Crusader War College

Just keeping track...

These two comments in the discussion are illuminating:

4. Pascal:

Inadequate. Lame sarcasm from the senator who never charged Clinton launderers of Chinese campaign money with contempt of Congress for failing to appear in front of his committee. Connect the dotted lines between his failure and Obama’s billion dollar campaign.

Here’s the question: Does Thompson believe his brand of humor will earn him the RNC chairmanship?
Dec 8, 2008 - 6:39 pm

8. E. Nigma:

RE:Pascal
He could never move forward for indictments of the Clinton campaign money launderers because Robert Torricelli (remember him?) and John Glenn knee-capped him at every turn. Out of party loyalty. And Carl Levin helped. And a slew of them fled the country to evade deposition.
I watched those hearings with disgust. I think they disgusted Fred so much that he decided he wanted out of the muck and did not run for re-election.

Fred is being just sarcastic enough to be serious. It all may blow over, but I think stagflation is probably one of the most likely outcomes, and the least of our worries.

Dec 8, 2008 - 8:29 pm

Thinking about the second comment made me realize the following: we are urged to 'work within the system' to resolve issues, with the implication that if we are not successful, we are to 'shut up and take it'.

But what if our issue is with the corruption of those who manage 'the system', whithin which we are to 'work'?

Hmm. Haven't we addressed this issue before?

During the persecution of Diocletian, 303 AD.

The Christians, about this time, upon mature consideration, thought it unlawful to bear arms under a heathen emperor. Maximilian, the son of Fabius Victor, was the first beheaded under this regulation.

Interesting...

Just noting those who are complicit.

The student body, faculty, and staff of the Crusader War College salute all those who have served in the military forces of our country.

In addition, we should go out of our way to thank those who took on the same protective and supportive roles in our civilian sector, such as Police, State Militia members, and EMTs.

And let us go our of our way to thank those who currently serve.

=> Read more!

The link is a tragic example of how compassion and the desire to serve do not compensate for an unwillingness to face the truth. A good heart does not shield one from an empty head. The American people are about to learn the lesson the Haitians learned, and with equal sorrow and bitterness.

Truth comes in all forms, but the most brutal is that of Physical Reality. And it is also true that, though it is the most brutal, that does not make it, as the Secular Materialists would hold, the ONLY Truth there is.

See this article for the reason why I will oppose this. This involuntary servitude is being proposed because the goal is purportedly "to do good". In actuality, it is an attempt to be superior to the good by controlling the good.

No. No one will dictate to me or my family what is good and what we should do to be good.

=> Read more!

Doing good in the face of evil.

It was on a whim," Limbaugh, who claims to have "Talent on loan from God," said. "She sounded so tired, distraught, and frightened about her and her husband's business future with an Obama victory.

"I just wanted to brighten her day, keep her inspired and 'in the game,'" he told CNS News. "We will need people like Belinda Davis to keep the country moving."

Davis runs a small jewelry business with her husband in Kerrville, Texas and called Limbaugh on Oct. 28 to complain about Hollywood celebrities getting undue attention during the election season while everyday working people like herself and her husband are ignored.

Belinda Davis told Gretchen Carlson of Fox News in an interview that the story tugged at Limbaugh's heart strings and she was just in the line of his heart.

And as luck would have it, the transmission had just died in her car.

I had read this yesterday, and it gnawed at the back of my mind. While I was at peace despite the results, and while I helped others take the long, divine view of things, I was sensing a higher than normal neurotransmitter drain. This morning, I realized that the election was taken by the darker forces in this world as permission to move in and selectively impose a spirit of discouragement and defeat on God's people, in the same way that corrupt Democrats selectively apply the laws of the land against God's people. This is a different sort of demon oppression that requires a different sort of exorcism. I tried a few different tacks, and it looks as if I was correct since I am now "keeping station" more easily.

Then the Spirit brought this incident back to my mind. I realized that repelling the spiritual oppression is merely defense. We must go on the offense. Rush shows us one way to do it: Agressive goodness done in defiance of those who hold it is best done via nanny state/paternalistic/meddling neighbor government.

Doubtless there are some who would criticize Rush for giving a car to a jeweler when there were "more deserving" people who could have been benefitted by him using the money to buy several used compact cars.

To those critics I say this: GO TO HELL, EVIL SPAWN!

"What!" they will cry, "We're good people! We know how to do more good than Rush did, who just did it for publicity!"

THERE! THAT IS WHY YOU ARE CHILDREN OF THE DEVIL!

Yes, I know what capital letters mean online, and yes, I AM shouting at the top of my lungs IN FURY that these pretentious bastards!

I do not hear of THEM giving cars or goods away from their own resources! No, they would rather control how others express their goodness. Lacking instincts of good within themselves, but craving the approval of being regarded as generous and good, they substitute THEIR micromanagement of the good others do.

Know this: Controlling the good that others do is impossible without controlling those doing good. Rather than doing good, these parasitic, pretentious hypocrites strive to control the good that others do. They won't buy cars for those they deem worthy, but want to control who gets Rush's gift of a car. Rather than pay for medical care of the indigent and poor, or better yet getting a medical degree and opening a clinic in a poor area themselves, they would rather raise taxes on workers to pay for their generosity, and control the doctors, the actual givers and doers of medical care, via controlling their compensation, their businesses, and their customers.

This attitude bleeds over to God. They criticize how God exercises his powers and capabilities for good, and even using the fact that He will not stop evil or bad things from happening as a proof against his existance. In actuality, they don't want a God who refuses to submit to their ideas of good and evil and how to handle them. They'd want big government (controlled by themselves of course) handling the disposition of good and evil, rather than a Babe in a Manger.

These bastards need to shown, repeatedly, that controlling those who do good is not inherently good as well. This will be done by doing acts of true goodness that defy their definitions of good. The pharisees believed that "good" meant following their man-made laws and traditions. The Sadducees believed that "good" meant keeping the peace by cooperating with those in power to get power. The Priests believed that "good" meant honoring them, the Temple, equating them with the Temple, and buying only from the Temple authorized marketers (who were on the Temple grounds as a sign of their authorization). It is enlightening how agressively Jesus did good that they disapproved of, even while they angrily admitted that He DID do good.

One way that the System of This World manipulates Christians is by defining what a good work is and how it is to be done. We need to break away from their bondage, reassert God's standard of good and bad, and do it.

Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

-- William Blake

Vote.

It may be our last peaceful and significant act as a free people.

Vote.

Fling it into the face of a lying media more consumed by show, oratory, and shallow education than the truth.

Vote.

Let it be a thread thrown about the necks of the corrupt which, when joined with others of like mind, we act in concert to pull them down.

Vote.

Because, YES, the fate of the free world DOES depend on it.

Media abuses the working man.

Check out the links at comment #4 of the above post. Informative.

We need a trip-wire. A red-line, enforced by blood and fire.

This is close.

...by muslims.

Dozens of Muslim protesters attacked participants of Bosnia's first-ever gay rights festival in Sarajevo on Wednesday, injuring at least two journalists and one police officer.

The scuffle broke out at the end of the opening ceremony of the four-day festival in front of the Academy of Fine Arts in downtown Sarajevo.

Police said at least eight people were injured when attackers dragged some people from vehicles and beat others in the street. A policeman was also injured.

That's the only reason I can think of as to why God has allowed us This One Last Chance.

It may appear, by my seeming inaction, to have broken faith with those who perished.

Not so.

While military action was necessary, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the critical battle space is spiritual, not physical.

It was necessary to gain strength, power, and capability in that area before any real opposition could be mounted against the ideological beasts attacking us.

In April of this year, the seven years of searching finally alighted on the one critical concept that has gone missing for centuries, and without which previous generations found themselves powerless in the face of an evil tailored to exploit their goodness in the same way that a virus exploits the machinery of the cell it infects and destroys.

The next seven years will prove quite different.

Very different.

Received from a Church Friend:

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

. Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
. why the early bird gets the worm;
. Life isn't always fair;
. and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place.

Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an Aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault. The condition of Common Sense worsened as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust, his wife, Discretion, his daughter, Responsibility, and
his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers;

1. I Know My Rights
2. I Want It Now
3. Someone Else Is To Blame
4. I'm A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

Been offline due to crackers, but we're back online.

The delay had nothing to do with any difficulty in restoration: we were tied up with more important issues on another website, and were cleaning up tons of spam.

Rick Hills at prawfsblog has an interesting post on pseudo-intellectualism.

From South Dakota Lawyer via Belmont Club.

Worth looking at.

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

An excellent article on the soulsearching and revisions of the chief Islamist theoretician, Dr. Fadl. It's a large article, with a lot of food for thought.

A long while back, I announced that this blog was going on minimal posting status. I was pursuing a line of biblical research, and needed more time to work on it, and the time had to come out of this blog. Occasionally, I've posted stuff, but mostly for a record and note to myself.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, I hit the jackpot. Hit it BIG.

I was researching several lines of inquiry on and off. One had to do with the church, one had to do with the Holy spirit, and one had to do with personal growth and improvement.

All three lines converged about 3 months ago, thanks mostly to the work of Owen Barfield, a fellow Inkling of C.S. Lewis, Lewis' lawyer (solicitor as they are called in Great Britain), and a rather prolific philosopher in his own right. I was cued in to Owen Barfield's work when I came across a PBS documentary titled "The Question of God", in which the work and world views of Sigmund Freud were compared with those of C.S. Lewis. In the documentary, Barfield played a key role in shifting the way that Lewis looked at the question of God: Lewis' secretary comments, in the documentary, that Barfield "Asked all the right questions." Lewis called the debate between Barfield and himself "The Great War", and all the Inklings (save Barfield himself) considered Barfield the most brilliant of their group.

You don't hear much of Barfield, since he eventually threw his intellectual lot in with Anthrosophy, an attempt to come up with a scientifically sympathetic view of Religion and the Spiritual world, created by Rudolph Steiner, a german philosopher that Barfield apparently idolized. Anthrosophy suffers from a bad case of Political Correctness, and shoehorned reincarnation into their view of the Spiritual side of man. Barfield adopted this view of man's existence, and generally abandoned classicial Christianity since he felt he could not get the results he wanted if he stuck with it.

It is probably not coincidence that about the time the PBS documentary came out in DVD, which is how I viewed it, Barfield's works began to be re-published. One that always was in print was his "Poetic diction", as close as a textbook on how to write poetry that one can find, and which I highly recommend if you need some help. I suspect that the documentary inadvertently stoked demand for his works. (The documentary itself is heavily stacked against God, putting in light-weights and distractors arguing God's side against the atheist publisher of Reason magazine. A fairer balancing would have put Chuck Colson on the panel, but that would have been too fair.)

While I have issues with Anthrosophy, having worked out an alternative method for getting the effects that Barfield needed without invoking reincarnation, I was able to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Reading Barfield's works, listening to the Holy Spirit, and pursuing an engineering approach to the three issues resulted in a mental and spiritual revolution. I came up with an alternative model of the Human mind that is more biblical and consistent with what I know of the workings of the human mind that science has proven (in contrast to its conjectures). From there, I was able to apply the model in a practical way to solving problems of a spiritual, mental, emotional, and psychological nature.

The results have been INCREDIBLE. I've lost temptations, sins, hang-ups, and phobias I've had for YEARS, since I was a child, and with hardly any strenuous work or mental effort. For the first time in 45 years since my parents divorced, I've been happy from the inside, not from externals coming to me from the outside. I've found depths of strength I never knew before. I don't think I've praised God so sincerely in my entire life. The only downside is that my bible study time is less efficient: I go only a few sentences before I get a revelation or a surge of joy, and then break off to give thanks.

You may have come here from Rantburg due to my strange attitude being demonstrated at the linked article. Simply put, I'M NOT SCARED ANYMORE. At the near top of my list of reasons for doing the research I've been doing is to figure out how to tap into deep spiritual resources to effectively fight the War against Terrorism. I've found those resources. Or, I should more properly say, The Resource. I've barely scratched the surface of what is possible. Trust me on this: the cavalry IS on its way.

Much work remains to be done, including the working out of a lesson plan to consistently replicate these results at a near-universal rate. Unfortunately, this will continue to take much of my time, so the status of this blog will remain at minimal posting. In fact, I've been dumping other non-essentials to pursue it.

In the meantime, don't bother Googling "Symbiotic Christianity": none of the hits are anywhere near the truth.

Al Fin.
Peak Oil Debunked.

Soon...

Someday soon....

A great post by a Marine Infantry officer whose e-mail was hosted by Wretchard at Belmont Club.

The bastards are back AGAIN.

Eight months ago he returned to Israel from the United States after generating a research breakthrough that changed his life. Berzin, the founder of GreenFuel Technologies - a U.S. company that produces green fuel from algae - discovered that "green slime" contains one of the keys to the alternative fuel the world is seeking. His company is the first ever to develop and produce biofuels from algae that are bred on gases emitted by power plants.

It might sound like some sort of magic trick to put algae, CO2 and sunlight into a box and come out with fuel, but Berzin did it.

God bless the Jews and Israel! Through them, they continue to bless the world!

Hattip twobyfour via Rantburg.

May Your Lord God watch over you, protect you, and resend the spirit of the Prophets and Kings to rescue you.

An interesting article on how building roads is defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hattip Wretchard via Belmont Club.

An excellent posting at John Ray's dissecting Leftism. Here's a sample:

When Leftists say, "There's no such thing as right and wrong", they are normally referring to moral judgments. They use that formula when confronted with something as uncomfortable as their unwavering support for murderous Communists and Muslims. And, as such, it is a transparent fraud. They themselves reveal that such talk is at best a tantrum by going on themselves to use the language of right and wrong to condemn "intolerance", "Zionists" or the Iraq war etc. Talk of right and wrong is meaningless when conservatives use it but highly meaningful when Leftists use it, apparently. To call such reasoning "sophomoric" is to praise it too highly.

And here's a real jewel, in the parenthesis:

So how come Pastor Wright can say the opposite of what is normally regarded as correct about race to thunderous applause at a NAACP convention? Simple: To a Leftist, the truth of a statement depends entirely on the use to which it is put. If a statement about an inborn difference seems to be derogatory to a favoured group (Leftists are so mentally limited that they think almost entirely in terms of groups) then that statement is WRONG. But if it defends the deviant actions of the same group it is RIGHT.

Jonathan Carson complains about how the left "nationalizes" ideas to gain unearned credibility, citing how the work of Karl Popper on scientific unfalisfiability was hijacked to delegitimize religious thought.

hattip David Coppedge at Creation Safaris.

Wretchard at Belmont Club discusses how Japan overcame Colonial stereotyping, giving this link to what Bill Cosby is saying along the same lines.

A delightful report by P.J. O'Rourke on his visit to the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

hattip Mike via Rantburg.

Whew! Talk about fire in the belly!

Hattip Sherry via Rantburg.

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.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club provides a link to Stanly Kurtz's book review of "Culture and Conflict in the Middle East" by Dr. Philip Carl Salzman. The book review is facinating reading.

A professor of anthropology at Montreal's McGill University, Salzman specializes in the study of Middle Eastern nomads. He, too, is something of a last survivor of a once proud band. What Salzman has managed is to have preserved, nurtured, deepened, and applied to our current challenge a once-dominant anthropological perspective on tribal societies: the study of tribes organized into "segmentary lineages." It was one of the great achievements of modern anthropology. Yet, over the past 40 years, scholars have largely rejected and forgotten the study of segmentary lineage systems.

And why is that?

The anthropological understanding of tribal social structures--especially in Africa and the Middle East--has been shunned for 40 years as exaggerating the violence and "primitivism" of non-Western cultures, discouraging efforts at modernization and democratization, and covertly justifying Western intervention abroad. Decades of postmodern and postcolonial studies have conspired against the appearance of books like Salzman's. That an academic, "on the inside," could have worked in relative concealment long enough to produce this book is testament to the possibility of cultural survival. Indeed, fully appreciating what Salzman has to teach us will first require us to dust off our records of his all-but-forgotten language, and trace the trajectory of its destruction.

Heh. He's not the only one going covert...

... decades before 9/11, the rise of terrorism as a tactic in the Palestinian struggle against Israel suggested embarrassing continuities between the endemic violence of traditional tribal life and the present. Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism was the key work in the rise of postcolonial theory, and Said, a savvy Palestinian academic and advocate, was particularly keen to keep the focus on American and Israeli policies that he claimed explained terrorism, rather than on any causes internal to Palestinian society. By attacking efforts to link terrorist violence to Middle Eastern culture as bigoted "Orientalism," Said and his followers gave a hard edge to already widespread Third World complaints about Western scholarship. That move, coupled with the growing number of faculty members entering American universities from outside the West, put paid to all but a remnant of the anthropological study of Middle Eastern tribes. The triumph of Said's perspective meant that by the post-9/11 era, when we'd need it most, the systematic understanding of Muslim tribal violence was largely lost.

That understanding, that wisdom, is power. Note this:

Disproportionately powerful though they may be, outlying tribal populations are small in comparison with peasants or city dwellers in the modern states of the Middle East. Even conceding the renewed significance of militant but marginal tribes, can we really follow Salzman in treating the tribal template as the dominant pattern of Arab culture itself? Salzman confronts this challenge persuasively and, if anything, actually understates his case.

Salzman says that it is not the details of tribal kinship structure that pervade Arab culture but the underlying principles of "balanced opposition," in which collective responsibility, honor, and feuding shape every action and thought, often calling for quick shifts in loyalty. Unite with your erstwhile enemy in opposition to a more distant foe; treat all members of an enemy group as potential targets; demand honorable behavior from members of your own group; and maintain your own and your group's honor by a clear willingness to sacrifice for the collective good. Warring Sunni and Shiite sects from Beirut to Baghdad follow principles of balanced opposition. They may be at each other's throats, yet they'll unite in opposition to an outside threat, as when Shiite Iran harbors members of Sunni al Qaeda on the run from America. In a sense, Islam's founding triumph was to raise the stakes of balanced opposition by uniting all the Arab tribes in an ultimate feud against infidel outsiders.

Since Muslims treat the tribal era of Muhammad and his early successors as the golden age of Islam, the cultural influence of the tribal template remains pervasive. To prove it, Salzman takes us on a country by country tour of Middle Eastern tribalism, from Jordan, where Bedouin form the backbone of the army, to Iraq, where even towns are heavily tribal, to Kuwait, where the strongest parliamentary opposition to women's rights emerges from tribal MPs.

Writing in 2006, Salzman cites a news report of clashes between Hamas and a powerful clan in Gaza to show tribal themes enduring in towns and cities. By early 2007, when Salzman's book was in press, the Palestinian unity government had fallen apart and Gaza was in quasi-anarchy, with Fatah and Hamas too busy fighting each other to govern. Such order as existed was enforced by brutal, battling clans.

This is no isolated occurrence. We ought to understand the emergence of Gaza's feuding clans as the revelation of a bedrock of Middle Eastern social organization ever-present and ever-influential, beneath superficial layers of Islam and state. Salzman noted the phenomenon in Gaza well before it became obvious. And long before he could have known of the tribal-based Anbar Awakening of 2007, Salzman identified it in nucleus thanks to some throwaway news reports in 2005.

Thus, Edward Said's fear that knowledge about tribalism would strip the mask off of Palestinian motivations proves true. More tellingly, the fact that he, a Palestinian, acted in a way to suppress the truth in order to tilt the playing field in favor of Palestinians shows that the traditional understanding of tribalism, updated with new finding, reveals that he himself is acting tribally. This exaltation of one's "tribe" over the truth is shared by communists and liberals, making this a marker for sub-groups/tribes that are hostile to truly individual rights. The truth is often the only defense for a poor weak individual, and justice is served if the judge/court/jury dig the truth out into the light and makes sure its implications are implemented in actual life.

Further, a knowledge of how tribes work again illustrates and proves the superiority of Judaism. While we see tribal dynamics operating from the Exodus through the times of the Judges, King David works to unify the tribes, and Solomon works to promote and exalt the position of truth and wisdom over all. Judaism thus, in a sense, incorporates elements of tribalism with elements of behaviors that promote the stability of societies in the modern western nation state. Of course I do not believe, along with pious Jews, that this is an outcome from Jews working alone and on their own: All the elements and construction plans were there in the beginning, in the Torah and other writings.

Much food for thought. I may pick the book up.

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!`

The link is to a topic at Rantburg that cites the Turks re-looking at the validity of the hadiths, or sayings of Mohammed. G(r)omgoru, a regular at rantburg, had commented thusly to my comments at 8 and 9:

Reformation Ptah, the key word is reformation = return to Old Testament.

I had failed to come back and look for responses. On the off chance that a rantburg regular comes by, here's what would have been my response to G(r)omgoru's comment.

Ah, I see. I failed to emphasize the "Reformation" aspect of Christianity.

However, in a way, I did address it: the Protestant Reformation was not a return to the Old Testament by overlooking the New Testament, but a return to the New Testament that demanded that the Church abandon centuries of accumulated opinion that forced a specific interpretation of the New Testament. One of those abuses of interpretation was that the Church replaced Israel and that its role was to rule in the governmental realm as if it was Davidic Israel. (One thing I didn't know until recently was that Martin Luther the Reformer opposed the Crusades, but not from the point of view of being pacifistic: he objected to the Church using its power to make decisions about war and using religious extortion to force secular rulers to fight the battles. His position was that the Church should make its case for getting pilgrims free access to the Holy Land from the point of view of the pilgrims being the subjects of the rulers being petitioned. They, in turn, would decide whether to obtain that free access, and how to accomplish that free access if they decided that it was worth working toward, either by paying tolls on behalf of the pilgrims, negotiation of treaties, or making war to force the making of a treaty or to take over the Holy Land. He was not as much pacifistic as insisting that those sorts of decisions were exclusively Caesar's, not the Church's.)

That's not theology. That's HISTORY.

Goodness gracious! How Spengler spells out the obvious at the link! Go read it all, for it would be copyright infringement for me to quote all the parts that are relevant: I.e. the whole thing!

Here are some good ones:

Strictly speaking, I do not quite agree with Wilders that the Koran should be banned along with Hitler’s Mein Kampf as an incitement to violence. Nonetheless, he is doing precisely the right thing. A house divided against itself cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln quoted the Gospels as he made ready to tear down the half that was misbehaving. No civilized state can abide a rival from within who contests the monopoly of violence of legitimate government. If governments refuse to act, the optimal course of action is pre-emptive: bring matters to a decision as fast as possible before the rot destroys the entire house.

And.

Not since lions tore apart slaves for the prurient enjoyment of the Roman mob has Europe witnessed a spectacle as revolting as Hirsi Ali’s appearance last week before the European Parliament. She has lived under guard since Theo van Gogh’s murder in 2004. To its shame, the Dutch government has stopped paying for her security. On February 14 she asked the European Parliament to fund her security, saying: "The threats to my life have not subsided and the cost is beyond anything I can pay ... I find myself in a very desperate position. I don't want to die. I want to live and I love life. I'm going to do anything legal to get help."

Before the eyes of the world, a leading citizen of the Netherlands begs the legislature of Europe to protect her against assassins whose declared goal is the destruction of Europe’s liberties as well as its civilization. The Dutch government turns its back. Europe’s Parliament listens politely and refers the matter to committee.

The best summary of the Archbishop of Canterbury sharia comment I've found is this:

I am ashamed to say that it did not become clear to me that Wilders has taken the only appropriate course of action until I read carefully the Archbishop of Canterbury’s now-infamous "sharia" speech. Stripped of casuistry, he proposed that Muslim women subject to forced marriages, genital mutilation, or domestic violence should be handed over to Muslim religious courts, rather than be offered the protection of English Common Law. To my knowledge, this is the first time that one of Europe’s spiritual leaders has proposed to abandon innocent victims to their fate.

Archbishop Dr Rowan Williams, to be sure, has a point. But he should have stated plainly what he really thinks. What he wanted to say is more or less: "To protect a few hundred or a few thousand colored ladies, the English state will have to put its big boots on, kick down the doors of Muslim homes, trample through Muslim living rooms, tear up the fabric of Muslim communities, and disrupt the social order. Why not turn such cases over to religious courts and wash our hands of them?" I reiterate: this is satanic hypocrisy.

If decent and well-meaning men like Dr Williams are so afraid of communal violence as to abandon the founding principles of common law and Judeo-Christian ethics, it is long past time to debate the fine points. Blessed are the pre-emptors, for they will get on with it.

Hattip Anguper via Rantburg, with much gratitude.

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Actually, the guy makes a good case.

Hattip John Ray at Dissecting Leftism.

Worth reading. I may add to the list later.

Hattip Gorb via Rantburg.

I may disagree with a lot that's at Slate.com, but the menu system for selecting articles is ingenious! I think the only drawback is that the menu selector boxes on the left are too short: another 25% to 50% taller would be better.

This extract from Peter's comment at Wretchard's blog is worth pondering:

50 countries on this little planet are governed exclusively or primarily by Islamic law. The best of them retain their veneer of civility only by oppressive monarchies or secular armies. Billions upon billions of petrodollars are spent annually to reinforce the supremacist teaching and yearning of Muhammed, the perfect human. Will endless accommodation convince a supremacist that something less than everything is enough? Who will stand up to Allah and say that the cost of one billion Muslim lives is too much to pay for Allah's supremacy of the world? Is any human cost too much for Allah?

Zenster's reply added context that I had initially missed. After citing the above extract, Zenster wrote::

Incredibly well put. Just another version of the "tipping point". Installation of a global caliphate will see the death of half this world's human population. The equation is rather simple. Some 3 BILLION Infidels versus 1 BILLION Muslims. Only Islam differs over which way the scale should tip. Most surreal of all is how insistent Islam remains over making this world choose right away. I think that Muslims are going to be very unhappy when that choice gets made.

Politiken, the New York Times of Denmark, published an article totally out of character for it. Go to Gates of Vienna for the translation.

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."

Via Little Green Footballs:

Hamas leaders spoke to the Arabic language Ash-Sharq il-Awsat newspaper recently and explained that as Muslims, they are allowed to lie. In an interview printed on Thursday, senior Hamas terrorists explained, “A Muslim is permitted to say things that oppose his beliefs in order to prevent damages or to be saved from death.”

None of that "deny me before men, I will deny you before the Father" crap.

This approach, known in Arabic as “taqiyya,” was behind several Hamas leaders’ recent public expression of support for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, they explained.

Even lie to each other.

Gloria posted the linked letter at Rantburg that came from Dr. Emanuel Tanay. I quote in its entirety, per the request of Dr. Tanay, with emphases in bold being mine:

A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War ll owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. 'Very few people were true Nazis 'he said,' but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'

We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the 'peaceful majority', the ' silent majority', is cowed and extraneous.

I must mildly disagree with Dr. Tanay: the mantras of "Islam is a religion of peace", and "the majority of muslims want peace", are not intended to make us feel good: They are intended to disarm us and render us immobile and powerless.

You see, Judaeo-Christianity is the true religion of peace. Being such, it is reluctant to take up the sword against any who similarly love peace. Yet, it is also necessary, to protect the weak and innocent, that the sword must be taken up at times to punish the wicked (else, you do not love them). Yet, even while wielding the sword, the tenets of Christianity continue to guide the hand and the gun. Knowing this, the terrorists hide amongst the "peace loving", knowing that our concern places hindernances upon us that do not hinder them in the least. The mantras are uttered, not because Islam is truly peaceful, but because the hearers ARE peaceful.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese individual prior to World War ll was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life. Lastly, at the risk of offending, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems of expand . So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world wide, read this - think about it - and send it on.

Send it on!

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Interesting...

The article has a fantastic story embedded in the comments, which I reproduce below without spelling correction. Or comment.

dad3-7

i have talked to hundreds of parents all over the U.S. one dad told me of his sons MARINE unit was on patrol when they came upon a little girl sitting and crying in the street. she was holding a doll the MARINE gave her the day b4.. she was sitting so the patrol couldn’t go around her, the son of the guy i was talking to got out of his hummer and approached the little girl and asked her what was wrong.. she pointed to 3′ away fm where she was sitting, the was planted an IED.. she saved those MARINES fm death and injury.. this dad was crying while he told me of his sons ordeal.. that little girl placed her life ahead of the MARINES….SEMPER FI mr lying murka

Thanks to Procopius2k via Rantburg, who provided a link to an article at Tennessean.com where the story was verified and all participants tracked down. Of course, the brave girl in this story was not named, to protect her from reprisals.

Old, but thought provoking...

The Cambrian explosion is a period of very rapid diversification of body forms that poses difficulties to Evolution. Evolution is supposed to take place slowly and gradually, but the fossil evidence points to long periods of relatively straightforward tweaking, punctuated by very short periods of elaboration. The Cambrian explosion is a case in point: living beings were very simple prior to the explosion, but during the explosion, the core body forms (morphologies) elaborated greatly. In fact, EVERY possible body form possessing hard structures (bone or exoskeleton) appeared in such a geologically short period of time as to be geologically instantaneously.

Now, it appears that another body form "explosion" occurred among soft bodied ocean organisms called Ediacarans. The link points to an article at the Id Update quoting the research that determined that, for the three eras of Ediacaran development, it appears that the major changes happened rapidly during the first era, not slowly through all the eras to cumulate in the final era.

John Ray at Dissecting Leftism doubts it, attributing the increase of verbal skills through a person's 40's as the side effect of knowing new words.

This ignores the reasoning power latent behind words.

A brilliant observation. A simply brilliant observation.

THE Church of England’s only Asian bishop, whose father converted from Islam, has criticised many Muslims for their “dual psychology”, in which they desire both “victimhood and domination”.

In the most outspoken critique of Muslims by a church leader, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said that because of this view it would never be possible to satisfy all their demands.

“Their complaint often boils down to the position that it is always right to intervene when Muslims are victims, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, and always wrong when the Muslims are the oppressors or terrorists, as with the Taliban or in Iraq,” said Nazir-Ali.

“Given the world view that has given rise to such grievances, there can never be sufficient appeasement and new demands will continue to be made.”

I am not being sarcastic: there has always been, at the core of my thinking about Muslim outrage, a sense of something being contradictory. Of wanting the cake and eating it too. One normally thinks of people having "one" psychology/personality, with those having more than one personality being labeled "schizophrenic". However, the phrase "dual psychology" expresses the same thing without pretense of being clinical.

Hattip a comment by Zenster posted at Belmont Club. The article to which he was commenting, by the way, reports the inevitable demand that the child who sees that the Emperor has no clothes be punished.

A very nice comment by Peter at the above post:

There is a wonderful set of ironies at play. Nietzsche and Marx paved the way for the postmodernists by killing God (and the rule set for how different people can live together) so that little bands of uneducated barbarians can twist into knots the epistemology of the new self-appointed gods, the university educated elites, by simply claiming that since no culture is better than any other that the elites have to live the way the barbarians tell them to.

EXACTLY. The rule set for how Christians live in the society has been changed.

It may appear that I haven't been doing much with this blog of late. In reality, a lot of stuff has been going on behind the scenes, with a lot of private posts to a sub-blog on this site that is acting like an on-line diary. The war on Islamism continues to motivate much of the activity, but other concerns have risen in priority. In other words, 9/11 and the War have been a wake-up call. In addressing the matter, other issues and problems, of a hidden but more serious nature, have not as much arisen as become apparent. In short, there is another War going on that is older, deeper, and more serious, of which the War on Islamism shrinks to being a front. A major front, to be sure, but still a front of a wider conflict.

Thus, my belief is that the way to victory necessarily lies through the spiritual and religious realms, not the political or sociological realms. The political leaders and intelligensia of western civilization are secular materialists that are, by choice and necessity, totally ignorant of religion and its power over the minds of individuals. They insist on seeing things through marxist, secularist, materialist, political, and atheist filters, and thus unable to see that the followers of the Islamists leaders see things exclusively through religious filters.

I should point out that unbelief in the necessity of victory lying through the spiritual and religious realms is itself a culturally imposed filter. Since much of how the spiritual and religious realms work relies on faith, a filter that affects what one believes and is willing to act upon will affect one's ability to work and maneuver in those realms. Indeed, it is the LACK of any ability to maneuver in the spiritual and religious realms that is cited by those who LACK the faith to maneuver as PROOF of their non-existence: The filter re-enforces the belief that it MUST be correct and continued use MUST be made of it.

Islamists believe that Islam can return to true power by its followers returning to its primitive roots and teachings. In this, they are correct.

Correct Prescription.

Wrong Religion.

Indeed, in looking back at the primitive roots of the Christian religion, I am struck by the pervasiveness and depth to which Greco-Roman filters have damaged and limited both Christianity AND Judaism. As a way of looking and living in the physical world, the Greco-Roman filters are unparalleled. However, they are no help, and are a great hinderance, when dealing with the spiritual world in which the Jews lived, and in which Christianity initially developed.

Thus, the current item being worked upon on my agenda is to work toward removing the Greco-Roman derived Secular Materialist filters imposed by years of living in the United States. These filters prevent a return to the primitive roots of the Christian Religion by imposing assumptions about what is and is not possible.

Unfortunately, one MUST wear filters: they tell us how to organize our perceptions and how to think about them, so my not having a filter means not being able to organise my perceptions and would render me incapable of thinking about what I perceive. I cannot as much remove a filter as much as I can replace a filter, in the same way that I cannot easily unlearn a habit: I must replace it by learning a new habit that would take its place.

To me, the best filter to use as a replacement would have to be a First Century Jewish filter, modified by reforms proposed in the Sermon on the Mount and the later teachings of Jesus Christ. This seems to be the best bet because of the current situation in Israel: Jews currently only occupy a portion of their true land heritage, and see how well they've done so far! Their current troubles stem from those who, however blindly and unknowingly, sense that a full occupation of the land would restore the Jews to full power as the True God intended. Thus, the current frantic process pressure them to give away land, land, LAND! The less of the promised land the Jew has, the less power he has. The more of the promised land the Jew has, the more power he has. As can be demonstrated, outside of that promised land, the Jew has little power, although what little he does have has been a great blessing, both to him and to the nations in which he lives.

Of course, there is nothing mystical or spiritual about the Land itself: its just that it happens to be land that God mentioned in a promise he made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and later to the entire nation of the Hebrews at Sinai. The power is in the God of the Promise, not in the land, but the land is a component of the promise made by God. No land, no promise fulfilled.

I, as a Christian, have a bit more maneuvering room since the promise of the land was made to the physical descendants of Abraham, so I'm not as tied to the Promised Land as the Jews are. Still, there had to be something to the Jewish filter that made Jesus who he was, and enabled the Disciples and the first Jewish believers catch on and replicate what he did.

Godspeed to you, Major.

The rantburg post links to an article at the New York Times that says, in part:

Israel continued its attacks on Palestinian militants in Gaza, especially from Islamic Jihad. In an incursion in southern Gaza, in a village near Khan Yunis, Israeli troops and tanks, backed by helicopter gunships, destroyed a house, killing two brothers, Ahmad and Sami Fayyad, their sister, Asma Fayyad, 24, and their mother, Karima Fayyad, 60. Their father, Muhammad Fayyad, a farmer, was wounded.

Medics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis said that Sami Fayyad’s wife was wounded, and that the couple’s 3-year-old daughter was clinically dead.

Sami Fayyad, 30, was a fighter with Islamic Jihad’s military wing. Ahmad Fayyad, 32, was a former member of the Palestinian Authority security forces. Israeli Army spokesmen said the brothers were firing on Israeli forces from alongside and inside the house. The house was hit by at least one tank shell, and Palestinian witnesses said Israeli forces, using armored bulldozers, then collapsed the rest of the house.

In a statement, Israel said blame for the deaths of the women “lies with the gunmen, who operated intentionally from a civilian environment.”

That last line is entirely correct: The Geneva conventions explicitly require that liberation movements adhere to the conventions of warfare, including the requirement of attacking so as to minimize danger to civilians, AND confining attacks to military forces, not civilians.

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.

Sean Corrigan's ballad on the origins of the recent economic crisis.

McCarthy wanted the government to clean it's own house, nothing more and nothing less. The original McCarthy revelations occurred around the same time as the collapse of China to the communists and shocking revelation that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had assisted the Soviets in obtaining nuclear secrets which led to the development of a Soviet A-bomb.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, KGB archives have been opened which further vindicate McCarthy. As unfathomable as it may seem, Americans, many of whom were in important positions in the government back then, were in fact collaborating with the Soviets in such projects as the take-over of Eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere according to de-classified Soviet files.

Eat truth and die, Lefty scum!