Z-blog

Son of Hamas on Islamic fanaticism

2010-03-07T10:55:00.001-06:00

Another interview with Son of Hamas, the son of a founder who was a Shin Bet spy for years before immigrating to the US.

He clears up the falsehood that the so-called Second Intifada was provoked by Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount"this was simply the pretext Arafat was waiting for after planning the uprising for months before.

He clears up the falsehood that Islam is a "religion of peace" by the following. His words are uncompromising. If they had been spoken by an American, he or she would be tarred as "islamophobic," "racist," or "extreme right-wing." But Son of Hamas knows what he's talking about, as does Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose ideas he shares. They lived and breathed Islam before breaking free. The pompous "dissidents" of the West prating endlessly about "speaking truth to power" are shamed by the real thing. That's probably why the media declines to report on Son of Hamas's story, as compelling as it is.

clipped from online.wsj.com

At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.

"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."

Amazing new voice on the Israel/Palestine conflict

2010-02-24T14:25:00.001-06:00

This is the exception that proves the rule about the thanklessness of the security forces' jobs: nobody ever knows how they saved lives; the only time anyone knows what they're doing is when they screw up somehow.

If an Israeli, or an evil neocon, had been quoted as below, he would be discounted as a racist or whatever. Of course, leftists won't ever consider his ideas. They'll just ignore them.

clipped from www.haaretz.com

The son of a leading Hamas figure, who famously converted to Christianity, served for over a decade as the Shin Bet security service's most valuable source in the militant organization's leadership, Haaretz has learned.

"Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I. The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis," he said. "Palestinians! They do not hesitate to massacre people in a mosque or to throw people from the 15th or 17th floor of a building, as they did during the coup in Gaza. The Israelis would never do such things. I tell you with certainty that the Israelis care about the Palestinians far more than the Hamas or Fatah leadership does."

Operation Moshtared Underway

2010-02-12T21:27:00.001-06:00

Must see video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBy0y2jAHpI&feature=player_embedded of the Assault Breacher. Nobody doubts that we will take over Marjah, not even the Taliban, many of whose commanders have already escaped. But nobody is so sanguine on what comes next: establishing the government of Afghanistan and reconstruction.

I wouldn't doubt our success their either but for one fact: the area's economy is based on opium production. The drug war could end up poisoning the entire operation. It's one thing to replace the Taliban with rulers who are not our enemies. It's another, more difficult, thing to attack people's livelihoods.

The only way out is for us to buy their opium crops, all of it. The government could sell it to someone who can make narcotics for hospitals. Or just throw it in the ocean. Whatever. It's a small price to pay for stabilizing a nation with Afghanistan's history.

clipped from www.theweeklystandard.com

The BBC is reporting that Operation Moshtarek has finally launched in Afghanistan's Helmand province. The principle objective will be to seize Marjah, the fortress city owned by the Taliban. Marjah is a key node for Taliban operations and resourcing, so expect the good guys to sweep it, clear it, and hold it ... permanently. The mission appears to have kicked off during the early morning hours, when NATO forces have a decisive advantage in night fighting. Marines will also be unveiling a wicked looking new infiltration vehicle, unsubtly dubbed the Assault Breacher.

Tip of the iceberg

2010-02-03T18:37:00.001-06:00

It will take an Arab/Palestinian/Muslim defeat by Israel for this to be revealed in the mainstream, just as similar tactics were used as part of the Soviet Union's attacks on the West.

clipped from www.commentarymagazine.com

SLUSH FUND
by Ben-Dror Yemini, Ma’ariv, 2.2.10

The New Israel Fund is part of the global deception campaign. It does not deal with human rights but with denying one people’s right to self-determination.

The New Israel Fund is angry. It thinks that it is correct to spread false testimony about the State of Israel. It thinks that it is OK to participate in the demonization campaign of groups whose goal is to eliminate Israel. It thinks that it is OK to cooperate with the Goldstone Commission

There is something wrong with those who clearly aspire to deny the Jews’ right to exist in the only place where they have sovereignty, in order to turn Israel into a “state of all its citizens,” in which the majority will be Hamas supporters.

there is something else that is also legitimate: Expose the truth about the Fund and the groups that falsely carry the description “human rights.”

Obama the post-partisan, post-racial demagogue

2010-01-28T15:06:00.000-06:00

The conclusion of this piece makes so much sense that it’s no wonder that Obama doesn’t get it. It doesn’t take a Harvard PhD to understand it or even to formulate it in the first place:

There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them.

A Blow for Free Speech

Riots in Iran

2009-12-27T18:06:00.001-06:00

If the last paragraph I excerpted pans out into more than "scattered reports," then the theocracy will be on its last legs. Fraternization of the forces of order with the people they're supposed to be putting in order has been the death-knell of regimes from that of Louis XV to Czar Nicholas II to East Germany (1989).

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Death Toll Rises to 10 as Clashes in Iran Intensify

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Iranian police opened fire into crowds of protesters on Sunday, killing at least 10 people and setting off a day of chaotic street battles that seemed poised to deepen the country’s civil unrest, as demonstrators flooded the streets in cities across Iran and fiercely fought back against security forces, witnesses and opposition Web sites said.

There were scattered reports of police officers surrendering, or refusing to fight. Several videos posted to the Internet show officers holding up their helmets and walking away from the melee, as protesters pat them on the back in appreciation. In one photograph, several police officers can be seen holding their arms up, and one of them wears a bright green headband, the signature color of the opposition movement.

Why did Obama get the Nobel Peace Prize?

2009-10-12T16:34:00.001-05:00

It's because Europeans love him. Not "Europeans" because people in Eastern Europeans and Russians do not love him. The Brits are not so sure. But Western Europeans do love him. Friedman explains why:

clipped from www.stratfor.com

In the European mind, the Americans prior to 1945 were liberators. After 1945 they were protectors, but protectors who could not be trusted to avoid triggering another war through recklessness or carelessness. The theme dominating European thinking about the United States was that the Americans were too immature, too mercurial and too powerful to really be trusted.

they love Obama because he took office promising to consult with them. They understood this promise in two ways. One was that in consulting the Europeans, Obama would give them veto power. Second, they understood him as being a president like Kennedy, namely, as one unwilling to take imprudent risks.

Mexican Power Union Power Struggle

2009-10-12T13:46:00.001-05:00

Calderón has attacked one of Mexico's most powerful unions. In Mexico, unions are powerful because of the power they enjoy to disrupt daily life for ordinary people, who just want to get to work and home again and be safe. Governments have been too pusillanimous to intervene to stop their illegal blockage of public spaces. See the six-month sit-in in 2006 that paralyzed Mexico City and took billions of pesos from people as work dried up for the poorest who lost their "job" washing and parking cars in Mexico City's chaotic downtown. Etc Etc.

Calderón effectively lost a battle with the mega teacher's union"the largest in Latin America. The "teachers" blocked highways and city centers throughout the nation and Calderón's "reforms" were immasculated (not that they would have done any good anyway).

Now he's taken on the electricians' union and with it the cultural icon of the government power company. Mexicans are taught to believe that their nationalized power company is a "right

clipped from online.wsj.com

Mexico Power Takeover Creates Sparks

MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón sent more than 1,000 riot police to take over operations of an important but inefficient and financially strapped power-distribution company late Saturday, setting the stage for a showdown with a powerful electricians' union and its political and labor allies.

The government plans to dissolve the company and lay off the more than 44,000 workers that make up the Mexican Electricians Union, or SME, the only union at Luz y Fuerza; the government said it plans to rehire some of the workers.

Analysts say featherbedding by the union, or requiring extra workers to provide more jobs, is a major reason for Luz y Fuerza's financial problems and endemic inefficiency. Some analysts say the company could have been run by a fraction of that number of workers.

Michael Barone again

2009-10-04T17:45:00.001-05:00

Barone has the ability to cut to the bone with very little wasted space. He's like a surgical strike on Obamoid smartough diplomacy:

clipped from www.washingtonexaminer.com

A war of necessity turns out not so necessary

"This is not a war of choice," Barack Obama told the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Aug. 17. "This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people."

Now it appears that Obama is about to ignore the advice of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whom he installed as commander in Afghanistan in May, after relieving his predecessor ahead of schedule.

First, Afghanistan was never a "war of necessity." It was, like all our wars, a "war of choice."

Declaring Afghanistan a "war of necessity" was a way for Obama and other Democrats to attack George W. Bush

The original self-hating Jew

2009-10-03T20:42:00.004-05:00

Jules Crittenden » It’s A Small World After All!

Guess who’s eligible to immigrate to Israel? Crittenden asks. That's one way to look at it, I guess. But if Sabourjian/Ahmadinejad doesn't get the Jimmy Swaggart treatment, then it's only because leftists want him to bash the US for them. This would be an interesting case study in cognitive dissonance if anyone's a psychologist.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret, evidence uncovered by The Daily Telegraph shows.
A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

Posted using ShareThis

Best take on US/Obamoid Olympic bid

2009-10-03T03:57:00.001-05:00

Happy to see Obama et al described as "metrosexual façades." This alone makes the article worth five minutes to read.

clipped from www.realclearsports.com

Arrogance Dooms Olympic Dream

Instead of dedicating three days and nights working the IOC members, as we hear Tony Blair did for London in its successful bid for 2012, President Obama figured all he had to do was show up for a few minutes here at Bella Center after an all-night flight on Air Force One.

But Obama was long gone by the time his ripple factor had flattened out. By then, Brazilian President Lula da Silva was wowing the room with his avuncular, rumpled flair.

With his nearest spin doctor as far away as the Amazon, Lula made his counterparts - Obama, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and new Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatomaya - look like metrosexual façades. And the freshly scrubbed politician just did not resonate the way the guy with a face full of hair did.

Pissed off at another failure of smartough diplomacy

2009-10-02T17:17:00.002-05:00

The Obama Olympics debacle has pushed Jay Cost over the edge. He says,

Sooner or later, the American people are going to say, "Enough is enough" with this constant, incessant politicking that is inevitably built around the specialness of Barack Obama.

That time may be approaching faster than anyone thinks.

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com

What should have been a story about Chicago - or better yet, Rio (good for you, Rio!) - is now a story about...Obama. Of course. Because just about everything in the public sphere must, must become a story about Obama. Because Obama injects himself and his campaign appartus/mindset/worldview into everything. And so, in this case, what would otherwise have been a "mere" rejection of Chicago and Mayor Daley has now become a rejection of the entire country. Why? Because of his decision to perpetuate the permanent campaign while holding the power of the executive.

Mr. Obama: please remember that you're just the President. It's a big deal, but it's not that big of a deal. Chester Arthur was President. For goodness sake, Warren Harding was President, and his share of the vote was much larger than yours. Thomas Jefferson's tombstone doesn't even mention his eight years as President. Your current office isn't discussed until Article TWO of the Constitution. Take the hint, and tone it down!

Breakthrough for Smartough Diplomacy! More talking!

2009-10-01T19:03:00.002-05:00

Iran has agreed to allow inspections of its uranium enrichment factory!

But... this is already covered under its treaty obligations. So why would it be such a breakthrough for them to agree to something they already signed, sealed, and delivered?

The answer's obvious: it's a breakthrough because we want to believe that Obama's smartough diplomacy is the answer for all our foreign policy ills.

There's really nothing new here. Like Stratfor[subscription required] says:

Bottom line: If the Iranians indicate that they will not cooperate and the Russians do not budge on their opposition to imposing sanctions, then war could come suddenly " and from the United States. All the pieces for that war are already in place. It is just a question of nerve " for all parties.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Iran Agrees to More Nuclear Talks With U.S. and Allies

GENEVA — Iran and the big powers opposed to its nuclear program appeared to make progress Thursday in talks that included the highest-level direct discussions with the United States in many years, with both sides agreeing to hold further negotiations and the Iranians pledging to allow foreign inspectors into a newly disclosed uranium enrichment factory.

Another useless exercise in smartough diplomacy

2009-09-24T20:35:00.001-05:00

There were, of course, two illicit nuclear projects stopped during that period, though the U.N. had nothing to do with it. One was Libya's clandestine nuclear kit, which al-Qaddafi--spooked by the fate of Saddam--agreed to hand over to the U.S. in late 2003. The other was Syria's North Korea-abetted secret reactor. That was destroyed in 2007, not by a U.N. resolution, but by an Israeli air strike.

clipped from www.defenddemocracy.org

America has "re-engaged the United Nations," said President Barack Obama in his maiden speech Wednesday to the U.N. General Assembly. Yes, it has, and within hours both Libya's Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had gone far to illustrate what a terrible idea that reengagement is.

But Obama is certainly correct that Bush did not enjoy anything like Obama's welcome at the U.N. Obama is indeed ringing in a different era, including new promises and a new gift list. He came to the U.N.'s headquarters in New York with an agenda of three jam-packed days, starting with an address on climate change and culminating with plans to chair a summit-level meeting of the Security Council, focused on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.

This is what smartough diplomacy gets you

2009-09-23T13:00:00.001-05:00

Don't we need a cowboy to enhance the national security of this cowboy nation? Yuppie smartoughness doesn't cut it with the likes of Ahmadinejad and Putin.

clipped from blogs.law.harvard.edu

Russia, America, and Iran—Again

Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s most recent statement that the Holocaust is a myth and denouncing Israel is an indication that he does not see U.S. President Obama’s call for dialogue and improved relations with Iran as desirable from his perspective.

Tehran is undoubtedly focusing on the Obama administration’s plan to instead deploy sea-based ballistic missile defenses closer to Iran. Ahmadinejad is highly likely to see this not only as more threatening to Iran than the Poland/Czech Republic option, but also to see the Obama administration’s foregoing the latter as an attempt to curry favor with Moscow in the hope of enlisting its cooperation against Tehran.

Moscow, though, is making it clear that the Obama administration’s abandoning the Poland/Czech Republic BMD deployment plan will not result in a quid pro quo from Russia vis-à-vis Tehran.

Twenty-seven dead in drug rehab massacres

2009-09-22T00:26:00.001-05:00

This article gives a unique Mexican twist to a pair of horrendous massacres.

Government-run drug rehab clinics are used as distribution centers by the narco and as infiltration points by police.

This fact makes the week's massacres at least intelligible to non Mexicans.

clipped from www.stratfor.com

Another Juarez Rehab Attack

At approximately 10:50 p.m. local time on Sept. 16, an unknown number of gunmen entered the Anexo de Vida drug rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, and opened fire on a group of patients, killing ten and wounding two others. This was the second attack on a drug rehabilitation center in Juarez in recent weeks. (A previous attack saw 17 dead and five injured.) After the Sept. 16 attack, 10 drug rehabilitation centers in Juarez closed their doors out of fears of further attacks. Juarez is hands-down the most violent city in Mexico, with the more than 1,600 organized-crime related deaths this year already surpassing the city’s 2008 total.

According to one Mexican government source, some of these clinics have become a point of contention between the police — who use the centers as a location to spy on cartel activities — and cartels, which use the facilities as distribution points.

Justice begins at home

2009-09-18T00:21:00.002-05:00

The main thing to keep in mind here is that Goldstone is not lying. Everything he says is true.

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed this situation that the IDF's so-called "serious violations" of the laws of war are truly nothing of the kind. Even if one hasn't been following the situation, simple rhetorical analysis will show then the utter fallacy that underlies Goldstone's sentence: notwithstanding his pro forma nods to Hamas violations, he's obviously telling only one side of the story, Hamas's side.

His version implies that the IDF was indiscriminately bombarding hospitals, schools and other typical civilian sites to sow terror as part of a campaign to subdue the Resistance. This is just a fairy tale.

For example, ask yourself why Israel attacked the civilian structures. It was because they couldn't fairly be considered civilian if they were being used as firebases by Hamas.

But the essential point is this: there would have been no IDF attacks whatsoever,
on anything in Gaza if Hamas had not provoked it by years of truly indiscriminate attacks themselves.
Therefore, Hamas bears the blame for all of the civilian casualties and deaths in the war: Israeli as well as Palestinian. Nobody had to die if Hamas didn't promote its intolerant rejectionist policy.
Some made the analogy to WWII: Germans bear the blame for all of the death and destruction simply because they started it. I don't see how anyone could possibly object to such logic and it was the basis for all the postwar treaties.

Why is this same logic not on display here, in the Palestine/Israel conflict, especially by such eminent personalities as the head of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Richard Goldstone?

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Justice in Gaza

In the fighting in Gaza, all sides flouted that fundamental principle. Many civilians unnecessarily died and even more were seriously hurt. In Israel, three civilians were killed and hundreds wounded by rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas and other groups. Two Palestinian girls also lost their lives when these rockets misfired.

In Gaza, hundreds of civilians died. They died from disproportionate attacks on legitimate military targets and from attacks on hospitals and other civilian structures. They died from precision weapons like missiles from aerial drones as well as from heavy artillery. Repeatedly, the Israel Defense Forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.

Failing to pursue justice for serious violations during the fighting will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy.

This doesn't look too good for smartough diplomacy

2009-09-17T13:47:00.003-05:00

Could it be possible that he just went into this blind, with no previous quid pro quo agreement with the Russians? Would he set himself up for such a humiliation for nothing? It's hard to believe, but, according to Stratfor, it looks like it's true. What happened to the smartough world charmer whose "face," (Andrew Sullivan dixit) was going to change the world?
If this turns out to be true, then it just fits the same sad-sack pattern of all of Obama's diplomacy so far: "engagement" and appeasement as a tradeoff for rebuffs and humiliation. Maybe world powers don't want to negotiate and engage. Maybe they want to get as much power and wealth as they can, while they can. Maybe negotiation and engagement are just playing into their hands, then.

Stratfor Intelligence Guidance for today says,

Ballistic missile defense (BMD) as a military system had no significance for either Poland or the Czech Republic. It was not designed to defend them. Rather, its presence was a symbol to both countries that the United States was prepared to defend them, because it has a vital strategic asset in their countries. The shock in Poland and Czech Republic is about a symbolic shift from their point of view.

And furthermore,

The timing of the decision is clearly intended to induce Russian cooperation with the United States over Iran. The question is whether there was any prior understanding with Russia regarding this matter. Does the United States have some understanding of a quid pro quo with Russia? The Russian-U.S. tussle over the issue of BMD in Central Europe was never really about BMD. The system never gave Poland anything. It was about the future of U.S.-Polish military cooperation. This is what defines Russia’s view of its relationship with the United States.

It seems like they answered their own question below, “The Russians are letting the United States know they do not see the scrapping of the planned BMD system as a concession” that could get them to cooperate with us on Iran.

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clipped from www.stratfor.com

U.S., Russia: Moscow's Response to Washington's Shift in BMD Plans

Russia’s initial response to the United States’ scrapping its plan for ballistic missile defense (BMD) in Poland and the Czech Republic indicates that Russia is not convinced that the change in plans is any sort of concession.

The Russians are letting the United States know they do not see the scrapping of the planned BMD system as a concession — and certainly not something that would spark a concession from Russia, such as Moscow ceasing its support for Tehran. Instead, Russia is linking the BMD move to the deal on Afghanistan. As far as the Russians are concerned, they owe the United States nothing until real concessions are made.

Smarttough diplomacy at work?

2009-09-17T00:43:00.005-05:00

I certainly hope so. For the US to get Russian concessions on its support of Iran would practically mean that missile BMD would be superfluous.

I don't think we're abandoning allies like the Czechs and Poles either. We don't need BMD to be loyal to them.

At least, this is what I hope US authorities are assuring them today. It's not too much to expect that at least this much common sense is on display.

It's past time to push Iran into a corner. It's the key insurgency in the region. The Islamic movement had its first success there and it must end there for it to end at all.

If this is what it takes, then I say my hat's off to Obama. I'm changing my opinion 180 degrees. Bush would never have dared such a move.
Clipped from stratfor.com

U.S.: Backing Down on BMD

Rumors are flying late Sept. 16 that the United States could be shelving its plans to build a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system in Poland and Czech Republic. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reportedly will hold a news conference on the issue sometime Sept. 17 or Sept. 18

As the entire situation intensifies, a U.S. concession on BMD would be one of the first major steps in a Russian-U.S. deal — one which could see Iran’s greatest foreign backer flip sides. This means that Russian support to Iran in things like complicating military strikes through the sale of strategic air defense systems and blocking crippling sanctions could now come into question. But all of this is hinged on Washington’s following through with shelving the BMD plan — something STRATFOR will be closely watching for as rumors are intensifying that Washington may in fact be conceding to Russia on the BMD issue.

Obama's law-breaking style of diplomacy, or not

2009-09-16T20:35:00.001-05:00

Commentary » Blog Archive » Breaking the Law to “Engage” Iran

Jonathan Tobin has a point here:

Liberals spent most of the past decade decrying what they never tired of describing as the “lawlessness” of the Bush administration. But today’s New York Times brings to its readers’ attention the fact that Obama’s team is just as willing to disregard legalities. But whereas Bush’s people showed a willingness to bend the rules to fight a war against Islamist terrorists, Obama’s minions will do the same in their quest to appease Islamists.
In this case, the Justice Department “has declared that President Obama can disregard a law forbidding State Department officials from attending United Nations meetings led by representatives of nations considered to be sponsors of terrorism.” Thus, rather than obeying laws passed by Congress to quarantine a nation like Iran, which ranks very high on that list of state sponsors of terror, Obama has sent State Department officials to take part in UN meetings chaired by Iran.

His point is of course the hypocrisy of leftists and their media. This is just the latest example of such a thing.

Crying about hypocrisy gets really old after a while. So both leftists and rightist and libertarians are hypocrites? What else is new? Someone once said that hypocrisy is the hallmark of civilization. With so many values to comply with, it's inevitable, after all. Thus, the most civilized cultures are the most hypocritical.

I find it hard to refute this idea. Is it just an excuse and/or a pretext for ethical laziness? Maybe, maybe not. Being ethically lazy, I'll never know.

On the other hand, on the narrow issue of legality, I can't really fault Obama for this.

As far as I know, the Constitution gives the president a free hand to conduct foreign relations in pursuit of his responsibilities as C in C. Therefore, he's entitled to negotiate with anyone he wants to, if it seems like it will enhance US national security. He was elected just for that reason: to use his best judgment to enhance US national security. That's just US-style democracy.

Tobin's conclusion makes this point obliquely,

Don’t expect many of those who are ready to hang anyone who worked for Bush on any technicality they can find to express much anger over legalisms conjured up to advance the cause of appeasement. As the Times notes, “the new memorandum demonstrated that the Bush legal team’s approach was not as aberrational from other administrations as some critics contended.”

I'd go The Times one more:

“the new memorandum demonstrated that the Bush legal team’s approach was [completely in line with other administrations. No president will ever give up his constitutionally enumerated powers, nor should he. Our democracy is founded on just such a principle.”—ed.]

More Swine/A(H1N1)/Mexican Flu

2009-09-14T20:24:00.001-05:00

A(H1N1): Just Another Flu | STRATFOR (Subscription requiered)

It has been five months since the A(H1N1) influenza virus — aka the swine flu — climbed to the top of the global media heap, and with the start of the Northern Hemisphere’s annual flu season just around the corner, the topic is worth revisiting.

If you take only one fact away from this analysis, take this: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believes that hospitalization rates and mortality rates for A(H1N1) are similar to or lower than they are for more traditional influenza strains. And if you take two facts away, consider this as well: Influenza data are incomplete at best and rarely cross-comparable, so any assertions of the likelihood of mass deaths are little more than scaremongering bereft of any real analysis or, more important, any actual evidence. [My emphasis]
Mexico will continue to shoot itself in the foot over this. Sinaloa has already closed schools in anticipation of the virus. Even today, the government must be meeting to discuss just what measures to adopt that will lower the nation's GDP even more—in fell some nine percent in the first quarter and ten percent in the second.

China sues us for dumping

2009-09-13T21:52:00.001-05:00

Stratfor reports (subscription required):

China has launched an investigation aimed at subsidy and dumping practices involving U.S. automobile and chicken products, Xinhua reported Sept. 13, citing a statement by the Ministry of Commerce.

Obama puts prohibitive tariffs on Chinese goods. China sues us for dumping. our trade policy and its support of our national security interests are damaged, but the steel workers (or whoever Obama wants to kiss up to) are happy. I thought the president was supposed to mark out strategy tha would make the nation stronger... We get involved in a gratuitous trade dispute with China while we are fighting wars and struggling with an economic collapse... That's smarttough diplomacy for you!

Obama Vows to Fight Health-Care Overhaul Opponents

2009-09-13T20:49:00.001-05:00

This is fighting:

“This is when the special interests and the insurance companies and the folks who want to kill reform fight back with everything they’ve got,” Obama said. “This is when they spread all kinds of rumors to scare and intimidate the American people.”

There were hundredes of thousands marching in Washington in opposition to Obama and his plans. All these folks are special interests? They're all paid scabs for the insurance companies? How stupid does Obama think people are?

The Chávez/Iran Nexus breaks into the MSM

2009-09-10T13:11:00.001-05:00

Finally! One mad genocidal dictator in alliance with another mad genocidal dictator... what else is new?

Well…for most people it is news. But now I hope not for long.

You can ask, if the WaPo editorial is true, then why are we harping on Israeli settlements as the key to world peace? Why are we obsessed with reforming the health care system? And so on.

Is there a contradiction here? I don't think so: Obama is in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of the state and little issues like Iran's nuclear capabilities and genocidal intent against Israel are not helpful, according to his thinking.

He's wrong: the state has expanded historically on the wings of war. He can't expand the state while at the same time promoting a pacifist agenda, as much as this will satisfy his legions of followers.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

A Friend to Iran

Does the Obama administration know what Venezuela is doing to assist Tehran's weapons programs?

DEBATES IN Washington about Hugo Chávez often end with the dismissive conclusion that the Venezuelan strongman poses no threat to the United States. If that's right, it's not because he isn't trying. For years he has been traveling the world in an effort to build alliances with present or former U.S. enemies, from Cuba to Vietnam. He dreams of standing at the head of a global anti-American military alliance. Most of his efforts have been rebuffed; some have produced mere buffoonery, like his annual, ludicrous love-fest with Belarusan dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

But Mr. Chavez has clearly forged a bond with one leader who is as reckless and ambitious as he is: Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The growing fruits of this relationship, and its potential consequences for U.S. security, have not gotten as much attention as they deserve.

Anti American anti Semitic get-together

2009-09-07T17:17:00.000-05:00

Can people really believe that this has no meaning for US security? That's aside from the moral issue of piling on the state of Israel by Venezuela, as if twenty two Arab/Muslim states in a declared state of war against it weren't enough to make Israelis paranoid.

Do Venezuela's ties to Iran mean a foothold for Hizbollah in the Americas? That is, one more foothold, since they have been a presence in the "four corners" region of Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay/Uruguay for many years now.

Do Venezuela's ties to Iran mean Hizbollah collaboration with the FARC? Does Hisbollah collaboration with the FARC mean Hizbollah collaboration with insurgents/drug gangs in Mexico? Mexicans have been identified at FARC camps in the past. Etc etc.

With Iran/Hizbollah influence in the Americas, and possibly in Mexico, the instability caused by the war on drugs should cause even more concern. Mexico is bordering on "failed state" status as it is. It will take very little to push it over the edge--a natural disaster, of which there are plenty to threaten the country; political unrest--and there a multiple groups interested in prolonging and deepening this unrest.

A failed state on the US' southern border rife with Hizbollah agents? This would be a nightmare under any president. Under Obama it becomes worse than a nightmare. He's in way over his head as it is. Add something like this, and he'll just go under completely.

Hugo Chávez/Ahmadinejad nexus

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez railed against the West on Saturday, pledging to deepen their ties and stand together against the United States and world powers the two perceive as imperialistic.

Chavez said Iran is "a true strategic ally, a staunch ally" to his country and defended Iran's right to a nuclear program.

He praised Iran for standing up to alleged attempts by "Western forces" to destabilize it after the June presidential election that brought his ally Ahmadinejad a second term in office. These attempts have failed, Chavez said, and "Iran has been strengthened."

Chavez and Ahmadinejad — both well-known for their anti-U.S. rhetoric — have forged ties in everything from finance to factories. Iran now manufactures cars, tractors and bicycles in Venezuela, and the deepening relationship has provoked concern in Washington.

This is the same Chávez who said, earlier,

"The state of Israel has become a murderous lackey at the service of imperialism," Chavez said. "It's a genocidal government. I condemn that Zionist government that persecutes the heroic Palestinian people."

[Chávez] added that "the people of Israel shouldn't support a genocidal government."

Nobel prize winner covering up for Iran

2009-09-04T16:23:00.003-05:00

Once again, the indispensable DebkaFile tells all. Although it's not as though we never suspected that UN officials were in the pockets of the world's dictators.

clipped from www.debka.com

Six nations may reveal data concealed by ELBaradei on Iran's nuclear progress

US, Israel and four other governments are urgently discussing the release of intelligence that Iran is running covert military nuclear projects parallel to its civilian program after Mohammed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, withheld this data from his last report, DEBKAfile's military and intelligence sources disclose.

In Paragraphs 18 to 20 of his report, he admits to possessing substantial intelligence but regrets he is unable to use it to confront Iran without betraying his sources and so Iran was not able to fully answer IAEA queries.

US and Israeli sources denounce this evasion as a diplomatic scandal verging on fraud.

The material passed to him left no doubt that Iran was engaged in developing a nuclear weapon and revealed for the first time that it reached the final stages, weapon design, of the process. But ElBaradei decided to keep it hidden

One official told DEBKAfile that passing the new information to the IAEA director had compromised its sources anyway so there was no point in holding it back any longer.
The seven governments concerned will decide very soon which parts of this unpublished information to air. According to our sources, it will not be attributed directly to any government but to "Iranian exiles" who will present it as coming from inside Iran.
This tactic was employed in 2004, when the opposition Mojaheddin al-Khalq leaders first broke the news of Iran's uranium enrichment plant in Natanz at press conferences in Washington and Paris.
The Israeli foreign ministry denounced the ElBaradei report, released ahead of the nuclear watchdog's regular annual meeting in Vienna on Sept. 7, for omitting "to detail "Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear arms or its continued attempts to deceive and conceal those efforts. Neither did it mention Tehran's refusal to cooperate with the IAEA and the international community."
Next month, when the UN General Assembly opens, a special high-level meeting of the UN Security Council will discuss nuclear proliferation.

Cold War mythology made new by hope n'change

2009-09-03T17:48:00.001-05:00

Oleg Atbashian is some kind of genius. Born in the ex USSR, he's impossible to fool with leftist propaganda. His sense of humor leaves one defenseless. Read the whole series.
This article concludes,
Evidently, if President Obama didn’t share these received views, he wouldn’t have felt the need to apologize before the world for America’s alleged wrongdoings " a gesture that could only reinforce such stereotypes. If his policies weren’t driven by these tenets, he wouldn’t be using the powers of the U.S. president to prop up the forces that oppose America’s founding principles of liberty while denying support to those who want to live by such principles.

The reason many Americans haven’t realized it yet is that most media coverage is also born of the same old yellowed clichés.

And yet no media bias can obfuscate the fact, clearly demonstrated by events in Iran and Honduras, that even in the absence of U.S.-led conspiracies, anti-American tyrants are still not welco

clipped from pajamasmedia.com

Generated in the depths of KGB think tanks, the Cold War-era propaganda template is comprised of the following linked axioms:

1. Socialism is “progress.”

2. Aversion to “progress” is a sign of outmoded backward thinking.

3. All forward-thinking people are leftists.

4. Leftists always speak for all people.

5. People always unanimously support leftist leaders.

6. Leftists are always under assault from the well-organized capitalist enemy.

7. All workers and peasants hate capitalist exploiters.

8. Armed resistance to a leftist government can only conceivably be staged by CIA agents in the service of American imperialism.

9. Capitalists engage in relentless anti-socialist propaganda, subversion, and sabotage; they will commit any crime in order to kill hope and prevent the masses from liberation.

10. The dying non-socialist sector of the world is run by a criminal conspiracy of capitalist oligarchs operating from the United States (and sometimes from Israel when appropriate).

What happened to "no meddling?"

2009-09-03T15:32:00.002-05:00

According to most accounts, the overthrow of Zelaya was "democratic, constitutional." At least, there is a good argument to be made that it was, even if other people disagree.

Now we have our government extorting the government of Honduras to reinstate Zelaya, which may be a reinstatement-for-life if he has his way.

What's going on here? I'd like to see half the pressure we've put on Honduras applies to the Palestinian Authority, for example. Or on Iran.

clipped from www.stratfor.com

Honduras: U.S. Terminates Aid

The U.S. Department of State announced in an official statement Sept. 3 that the United States has terminated a broad range of foreign aid to Honduras. The statement said aid will be restored when “democratic, constitutional” governance is returned to Honduras, and that several individuals and supporters of the current regime have been identified and will have their visas revoked. Aid had been suspended following the June 28 coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya. The statement also said that the United States would not support the result of the planned November presidential election unless a settlement between Zelaya and the current regime is reached.

New facts and new troubles for Mexico

2009-09-02T16:28:00.002-05:00

The estimated million plus Mexicans returning to Mexico plus the many more who choose to stay home, when earlier they would have gone to the other side, means more pressure on the nation's development.

In this situation the country's GDP shrunk nine percent in the first quarter and a bit over ten percent in the second one. Whatever fiscal and economic reforms the government has planned are still being planned. The president insists on using his power to fight a useless losing drug war and effectively sabotaged the economy by locking the nation down for a month so that we wouldn't get the flu.
The country cannot provide opportunities to vast swaths of the population. Now there is another swath to add to the others: returning illegal immigrants and others. Vast numbers of young unemployed kids whose skills are mainly in how to break the law and profit by it somehow are swelling the populace of Mexico's provincial backwaters (where most illegal immigrants come from) quite outside the the awareness of most people, who live in the cities, not to mention the government, who will never be aware of anything besides preserving their own grip on power and the impunity to chingarnos.

clipped from www.washingtonexaminer.com

New facts undercut old positions on immigration

The Pew Hispanic Center reported in July that the flow of immigrants from Mexico -- by far the leading source of illegals -- has declined sharply since mid-decade, and that from spring 2008 to spring 2009 only 175,000 Mexicans entered the United States, only about one-quarter as many in 2004-05.

The Center for Immigration Studies had a different interpretation in its July report. It tried to distinguish legal and illegal immigrants, and found no decline in legal immigrants. But it estimated that the number of illegals in the United States dropped from 12.5 million in summer 2007 to 10.8 million in spring 2008 -- a decline of 14 percent. It found that the illegal population declined after July 2007 when the immigration bill died in the Senate and then fell off more sharply with the financial crisis in fall 2008. It estimated that 1.2 million illegals returned to Mexico between 2006 and 2009, more than twice as many as in the 2002-05 period.

This is what happens when you have "Education Ministries"

2009-09-02T12:40:00.001-05:00

They become control systems for the future. The conclusion:young students who will be given Danilov’s history textbook on Tuesday will be taught not to pose unnecessary, uncomfortable questions to their leaders. Let the wise politicians and bureaucrats continue to rule the country and pilfer the oil and gas wealth. This is precisely how they will build a strong and wealthy Russia " at least for themselves and their families.
Any similarity with the Obamoid "independent experts" who will run the US health-care system is quite accurate.

clipped from www.moscowtimes.ru

An Enlightened Way to Distort Soviet History

On Tuesday, the whole world will remember how 70 years ago, Adolf Hitler — nine days after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact with Josef Stalin — invaded Poland and started World War II. Seventeen days after Hitler invaded western Poland, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland

Sept. 1 is also the first day of classes in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of last-year high school students will be given a new textbook recently approved by the Education and Science Ministry that contains a highly distorted version of 20th-century history.

they try to reject the notion that Stalinism and Nazism had the same criminal, totalitarian foundations. This allows the authors to “normalize” the Soviet regime and to claim, for example, that “the Soviet Union was not a democracy, but in terms of social policy and programs, it was the best model of a fair and just society for millions of people around the world.”

Bringing Chaos out of Order, Latin American Style

2009-09-01T11:52:00.001-05:00

Montaner's proposal for bringing order to arbitrary facts suffers from pundit/academic dissociation. His purpose is to show how Latin American societies can change their collective attitude towards the law from one based on revenge to one based on justice and truth. In the end, his proposal simply makes the traditional attitude seem all that more set in stone.

Author reviews several cases pending against former rulers for corruption. He says,

Few Latin American countries are exempt from these judicial vendettas. The victor attempts to liquidate the vanquished. In those nations, the law is not an instrument to regulate civilized coexistence but a mace to crush the adversary’s head.

Which is quite true.

Benito Juárez (Mexico’s first Indian president, mid-19th century) put it best, after the ten-year civil war and insurgency against conservatives and monarchists: “For my friends, clemency; for my enemies, the law.“

Montener can have these insights and yet they do not interfere with his policy proposals, which completely contradict the insights themselves.

The author’s suggestion for a remedy is to revisit a Spanish colonial practice, called “judgments of residence.” These are,

For 50 days, any citizen who was convinced that he had been the victim of an injustice or abuse by a judge or official could sue him before a tribunal created especially for that purpose, as soon as the official completed his mandate.

Instead of a remedy, however, they would become just another example of the evil that the author describes: the law as a club with which to beat one’s enemies and not as what we consider “justice,” or finding the truth. These “judgments of residence” seem to be similar to the Chinese practice of “talking bitterness.” A government functionary is brought up before the public and humiliated by former victims of his corruption.

It’s a good idea, but not for “bringing order” to the chaos of political culture in LA. It’s a good idea for revenge. If Montaner added a bit of "talking bitterness," i.e., public humiliation in the public square, then I'm sure he would find a lot of support amongst the people of Latin America.

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder

2009-09-01T00:41:00.001-05:00

Painting by Victor Oliva, from Wikipedia.

Yesterday, I had two glasses of absinthe. I was going to order tequila but when I saw the absinthe (made in the Czech Republic), I had to try it. After reading the decadent turn-of-the-century artists and poets as a kid, I was curious. The stuff was supposed to be hallucinogenic and therefore banned along with so many other drugs at the turn of the century.

I was ready for an experience like the one Viktor Oliva portrayed, above. No such luck, as always. But the Wikipedia remark, "The most commonly reported experience is a "clear-headed" feeling of inebriation — a form of 'lucid drunkenness'"(See below) is accurate. The feeling lasted only a few moments, however.

Below, the Czech absinthe:
From Wikipedia

The banning of absinthe
Spurred by the temperance movement and the winemakers’ associations, absinthe was publicly associated with violent crimes and social disorder.

A critic said that:[23]
“ Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country. ”

Edgar Degas’ 1876 painting L’Absinthe, which can be seen at the Musée d’Orsay, epitomized the popular view of absinthe addicts as sodden and benumbed. Although Émile Zola mentioned absinthe only once by name, he described its effects in his novel L’Assommoir:[24]
“ Boche had known a joiner who had stripped himself stark naked in the rue Saint-Martin and died doing the polka — he was an absinthe-drinker. ”

In 1905, it was reported that Jean Lanfray murdered his family and tried to kill himself after drinking absinthe. The fact that Lanfray was an alcoholic who had consumed much more than his usual two glasses of absinthe in the morning, was overlooked; the murders were blamed solely on absinthe.[25] The murders were the last straw, and a petition to ban absinthe in Switzerland was subsequently signed by more than 82,000 people. The prohibition of absinthe was then written into the Swiss constitution in 1907.

Effects of absinthe

Absinthe has been frequently and incorrectly described in modern times as being hallucinogenic. In the 1970s, a scientific paper mistakenly reported thujone was related to THC, the active chemical in cannabis.

Ten years after his 19th century experiments with wormwood oil, Magnan studied 250 cases of alcoholism and claimed that those who drank absinthe were worse off than those drinking ordinary alcohol, and that they experienced rapid-onset hallucinations. Such accounts by absinthe opponents were embraced by its most famous users, many of whom were bohemian artists or writers.

Two famous painters who helped popularize the notion that absinthe had powerful psychoactive properties were Toulouse Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh, the latter having suffered from mental instability throughout his life. In one of the best known accounts of absinthe drinking, Oscar Wilde described the feeling of having tulips on his legs after leaving a bar.

Today it is known that absinthe does not cause hallucinations. Thujone, the active chemical in absinthe, is a GABA antagonist; and while it can produce muscle spasms in large doses, there is no evidence that it causes hallucinations.[62] It has been speculated that reports of hallucinogenic effects of absinthe may have been due to poisonous chemicals being added to cheaper versions of the drink in the 19th century, to give it a more vivid color.

However, the debate over whether absinthe produces effects on the human mind additional to those of alcohol has not been conclusively resolved. The effects of absinthe have been described by some as mind opening. The most commonly reported experience is a "clear-headed" feeling of inebriation — a form of "lucid drunkenness". Chemist, historian and absinthe distiller Ted Breaux has claimed that the alleged secondary effects of absinthe may be caused by the fact that some of the herbal compounds in the drink act as stimulants, while others act as sedatives, creating an overall lucid effect of awakening.

Long term effects of low absinthe consumption in humans remain unknown, although the herbs in absinthe have both painkilling and antiparasitic properties.

Typical left-wing version of the CIA/Cheney debate

2009-08-27T12:05:00.002-05:00

Peter Bergan, of the left-wing New America Foundation provides the main talking points behind the continued criticism of Bush/Cheney's authorization of so-called torture.

The newly released CIA documents merely rehash the range of anti-American plots cooked up by KSM that the government had already made public three years ago. And though this second wave of attacks all sounded very frightening, there is no indication that these plots, like the plan to attack Heathrow, were ever more than just talk.

These plots were "just talk." Nothing to worry about, then. Let them talk. They're Muslim fanatics and that's what they do. Why worry? Be happy!

This is effectively countered by the WSJ editorial today:

Some will argue that these details could have been elicited without enhanced techniques. We'll never know. The question is whether Attorney General Eric Holder and his new special counsel intend to second-guess the decisions of CIA officials who were operating in the shadow of 9/11 and who, we now know, successfully unraveled terror plots and saved lives...

Left-wingers, like Bergan, will seize upon this argument to salve their own consciences as to the coming witch-hunt against the CIA by Obama. It seems convincing today but it's obviously an argument by hindsight—the worst kind of historical fallacy.

If we're going to debate history, we must put ourselves in the place of those decision-makers who made the decisions at the time they did it. Decision making in the real world takes place under conditions of extreme ambiguity. No one ever has all the facts they need to make the decision. Those facts may be more apparent today than they were back then but people back then did not have them at their disposal to form their opinions and their decisions.

For example, if somehow the Clinton administration had obtained information about the 9/11 plot back in 1999 by "torture" and then go ahead and disrupted the plot on that basis, Bergan would now be arguing that the plot was "just talk." How absurd is it to think that a bunch of Muslim fanatics could hijack airplanes and bomb the WTC, the Pentagon, and the US Congress with them?

Obama, singing a song to himself

2009-08-27T01:34:00.002-05:00

To document our pessimism about the Obamoid government, Michael Barone introduces a new slant on analyzing ideologies in the US"lyrical leftism. Leftists of the past were able to mobilize people in the expansion of the state through war"Wilson and Roosevelt used their wars to take control of wide swaths of the economy. Leftists today are "lyrical" when they repudiate the state's use of force and celebrate diversity. It's just singing in the wind.

This is the "basic contradiction in what the party and the liberal movement stand for," according to Barone.

www.washingtonexaminer.com

Obama's lyrical Left struggles with liberalism

The problem for Obama and America's lyrical Left is that dovishness abroad and statism at home don't readily go together. Mobilization in a war effort, as Randolph Bourne taught, tends to create a frame of mind that welcomes regimentation under big government at home. Denigration of military discipline and tolerance of cultural diversity tend to create a frame of mind that resists government ukase and standardization. A big government president, Obama is learning, needs to be a war president first.

President Mom

2009-08-26T11:30:00.002-05:00

www.jornada.unam.mx Via Navegaciones:

Calderón pide no resaltar más la violencia; hablen de las cosas buenas que tiene el país.

Calderón tells us not to emphasize the violence: "talk about the good things that the nation has."

México avanzará en la medida en que se destaquen las ventajas que ofrece, asegura.

Mexico will progress when its advantages are emphasized, he maintains.

El presidente Felipe Calderón criticó a quienes difunden una imagen negativa de México, de un país donde prevalece el caos y la inseguridad. Hablar mal del país es, para muchos, no sólo un esfuerzo cotidiano, hasta de eso viven, puntualizó.

President Felipe Calderón criticized those who spread a negative image of Mexico, as a nation where chaos and violence prevail. "Talking trash about the country is, for a lot of people, not only a daily task, but they make a living out of it," he said.

Queremos hacer de México un país competitivo, con infraestructura de primera clase que, precisamente, permita competir, insistió Calderón Hinojosa, y destacó que el mejor camino para el crecimiento económico es la inversión y la creación de oportunidades para todos los mexicanos.

We want to make Mexico a competitive country, with a first-class infrastructure, Calderón said. He underlined that the best path towards economic growth is investment and the creation of opportunities for all Mexicans.

Mariguana sets Argentina on fire

2009-08-25T20:54:00.003-05:00

Some of the controversy from the BBC Video:

From now on, we're free!

In twenty years, twenty percent of the population will be walking schizophrenics.

La marihuana enciende a Argentina
Por decisión de la Corte Suprema, la tenencia de marihuana para consumo personal ya no será penalizada en Argentina.
El máximo tribunal del país resolvió que la posesión de pequeñas cantidades de cannabis, que sean para uso individual y no representen riesgos para terceros, no tendrá carácter de delito.
Una medida que ha generado opiniones encontradas como se puede ver en el video de BBC Mundo.

The Supreme Court has ruled that possession of marijuana for personal use will no longer be criminalized in Argentina.

The high court ruled that possession of small quantities of cannabis, which are for personal use and do not pose risks to anyone else, will no longer be characterized as a crime.

The ruling has generated controversy, as one can see in the BBC World Video.

www.bbc.co.uk

The worst has come to worst

2009-08-25T11:30:00.003-05:00

Once the US abandons Israel, there's nothing left to do but watch Israelis die by mass murder.

ALERT :: OBAMA PLANNING ISRAEL AMBUSH AT OPENING OF UN ASSEMBLY!
Several sources have informed One Jerusalem that the Obama Administration is planning to significantly step up the pressure on Israel by announcing a comprehensive plan for Israel and the Palestinians at the opening of the United Nations General in September.
Picture this: The anti-Israel nations of the world surrounding President Obama as he demands that Israel give up sovereignty over Jerusalem, abandon settlements, and recognize a terrorist state on the West Bank.
If this happens, Israel will be isolated from the rest of world in a very dramatic manner.
The first sign that something was up came when Egyptian President Mubarak said that the Obama Administration was ready to propose a plan in September and the White House rushed to dampen expectations by declaring that they are nowhere near to readying a plan.
Our sources confirmed that the Obama administration is contemplating this ambush of Israel at the United Nations.

The hard core of Obamoidism

2009-08-25T11:18:00.002-05:00

Fouad Ajami, once again, puts his finger on the main point. An elite yuppie so-called constitutional scholar who thinks the constitution can be changed by force of his own yuppiness.

Obama's Summer of Discontent

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path. online.wsj.com

New drug laws in Mexico raise the cost of bribing the police

2009-08-25T01:35:00.001-05:00

In Mexico, Ambivalence on a Drug Law - NYTimes.com

You may have seen this news about the new drug laws in Mexico.

Before, if one was caught with small amounts of drugs, one could pay off the police. Now, under the new law, the cost of the bribe just went up: it will cost more because one will be faced with compulsory "treatment." Like the NYT article says,
Even before the new law went into effect, Mexicans caught with small amounts of drugs were not routinely prosecuted, officials said. But the change takes the discretion of whether to throw drug users in jail away from police officers, who frequently shook down people by threatening them with arrest.
So now, if one refuses to pay the bribe and wants to be remanded to some bogus treatment program, as the law says, then one will be faced with paying even more bribes—to the technocrats staffing the treatment centers so that they will approve one's course of treatment.

More Euro Anti Semitism and a living example of why Jews need their own state

2009-08-21T10:49:00.004-05:00

I'm not a racist. Jag är inte antisemit. I'm not anti-Semite. Aftonbladet är inte en antisemitisk tidning. Aftonbladet is not an anti-Semitic newspaper. Tvärtom tar vi öppet ställning emot främlingsfientlighet. On the contrary, we openly stand against xenophobia.

In other words, some of his best friends are Jews.

This is the sort of politically-correct "polite" anti Semitism that characterized German intellectuals back in the '30s and '40s. One doesn't hate Jews. That would be vulgar and low class. Not our sort of people at all. But, still... Jews are responsible for heinous crimes, etc etc. and are in control of the media, government, finance, etc etc. ... That's political analysis, not racist hatred. Therefore, it's protected speech. Therefore any criticism of this sort of political analysis is an attack on free speech. So, let's hate the Jews all that much more--they want to limit intellectuals' right to freedom of expression.

The ultimate purpose of such libels is to delegitimize the Jewish people and to exculpate the violence committed against them.

This is why they are anti Semitic. It's precisely the political analysis that puts it in that category. It may surprise people, but it's entirely possible for one to hold such beliefs against Jews and Israel and still like and respect individual Jews in one's own life. Nazi Germany was replete with such people. Read Victor Klemperer's Language of the Third Reich for as many examples as you need.

The following is the main point. It applies beyond the Swedish intellectual establishment. Anything even resembling this--but not even approaching the crudity of the organ-harvesting libel--would be cause for heads rolling if it was about any other group besides Jews (or perhaps Americans).

What does it say about a country when one of its leading newspapers deems a wild blood libel against Israel and Jews worthy of publication? And what it does it say about a government and its opposition when they view efforts to condemn this vicious lie as itself worthy of condemnation? What must be understood is that this episode would not be possible outside the context of anti-Israel propaganda that permeates Europe.

Via Commentary, there's more on the Swedish report of IDF Palestinian-organ-harvesting. At Commentary, they call it a "blood libel" because of the European tradition of accusing Jews of eating babies, etc etc during the Middle Ages (and later) so as to incite pograms (i.e., holy war/Crusades)against them. Back then, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, causing the plague, etc etc.

Earlier this week, the Jerusalem Post reported that the popular Swedish daily tabloid Aftonbladet had published a story alleging that Israeli soldiers were not only killing Palestinians but also harvesting their organs for use by sick Jews. The piece by one Donald Bostrom repeated some wild and unsubstantiated tales of atrocities told by Palestinians and then attempted to connect them with a recent story of how some Jews in America were behind the illegal trafficking of organs.

According to Bostrom:

We know that the need for organs in Israel is large, that an extensive illegal organ moving is ongoing and has been for a long time, that it is done with the blessing of the authorities, the senior doctor at the major hospital is involved, as well as officials at various levels. And we know that the Palestinian young men disappeared, they were back five days later in secrecy at night, sewn up.

This is nothing but a modern version of medieval Jewish blood-libel myths. Whereas in the past, the object of these hate-inspired canards were helpless Diaspora Jewish communities, now it’s the state of Israel. Though Bostrom disingenuously claimed that he was not promoting the tale but merely repeating what others had told him, the ultimate purpose of such libels is to delegitimize the Jewish people and to exculpate the violence committed against them.

Nat Hentoff must be on the McCarthism bandwagon along with Sarah Palin

2009-08-20T12:27:00.007-05:00

Nat Hentoff has a long history as a dissident. It's hard to believe that he would be part of any right-wing attack machine or be a follower of anyone--let alone of so-called McCarthyite Sarah Palin. I'd love to see Richard Cohen call him a McCarthyist to his face. That won't happen, though. Cohen and his ilk will never pick on people their own size. And yet, Hentoff echoes her concerns:

Does the following sound like "death panels?"

I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) - as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill - decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.

Hentoff sees a massive bait-and-switch forming on the horizon. Does this sound like "death panels?":

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama's eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a "very difficult democratic conversation" about how "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care" costs. Emphasis added.

Is this an example of McCarthyism?

A specific end-of-life proposal is in draft Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, a House Democratic health care bill that is echoed in two others that also call for versions of "advance care planning consultation" every five years - or sooner if the patient is diagnosed with a progressive or terminal illness.

Hentoff adds the following, which makes Palin's fearmongering McCarthyism seem placid:

As more Americans became increasingly troubled by this and other fearful elements of Dr. Obama's cost-efficient health care regimen, Smith [Wesley Smith, reporter/researcher into the health industry and author of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America (Encounter Books)] adds this vital advice, no matter what legislation Obama finally signs into law:

"Remember that legislation itself is only half the problem with Obamacare. Whatever bill passes, hundreds of bureaucrats in the federal agencies will have years to promulgate scores of regulations to govern the details of the law.

"This is where the real mischief could be done because most regulatory actions are effectuated beneath the public radar. It is thus essential, as just one example, that any end-of-life counseling provision in the final bill be specified to be purely voluntary ... and that the counseling be required by law to be neutral as to outcome. Otherwise, even if the legislation doesn't push in a specific direction - for instance, THE GOVERNMENT REFUSING TREATMENT - the regulations could." (Emphasis added.)

The problem isn't the rationing and death panels in themselves. People are used to such things since all goods and services are "rationed" somehow by cost in the free market. The problem is that Obama is proposing government rationing and death panels. In other words, he's proposing socializing health care by taking it away from free market forces and giving it to some group of government wise men who will have the very difficult democratic conversation about what care a person deserves to recieve, or not.

Iran: The Factionalization of the State

2009-08-20T11:34:00.002-05:00

I'm copying this article here (subscription only) in case anyone wants an analysis of the situation in Iran:

Summary

Iranian politics became increasingly complex in the wake of the country’s June 12 presidential election. Cracks in the establishment have begun to spread as the country’s four top leaders — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani and Expediency Council chair Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — compete for influence.

Conclusion

A complex metamorphosis is under way in the Islamic republic and has been accelerated by the outcome of the June 12 election. The increasing complexity of the system has undermined the use of ideological labels, such as “pragmatic conservatives” and “ultraconservatives” in keeping track of the political ebb and flow. A more useful method of making sense of this struggle is to examine the political institutions in relation to each faction’s influence. The supreme leader remains at the apex of the maze, and beneath him, Ahmadinejad, Larijani and Rafsanjani are the principal political figures to watch.

Full analysis

Iran’s June 12 presidential election, which granted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term and threatened to rip the clerical establishment apart, illustrated just how complex Iranian politics can become.

The Iranian political system is a labyrinth of competing institutions made up of elected, quasi-elected and appointed officials. It is difficult to brand the Islamic republic as a pure theocracy, democracy or even an oligarchy. In reality, it is a blend of all three, where power traditionally has been concentrated in the hands of the religious elite and the right to rule comes from a mixture of divine right and the people.

Prior to 2005, when Ahmadinejad was elected to his first term as president, the political landscape in the country was roughly divided between reformists (who had risen to power during two-term President Mohammed Khatami’s time in office) and conservatives, who dominated the clerical political establishment. During Ahmadinejad’s presidency, however, a fissure opened up among the conservatives that pitted the so-called pragmatic conservatives, led by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, against an emergent ultraconservative faction led by Ahmadinejad. This split intensified in the final years of Ahmadinejad’s last term but turned vicious after the June presidential vote.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has long attempted to remain above the fray of Iran’s factional politics, preferring to play the various blocs off each other to maintain his own position at the apex of the Iranian political system. But the fallout from the election was so severe that Khamenei had little choice but to directly intervene. The supreme leader took a calculated risk in coming out in support of Ahmadinejad and the hard-liners. This move prompted Rafsanjani’s pragmatic conservative camp to align temporarily with the reformists in a united front against the firebrand president.

Ahmadinejad entered his second term on shaky ground and chose to test his limits by trying to pack his government with loyalists. The president ended up alienating members of his own hard-line camp, including Khamenei, when on July 16 he attempted to appoint his close friend and relative, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, as his first vice president — an extremely controversial move given Mashaie’s past remarks on how the Islamic republic was a “friend” to the Israeli people. Ahmadinejad quickly buckled under pressure from his fellow hard-liners and canceled the appointment. However, he made Mashaie his chief of staff and top adviser, thus drawing attention to a growing unease between the president and the supreme leader.

Khamenei has continued to defend Ahmadinejad against powerful figures like Rafsanjani, but the supreme leader also understands that he needs to place limits on the president’s power. With Rafsanjani already heading up two of Iran’s most powerful institutions, there was a need for a third political front to rise up that would remain loyal to Khamenei’s wishes, but act as a counter to both Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. This third faction is led by Iran’s current speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, whose clan now controls two of the three branches of the Iranian government — the legislature and the judiciary.

In addition to encouraging the rise of factions within the regime, Khamenei has taken a number of other key steps to protect his position and alter the power balances within the state. A number of non-clerical politicians like Ahmadinejad and technocrats like Larijani have risen up to diffuse the powers of the religious elites. At the same time, the military — though under the control of Khamenei and ideologically subservient to the clerics — has emerged as a powerful stakeholder in the system with a growing say in national security and foreign affairs and control over the Iranian economy.

After the clerics, Iran’s security establishment, dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is the strongest force within the Iranian power structure. The IRGC is closely watching how the ongoing political knife fight among the elites plays out and is realizing that figures like Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are going to have to increase their reliance on the security apparatus to remain afloat politically, given the growing splits within the political establishment. The IRGC is already well on its way to exploiting this political fracas to enhance its position within the decision-making process. And should present trends continue, the IRGC could emerge as the lead group calling the shots through figurehead clerical and non-clerical politicians.

Historical ignorance disguised as conventional wisdom

2009-08-18T14:28:00.003-05:00

Richard Cohen, NYT pundit, uses his ignorance of history to preach conventional wisdom to the choir. In the end he shoots himself in the foot and ends up showing the opposite of what he purports to show, i.e., that Palin is a nutjob. Try this on for size:

Palinism. What is it? It is an updated version of McCarthyism, which takes it name from the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin liar, demagogue and drunk, and means, according to Wikipedia, "reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries." As far as we know, Sarah Palin is not a drunk.

Whatever Wikipedia has to say, McCarthy's "reckless, unsubstantiated accusations" have turned out to be quite substantiated by now. At the time (early 1950s), it was not possible to substantiate them because to do so would have ruined US intelligence sources, etc etc. Take the famous example Cohen cites:

For sheer disregard of the facts, her statement about President Obama's "death panel" has to rank with McCarthy's announcement that "I have here in my hand a list of 205" (or 57 or 72 or whatever) names of communists in the State Department. They were both false -- McCarthy's by commission, Palin's probably by omission. She rarely knows her facts. [...] As with McCarthyism, Palinism is a product of its times. McCarthy exploited the public's fear of communism and communists. Not only were they abroad, but they were here in America -- spies, fellow travelers, pinkos, apologists, intellectuals and short, bespectacled minorities. It was their very ubiquity and invisibility that made them so dangerous.

We don't know if McCarthy had a real list in his hand or if that was just a rhetorical device but the Communists in the State Department accusation has been shown to be quite accurate after ex Soviet/Communist Party archives were opened up to researchers under Yeltsin. See for example, Hayes and Klehr. They document the KGB/GRU status of the most famous cases, including that of Alger Hiss, such that there can no longer be any reasonable debate about it. As for the "fellow travelers, pinkos, apologists, intellectuals and short, bespectacled minorities," that Cohen cites, the Hayes and Klehr book (among others) is full of info about journalists, union leaders, Hollywood types, etc etc, who were on the Communist Party/KGB/GRU payroll. This includes leftist icon IF Stone.

With this in mind, let's deconstruct Cohen's argument: McCarthy was tarred and feathered by the leftist intelligentsia of the day/Palin is being tarred and feathered by the leftist intelligentsia of the day--for example, by Richard Cohen. McCarthy's accusations were accurate according to the latest historical research/Palin's accusations will be shown to have been accurate... etc etc.

Therefore, to anyone aware of the historical debate over "McCarthyism," Cohen's comparison of Palin to McCarthy favors Palin with the "truthteller-to-power" image. Not what he had in mind at all.

Why is the Obama administration trying to help Hugo Chavez?

2009-08-17T15:42:00.008-05:00

Anastasia O'Grady's answer:

Mr. Obama has expressed the same views on Honduras as Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), who holds that the interim government must be forced to reinstate Mr. Zelaya and who has, over more than two decades in office, consistently allied himself with socialist causes in Latin America.

I'm not so sure. Obama may be "tacking to the left, like O'Gragy says, but on the other hand, she asumes some overall plan on his part, like a bait and switch from his pragmatic, post partisan campaign persona. I doubt that there is such a plan. Obama is plainly in over his head and the government is being run by whichever of his advisors he trusts at the moment. Right now, according to press reports, that would be Rahm Emmanuel. Emmanuel wants to allign the US more with Chávez for his own ideological reasons.

Most people in Latin America loathe Chávez and his followers. Most people have some memory of some form of autocratic government, which Chávez and his followers certainly exemplify. Most people in Latin America are therfore looking for the US to stand up to Chávez instead of bending over for him to ram it in like he did last weekend. He was in Ecuador , where :

he launched a virulent assault on the U.S. military, reiterated his commitment to spreading revolution in the region, and threatened the continent with war. Mr. Zelaya was by his side.

O'Grady says thatif Honduras has been able to "neutralize" Chávez, we should be celebrating it, not siding with hin against the people of Honduras and around the region who loathe Chávez-style authoriarianism.

Meanwhile, Chávez accuses the US of planning an invasion of Venezuela (to take its oil, of course) and to meet this threat, he is arming himself with Russian arms and treaties.

So, we have a typical Latin American dictator spewing conspiracy theories about the US while making traties with our enemies--Russia, Iran, Hezbollah--and dealing drugs through the FARC. Then we have our president sucking up to him in public. Even so, Chávez persists in making Obama look like a fool:
“Señor, lea las ‘Venas abiertas de América Latina’ (libro de Alberto Galeano que le regaló), porque creo que anda perdido en la nebulosa de Andrómeda, anda perdido, sin horizonte, creo que están entrando en un laberinto, si le damos el beneficio de la duda. Está confundido, nosotros no le que estamos pidiendo que intervenga en Honduras, le estamos pidiendo que el imperio retire sus manos de Honduras y sus garras de América Latina, ya está bueno”, señaló.

HRW/Amnesty Int'l won't bother to denounce this

2009-08-14T14:46:00.003-05:00

Most people will find this unexceptional. After all, what can one expect from the Muslims, anyway?

So, like the old joke where a guy is looking for his contact lens under the light instead of where he lost it because the light is better there, people will denounce the US/Israel because the light is better there even though there is nothing to be gained from it. Unless one wants points for moral posturing, like the Obamoids...

Debka File

Until the defeated Iranian presidential contender Mehdi Karroubi broke the wall of silence surrounding the Islamic Republic's prisons to demand an investigation into allegations of rape, little attention was paid to the abuses meted out to protestors who dared to claim that the June 12 election was rigged.
These abuses are inflicted routinely and systematically in seven secret prisons where political detainees are held at the behest of the revolutionary Islamic regime. Those prisons are described DEBKAfile's Iranian sources as inhuman hellholes:
Kahrizak
This is the jail which supreme leader Ayatallah Ali Khamenei wanted razed to the ground to conceal the outrages committed there against scores of reform-seeking protesters who had the cruel fortune to be dumped there. Kahrizak on the southern outskirts of Tehran was notorious as the penal facility for Iran's most violent thugs and gangsters. Those inmates were let loose on the political prisoners who were incarcerated in cells ten meters square. An unknown number suffered rape and bloody beatings, which not all survived.
The commander of Iran's internal security forces Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam said Sunday, Aug. 9, that he would not deny his share in the blame for the "terrible things that took place in Kahrizak" where two protesters were admittedly found dead. He claimed that two of the security officials responsible for "widespread prisoner abuse" had been fired and awaited trial.
The prison remains open and our sources doubt those responsible for the outrages will be brought to trial.
Six more jails and detentions centers operate in the Tehran area.
Ghamar prison
A low, inconspicuous door behind the Ghamar Bani Hashem Hospital on Resaalat Street near the security ministry leads into a top-secret holding facility for interrogating political prisoners. It is closely guarded by Iran's intelligence ministry.
It has two floors and a yard, containing four interrogation rooms, eight isolation cells and eight holding cells in which dozens of detainees are crammed, allowed access to showers once a week and toilets three times a day . Here, the detainees undergo their first inquisition and beatings before they are transferred to other prisons. Their eyes and mouths are bound with leather straps to prevent them from identifying their tormentors. Their agony ends when they sign written confessions.
Most of the victims' families do not know their whereabouts.
Esharat-Abad prison
Several hundred political prisoners are crowded into this facility for drug offenders which is designed for 250 to 350 inmates. It is situated in the Narcotic Unit's headquarters in central Tehran.
The building consists of three large units broken up into cells of 1.5 x 2 meters, into each of which up to five detainees are squeezed for an agonizing three to seven days. Under interrogation, their arms and legs are broken to make them confess and give up information. Accustomed to beating and humiliating dope traffickers, the wardens carry on abusing the political detainees.
Sanitary conditions are appalling and the inmates are fed scraps from the prison staff canteens. The stench of vomit and sweat in the unventilated cells is unbearable. Whenever a detainee dies of torture or disease, prison authorities file a fictitious report. After the questioning finishes, those who survive are transferred to the central prison at Evin. No one has been brought to book for their deaths.
The Revolutionary Guards Prison 59
This penal complex in the cellar of the Revolutionary Guards Corps base Esharat-Abad suburb of Tehran is the most terrible of all seven secret jails. It is so secret that even the head of the justice department for the Tehran district has never been granted permission for a visit.
Run by the field security unit of the IRGC, this is where suspected spies and people accused of grave security offenses are questioned by officials who are not bound by any laws or regulations. They have sole discretion to determine the degree of abuse their victims deserve.
Most of the cells are made for solitary confinement, although around ten large chambers hold a number of detainees. None have light or ventilation; sanitary conditions are appalling and food scanty. Detainees are allowed one telephone call during the period of their detention subject to permission from the security guards, which means depending on how well they cooperate.
Inmates are completely cut off from the outside world so that when it is important for the regime to extract confessions to crimes they never committed, they are susceptible to psychological manipulation, such as fake newspaper front pages or fabricated news bulletins.
These detainees may disappear into this top-secret prison for long stretches of time of up to a year or two without their families knowing where they are.
Nabovvat
This detention center on Schrevardi street in central Tehran is shared by the intelligence ministry and Revolutionary Guards. It is located on the top floors of a shopping center and hidden behind a secret door. It is used for political detainees whose incarceration is too secret for them to be held in other prisons. For many it is also the end of the line for few survive the questioning practices at this place
Abu Ghoraib prison
This jail administered by the internal security services, named for the notorious American prison in Iraq, is located on Seoul Street in the Fatemieh suburb of Tehran, a residential district where few are aware that Abu Ghoraib is used to torture security personnel accused of grave offences or crimes against the regime. Prison No. 66
This jail is also run by the Revolutionary Guards behind the Allameh Tabatabai military base on the Asfarieh highway north of Tehran. Here former Guards members accused of serious offenses or subversion against the state are subjected to extreme torture. At least two inmates have died in recent weeks.

More bad news for the Obamoid "engagement" policy

2009-08-14T14:03:00.002-05:00

We haven't read about this in the MSM. Wonder why? www.debka.com

Assad slams the door on Obama and on talks with Israel
Syrian president Bashar Assad like the leopard has not changed his spots. After Washington opened the door wide to reconciliation, lavishing goodwill gestures and a procession of emissaries over several months, Assad has abruptly slammed it shut.
Wednesday, Aug. 12, he announced he was off to Tehran next week to congratulate his good friend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his reelection as president and further cement their ties.
He left behind him a trail of dashed hopes in Washington. The Obama administration had made a serious bid to detach Assad from his strategic bonds with Iran and make him the keystone for the president's comprehensive Middle East program.

Further refutation of the Obamoid "settlement freeze" formula

2009-08-13T23:06:00.002-05:00

Michael Oren is Israel's ambassador to the US. He is also an IDF veteran and a historian of some note. His book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy covers the two-hundred-years US history of relations with Arab/Muslim nations.

His article here of course is in support of Netanyahu's policy towards the West Bank. That's to be expected since Oren is Netanyahu's ambassador. But the point is that Oren/Netanyahu have some facts on their side while the Obamoids only have Power, Faith, and Fantasy.

West Bank Success Story
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the West Bank economy is flourishing. Devastated by the violence and corruption fomented by its former leadership, the West Bank has rebounded and today represents a most promising success story. Among the improvements of the last year cited by the IMF and other financial observers are an 18% increase in the local stock exchange, a 94% growth of tourism to Bethlehem—generating 6,000 new jobs—and an 82% rise in trade with Israel.
Israel, too, has contributed to the West Bank's financial boom. Tony Blair recently stated that Israel had not been given sufficient credit for efforts such as removing dozens of checkpoints and road blocks, withdrawing Israeli troops from population centers, and facilitating transportation into both Israel and Jordan. Long prohibited by terrorist threats from entering the West Bank, Israeli Arabs are now allowed to shop in most Palestinian cities. online.wsj.com

The irrationality of realpolitick

2009-08-13T11:16:00.003-05:00

Is it ironic that the latest proponents of realpolitick--the Obamoid masses--are so irrational as to expect rationality from a fanatic religious regime?

Is Iran’s regime rational?
Was it rational for the “Supreme Guide” to jettison all pretense of electoral probity, and of a “Republic” supported by the people, for such a small gain? Was the loss of legitimacy both at home and abroad worth it? Was driving the populace, seeking small measures of personal freedom and economic stability, to a new understanding that the Islamic Republic regime was their enemy, a reasonable price for the small gain of choosing one among the selected candidates? I would suggest that it was not rational, but rather an expression of fanatical religious motivation. And that would make the Islamic Republic regime a non-rational player. blogs.law.harvard.edu

More people pile on against Obama's settlement freeze

2009-08-12T21:44:00.005-05:00

This time it's by a Palestinian and US advocate for the Palestinian cause.

Strangely, both sides seem to agree that Palestinian rejection of the state of Israel is the root of the conflict. How can Obama et al then show that that the settlements are the key to resolving the conflict?

They can't. The "settlement freeze" is only supposed to be a "first step," which Israel has to take, since the Arabs/Palestinians won't. Something like that.

The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anythingwww.nytimes.com

Over the past two decades, the origins of the conflict were swept under the carpet, gradually repressed as the struggle assumed the narrower shape of the post-1967 territorial tug-of-war over the West Bank and Gaza.
In their eyes, to accept Israel as a Jewish state would legitimize the Zionist enterprise that brought about their tragedy. It would render the Palestinian national struggle at best meaningless, at worst criminal. Their firmness on the principle of their right of return flows from the belief that the 1948 war led to unjust displacement and that, whether or not refugees choose or are allowed to return to their homes, they can never be deprived of that natural right. The modern Palestinian national movement, embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organization, has been, above all, a refugee movement — led by refugees and focused on their plight.
www.nytimes.com

Saudis also reject Obamoid engagement

2009-08-07T14:01:00.001-05:00

The indispensable Debka File gives us one more reason why the Obamoid insistence on the settlement freeze as the key to Mideast peace is a red herring.

clipped from www.debka.com

Saudis reject Obama's plan for ties with Israel: Top urgency is Iran threat

Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal's rejection of the Obama administration's Middle East approach was a lot more comprehensive than a blunt refusal to improve relations with Israel to help restart peace talks. DEBKAfile's Washington sources report that in closed-door talks with US leaders, including secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Saudi prince urged the US to get off their backs on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and deal more seriously and effectively with top-urgency action for stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb.

The Saudis maintain that Obama and his Middle East envoy George Mitchell have been sidetracked by minor regional issues from dealing with the primary concern of the Gulf and Middle East region, the looming threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Until that cloud is lifted, they say, no other initiatives have a chance.

Michael Barone

2009-08-06T13:59:00.001-05:00

Michael Barone is more a scholar than a pundit/commentator. It's impossible to argue with him since he has all in the info at his fingertips.

Here, he points out the benefits of US-style free enterprise in medicine. He also shows how other nations free-ride on US creativity and investment even as they call us right-wing morons.

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com

Obama Would Stifle Military and Medical Creativity

We also may be at risk of squandering our high-tech advantage in medicine. As Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution points out, the top five American hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in all other developed countries. America has outpointed all other countries combined in Nobel Prizes for medical and physiology since 1970.

American theoretical health research financed by the National Institutes of Health and by American market-oriented pharmaceutical companies outshines the rest of the world combined. And the rest of the world tends to get the benefits at cut rates. American taxpayers finance NIH, which reports results publicly to the whole world.

The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The

Have a nice atomic 6 August

2009-08-06T13:46:00.001-05:00

It's the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. It's another chance for people to call the US a terror state and Truman a war criminal. Or it's another chance for a lot of people to realize that they're alive today because of the A-bomb"not just the millions of US troops who were slated to invade the Japanese home islands, either. There are their descendants as well. Then there are the millions of Japanese who survived because of the A-bomb, and their descendants. And"as this article makes clear"there are many more millions of Chinese and other Asians who survived once the Japanese surrendered"and their descendants. But…who really cares about so many Asians anyway if the point is to blame the US?

As for the Japanese themselves, they have always blamed the correct person for the A-bomb: the emperor. His policies brought this destruction down on their heads, nothing else.

Then again, the bomb also saved lived in Europe since it prevented Stalin from taking over nations in Western

clipped from online.wsj.com

The Hiroshima Rorschach Test

The fact that the quick end to the war allowed the U.S. to avoid a land invasion of the Japanese mainland, thus saving many more lives, is quickly tossed aside by some critics. They say there is no basis for the estimates of large numbers of casualties. But then there is the appalling number of Asians who were dying at the hands of the Japanese. Upwards of a quarter-of-a-million were dying each month. The fact that this orgy of death—17 million died in all—came to an abrupt halt when the Imperial Army was finally forced to go home is rarely mentioned.

Perhaps the simplest and most compelling argument for the bombs is the main reason President Truman decided to drop them in the first place: He hoped it would rattle Japan enough to force it to surrender. That is exactly what happened.

Fouad Ajami strikes again

2009-08-06T13:23:00.001-05:00

Ajami is one of the "truth-tellers," as he calls the authors of the UNDP Arab Human Development Reports. He pulls no punches. Must read if you're interested in US policy i the Arab world.

clipped from online.wsj.com

Autocracy and the Decline of the Arabs

The Arab world is plagued by despots. But don’t expect the U.N. to give President Bush any credit for challenging this order.

We are now in the midst of one of those periodic autopsies of the Arab condition. The trigger is the publication last month of the Arab Human Development Report 2009, the fifth of a series of reports by the by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on the state of the contemporary Arab world.

The first of these reports, published in 2002, was treated with deference. A group of Arab truth-tellers, it was believed, had broken with the evasions and the apologetics to tell of the sordid condition of Arab society—the autocratic political culture, the economic stagnation, the cultural decay.

Little has altered in the years separating the first of these reports from the most recent.

It is no mystery, this sorrowful decline of the Arabs. They have invested their hopes in states, and the states have failed

Krautahammer on ObamaCare

2009-07-31T13:18:00.001-05:00

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com

Obamacare in Retreat

To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no pre-existing condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn't this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Organic food is now officially a ripoff

2009-07-30T15:03:00.001-05:00

I love this kind of thing. Once again, science confirms common sense. Now people have a weapon to wield against the organic food fanatics.

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk

Organic food has no health benefits, study finds

Organic food gives no health benefits to consumers, according to research
for the Food Standards Agency published today.

Shoppers pay more for organic fruit, vegetables, chicken, beef and milk but
the food gives no nutritional enhancement to people’s diet.

The watchdog stopped short of advising consumers that buying organic produce
was a waste of money but its message was clear: choosing to eat organic food
will make no important difference to a person’s overall health. Eating a
healthy balanced diet is the only important thing, the report concluded.

“Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the
selection of organically over conventionally-produced foods on the basis of
nutritional superiority.”

European anti Semite gets Presidential Medal of Freedom

2009-07-30T14:05:00.001-05:00

Mary was in charge of the infamous Durban I so-called anti racism conference, which turned into an anti Semitic festival.

When she was replaced as UNHRC, Richard Holbrooke (today one of Obama's most senior diplomats) commented, "I think Sergio is much better than Mary Robinson. I think she overly politicized the job."

But wait. There's more:
The trouble starts with Robinson's tenure as president of Ireland. During the last four years of Robinson's tenure, the European Union donated large sums of money to the Palestinian Authority. Ireland even held the presidency of the European Union for the second half of 1996. During this time, Arafat siphoned large amounts of European aid money away to pay for terror. Robinson can plead ignorance, but documents seized during the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank revealed that the Palestinian Authority spent approximately $9 million of European Union aid money

clipped from www.undispatch.com

Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus receive presidential medals of freedom

Mary Robinson was the first female President of Ireland (1990 – 1997) and a former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997 – 2002), a post that required her to end her presidency four months early. Robinson served as a prominent member of the Irish Senate prior to her election as President. She continues to bring attention to international issues as Honorary President of Oxfam International, and Chairs the Board of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI Alliance). Since 2002 she has been President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, based in New York, which is an organization she founded to make human rights the compass which charts a course for globalization that is fair, just and benefits all.

The decider's foreign policy

2009-07-30T10:18:00.001-05:00

According to Matthew Crowley, Obama is his own national security adviser and secretary of state. Clifford May shows what we got out of the deal.

clipped from article.nationalreview.com

Friends and Foes

Treating the former worse than the latter is not smart policy.

Historian Bernard Lewis has observed that a nation can make few mistakes worse than this: to be “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” Is that a fair characterization of American foreign policy under the Obama administration?

Mackubin Thomas Owens, editor of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, calls Obama’s “disturbing propensity to curry favor with our adversaries at the expense of our friends

The Czechs and Poles are now “are rightly concerned that they will be sacrificed on the altar of better U.S. relations with Russia,” Owens wrote. “And the Israelis fear that the Obama administration’s desired opening to the Muslim world will be achieved at their expense.”

In particular, Obama has been pressing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make unilateral concessions to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority.

The Role of the Mexican Military in the Cartel War

2009-07-29T16:27:00.001-05:00

The subtext here is simple: the Mexican military is just one more cartel in the cartel war. Another subtext is that U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske wants the US and Mexico to focus on so-called prevention and treatment, etc etc. This is quite politically correct but it means even more interference in Mexican society than before: people will be sent to reeducation camps instead of to jail, etc etc. Therefore, the bait and switch is still on: the war on drugs is destroying Mexican society far more than the drugs ever could or would. The next step, if U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has his way, is for it to begin destroying individual autonomy...

clipped from www.stratfor.com

The Role of the Mexican Military in the Cartel War

U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske is in the middle of a four-day visit this week to Mexico, where he is meeting with Mexican government officials to discuss the two countries’ joint approach to Mexico’s ongoing cartel war. In prepared remarks at a July 27 press conference with Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, Kerlikowske said Washington is focused on reducing drug use in the United States, supporting domestic law enforcement efforts against drug traffickers and working with other countries that serve as production areas or transshipment points for U.S.-bound drugs.

However, the renewed debate, combined with recent changes in the Mexican legislature, have set the stage for a general re-examination of the Mexican military’s role in the cartel war. And while it is still unclear exactly where the re-examination will end up, the eventual outcome could drastically change the way the Mexican government fights the cartels.

Larry Summers unmasked?

2009-07-27T11:51:00.001-05:00

I really don't have an opinion about this stuff"it's too complicated for one without basic economics knowledge. Therefore anyone can convince me... On the other hand, this looks pretty damning...

clipped from gregmankiw.blogspot.com

In a speech last week, Larry Summers said:
Without comprehensive healthcare reform, there is little prospect of convincing markets that the long-term growth in Federal debt is under control or of convincing businesses that the United States is the most competitive place for them to invest.

This statement, while seemingly sensible to some laymen, is actually inconsistent with standard economic analysis, such as that offered by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO tells us that the healthcare bills being considered in Congress will increase rather than decrease health spending and so will hardly assure markets the Federal debt is under control. The CBO also tells us that health spending does not raise problems of international competitiveness. My understanding is that the CBO analysis of these subjects is not at all controversial among professional economists.

Is Obama the political fox?

2009-07-27T02:58:00.001-05:00

Is Obama the political fox and not the sad sack conservative commentators say he is? That's what Madigan says"and he's "presidential writer in residence at Roosevelt College."

clipped from www.chicagotribune.com

Unraveling ObamaCare

By Charles M. Madigan

July 26, 2009

People really want to make a change of some kind, but they aren't sure quite how or what, and Obama remains a brilliant campaigner.

The president has watched from the sidelines as Congress wrestled with the question of what kind of health reform America actually needs. He's not doing that to be passive. The answers range from "none" to "complete" and touch on most points in between.

Remember President Bill Clinton's health-care debacle? He handed it to his wife and she emerged with a proposal crammed full of meticulous detail and dropped it on Congress like a cow pie in a hot pasture. People shifted away from it very quickly. Obama is not having any of that.

Obama is pulling on the levers of public opinion to create pressure to force Congress to make some difficult decisions.

He is letting Congress do the very messy part, which includes all those predictions of failure.

Ultimatum watch: Mexican standoff?

2009-07-18T14:13:00.001-05:00

La Jornada: Zelaya regresará a Honduras este fin de semana si fracasan negociaciones

El mandatario constitucional recordó que el fin de semana dio de plazo hasta este sábado a los golpistas para que se retiren del poder o de lo contrario hará valer su derecho a volver al país.

Ultimatum watch:

Me estoy preparando para regresar y hacerles sentir vergüenza a estos militares, precisó Zelaya en entrevista difundida por una radioemisora de Nicaragua, sin dar detalles dónde y en que momento llegará a Honduras.—Zelaya, Managua, Nicaragua, 17 de julio

Keeping in mind the following:

Horas más tarde, un portavoz del Departamento de Estado, Robert Wood, afirmó que Washington se opone a cualquier intento de Zelaya de volver a su país porque “no sería de gran ayuda“ a la mediación de Arias. El mandatario hondureño está totalmente al corriente de nuestra posición sobre este tema, precisó.

Will Obama dare to cross Hugo Chávez? Did he learn nothing from reading The Open Veins of Latin America?

Al-Qaeda in Retreat

2009-07-09T21:49:00.001-05:00

I imagine that anti-war types will say that Al-Qaeda was never the strategic threat that Bush said it was…it was always about expanding his own power.

clipped from www.worldaffairsjournal.org

Obama’s Inheritance: Al-Qaeda in Retreat

Marc A. Thiessen

In a widely noted speech at the National Archives in May, President Barack Obama said of George W. Bush’s national security policies: “We are cleaning up something that is quite simply a mess.” The president is wrong. Far from a mess, when it comes to national security, President Obama actually inherited a very strong hand from his predecessor. When Bush left office in January, America had marked 2,688 days without suffering another terrorist attack on its soil, an outcome that seemed all but impossible when the smoke cleared on September 12, 2001. Despite repeated attempts, al-Qaeda failed in its efforts to strike the U.S. again—because Bush kept its leaders on their heels and left them increasingly defeated and discredited on battlefronts across the globe.

Why is this sort of common sense so polemical?

2009-07-01T09:45:00.001-05:00

Learn from France -- and consider banning the burka

It is quite plainly designed by men for the subjugation of women. One cannot be absolutely sure that no woman has ever donned it voluntarily, but one can certainly say that, in countries where women can choose not to wear it, then not wearing it is the choice they generally make.
This disposes right away of the phony argument that religious attire is worn as a matter of "right." It is almost exactly the other way around: The imposition of burkas or even head scarfs on women - just like the compulsory growing of beards for men - is the symbol of a denial of rights and the inflicting of a tyrannical code that obliterates personal liberty.
It is depressing that our President, in addressing the Muslim world, takes the most reactionary religious practice as the symbol of rights and identity.
[Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state of our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That is why the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.]
The klansman's hood, remember, is also the symbol of a white Protestant religious "identity" movement. We may be too constitutionally squeamish to ban the klan regalia outright, but we are entitled to our prejudice against those who choose to assert themselves in this way, and I would shudder for the country if this prejudice ever showed any sign of weakening.

Related articles by Zemanta:
Burkas have no place in France: Sarkozy
French president: Burkas not welcome here
France to consider banning the burka
Burka sign of subservience, not religion, says French president

Juan Cole: apologist for anti Semitism

2009-06-22T13:29:00.001-05:00

clipped from www.meforum.org

While Cole and the National Iranian American Council—the Islamic Republic's de facto lobby in Washington—play down Iranian rhetoric and deny any incitement to genocide, a number of scholars, most prominently Tel Aviv University scholar Joshua Teitelbaum, editor-designate of the Middle East Quarterly Denis MacEoin, and German political scientist Matthias Küntzel, have chronicled Iranian rhetoric, including its dehumanizing medical metaphors recalling those used by Nazi propagandists since Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.[15]

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lectures above a sign saying "Death to Israel" in Persian and Arabic, not "Down with Israel" as in the English translation below. Ahmadinejad has also declared in Persian that Iran will "wipe Israel off the map." University of Michigan's Juan Cole argued that the phrase was a mistranslation and that Ahmadinejad did not have genocidal intent.

"Most Evil"/"Most Stupid" Government

2009-06-20T10:20:00.001-05:00

The "most stupid" label fits most Obamoids defending their lightworker's "engagement" policy.

clipped from www.hurryupharry.org

“Most Evil” or “Most Stupid” Government?

I thought the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameneii, had a cheek calling UK, “the most evil of western governments”. The figure head of this “most evil” government, i.e. Her Majesty the Queen, congratulated the Islamic Republic on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution, calling it the ‘Iranian National Day’.

This “Most Evil” government has allowed the Islamic Republic to set up its Press TV here in UK to poison the minds of young impressionable Muslims in Europe. London’s buses advertise Press TV as the ‘Voice for the Voiceless’, while the crack down continues in Iran and Iran’s bus drivers union leaders are still in jail.

Perhaps Most Stupid, would have been more fitting. A Most Stupid government that is easily taken for a ride and has advisors like Baroness Haleh Afshar.

House disagrees with Obama's passivity

2009-06-19T10:34:00.001-05:00

clipped from www.rollcall.com

House to Vote on Bipartisan Iran Resolution

By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff

June 18, 2009, 9:07 p.m.

The House will vote Friday on a bipartisan resolution expressing support for Iranian protesters who have been subject to violence in the days following that country’s presidential election.

If Protesters Don't want US Support, Why Are Their Signs in English?

2009-06-18T19:26:00.001-05:00

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com

I know that the protesters in Iran don't want the United States to interfere with their efforts in any way. I know this because John Kerry says it's true, and because every Democrat in government and the media is telling us that the people of Iran want the United States to keep quiet and not become, in President Obama's words, a "political football" in the standoff between the regime and the protesters. (Never mind reports of crowds gathered outside police stations pleading, “Obama, please help us, they are killing our young children.”) But there is one fact that doesn't jibe with the left's absolute certainty that this administration's silence is precisely what the protesters being beaten in the streets of Tehran want most from America -- the pictures. All the pictures show protesters holding signs in...English. To what end? Why would they want to galvanize support for their movement in the outside world if the only thing they want from the outside world is silence?

Amir Taheri on Obamaoid engagement | pandering to Muslims

2009-06-02T22:25:00.001-05:00

If Taheri is right, then what is going on here? Why pander to religious fanatics just because they wrap themselves in thirdworldist references? There must be a better plan than this.

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk

From

The Times

June 2, 2009

Barack Obama is blind to his blunders over Islam

The new President's approach discourages change in Middle Eastern countries that need it most

Amir Taheri

In trying to prove that he is not George Bush, Barack Obama has committed big mistakes on key issues of foreign policy. His Cairo address, and his “one-size-fits-all” Islam policy, is just the latest. It encourages Islamists and ruling despots, discourages the forces of reform and change and, ultimately, could produce greater resentment of the United States among peoples thirsting for freedom, human rights and decent governance.

I always love Nazipriest photos

2009-06-02T21:45:00.002-05:00

Pubic opposes closing Guabntámo

2009-06-02T21:38:00.002-05:00

I thought we already knew this, but it's useful to have this blackandwhite Gallup confirmation.

What happens next?

I think that the "one of the few subjects" and "fear remains" remarks offer a clue: intellectuals, Europeans and Euro wannabees will be able to condescend to the lowbrows as creatures of a lower order, ruled by fear and loathing, and dominated by state propaganda. Then they will somehow accept that Guantánamo, or an identical prison setup somewhere else, continues to function in spite of the so-called consensus that it was doing grievous harm to our credibility worldwide.

clipped from www.usatoday.com

News »

World

War casualties

Poll: Most oppose closing Gitmo

By Susan Page, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to closing the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and moving some of the detainees to prisons on U.S. soil, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.

It is one of the few subjects on which most Americans side with the views of the Bush administration over its successor.

"Coming up on eight years after Sept. 11, fear remains, and fear is politically potent," says political scientist Paul Freedman of the University of Virginia, who studies public opinion. "When it comes to the issue of terrorism … people are inclined to err on the side of that fear."

New poll results are devastating for Obama's Gitmo plan | Byron York | Washington Examiner

2009-06-02T21:14:00.003-05:00

When will they let us forget about how grievous a fault it is to hold prisoners in Guantánamo? Maybe soon, from the looks of the following. How can politicians oppose such overwhelming public sentiment? It's all over now except the clarifications and confusion. In the end, we'll have pretty much the same system Bush installed.

New poll results are devastating for Obama's Gitmo plan | Washington Examiner

When virtually the entire opposition party, plus 68 percent of independents, plus 42 percent of your own party oppose something you want to do, then you're in trouble.

Most people don't agree that Gitmo has weakened US national security.

Peter says,

Jun 2, 2009
The significant thing about the entire policy regarding not only GITMO, but non-combatant prisoners and anti-terrorism policies more broadly, is that Obama and Democrats used this in the last election as a key issue on which they claimed was nothing less than a violation of the Constitution. Now Obama is maintaining renditions, the prison in Bagram, domestic wiretapping, indefinite detention without trials, military tribunals and arrests without warrant anywhere in the world. And, oh yes, there are a growing number of assassinations of suspected Taliban and al queda leaders, which of course is a far more moral and ethical approach than capturing them and using enhanced interrogation techniques. The hyrocisy, lies and corruption of this Administration and Congress are nothing short of outrageous! We have quickly established an Orwellian world of doublespeak where red means white and white means black. Thanks liberal slime.

Bob VADemHawk says,

Close GITMO, Mr. President. That is what you were elected for among other things. This poll, at best, is an outlier. My guess is they only called places like ID, WY, and GA which have strong Republican support but no intellectuals. This is still America. Try them in court or release them where you picked them up. It really is that simple.

Manufactured Democrat Propagandia says,
Jun 2, 2009

In this poll the American people are providing evidence that the Democrat party manufactured outrage over Gitmo to damage the Bush Administration shamlessly chosing political gain over national security. The Democrat chickens are coming home to roost.

Those peaceful hadjis

2009-06-02T21:14:00.002-05:00

Here's some data points for you.

Council on Foreign Relations

How history is revised

2009-05-29T22:51:00.002-05:00

East German Stasi Spy Killed Protester, Ohnesorg, in 1967 - NYTimes.com
This is the "iconic image" that launched a thousand protests back in the '60s [Note the Vocho in the background. It's still the coolest car on the road]. Now we find out the the "fascist pig" who took Ohnesorg's life was an agent of the East German Stasi, or spy service. The "violent unjust state" that the '68 Germans were protesting turns out to be the Communist state that they held up as avatars of peace. So now, the "iconic image" becomes the "ironic image" of the Communist dupe hippy generation.

Vargas Llosa, Castañeda y Krauze aceptan debate con Hugo Chávez

2009-05-29T21:42:00.004-05:00

Vargas Llosa, Castañeda y Krauze aceptan debate con Hugo Chávez
Left to Right: Enrique Krauze, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge G. Castañeda

Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian novelist and politician, Enrique Krauze, the famous Mexican history and politics entrepreneur, Jorge G. Castañeda, the famous Mexican writer/politician/ex Secretary of State/son of an ex Secretary of State/interpreter of Mexico/Latin America for American audiences.

All three are "ultra right-wing" according to Hugo Chávez and most leftist writers here in Mexico for their defense of classical liberalism.

The three writers/entrepreneurs/politicians/gas bags are in Caracas for a forum on liberty, or something. Chávez called them out on his interminable radio show, Haló Presidente, while they are busy criticizing his regime in some forum on liberty or whatever.

Castañeda says Chávez is desperate: he's riding the wave of high oil pricesand expropriating businesses, closing down opposition media, and undermining the authority of elected officials.

Vargas Llosa says that Venezuela is becoming a Communist dictatorship, following Cuba. He spoke at the conference after being detained for ninety minutes by Venezuelan authorities and being warned not to say anything bad about Chávez.

I don't know what Krauze says about Chávez. It's probably something about democracy.

Chávez will never follow through. He can't stand up to these three gas bags all by himself. Nobody could. Still, it would be fun to watch the debate—for sure he'd pull all kinds of dirty tricks on the three intellectuals. Aside from one's contempt for Chávez, one's contempt for these gas bags is greater. It would satisfy my schadenfreude needs to see them blathering away as Chávez makes them look like idiots.

Massive prision break

2009-05-17T14:00:00.001-05:00

An armed commando of about 80 men arrived aboard 17 SUVs with AFI (Mexican FBI) seals, with a helicopter flying overhead.

In the vehicles were traveling around 80 men armed with fragmentation and smoke grenades, tear gas, machine guns, AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles.

A small team of self-styled federal agents dismounted the SUVs and arrived at the door of the customs house (access to the prison for both prisoners and employees). They told at the custodians and the prison authorities that they were an AFI inspection operation. They believed them.

The Zetas went through the the regions that they were interested in and started to remove prisoners, 38 serving federal sentences and 15 serving state sentences. They lined the prisoners out, put them in the SUVs, and exited by the same door they came in by, without anyone attempting to stop them.

Meanwhile, the other team of sicarios guarded the perimeter of the penal in which more than 800 prisoners are held or sentenced on federal charges.

Salento

2009-02-02T08:24:00.001-06:00

El árabe de la calle árabe habla con Reuter's

2009-01-21T01:07:00.001-06:00

Esto no es una buena señal para los adictos del proceso de la paz en medio oriente.

"Ahora Hamas está negociando una tregua. Se les ofrecieron renovarla en deciembre pero se negaron. ¿Ahora, tras miles de bajas, cómo explica Hamas esto?"

Para Hamas, la capacidad de lanzar cohetes a hasta 40 km de distancia al interior de Israel fue un desarrollo de tácticas desde los ataques suicidos que eran el emblema de las primeras fases de la segunda intifada (levantamiento) en contra de Israel que empezó en el 2000. For Hamas, the ability to fire rockets up to 40 km (24 miles) into Israel was a progression in tactics from the suicide attacks that were a hallmark of the early part of the second intifada (uprising) against Israel that began in 2000.

Sin embargo, con las cantidades de muerte y destrucción visitadas sobre Hamas y Gaza por Israel como resultado de los cohetes, inclusive los que apoyaron la táctica empezaron a cuestionarla.

"Yo siempre he apoyado de los cohetes y de todas las formas de la resistencia," dijo Azia, el chofer de taxi. "Pero tal vez en vez de esto, Hamas debe regresar a las operaciones de martirio," dijo en referencia a los ataques suicidos.

Hassan, padre de cinco, dijo que lanzar cohetes era inútil si no iba a ser efectivos.

"Los cohetes—creo yo que se debe detener este asunto un rato y reevaluado," dijo. "Una vez que tengamos un cohete que alcanza el corazón de Tel Aviv y explotar un edificio, tal vez puedan renovar el fuego."

Salento

2009-01-18T00:47:00.004-06:00

Narco

2009-01-15T13:22:00.001-06:00

"The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone."

The above isn't the half of it. I'd like to be able to write some kind of chart that illustrates all the groups that are "assaulting" Mexico today. But to stick with the narco for a moment, here's a map: The shaded areas show [my own estimate of] territory where power is wielded by the narco or sometimes by the narco/guerrilla, as in the south. Official estimates are that some ten percent of Mexican counties are under narco control, but, as bad as this is, it is surely an underestimate. This just shows the geographical extent of the above phrase, "criminal gangs and drug cartels."

The geopolitics of this is more interesting and dangerous: these regions have never been brought under state control. Never. Ever. [Well…maybe Don Porfirio accomplished this for a while] The phrase is "lawless regions" but this isn't all that accurate: it's more like feudalism, with the feudal lords (called caciques in Mexico) controlling overlapping fiefs, each with its own laws. Like in other areas of the world controlled by insurgencies, these narco/caciques provide social services—as people like to say about Hizbollah and Hamas—that the government can't. They get the loyalty of the people by these means, but violence is their main MO. Nobody would be so stupid as to refuse an offer by the narco, if they wanted their families to survive. They have no other resources. They can't call the cops, like people can in the States. The cops are hundreds of miles away across dirt tracks and they are narcos as well. Today, of course, the government is establishing a presence in these areas in the drug war by the army. It amounts to Mexico invading itself, or a civil war.

Another way to look at it is with these World Bank charts:

Apart from the narco, there are many other groups holding fiefs in Mexico: the various security branches—federal police, army; guerrilla [shown on the map]; "opposition" political groups, both in the government and out of it [these include the different "militant" unions, who disrupt daily life on a daily basis]. It's important to note that all of these groups are violent.

That's just considering the domestic situation. What about the bugbear of foreign intervention? Just as in the Cold War, the drug war is fought through proxies. Our proxy is of course the government of Mexico, under Felipe Calderón. But Hugo Chávez has his proxies here. Chávez is a proxy of Hizbollah and Russia.

It's encouraging—although it is distressing for anyone living in this wonderful country—that the US is dealing with the facts by ranking Mexico as a risk of failure. As the above shows, the drug war intersects with the problem of illegal immigration in important ways. Immigration is caused by the failures of the Mexican economy to provide opportunities for the people. They abandon their land and it's taken over by the narco. The drug war itself is destroying any legitimacy the government has by attacking the livlihoods of Mexico's poorest citizens. Lacking legitimacy, reforming the economy is pretty-much impossible.

It won't do any good to have Obama shaking Calderón's hand and calling him a courageous leader for fighting the drug war. It's not a test of machismo.

The narco is an insurgency, but not quite. It has no interest in taking power. It has an interest in preventing anyone else from doing so. It will prosper most in an anarchy. Mexico will fall off the brink into anarchy instantly if the president is ever assassinated (got forbid). That's because there is no law of succession. There is only a procedure for choosing a new president, which means up to eighteen months of an interim government, elected by congress upon the president's murder (god forbid). One can't even imagine all the armed groups in this country playing the political process to maneuver themselves into power. So if Calderón's futile display of machismo risks his own life, maybe he's "courageous" but since he's risking anarchy, he's reckless.

Antisemitism

2009-01-07T11:49:00.004-06:00

Indeed as Beverley Milton-Edwards explains in Islamic Politics in Palestine:
[T]he Hamas view of the Jewish people is not drawn solely from the pages of the Qur’an and hadith. Its myopia is also the product of Western anti-Semitic influences.

All the history I've read about Arab/Muslim politics in the twentieth century shows the influence of European-style antisemitism, specifically German and French. This holds true in secular movements, like Ba'ath and religious ones, like the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda. As far as I know, this didn't exist in the Arab/Muslim world before French and German colonization. Jews had lived under the apartheid-like restrictions of Islamic law, but weren't necessarily persecuted, much less the object of genocidal hatred. So Hamas is typical, not an exception.

Syrian state TV put on a multi-part dramatization of the Protocols some years back. One can find copies of the book for sale. Check out the MEMRI website some day. The image I've posted is a screenshot of the front page today. It shows links to articles published more or less in the past month. Two of them—the "apes and pigs" and the "Judgement Day" articles—draw their inspiration from the Koran. Two are inspired in Protocols-style antisemitism—the JFK assassination article by the Syrian economist and the "Columbus" articles. The Protocols are specifically mentioned here. You can see that articles are drawn from all over the Arab/Muslim world. Of course, as you say, there is no lack of evidence that Europeans commonly hold antisemitic beliefs that would shock most Americans.
/>I wonder why it's so hard for people to see that with this background, European "anti-Zionism" and support in general for the Palestinians—so evident today in the Palestinian flag-waving protests in European capitals—looks like an unfolding threat to Israelis and to Jews worldwide. It shouldn't take all that much imagination or empathy to see this. I wouldn't blame Jews for being even more pessimistic than this because European antisemitism is the direct cause of the Zionist movement in the first place. Jews were liberated from the feudal laws were expected to assimilate into the European culture. This was the first solution to the Jewish problem: they should just stop being Jews and become Frenchmen or whatever. That didn't happen. Jews wanted to keep their identity and it really beats me why. Who would want such a thing as a Jewish identity if he could avoid it? I guess that would have been bad enough, but they began to be successful—even to dominate in some places, like Vienna—in business, the arts, science, the professions, and in the academy, when a wave of Jew-hatred and massacres swept Europe. This was when the Zionist movement was founded. Some people just thought that it was hopeless to count on Europeans to make good on their liberal values when it came to them. If it hadn't been for this, today Jews would be living in Europe as they had been for centuries and the Arabs would still have Palestine, for all the good it would do them. For that matter, there wouldn't be any Jews in the US either, since the Jewish immigration was a much better bet for the many millions who escaped from European antisemitism 1880-1920 or so.

Nacimiento Mexicano

2008-12-29T09:49:00.000-06:00

Nacimiento Mexicano

Jesús fue un hongo

2008-12-28T19:38:00.001-06:00

Se trata de un libro que dice que Jesús fue un hongo. Literalmente. Según esto, los evangelios fueron una especie de código secreto de una secta de devotos al hongo alucinógeno. Se trata de un estudio filológico de los evangelios que no tengo ni idea cómo criticar. Puedo imaginar que algún estudioso puede desvirtuar mucho del libro—aunque dudo que podría hacerlo en su totalidad por el grado de detalle que tiene. La cuestión de si su tesis es válido o no seguramente queda muy lejos de comprobar. Pero lo interesante es la reacción convencional: la gente creería que el autor está loco. Pero cualquiera diría que la hipótesis tradicional de Jesús está mucho más loco. La gente cree que hace dos mil años, Dios tuvo un hijo que nació milagrosamente y luego fue sacrificado para redimir los pecados de la humanidad entera, para después revivir, etc etc, y luego acusa a otros de perder contacto con la realidad.

Jesus as Mushroom [Reseña del libro The Sacred Musroom and the Cross, Time
magazine—1970. Liga en inglés] Se trata de un resumen del libro y ofrece un buen retrato de la actitud convencional hacía el libro.

Lo que sigue es para tener alguna experiencia de la polémica:

Council on Spiritual Practices [liga en ingés]
En un libro llamado El Hongo Sagrado y la Cruz, el estudioso John Allegro amplía estas especulaciones con argumentos etimológicos para proponer que el cristianismo se originó como una decepción en la que el rabino Jesús fue investido de las facultades y los nombres del hongo agárico, el verdadero cuerpo de Cristo. En efecto, según Allegro, el cristianismo fue el camuflaje de cultos secretos de hongos cuyo contenido original ha sido perdido. Sus argumentos no son consideradas plausibles por ningún estudioso bíblico, religioso o laico, pero los mencionamos aquí por su interés y audacia.

… el camino de Dios y la vista fugaz de los cielos fue a través de las plantas saturadas de espermas de Dios. Éstas fueron las drogas, cuya ciencia de cultivo y uso se había acumulado a lo largo de siglos de observación y experimento peligroso. ...

Aquellos secretos fueron rara vez plasmados por escrito y sólo con motivos prácticos y urgentes. Normalmente se pasaron del sacerdote al principiante de boca en boca ... Pero si, por alguna razón drástica como la interrupción de sus centros de culto por la guerra o la persecución, se hizo necesario escribir los nombres de las valiosas hierbas y la forma de su utilización y sus encantamentos, sería de alguna forma esotérica, comprensible sólo por los de sus comunidades dispersas.

Tal ocasión, a nuestro juicio, fue la revuelta judía de AD 66. ... El judaísmo se vio perturbada ... Los secretos, si no se había de perder para siempre, tenían que ser plasmados por escrito ...

Los medios de transmitir la información estaban al alcance de la mano, y habían sido durante miles de años. Los cuentos populares de los antiguos habían figurado desde los primeros tiempos—mitos de la personificación de las plantas y árboles. Se investían con facultades y cualidades humanas y sus nombres y características físicas se aplicaban a los héroes y heroínas de las historias. ... Aquí, a continuación, fue el dispositivo literaria para difundir el conocimiento oculto a los fieles. Para contar la historia de un rabino llamado Jesús, y de darle el poder y la magia de los nombres de las drogas. Para que viviera antes de los terribles acontecimientos que habían perturbado la vida, predicara el amor entre hombres, que se extendiera incluso a los odiados romanos. Por lo tanto, al leer este cuento, en caso de que cayera en manos romanas, incluso sus enemigos mortales pudieran ser engañados y no indagarían más en las actividades de las sectas en sus territorios. (páginas XII-XIV)

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross [Edición pirata del libro en inglés. PDF.]

Si vamos a hacer suposiciones informadas acerca de las ideas del hombre "primitivo" acerca de Dios y el universo, la primera sería que serían sencillos y directamente relacionadas con el mundo de su experiencia. Se puede haber dado a dios numerosos epítetos que describían sus diversas funciones y manifestaciones, pero no hay ninguna razón para dudar de que vislumbraban una la realidad detrás de una deidad omnipotente, dador de vida, creador supremo. El examen etimológico de los principales nombres de dios—que es posible ahora—apoya este punto de vista, que apunta al tema común, de la vida y la fecundidad. Así pues, los principales dioses de los griegos y hebreos, Zeus y Yahvé (Jehová), tienen nombres derivados de sumerio que significa "jugo de la fecundidad", los espermatozoides ", las semillas de la vida". La frase se compone de dos sílabas, IA (ya, o, za), "jugo", literalmente "agua fuerte", y U, tal vez la más importante en todo el fonema de la religión del Cercano Oriente. Se encuentra en los textos representados por muchos diferentes signos cuneiformes, pero en la raíz de todos ellos es la idea de "fertilidad". Así pues, una U significa "copular" o "montar" y "crear;" otro significa "tormenta, como fuente de la esperma celestial; otro "vegetación," como la descendencia de los dioses, mientras que otro U es el mismo nombre del dios de la tormenta. Así que, lejos de mostrar la multiplicidad de dioses y nociones de conflicto teológico, nuestros primeros registros nos llevan a una sola idea, inclusive a una sola letra: "U." Detrás de el judaísmo y el cristianismo, y de hecho todas las religiones del Cercano Oriente, se encuentra este fonema único "U."

Sencillamente, el razonamiento de los primeros teólogos parece haber sido la siguiente: ya que la lluvia hace crecer los cultivos, debe contener en su interior la semilla de la vida. En los seres humanos se trata de espermatozoides que se expulsa del pene en el orgasmo. Por lo tanto, sigue la idea de que la lluvia no es más que esperma celestial, del todo poderoso creador, Dios.

Los chorros más enérgicas de esta "semilla" van acompañadas de truenos y el viento. Ésta es la "voz" de Dios en el cielo: un gran pene alcanza un orgasmo que sacude los cielos. El "boca" de la punta del pene, el glande, abierto y la divina semilla brota y en seguida se va por el viento a la tierra. De la mismas manera de que se puede ver la saliva mezclada con la respiración durante el enérgico discurso humano, el "hablar" del divino pene es acompañado por una poderosa ráfaga de viento: el espíritu santo, creativo, que lleva la "saliva" del semen.

Este "saliva" es la parte visible del "discurso" de Dios; es su "Hijo" en el Nuevo Testamento, la "Palabra", que "estaba con Dios y era Dios, y era en el principio con Dios, por medio de las cuales todas las cosas fueron hechas, y sin él no se hizo nada que se hizo. En él estaba la vida. . . "(Juan 1:1-4). En las palabras de los Salmos: "Por la palabra del Señor se hicieron los cielos, y todos sus acogida por el aliento de su boca" (Salmo 33:6), o bien, "cuando se envíe el aliento de su creación, y la faz de la tierra se restaura "(Salmo 104:30).

Esta idea creativa de la Palabra de Dios llegó a tener una profunda importancia filosófica y religiosa y fue, y sigue siendo, objeto de mucho debate metafísico. Pero originalmente no era una noción abstracta: usted podría ver el "Palabra de Dios", se siente como lluvia sobre tu cara, se ve filtrarse en los surcos de la madre tierra, los "labios" de la matriz de la creación. Quemaduras en un fuego eterno que de vez en cuando demuestra su presencia de manera espectacular, por la ruptura de la superficie en un volcán, o de calefacción por agua de manantial a punto de ebullición cuando la corteza terrestre es más delgado. Fue este calor uterino que hizo posible la generación y que más tarde los teólogos identificados con el lugar y medios de castigo eterno.

My personal day of Death

2008-12-28T13:17:00.002-06:00

Monday, June 10, 2024
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