Crusader War College

From South Dakota Lawyer via Belmont Club.

An interesting proof of the Existence of "God" using Multiverse theory.

The bastards are back AGAIN.

The link is to an article doing arm chair psychoanalysis of (thankfully) former President Jimmy Carter and why he is trying to visit Hamas: The title comes from the money quote:

When one, instead of recognizing and metabolizing his hatreds and aggressive drives, denies their existence, they continue to live on in the unconscious, empowered by the denial. The expression of such denied aggression can be seen in the Preacher who is "holier than thou" and takes great pleasure in condemning the sinner to eternal torment. Some will happily supply details of the unimaginable torments (easily imagined by the Preacher) of those unfortunate consigned to the Preacher's vision of Hell.

Another way of expressing such unacceptable impulses is via a third party. There are people who are particularly adept at stirring up others to rage. Radical Islamists are particularly talented in stirring up their followers into manic rage against those who they believe have threatened their religion. The Imams, of course, are men of peace representing the religion of peace, yet their followers commit egregious acts of violence and mayhem in their name. It requires learned academics and media people operating above their level of comprehension to explain how violence actually equates to peacefulness.

Jimmy Carter is the Godfather of the modern leftist hater. He presents a pious mien, untroubled by rage or hate. He truly sees himself as a man of peace. Yet Hamas is openly and unapologetically genocidal. Jimmy Carter hates through others maintaining deniability of his own monstrous impulses. His evil is worse than the banality Hannah Arendt described because he should know better. The compartmentalization required to embrace the murderers of innocents while proclaiming their moderation is breath taking yet never seems to give pause to our ex-President. Jimmy Carter is a hate filled and bitter man and every effort he makes seem to support monsters. It is a mystery only to him.

I don't know about the actual veracity of the theory of psychology motivating this analysis, but the bolded portion says it all: you can either hate openly and be condemned as a hater, or use proxies and maintain the facade.

Hattip John Ray at Dissecting Leftism.

Zenster, formerly of Rantburg, has moved to Belmont Club as a regular commenter. I kinda miss being able to hit the comment link and say "right on!", so here's one of his comments from a post by Wretchard worth thinking about.

Meremortal: Mock incessantly, unceasingly, until they collapse. As they will, for there is no answer to mockery in their world. They can't kill everyone. They can't stop the mockery. They will implode.

ONE MORE TIME.
Fifty or sixty years ago? Sure, mockery would do just fine. WE ARE NOW IN THE AGE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. We no longer have the luxury of such genteel methods as ridicule and lampooning. Islam must be crushed and damned soon. Pakistan's tenuous control of its own nuclear arsenal should be enough to give any competent military planner conniption fits. We do not have a few decades to wait. We have less than TEN YEARS to turn this situation around before total Hell breaks loose.

All Muslim majority countries must be denied access to nuclear weapons until Islam has been neutralized. Nothing less will do. Anything short of such a policy will permit Islam to inflict sufficient damage upon the Western world that even the most brutal retaliation will not change how civilization will have been mutilated, possibly beyond all recognition.

I would sooner see every Muslim on earth perish than endure even a single major Western metropolis being immolated by an Islamic terrorist nuclear attack. WE HAVE TOO MUCH TO LOSE. The sandswept MME (Muslim Middle East) cesspits are already so close to the stone age that they have little more to sacrifice save their populations. Something they are all too ready to do. Need I remind you of Khomeini's 1980 speech in Qom?

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

You DO NOT ridicule such insanity. You DO NOT mock such psychosis. You KILL IT in sufficient quantities whereby such concentrated evil no longer constitutes a threat. We can do this by targeting Islam's aristocracy or resign ourselve to genocide on an unheard of scale. Those are the options.

Again, Islam has nothing to lose. We have the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Louvre, the Uffizi and myriad other irreplacable troves of genius that must be retained to inspire further generations of artisans yet to come.

Permitting Islam to vandalize even one such treasure is an unpardonable sin. We have worked far too hard merely so some Neanderthal cretins can bull their way through the China shop of Western heritage.

Put another way: How many of these incalculable jewels of civilization are you willing to see immolated as the price of kick-starting dormant Western intervention?

My own answer? Not a one.

Right on!`

This comment (#2) from the Rantburg article is worth thinking about:

As far as the failure of what Lewis calls "the jihad east of the Pyrenees" being "one of the most significant losses in world history," where is H. L. Mencken now that we need him? He once wrote "Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable."

There was an earlier news story going around that the RIAA, the legal watchhound for the music recording industry, was changing its position on private ripping of CDs in a legal brief filed in a lawsuit, maintaining that the process of ripping is illegal copyright infringement in and of itself. The earlier position was that, as long as the ripped MP3 files were used ONLY by the original purchaser, and not shared with others via the public internet, ripping was legal.

The link is to an article at Crave that outlines the position that the RIAA was unfairly maligned: the Washington Post reporter having made the accusation based on extracting a clause from a larger, two clause, sentence. This is called Dowdification. However, the following quote from the Crave posting is illuminating:

Still, Fisher received little support from respected and independent copyright experts. William Patry, the copyright guru at Google--not exactly known as a lackey for copyright holders--wrote on his blog that the RIAA is being "unfairly maligned" in the Post story.

Patry does, however, caution that recent statements made by the RIAA and included in Fisher's story reflect the group's growing tendency to use language as a means of control.

Fisher quoted Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, who testified recently in court that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song."

Patry disagreed.

"This new rhetoric of 'everything anyone does without (RIAA) permission is stealing' is well worth noting and well worth challenging at every occasion," Patry wrote. "It is the rhetoric of copyright as an ancient property right, permitting copyright owners to control all uses as a natural right; the converse is that everyone else is an immoral thief."

In short, the rhetoric is being used to fabricate an expansion of the idea of copyright beyond its intention.

At the New Atlantis, Robert Zubrin applies some elementary chemistry to dispose of the touted benefits of the Hydrogen Economy. Recommended.

Or that's what Riley Driver, a letter writer to Amercian Spectator, notes (emphasis mine):

Ari Kaufman's What Conservative Media? while spot on missed the point on why so may liberal leftists think the media is balanced or conservative.

They know the political ‘stuff' is clearly biased in their liberal leftist direction, but they are railing against the news as a whole.

I first became aware of this when discussing how liberal campuses are with a liberal acquaintance of mine. He vehemently disagreed. His rationale? All those science, math, business, and medical courses that would not yield to opinion or feeling - they were by definition (for him) conservative.

Over time it became clear this was not a random opinion or thought process. Liberals find things that cannot be swayed by opinion or feelings to be intrinsically conservative.

Hit them with facts and more facts and eventually their response will be some form of name calling. It's all they know to do - so far.

But holding my nose and dipping into the DU from time to time and there is a sense of violence in the air when too many facts are presented and name calling no longer satisfies.

Facts - a liberal's conservative enemy.

This is an interesting observation: Conservatism is apparently being associated with the concept of "being resistant to change", but the REASON for that resistance is not even considered. After all, what you believe now is not important, provided that you change your beliefs in response to "opinion and feelings", rather than to unchanging realities such as facts. And religion. And God (who generates both).

Hattip John Ray at Dissecting Leftism.

The post below this one refers to an article by Jonathan Rosenblum at JPost.com regarding Saddam's execution and the moral bankruptcy of those who mourned it, but not the murder of his victims.

However, there was a sentence in the article that pointed out something that should have been so patently obvious that I felt it necessary to address it separately. In light of a post made yesterday, I have bolded the sentences that I found significant, and add several preceeding paragraphs to provide some context:

The contrast between Jewish and Christian attitudes to forgiveness was recently highlighted by the response of an Amish community to the cold-blooded murder of five schoolgirls and the serious wounding of 10 more. At the funeral of one of the slain girls, her grandfather spoke and said of the perpetrator, "We must not think evil of this man." The neighbors and friends of the victims' families professed to feel no hatred towards the girls' killer.

In contrast to the Vatican's cheap sympathy for Saddam, the attitude of the Amish, at least, manifests spiritual grandeur. They offered forgiveness to the murderer of their own children and grandchildren, not to the mass murderer of distant victims.

Jews too are instructed to hate the sin and not the sinner. But sometimes the two are inextricably bound, as in Saddam's case. And often, easy forgiveness of the sinner diminishes the horror of his crimes. As Rabbi David Gottlieb of Baltimore pointed out in the wake of the Amish tragedy, even God Himself does not forgive sins committed against a fellow human being until the victim's forgiveness has been secured. No one can confer forgiveness on behalf of the victim, and all the more so when no forgiveness was sought.

Well doh! *flagellates self with wet noodle*

There is an incident where a bedridden man sought healing from Jesus. Some friends brought him to the house were Jesus was teaching, found the way blocked, then proceeded to vandalize the man's house by making a hole in the roof big enough to let their friend down through it in front of Jesus. When Jesus forgave the man's sins, the Pharisees rightly believed that only God could forgive the man's sins, since Jesus was not the victim of the man's sins. Where Jews and Christians part company in this parable is that Jesus explicitly claimed to be God by right of having the power to forgive sins. The claim was sealed by his healing of the man. This story was so important to establishing Jesus' claim to divinity that it is cited in the synoptic Gospels. (It also establishes that the man's ailment was caused by his sin.)

However, despite the sharp difference between Jews and Christians that Jesus Christ represents, it should be pointed out that Jesus DOES act as the Jewish God does: he does not forgive sins done against others if forgiveness is not asked of him. He forgave the soldiers for crucifying him, but not for crucifying the two thieves on either side of him. We are told that the disciples and Paul preached so that men would repent of their sins, ask for forgiveness, and live a new life. When Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother, he conditioned it on the fact that the brother asked forgiveness after each offense. We can assume that Jesus forgave this man's sins only because he could NOT ask the victim forgiveness in some way, and he forgave the repentant thief because the thief could not reasonably be capable of asking forgiveness of all the people he wronged. And he forgave those who crucified him since, regardless of whether he was resurrected or not, they would have no ability to ask for forgiveness even if they wanted to.

Finally, if God automatically hands out forgiveness of sins, even if not asked, then why have US forgive men their sins?

People yammer about "cheap grace": what about cheap forgiveness? More importantly, what value is there for forgiveness that is extended by someone who is not the victim? The grandfather could forgive the murderer of his granddaughter for the sorrow he created in him, but the grandfather cannot forgive the murderer for the murder, SINCE HE WAS NOT THE ONE MURDERED. It is mere presumption that God would heed what the grandfather said.

While there is something to be said about the psychological side of forgiveness on the part of the one doing the forgiving, there seems to be a distinct reluctance to even talk about the requirment that the offender ASK for forgiveness.

Mr. Rosenblum finishes with the following paragraph:

Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is also "a time to hate." Would we really wish to live, asks Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby (an observant Jew), in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered, a society in which there is an instantaneous dispensation for the most horrific acts of cruelty? I would not. And that is why I was glad to see Saddam hanging at the end of a noose.

I agree.

A good post at Israpundit that shows who's got the real phobia...

For Muslim women, that is...

Hattip Bersoeker via Rantburg.

Bigwig at Siflay Hralka notes the following:

Houses Built Upon The Sand
Lots of coverage in the internet press on the left side of the Blogosphere's vicious attacks on Joe Lieberman during the run-up to the Connecticut Democratic Primary, but so far the answer as to why remains elusive to those not drinking the Ned Lamont kool-aid.

Bigwig quotes from two sources that show that Liberman is not as conservative as the LeftNet (Bigwig's terrific term) wants us to believe. He then says:

I think the answer is simple. Having so obviously targeted Lieberman, the netroots/nutroots/Townhouse crew must now defeat him, or risk being seen as irrelevant, especially considering their dismal electoral record thus far.

National races are one thing, but If the LeftNet cannot elect a candidate of their own choosing in a Democratic Primary in one of the most liberal states in the Union, then they can't win elections, period. If that happens, it should become obvious to one and all that the Emperor has no clothes.

As to the question of why the LeftNet has yet to discover this on its own, despite repeated reminders, we've talked about this before:

Essentially, the Internet has given the Left a perception of growth where there is in fact none. It may have even masked a decline in the real political power of the Left.

Say one 10-member anti-globalist organization, in San Francisco, comes into contact with another 10-member group, in Seattle. Each feels that their membership and political power has doubled, when in reality nothing of the sort has occurred. Communication and coordination between the two is enhanced, but the actual number of votes has not changed at all. There is an inflation in each group's perception of its political power, but there is no corresponding rise in actual power wielded.

Given the horrid demographics of the Daily Kos readership (mostly elderly blue state boomers), the situation can only get worse, another reason why the effort to defeat Lieberman is so important to the LeftNet. When the most dedicated members of your power base are also the ones most likely to wake up dead tomorrow, you have to move now when it comes to grabbing a piece of the political pie. A victory in Lieberman/Lamont is crucial for the LeftNet. "Just wait till next time" is useless as a rallying cry for your base when so many of them won’t be around.

His observation that the Internet gives an illusion of increased power that may mask a real diminution of power is an eye-opener. The comments were particularly enlightening, including this one by a Mr. Snitch! about sites that edit comments to maintain the integrity of their echo chamber. He was probably referring to Democratic Underground, but it equally applies to another site that comes to mind.

Hattip Mike via Rantburg.

The link is to an article posted at Rantburg. However, I want to cite an excerpt from Dan Darling's first comment, which crystalizes some thoughts I was rolling over in my mind.

I've noted on more than a few occasions that Putin is essentially what the looney left thinks Bush is, whether it be his autocratic tendencies, cynical manipulation of terrorist attacks to enhance his own power, and so on.

From FOXNews.com:

A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target, according to a summary of the investigation released Monday.

Investigators blamed the collision on faulty navigational data that caused the DART spacecraft to believe that it was backing away from its target when it was actually bearing down on it.

Faulty navigational data? I don't think so: Navigational data comes from instruments similar to automated sextants, or maybe an orbital version of GPS. If the data was faulty, it was faulty enough to get DART close enough to hit the satellite. That's like blaming a map for being inaccurate because you were using it to drive into the living room of the house to which you were heading.

Faulty my A**: it was a switched sign in a set of equations to which the CPU switched when the distance got small enough to ignore parameters particular to curved orbital paths in space. Methinks somebody is trying to pin the blame on someone else other than the firm programming the navigational software.