Tuesday, October 31. 2006
Remarkable - don't miss this: A German scientist did a comparison test to see how many people could tell the difference between the first and second picture. 3 things were different. Only 49 out of 8,000 were able to solve it. Can you? Click below: COMPARISON TEST
 Unanimity on global warming: Samizdata, Tangled Web, YARGB, and Maggie's Farm agree that the Stern Report, and the warming hysteria in general, is a government play for money and power. Now that people in the West are so relatively secure and prosperous, the socialists need a fresh angle.
In the mood for more Soros dirt? Atlas Laptops for wounded soldiers. Info at Sisu "John Kerry said WHAT?" Incredible. Michelle The top earning dead celebs. Businesspundit. Men spend six months of their lives ogling females. Is that all? (h/t, Carnival of the Insanities) Snoopie with the Jihad Christmas. Tasteless! Are we finished with tolerance yet? The decapitated 12 year old. LGF. I have no doubt that this is killing for the pure fun of it. Can angels see the color green? Platonic forms, and God. Evangelical Outpost The almost-dead buck: We posted this a year ago, but Howler reminds us of this goofy trick. Rather hilarious. Amnesty Int. gets one thing right: Protect the internet from governments - and the UN. Kirsten Powers understands an important concept. From a piece about Andrew Sullivan, about whom everyone always is talking (for no reason I can understand): It is a common criticism today that if you divine your truth from the Bible, that is unacceptable. But if you divine your truth from your own internal dialogue or from talking to friends or from a philosophy other than that which is found in the Bible, then that truth is okay. The criticism of devout Christians is founded on a faulty premise: that non-Christians come to conclusions about what they believe without the influence of some sort of philosophical teaching. Even atheism is in itself a philosophy. It's based on the premise that humans are random occurrences and that there is no higher moral power. But since that doesn't come from the Bible, it's considered "objective" and developing public policy based on that view is acceptable. Or Sullivan's brand of Christianity -- that interprets the Bible in a looser fashion -- is held up as being "objective" which of course it is not. Sullivan is just as fundamentalist in his view of the world as any fundamentalist Christian. They just have different conclusions.
Plenty of people are uninformed and make decisions based on what their friends think or party identification, and there is precious little conversation about how the public discourse is being destroyed by uninformed, lazy people who spend all their time watching Fear Factor and The Bachelor (which in my opinion is closer to the truth) and a seemingly constant conversation about how fundamentalist or evangelical Christians are the root of all the problems in the political system.
There must be a separation of church and state, for we are not, nor should we be a theocratic state. But a religious person has as much right to make a voting decision based on their faith in God as an atheist person has a right to make their voting decision based on their belief that there is no God.
Image above: Edvard Munch's "Vampire"
Monday, October 30. 2006
 Another good reason not to run marathons.
Stop The Mercedes? Blair Down at the bottom of a world full of lies: French news. No Pasaran Why Dems are losing the culture wars: USA Today Is boot-licking dead? It deserves another chance. Reasoned Audacity Ace liked Prestige. Might have to actually go to a movie. What he said: (Gay Patriot): While they’re campaigning on banalities and bromides, the Democrats are keeping their real agenda hidden from voters. For, if they make that public, they’d make it clear to voters that they haven’t changed since the American people voted them out of power in 1994. As the Journal puts it: “A Democratic triumph would produce a major shift in the national policy debate, and we can understand why Ms. Pelosi isn’t plastering most of this agenda on billboards around the country.” To see the type of agenda we’d expect from a Democratic Congress, read the Journal’s piece. And you’ll understand why the Democrats have been keeping their focus on the GOP — and neglecting to campaign on their own agenda.
The Camille Paglia piece, a quote via Clayton: What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It's snide, elitist, and politically marginalized. The chattering class clearly has no effect whatever on decision-making in Washington. Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush's decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler's rise. The intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.
Image: Hope this witch comes trick-or-treating to all of you (single) fellows tomorrow night.
 The Monster Mash.
It was a graveyard smash.
 Who knew that the Federal Reserve has programs to make it easy for illegal Mexicans to send their money back home?
Check this out: FRB Services. And the FRB's FAQs for Directo a Mexico. We are paying for this?
A new Episcopalian discovers that it's all about defeating "patriarchy," and about LGBT inclusion. Honestly, I had to think for a minute to figure out that LGBT thing; maybe I need to get out more. A quote: “The Church is the world’s greatest oppressor,” I reasoned, “but God is at work outside the Church, so our mission as Christians is to work to change the Church until it becomes like, you know, those places outside the Church.” It still seemed like I was missing something, but I figured I could think about it later. Bishop Robinson’s talk was, on its surface, all about LGBT inclusion, but he said it actually was about much more than that. At its most basic level, it was about the end of patriarchy, which to him explained why he met with such opposition. The audience nodded approvingly—civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the sexual revolution were all part of a single struggle for liberation, from the Man, or something like that. Freedom, justice, and sex were all the same thing! I liked this idea. Being an Episcopalian, I thought, was going to be fun.
Whole piece at First Things.
 White trash in Europe? You bet. Der Spiegel, (via A&L Daily). Laziness, fast foods, cigarettes and beer...and excellent social benefits.
How nerdy are you? Test here. (h/t, Mr. Free Market) Hiding the cross at William and Mary. Michelle. YARGB wonders whether they want to make sure that the chapel is welcoming to vampires. In seriousness, though, what is more welcoming to all people than a cross? "I never had energy independence with that woman." Flat-out lies from Clinton. Faith and Reason. Dinocrat. With a link to Godel's proof of God's existence. School board member speaks the truth, without realizing it. Coyote From a piece at Atlas, with a killer quote: The invaluable Brussels Journal recently translated an interview with the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from the Belgian paper De Standaard. A Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), Mr. van den Boogaard was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”
Sunday, October 29. 2006
Jerry Lee Lewis on YouTube. The dark side of environmentalism. Trailer of the movie at Samizdata. I'll take one of these and one of those. Twins with different colors. AOL news Astonishing pool trick shots. Eight ball san at RTLC The Big Pharaoh raped a girl, but he has an excuse. Is multiculturalist submission reaching a dead end in the UK? TCS NYT working overtime to defeat Joe Lieberman. Sister Toldjah The states, by ideological impact. Willisms Auster is fed up with the Admin's approach to Iraq: So, Steyn’s question should not have been, “Where is the offense in all this?” His question should have been, “Where is the strategy that can lead to victory?” And that would have brought the president up short. He would have started talking about the love of freedom that beats in every human heart. Or he would have said that we are training the Iraqis so that we can hand over the endless job of insurgency-management to them. Both answers would have shown that we have no strategy to achieve victory and that this war is a fraud. All we are doing is staying in place, keeping total chaos from engulfing Iraq, and getting lots of American men killed and maimed in the process. But that is not war, and that is not victory.
Saturday, October 28. 2006
As usual, when Dust My Broom posts a blues mix, it's pretty darn decent. Last night he included a recording by Roy Buchanan, the guitar legend. (He also has Marcia Ball, the New Orleans piano player and blues belter who I saw in CT a year ago. She is a firecracker.) Roy's bio here. Amazon has some Buchanan recordings.
Thanks to our Aliyah Diary guest author for bringing to our attention Armand Laferrere's essay The Huguenots, the Jews, and Me. Laferrere's piece explains some of the history of the growing links between Protestants and Jews in a hostile world. The book by Matthew Levitt is Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad. Levitt, now deputy assistant secretary for intelligence in the Treasury Department, is interviewed here. Levitt's "Hamas" (AZURE 26, Autumn 2006, reviewed by Leiter) and Laferrere's "The Huguenots, the Jews, and Me" are conceptually
related.
Laferrere's deeply personal essay describes a worldview established by the Reformation, refined by Calvin, and later articulated by Max Weber. This worldview, Laferrere writes persuasively, connects the French Huguenot (Calvinists) and himself to the Jews. Laferrere explains this in terms of the French Catholic persecution of the Huguenots. But Weber teaches us another perspective.
Weber, an economist and sociologist, connected the economic/social rise of capitalism (i.e. the rational group/societal pursuit of economic gain) with Calvinist revision of a religious worldview, a revision begun radically by Martin Luther in his shift from Catholicism to Protestantism, but refined by Calvin. The latter emphasized worldly gain as a sing of salvation, emphasized group/societal wealth along with individual asceticism and modesty. That is, Weber argued, Calvinist "religious" beliefs influenced the
new economic belief and actions of capitalism. In fact, Weber cites Ben Franklin's recasting of Calvinist values into very secular anodyne proverbs about work.
How is this connected to the book, "Hamas"? Levitt argues that the contemporary Western constructs of "religion," "charity," "political versus militant" wings of an organization do not hold for Hamas (nor for Hezbollah, nor for militant Islam, including the Iranian regime). Rather, there is a more seamless fabric of beliefs that cross Western boundaries such as "religion" or "politics" or "economy." A quote from Leiter's review: "...It is in this context that Levitt makes one of his most important contributions to our understanding of how terror works. Fungible funds, it turns out, are only part of the problem. The crossover between dawa and terror, he shows, extends to works of charity themselves. Ambulances are used to transport suicide bomb belts, schools are used to hide weapons, and charitable organizations are used as recruiting centers for terrorists. Hospitals are used to procure ingredients for bombs, such as the nitric acid and hydrogen sulfide used to produce nitroglycerin explosives, and hydrogen peroxide to make an explosive called tatp, which is favored by Hamas. Dawa-supported doctors use their freedom of travel privileges to smuggle suicide bombers into Israel. Likewise, libraries supported by the Hamas dawa are used for the dissemination of radical sermons glorifying death and murder, and in what is perhaps the most potent symbol of the link between dawa and terror, mosques are used for storing weapons and hosting operational meetings. In short, Hamas offers a holistic religious doctrine that treats good works toward coreligionists and terrorization of the enemy as two sides of the same coin."
Ironically, Weber makes an argument that with the rise of Protestant/capitalism, the societal (Catholic) compartmentalization of religion (otherworldliness) and secular become woven together. In fact, a change in religious worldview results in a change in secular action (in contrast to Marx's argument).
Clairvoyantly, the editor of Ha'Aretz, Carlebach wrote in 1956, shortly before his premature death, that the West did not comprehend the way of thought of Arab societies and how different is this way of thinking from the heirs of Western Enlightenment. Carlebach did not use the perhaps more precise concepts nor terms used by Weber, but he seemed to get the basic idea. And, Carlebach argued, if the West didn't get the difference in thinking about human relationships, then it didn't get the great struggle brewing between Islam and the West.
Levitt's book is a conceptual contribution to a Weberian understanding of the worldview of Hamas and related societies. To understand them better is understand the dedicated (mortal) enemies of not only the Jewish States, but also of a way of thinking and being and living together shared in the West.
Nathan Szajnberg, MD
Jerusalem
 Forever young? For women (maybe men, too) 40 is the new 30, and 60 is the new 40. Daily Mail
830. A new record Scrabble score. An ESV Bible trick. Middlebrow. Cool. Why won't France send the army into the banlieus? Too many Moslems in their army? Brussels Journal (h/t, Dino). Great idea - a multicultural army. Will Bin Ladin win the American election? From a piece by Scheuer in Wash. Times (h/t, Env. Republican) Bin Laden, his lieutenants and their allies are no doubt pleased by the destruction of the Spanish and Thai governments and the exhilarating message it sends to the worldwide Islamist movement: The infidels are weak, politically divided, terrified of using full military power and think we can be appeased. In short, war works; keep at it.
Even so, bin Laden, et. al, know the biggest prize looms just ahead — the chance that the Republican Party will be ousted from one or both houses of Congress. There are many factors contributing to this possibility: the Foley abomination, other corruption cases, the trumped?up "crisis" over First Amendment rights and the administration's ill-informed and ham-fisted handling of the Iraq and Afghan wars. If the Republicans are ousted, pundits on both sides of the aisle will find the causes strictly in America's navel.
But what will bin Laden and his Islamist allies think? Well, if Republican defeat comes to pass, they will first thank the Almighty — "Allahu Akhbar!" or "God is the greatest!" — for tangible proof of approaching victory. In Spain, Thailand, and Britain — where Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered the fate of Messrs. Aznar and Thaksin for the same reason, but is leaving gracefully — al Qaeda and its allies see politicians winning power who argue: "The military option has been tried and it has failed. We must seek other-than-martial means to defuse the Islamists' appeal and power." As in Europe and Thailand, this has been the refrain of Sens. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jane Harman, and a swath of Republicans who value their seats more than U.S. security.
If Americans vote for what sounds like sweet reason from the Democrats, bin Laden and company will rejoice. What they will hear is the death knell for any prospect of effective U.S. military resistance to militant Islam. With the Republicans out, the Islamists will be confident that Democrats will deliver the best of both worlds: less emphasis on military force and a rigid maintenance of U.S. foreign policies that are hated with passion and near-unanimity by 1.3 billion Muslims. If Osama approved of music, he would be whistling "Happy Days Are Here Again!"
From Sailing Anarchy: "Hydroptère, the radical 60' hydrofoil trimaran hauling ass. For those who haven't seen it, it is a pretty fascinating thing. Take a look at the "shock absorber" foils." 
Friday, October 27. 2006
We need to create a blogroll category for media-watchers. Here's one dedicated to keeping an eye on the NYT: Timeswatch.
National Health Service update. Protein. Equally poor care for all, as only government could provide. Religion is thriving around the world. Atheists are puzzled. Dinesh D'Souza Dirty old toad-suckin' dog. NPR. Shoot, I ain't sucked a toad since I was in collidge. Government cheese milk. Someone in govt made a good decision, but it looks bad. Milk sold to feed catfish. From Anchoress, in a piece on the Michael Fox campaign advts: The sufferings or privileges of a person’s past should have no bearing on whether or not you will deign to give them an ordinary measure of respect, and victimhood should never confer instant credibility (or unquestioning moral authority) on anyone, and I will not accept the empathetic and well-meaning gesture of my correspondant. I am still the exact same person I was last week, when he considered me more than worth a good tussle, and I will be damned if anyone is going to kid-glove and soft-focus me. Put up yer dukes, pally…you and me ain’t done fighting by a long shot, and don’t you dare freaking pity me and just roll over, or I’ll hammer you senseless.
How can you distinguish Christian love from pitiful submission and dhimmitude? From a piece at Dhimmi Watch: The Protestant Lutheran Church in the German city of Hannover organized an exhibition to acquaint the Germans with Islam. The exhibition, entitled "The Faces of Islam," was the work of the female students of the Protestant Studies Institute in Aachen. On Palm Sunday in 2006, a Protestant church in Bochum, Germany celebrated Muhammad's birthday and invited the local Turkish community to attend the service. A Turkish music band played Sufi music during the service, in which Protestants and Muslims joined together in honor of Muhammad. In the UK, church leaders wanted to invite the families of the London suicide bombers to a national memorial service in honor of the victims. Two senior Church of England bishops believed that extending the invitation to the bombers' families would acknowledge their own loss and send a powerful message of reconciliation to the Muslim community. Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, urged the nation to unite and turn would-be suicide bombers into friends by building "an inclusive circle of love."
In a similar vein, Fjordman warns against "naive compassion" in relation to Islam, in a piece titled Thou Shalt Hate Chrsitianity and Judaism. A quote: The First Commandment of Multiculturalism is: Thou shalt hate Christianity and Judaism. Multiculturalists also hate nation states, and they even hate the Enlightenment, by insisting that non-Western cultures should be above scrutiny.
From Sailing Anarchy: "We recently sailed in a race from St Simon Island GA to Ameilia Island FL with my 70 year old father, brother in law and brother last weekend. We won the race.
In the middle of a 60 feet deep channel between two islands separated by about two miles was a six point buck swimming at about three knots."10/27/06 
If this is what you like, vote for a Dem on November 6th: (from And Rightly So) The following is just a sampling of Nancy Pelosi’s voting record on issues that are critical to mainstream Americans. Pelosi voted: NO on the Border Security Bill
NO on making the Republican tax cuts permanent
NO on eliminating the marriage penalty
NO on eliminating the death tax
NO on creating Health Savings Accounts
NO on the Defense of Marriage Act
NO on the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (and NO on its reauthorization)
NO on protecting the Pledge of Allegiance
NO on banning partial-birth abortion
NO on requiring a photo I.D. to ensure only legal voters vote
NO on the Patriot Act
NO on authorizing domestic tracking of terrorists
* NO on military tribunals and new interrogation rules for terrorist detainees
Any breed of cattle can be - and is - made into hamburger meat, including old Daisy herself, when her milk production slows down. But today we'll just look at two of the historically popular American beef cattle. The Shorthorn is a relatively minor breed now, but when it was brought from England in the late 1700s it became popular. It had its origins in Roman times. This is a bull: 
The Longhorn was brought to the New World by the Spanish, and was the main Western breed until replaced via hybridization, and by other breeds like the Angus and the Hereford, by 1900. Now it only exists on refuges and there are few breeders, but its gene pool might have something to offer today's breeders. 
Legal humor. Consent: the YouTube. (h/t, Overlawyered)
Re the BBC, from a piece in View from the Right: You’ve probably seen the news about the BBC admitting its left-wing bias. Unfortunately, to describe the BBC as biased is a huge understatement. The sheer cold malevolence toward Israel, toward America, toward traditional Britain, toward the West, toward God, toward existence itself that emanates from the BBC newsreaders and reporters is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It chills the soul. Soviet newscasters were mere grumpy apparatchniks by comparison.
Re Jihad, from a piece on Monday in Belmont Club: Just a few hours ago, Sky News published an interview with a Taliban commander in Pakistan who stated his intention to attack Europe. Iraq is mentioned — of course — but not as the casus belli, simply as another theater in a larger campaign. A Taliban commander has told Sky News that the militants are for the first time plotting to attack Westerners in Britain and the rest of Europe. ... Referring to Tony Blair and George Bush, Mullah Amin said: "It's acceptable to kill ordinary people in Europe because these are the people who have voted in the Government. "They came to our home and attacked our women and children. "The ordinary people of these countries are behind this - so we will not spare them. We will kill them and laugh over them like they are killing us and laughing at us." He said Taliban fighters were learning from the Iraq insurgency in their use of remote-controlled bombs, landmines and suicide bombers. He said: "They are our best tactic."
And the casus belli isn't about Afghanistan the nation-state at all either; nobody is fighting for the political independence of a country in the Western sense. It about the clash between the sacred space of Islam with the secular space of Europe. Two-tour Afghan veteran British Army Major Jamie Loden wrote a 25,000 word master's thesis on "The Need For An Ideological Response To Islamic Extremism", described in an interview in the Guardian. Major Loden understood that there was a large element of infidel versus believer in the whole mix; that events in Helmand province and "Leicester and Bradford" were inextricably related. He talked to me about the radical thinker Sayyid Qutb, about shariah law, about the difference between Shia and Sunni jurisprudence. Having addressed Islamic extremism through the library and through the bullet, he believes that US and British strategy is wrong from the foundations up. "You can improve homeland security from a purely physical point of view, you can increase security at airports, but that isn't exactly addressing the issue. Yes, it's making terrorist attacks harder to conduct... It's not addressing the rationale for it." The west had to give more support and publicity to Muslims who were trying to reform Islam from within, he said. The implications of extremism spread way beyond the Middle East. He talked of the notion of "sacred space", the notion that land conquered by Muslims in God's name must remain Muslim and, if lost, recovered. "That means Spain, bits of France... all over the place." Loden said there was a more risky interpretation of the sacred space doctrine which said that land where Muslims had a political majority was actually Muslim land. "So when you have the debate in Leicester and Bradford about separate education, separate areas of the town, you know, communities being allowed to apply their own law - then you are in fact going down a fairly dangerous path."
and It may have been the low cut dresses of American women that first planted the seed which was to grow into al-Qaeda's ideology but it was the blood shed by Marxist torturers that watered it. Qutb and later Osama bin Laden saw Marxism and secularism as agencies of the Devil; but to destroy them it was first necessary to destroy the world's system administrator: the USA. One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are its most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda's pet hates that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats. But the second greatest irony that the surviving non-Muslim believers in Europe — the Christians, Buddhists and Jews — have not only had to bear the intellectual brunt of defending liberalism up to now, but are now being asked to give up the public profession of their own faith in order to preserve it.
Thursday, October 26. 2006
 (Image shamelessly borrowed from Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.)
Our News Junkie made a good point the other day when he mentioned distraction as the Dem election strategery. Like good attorneys, politicians can always find a case to make for themselves, regardless of its relevance - or honor, or honesty. That's their job, and that's why politicians are among the most despised professions in the US. The problem, in a mid-term election like this, is that the nation is prosperous, the economy is great, everyone has a job, the bad guys are on the defensive and leaving us alone here, the old folks have their free medicines, the Dow is up, and all is rosy in America the Beautiful. The Iraq War has turned into little more than an aggressive policing, and they may build a fence to protect us from the Mexican invaders. So clearly the Dems, with their allies in the MSM, have come up with the only logical strategy, or "theory," as we lawyers term it. This theory appears to be "Distract the moron voters:" Don't talk about the economy - talk about Mark Foley.
Don't talk about the Dow - talk about Obama (What's he ever done? You'd think
no-one has ever seen a smart black guy before. Well, I have met plenty.
Ever notice how the MSM applies the (racist, almost; condescending,
definitely) term "articulate black politician" anytime a black guy speaks
grammatical English?) Well, he loves Jesus, and God guides him, which is
just great...in a Dem.
Don't talk about illegal immigration - talk about Vietnam Iraq. It's a debacle
illegal war morass defeat whatever. Oh, and Rumsfeld is a moran.
Don't talk about jobs - talk about corruption - woops, that knife cuts both ways...
never mind. Well, how about embryonic stem cells? Yeah - let's try that. We
care about sick people, unlike those evil, cruel, heartless Repubs who want to
kill our women and children.
Don't talk about Islamic terrorism - Bush seems to have stopped it in the US, for the
moment. Talk about global cooling warming weather whatever. Yeah,
maybe Gore is onto something: Let's run against the weather! Well, but dang
- the weather has been really nice lately.
Don't talk about Iran - talk about WalMart (huh? everyone loves WalMart). Woops.
What else we got? All of the above seasoned with the usual and time-honored "Scare the blacks," "Scare the old folks", "We care," "Let the dead felons vote," "Scare the women who want abortions," "Saddam wasn't all that bad," "Time for a change," and "Promise the suckers more freebies." The MSM is clearly on board with this plan, as expected. My message to the Dems: Tell me plainly what you are FOR, and what you want TO DO, and I will decide how to vote.
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