its basis on Mecca’s variant of Sin, the moon god that was called Allah in Mecca. Indirectly, the motiff of human sacrifice is present. Islam is a religion of death, which is readily admitted by salafis, in contrast to Judaism and Christianity.
If you want to understand the rise of Islam better, I recommend Prophet of Doom.
It is an analysis from a Christian perspective, sometimes a bit heavy handed, but that set aside, it is an excellent study and explains many things that may be quite obscured to a cursory observer.
171. twobyfour
Two by four
Dense
Hmmmmmmm. I’m thick as a brick said pot to kettle.
Wasn’t Jesus a ‘human’ sacrifice? Why do some Christians feel it’s okay to kill an abortion doctor (especially since a new doctor will take his/her place anyhow)?
Why do Jews believe it’s okay for women to have abortions?
Is God only for stupid people? Is abortion murder?
Do we believe in order to not feel alone or to not feel ashamed of our sinful natures by believing in a loving God who would give us his Son or for power over others?
*yawn* And I’m outta here!
Delia, my density was not in question.
Wasn’t Jesus a ‘human’ sacrifice?
Not in the sense as human sacrifices were practiced.
Say, there are 4 men in a foxhole and the enemy lobs a grenade in there. One of the men covers the grenade with his body, saving the three, knowing that he will die. It is something entirely different than tearing beating hearts from men on a top of an Aztec pyramid.
Why do some Christians feel it’s okay to kill an abortion doctor (especially since a new doctor will take his/her place anyhow)?
Ask them. I wouldn’t. I would find another way to convince the doc not to do it. Same with the next one and so on.
But say that I lived in 1930-1940 and somehow I knew what is to come. Would I slug Hitler? Yes, I would.
Why do Jews believe it’s okay for women to have abortions?
That sounds like a blank check. I don’t think that is true, there are qualifiers, aren’t they?
Is God only for stupid people?
That is not a well though out question.
Is abortion murder?
Depends on circumstances. Often it is. Exceptions: woman’s life is threatened, or the fetus has a serious defect that would be terminal during pregnancy and may have a serious consequences on woman’s health.
Telling women that abortion is not a big deal is a lie. It is a big deal. To the woman. She has every abortion twice.
But why there are abortions at all, bare the above circumstances? Anticonception pills, condoms,even morning-after-pill, or even abstinence. Is it really that complicated to act responsibly?
Do we believe in order to not feel alone
Some do.
or to not feel ashamed of our sinful natures by believing in a loving God who would give us his Son
Some do.
or for power over others?
Some do.
But all three questions represent fallacies.
Delia, I remember you “quitting” Belmont about 10 threads back or so. Also, you remind me of my ex, as in Whoever drags the Biggest cross Wins.
Just sayin…
I haven’t caught up but to put semi-closure on the government issue:
The Big Alienation by Peggy Noonan.
Excellent writing and analysis. Noonan walks on water with this piece. I agree with every punctuation point.
b@160: In things biological, if they work, they scale.
Good point. If my biologic phenotype weren’t such an efficient scaling system, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time at the gym.
It’s snowing in Montana. Weather patterns totally out of whack for the last ten years or so. There go the flower gardens.
134 Cowboy
“The Founders, and today’s Tea Party, place more weight on idealization and the rational justification of natural rights. These sublime county lines; I believe they are the backbone of the American experiment’s success and also the key for its renewal.
I would substitute “God Given” for natural.
But whatever, you and I agree on that. But…
If your surrounded and inudated daily with what whiskey is, it WILL affect not only your thinking but pollute your soul after awhile. How long does it take for this to happen? Well that differs because of many things. Do you believe in a higher power? Do you have family and friends support? Do you have neighbors who continually threaten your peace and your prosparity or even your sanity? Are you transplanted to urban bliss and turmoil? If your a country boy/girl slammed down in the city it won’t take long to either drive you mad or make you madder than…well you get the idea.
I can’t say much about the big cities except that I hate the traffic even on the loops around them. I have never lived in one. I have spend months upon months over the years going to schools around this Nation in large cities. Chicago, Rochester, Boca Raton, Denver and many others. But we were segregated and had fairly strict time schedules and had killer classes and long hours of study. We hardly had time for eating something out of the hotel restaurant or even our rooms microwave. Big Blue for thirty years was a hard and sometimes cruel taskmaster.
If we ever did get out it was almost like an adventure in Alice and Wonderland. Most of us didn’t like it one damn bit, but what did we know we were ignorant tourists.
131. whiskey
You seem to be running on all 16 cylinders with this comment. And hit the nail so to speak almost every time, even if you are leaving out much so that not to come across too strong or alienate the more sensitive here.
You need not worry about that with me of course. Truth is what it is. Shaded truth is still truth if you can shine the right kind of light on it.
I used to live in a mostly white middle class county with a sprinkling of Black, Mexican and surprisingly a good amount of other cultures for West Texas. After moving to a very sparsely populated area further south and slightly east I am now surrounded by farmers, ranchers and NOT surprisingly for me at least a community of illegal Mexicans. Scattered of course because there are no large towns, just wide places in the road around here.
And there is a lot of “here”. People that have never been to Texas or even flown over it just can’t comprehend how big and varied and wonderful the state of Texas is. Looking at a map will never give you more than an inkling of the vast distances involved. You could hide all of America’s Military just in the general area I now live in and without crowding their equipment.
138. wws
I’m not sure I agree because most don’t have the money or the promise of a new job in the rural areas. The Suburbs maybe, but even then they are not really getting away from the city, just to smaller city like environments around the large cities. Those that do actually get out of the cities sometimes (in my experience with them) still carry the attitudes, beliefs and problems with them and it is hell getting them to change. Like Cowboy said I have tried to take some of them “under my wing” mainly because my manager told me to and it seemed the right thing at the time anyway. It really didn’t work out all that well over the years for the majority of them. Becoming transplanted Texans is something not everybody can do.
It is true that Texas is a “State of the Mind” but I also believe it has to be something that can be only found in the soul.
BTW…I left a link to this thread over at that “newspaper”. Hoping to attract a few to get their brains engaged. May or not work. But I’m for trying almost anything to try and force Americans to break out of their PC bondage and their liberal education’s brainwashing.
Gotta go, chores and such await.
Papa Ray
Delia: I’m a bit confused since I recall you arguing rather
fiercely on a PJM thread months ago that abortion is murder. (What
abortion, killing abortion doctors, or Jesus have to do with this
particular thread is beyond me, but oh well.)
I admit that whiskey’s overly-broad generalizations (i.e., women all
think like Contessa Brewer; non-Westerners all hate the West) and
defeatism annoy me. But his posts are well-written and there is
certainly some truth in what he says. Since I take some care in
choosing my friends and don’t associate with chuckleheads, I don’t
know any women of my acquaintance who yearn to be abused by an
alpha male like Charlie Sheen. (Even in the ’80′s, when I was a
spring chicken, I read an Sheen interview and concluded that he had
the IQ of a turnip, which negated his good looks and “star quality”
as far as I was concerned.) But yes, I have known too many non-
political women who will fall for any BS about government programs
if “it’s about the children.” Dems are very good about framing
their political arguments in terms of “compassion” and too many
women fall for it. Not all by any means, but there was a time when I
did.
Donna V, maybe it is a pod situation… sometimes there is a flicker of internal resistance, but she has been gradually replaced by a troll. Tried other explanations, but they seem to fall a bit short.
There is no such thing as a good Muslim if they really follow Islam.
Time for another Winston Churchill:
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”
Since this thread is winding down I have to print this in full (h/t EB):
From Multinational Monitor’s 2005 list of the world’s 10 Worst Companies:
BP
In November 2005, BP said that it expects to spend as much as $8 billion in alternative-energy projects, including solar, wind, hydrogen and carbon-abatement technology, over 10 years.
It is running two-page ads in major U.S. newspapers touting itself as a leader in alternative energy.
This is part of a high-energy campaign to cover up BP’s dirty tricks that flow from its oil business.
To do so, it has to cover up its shoddy operations on the North Slope of Alaska, where it is seeking to bust open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, and its reckless operations at its refineries around the globe.
In March, 15 workers were incinerated, and more than 170 injured, following an explosion at BP’s sprawling refinery in Texas City, Texas.
It was the third fatal accident at the Texas City BP facility in the last four years.
In September 2004, two workers were burned to death and another was seriously injured.
In 2001, a maintenance worker at the facility died after falling into a tank that had been shut down. Nationwide, BP’s facilities have had more than 3,565 accidents since 1990, ranking first in the nation, according to a 2004 report by the Texas Public Interest Research Group (TexPIRG).
BP has admitted it was at fault in the Texas City explosion. “We regret that our mistakes have caused so much suffering,” said Ross Pillari, president of BP Products North America, after the company had completed an interim investigation in May.
“We apologize to those who were harmed and to the Texas City community,” said Pillari. “ We cannot change the past or repair all the damage this incident has done. We can assure that those who were injured and the families of those who died receive financial support and compensation. Our goal is to provide fair compensation without the need for lawsuits or lengthy court proceedings.”
There is a case to be made that BP engaged in criminal reckless homicide, or involuntary manslaughter. To prove this, the District Attorney in Galveston County, where the deaths occurred, would have to find that BP and its executives consciously disregarded “a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a death will occur.”
We believe that the families of the dead deserve a full-blown reckless homicide investigation by the District Attorney in Galveston County.
When asked about this, Mohamed Ibrahim, the first assistant district attorney in Galveston County, told us that his office had opened no such criminal investigation into the BP matter. “We have no reason to believe at this point that it was anything but an unfortunate industrial accident,” Ibrahim said.
“If OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] came to us and said it was a result of criminal recklessness, we would look at an investigation,” he added.
In September, OSHA fined the company $21 million for violating federal OSHA law. There was no criminal referral. Lesser workplace crimes this year have resulted in criminal convictions against smaller companies. BP gets off because it is a large multinational?
On the North Slope of Alaska, BP continues to muscle the political machinery to get its way.
Its reckless operations there — including unreported oil spills — will someday end up in an environmental disaster, long predicted by oil industry critic Charles Hamel.
BP is eager to portray itself as the good guy oil company, but it is not eager to answer tough questions.
In October, U.S. News and World Report held a press conference to announce “America’s Best Leaders 2005.”
The press event was paid for by BP.
BP’s guy at the door wouldn’t let us in.
No questions about corporate crime allowed.
Marie Claude (#165): “uh Bob, I can’t decide if you’re really worshipping the Gallic or rather the homocidal latin lovers”
For answers, y’all are invited to an exclusive party at Bob’s loft late tonight. Definitely not suitable for children.
(Marie Claude, my comment (#154) is based partly sur le calembour un peu tiré par les cheveux garlic-gallic. Et je ne suis même pas de Boston. Mais… pourquoi ce texte est-il en français?! Put@in d’ordinateur! Whack! Whack! Hello? Ah, much better!)
Well, well… will you look at this:
NATO Pushes ‘Courageous Restraint’ for Troops
I don’t know if I should laugh, cry or just throw up.
Papa Ray
Bob, are you an expat ? or bi-national ?
your knowledge of our slang vocabulary is showing that you’re more than an Amrican that learnt french language.
and the fact that you associate garlic with gallic would rather tell me that you’re a Brit, this garlic referrence was one of the favorite flame that was fashionable in the seventies in UK, when the Brits only had “Fish & Chips” and or boiled mutton with a mint sauce (for the fresh breath) whereas we cook (or roast) it with garlics.
Why New York? Because an attack in Times Square in NYC cannot be hushed up, cannot be ignored, cannot be made into a non-event, no matter how much certain parties would prefer to sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened.
When the first plane hit the WTC on 9/11, the media were talking about some flukey navigation error being a possibility. If it had just been a single plane, it’s possible that it would have been swept under the rug as being some weird fluke. Too many people didn’t want to face the possibility of an event that would have DEMANDED a response.
@158 Cowboy: A Muslim woman who rejects Islam’s treatment of women, rejects Islam itself. Whether she admits it to herself or not. Islam’s treatment of women is embedded in the Quran.
Marie Claude (#184):
And yet I seem to have full mastery of US slang and culture. The mysterious Mr Bob. I’m the original multi-culti, ya habibti.
Papa Ray (#183):
Heh. I’m reminded of the mantra of Israel’s leftist government at the beginning of the second Intifada: restraint is strength. Israeli casualties continued mounting, and as you might have noticed, Israel’s government is leftist no more. A good day to you, Mr Darwin.
Bob, ya habibti coussous kebab
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZfMbD-LHy4
Que c’est beau la culture!
But until I become Bobbie, ana habib.
Let’s continue promoting inter-cultural dialogue, muchachos y muchachas.
fais gaffe, on va nous tirer dessus avec du Morton
Re: 150. Cowboy
may be.. Actually most likely but not on a presidential (or congressional) election cycle scale. Present trend continues since the beginning of last century and may be even earlier, so one or two sparse elections do not change anything. So the consolidation of bureaucratic power will continue for awhile. Mid-century, anyone?
178:
Sometimes people challenge their own beliefs and Christians killing people in the name of God or Jews being God’s chosen people and still allowing for abortion may be one of those things things that can put doubt in one’s heart about their religious beliefs and cause them to wonder if perhaps they are just plain duped.
With the constant Islamic-Terror sub-plot going on in the world, one can’t really help but wonder about religion in and of itself on an almost daily basis and wonder why some beliefs are so inherently destructive and yet exceedingly prevalent (and growing fast).
179. twobyfour,
Calling me a troll is retarded.
What? Regrets about that proposal you gave me a while back once I told you I was married?
Men like you are the losers who hang on Whiskey’s every retarded word hoping for a nugget of mind-alt/net.
Delia, Sheesh!
No, no regrets. C’mon, online talk.
I hang on Whiskey’s every word? Thanks for pointing it out, I wouldn’t know if you did not tell me.
Look, just go back some threads and check my responses to Whiskey. You’d see that I am the last one that would consider Whiskey’s pronouncements vis-a-vis women having any correspondence with reality. He is misguided in his racialist and misogynist views.
What I did not like was your ad hominem. Trash his ideas all day long if you must, but when you resort to ad hominem, your argument loses all its weight.
Delia, re proposal, no regrets, you are happily married, and I am happy for you… just online talk, ok?
As for whiskey… go back some threads and read my replies to whiskey. You would plainly see that I’d be the last one hanging on his racialist and misogynic pronouncements.
I suppose I thought you may do better than starting ad hominem, instead of arguing ideas. Maybe you are going through rough times and that somehow spills over to BC. I dunno, it was a bit disappointing, some of your posts a while back were purdy good.
“Nevertheless, the Romans CERTAINLY held themselves out as a separate and unique race.” This has to be the most laughable thing Whiskey has ever posted, exceeding much other foolishness and tom[cat]foolery. Did he miss the part of the Book of Acts in Sunday school where the presumably non-Italian jailer brags to the Jewish Roman citizen Paul that ‘had to pay a big price for his citizenship’? Or was that only the late decadent Roman Empire of the post-Teutoberger Wald, about to be weakened fatally by Christianity and other subversive Jewish spawned ideas? [sarcasm]
I agree with the other commenter, someone get him to a woman who might be able to show him some good sense.
Mr.X, you think it is a good idea to get him a woman? Maybe he needs to get out of where he is now, see that his perception bubble is not in any way representative of the world at large… Then there may be a chance it would work out.
“Caller, What song do you want to hear?”
Whiskey- “How about “Delia’s Gone” by Johnny Cash?”
“Here you go , Whiskey”
Delia, oh, Delia
Delia all my life
If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia
I’d-a had her for my wife
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
I went up to Memphis
And I met Delia there
Found her in her parlor
And I tied to her chair
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
She was low down and trifling
And she was cold and mean
Kind of evil make me want to
Grab my sub machine
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
First time I shot her
I shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot she died
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
But jailer, oh, jailer
Jailer, I can’t sleep
‘Cause all around my bedside
I hear the patter of Delia’s feet
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
So if you woman’s devilish
You can let her run
Or you can bring her down and do her
Like Delia got done
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
Moral of the story- She shouldn’t have called him a homo!
grrr/190
So the consolidation of bureaucratic power will continue for awhile. Mid-century, anyone?
Two problems.
One, if the powers-that-be go outright totalitarian before November, they risk upheaval (civil war) and that would certainly mean an end of the current entrenched bureaucratic power.
Two, if they elect a slower approach, they may pull it of by 2012/2016 and create conditions for an undisturbed consolidation of a semi-permanent type. Problem is that that we are heading towards a big war, exploding roughly about 2014-2015. WWI and WWII were skirmishes in comparison. Everything would be shuffled, the whole deck.
So, no, they will not have that opportunity.
trangbang68/197
Moral of the story- She shouldn’t have called him a homo!
OK, ad homonem, then!
I don’t think some of the regulars on this blog understand how deeply offensive whiskey’s exposition is to a wide swath of demographic groups. I started an “In Defense of Delia” post but dropped it because I have other demands on my attention that are more pressing than getting knotted up in a tizzy with an anonymous blogger who may very well be having more than a little fun at everyone’s expense.
Whiskey’s rants detract from the more substantive critiques and analyses that emerge from this site on a reasonably regular basis. Anyone whose reputation has been compromised by association understands the danger of demagoguery, which by any other name is still a virulent and incendiary path to mob action, manifested, by definition, in the absence of considered thought. Words matter, as whiskey well knows. He’s good with them.
The subjects raised by whiskey deserve a longer and more thorough treatment to parse fact from fiction and theory from observation, but I don’t have time. And that’s as far into the whiskey Rebellion as I will go.
ad homonem – sigh – wish I could top that but can’t even come close.
Geeze Louise: Were you around when he referred to me as a
“utopian liberal”? That was right after I pointed out that being a Muslim did not render an individual incapable of ethical behavior.
Which in turn followed on his rants about how polygamy had to be abolished before terrorism could be defeated.
Since distilled spirits are a little more than he can handle, I refer to this person as “Near Beer”.
“utopian liberal”
I’ve been around forever, but I missed that.
That’s just mean.
Drive-by post – I have to go back to watching these markets snap like dry twigs.
I am so hollowed out by this mess. I thought we were on course for a slow but steady “Oldsmobile” recovery. Dopey old me.
At any rate: Thanks to all that gave my NYC question their best shot. I think I may be getting close to filling some EEI.
The basic driving emotion looks like envy to me. The desire to make others as miserable as you are.
This is normally associated with those that lack material wealth, income and the like. However, envy seems to have but a casual, as compared to causal, relation to degrees of prosperity and poverty.
Rather it stems from a lack of self-respect. (NOTE: “respect” NOT “esteem”. Or maybe envy creates a lack of self-respect. Might have a chicken-and-egg thing going here.
The envious can be both scattered individuals and/or
components in cultural groups to include the ethno-cultural.
As birds of a feather flock together, seemingly disparate
cultural/ethno-cultural groups will back each others play even while professing eternal hostility. Queers Incorporated and Foxboro Baptist Church are a couple of examples. Squishy Jews and squishy Israelis even therefore manage to give aid and comfort to wahabis. The latter in turn do nothing that would actually harm existing actual examples of western decadence or what they deem to be decadence.
Why NYC is a symbol of robust prosperity and propriety mystifies me. However, that is exactly how many view it. So the Big Apple is Target One while homosexual brothels in San Francisco get a bit of a pass as do
Vegas casinos.
The muslim takeover of Khaibar resulted in it going from prosperity to a near wasteland. That now appears not to have been an unintended consequence gut the goal all along.
I am now reminded of a book that I read as a teen. It purported to be the autobiography of Timur Il Lang or Tamerlane. The narrator kept mentioning the “Way of the Tree of Life”—–a corruption of the Garden of Eden.
The purpose of the King was to be absolutely certain that all were eventually in misery with the misery-makers enjoying extreme self-indulgence in the interim.
(The Al Gore mansion(s) and jets anyone?)
Well, if I have got this one right, it gives us something to go on. While primitive Afghan tribesmen and the like are out for loot, those behind them are driven by a compulsion to tear down all that is right and good.
Now what do we do about it? Suggestions welcome.
Dave -
I think you’re thinking too hard.
I had also prepared a preliminary post on Why NYC, which I tossed for various and whatever reasons but primarily because I don’t see any special There there. And I looked pretty hard immediately after 9/11.
Islamic Terrorism is a hierarchy of players: the not-so-bright running the explosives; the mid-level handlers with mastery of weapons technology and little else; and the top of the pyramid who give all indications of being little more than purely nasty little buggers driven by monotonic hatred with little psychological depth.
Target “selection,” such as it is, is a function of integrating abilities, motivations and accessibility of the three layers – available runners with prepared handlers timed to make some sort of Statement that jazzes the Thinkers.
It is a mistake to seek too much logical consistency or psychological insight. The former is a western construct founded on a different value system, not to mention an epistemology that intersects not at all with the seventh century, and the latter is a fool’s game that presumes one form of terrorist behavior is significantly different from another. Baader-Meinhoff, the IRA, and the SDS? Significantly different? Sure. Theses and reputations built on defining those distinctions. But in reality, same old human persuasion and same old tangled knot of human emotion disguised as a Cause.
Islamic terrorism has less legacy in spreading misery than it does in maintaining a delusional world view.
And don’t forget to consider. They might not be expanding their range of targets because Somebody is doing a really bang-up job of interception.