Thunderheads over the Fortress

 

All 5 at Skepphult

 

"My goodness."

The fact that Donald H. Rumsfeld is still Defense Secretary has to be seen as conclusive proof of the failure of US foreign policy.

This failure is so total that it can't be admitted. A Big Lie is required.

Hence a pompous, discredited flop like Rumsfeld stays in the cabinet and will do so indefinitely. This is faith based politics. In order to sustain faith in the Big Lie Rumsfeld must stay.

Two predictions:

1) The disaster in Iraq will grow steadily worse for the remainder of G. W. Bush's second term. It will get much worse.

2) Donald H. Rumsfeld will leave his post the same day President Bush leaves his.

More on the Hatometer

On 7/28/06, Esdmz <xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:

William, Joseph,

As the hatometer reads in decimal, turning it over will not yield your desired result Mr. Peachy.

But more to the point, there is practically no phenomena we encounter in the course of these discussions that can bear quantification.

That is what I was trying to say. But one small point can be quantified. There are more Moslems than Jews. That has an important bearing on the total amount of hate.

I have never been openly taught to hate anybody. I was rebellious enough as a young man that I would have instantly flown off the handle and perhaps started a fight if someone tried to indoctrinate me the way kids are routinely - and in huge numbers - indoctrinated in Moslem schools all over the world.

I recall a few comments, made by me in my younger days, in the course of otherwise casual conversations that had turned ugly and racist: "Well, you've got one big accomplishment to be proud of. You were born white."

Moslem kids are being taught - in well financed programs, systematically, in huge numbers - that Jews are monsters and should be eliminated. This is not a controversial claim. There is no corresponding effort among Jews - not even among the fanatics. Israeli racism - which is certainly real - arises in a completely different way. Anyone who has spent any time in Israel and is not deaf knows this.

I will assume instead, my oversight was not to provide some supporting arguments for a proposition I found self-evident.

I know from direct personal experience that the Saudi government has distributed extensive, explicit anti-semitic hate hate literature throughout the Muslim world, including its furthest non-Arab outposts. My lengthy time in SE Asia made it very clear to me that efforts to inculcate the populations of Malaysia, Indonesia and portions of the Philippines with anti-semitism were entirely successful, (that is, despite the vast majority having absolutely no experience with Jews).

Just look at the Poles. The Jews are still their great domestic nemesis and there are no Polish Jews to be had.

Why are Poles still picking berries 16 hours a day in the northern Swedish forests for less than the minimum wage? Why are they being kept as tomato picking slaves, under unspeakable conditions - in Calabria? Poland is and will remain the very last religious country in Europe. The Irish have succeeded in liberating themselves from their black midnight. The Poles failed and will fail forever.

Media throughout the Muslim world avails itself of imagery that may be traced directly to European anti-semitism, even to the creation of popular TV programming of unambiguous anti-semitism.

This will be very interesting to follow in the future. I'd guess that there's going to be a much higher price to pay for this crap soon. The world of ideas is getting easier and easier to navigate.

Blängen: The Red Lilies

 

Suffering in the Great European Heat Wave of 2006

 

"Israeli savagery"

Those who are protesting about Israeli "savagery" should ask themselves what civilian casualties would look like if the Israelis actually were savage.

Never in history has a military force acted with the restraint and care for hostile civilians that the IDF has consistently shown. The demography of the region is eloquent testimony to this simple fact. Had the IDF had ever acted even remotely like the cartoon caricature put forward by anti-Israeli propagandists there would be no conflict today.

The big question

This is the big question: Will G.W. Bush leave office without engaging the US in another war, this time with the Iranians?

After watching his press conference in the wake of vetoing the stem cell research funding bill I am more worried than ever before that the answer is "no". He is operating on religious conviction. Lincoln said that we should be sure to be on God's side and not make presumptuous statements about Him being on our side. Bush has no sense of this distinction from what I can pick up. The righteous Protestantism of M. L. King and Johnny Cash is being forced out of public life in the US by the self-righteousness of evil preachers, hypocrites, liars and warmongers.

The logic of madness

U.S. Moves More Troops Into Baghdad

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 22, 2006

The Supreme National Committee for Reconciliation and National Dialogue convened behind the blast walls and barbed wire of the Green Zone in Baghdad.

After the meeting, al-Maliki, a Shiite, told reporters that despite his proposal for amnesty for some insurgents, ''all those whose hands were tainted with blood should be brought to justice.''

But the Sunni speaker of parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, said ''if we punish a person who killed an American soldier, who is an occupier, we should punish the American soldiers who killed an Iraqi who fought against occupation.''

-- A curfew was imposed on Samarra after a bodyguard of the city council chairman detonated an explosives belt, injuring the chairman and another security officer.

-- In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi base with rocket-propelled grenades and mortar fire. A suicide car bombing followed, but nobody was hurt, said police Lt. Col. Abdul-Karim Khalaf.

Baghdad recorded an average of 34 major bombings and shootings for the week ending July 13, the U.S. military said. That was up 40 percent from the previous period last month.

Notice how we read this, like it was describing a world where there was the slightest shred of common sense. Fortunately, nobody was hurt in the suicide bombing. This insanity will never end, not in our lifetimes, at least. And certainly not before the last US troops leave "Iraq".

Thank you, Tom Toles.

Salt

More fun . . .

Public opinion surveys are fun.

Linux

After many delays I have downloaded, burned and installed a Mandriva Linux distro. I'm running a dual boot (grub) on my main, business, development platform, pay-the-bills machine.

I'm very impressed with Linux. It's a marvel of collective intelligence. And it works as advertised.

I keep setting myself new tasks in my new, part-time OS. I've done a lot in a few hours of fooling around.

So far, however, getting an Apache webserver up and running has eluded me. I have not been able to get a C compiler (gcc) installed and have not been able to upgrade the Java environment.

But I'm working on it. I've started reading the instructions, which will help.

Soon there will be all kinds of new things I won't be able to do.

Country Folks at the Market

On the Porch - Three

 

On the Porch - Two

 

On the Porch - One

 

Camden Town at Sunset

 

Euston and Grey's Inn Road