Bush speaks up for America at the UN. Quit the terror - we want peace. It's the right message. Comments in the NY Sun.
"They say that it's the institution..." Thinkin' about blaming it on "the system," at Asst Village Idiot. One quote:
The Zen koan "The Tao that can be described is not the real Tao," applies here. The system that can be described is not the real system. Better to start from the idea that there is no system at all.
Free Willy Nelson! Does this explain his politics? Protein
From the author of Path to 9-11, Cyrus Nowrasteh:
In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, "No." I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings--wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.
Whole piece at Ed Driscoll
Experts want to move the Mississippi to save New Orleans. Why not. What the heck? It's just water, right? NYT Science News
Wish I had written this, quoted from a piece by Malzahn in Spiegel Online:
One thing should be kept in mind, however: The often violent protests that erupted in the Muslim world in the wake of the cartoon controversy have often been manipulated and fuelled by Islamists. The bile currently being flung at the pope is no different.
But the attacks against the pope are especially grotesque. The severe criticism -- often coupled with threats of violence -- directed at the speech held last Tuesday by Benedict XVI is not just an attack on the head of the Catholic Church. The malicious twisting of the pope's words and the absurd allegations made by representatives of Islam represent a frontal attack on open religious and philosophical dialogue.
That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism.
Bending to this demand would be a mistake -- indeed it would be tantamount to turning one's back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next? Perhaps a complaint that Allah feels insulted by the numerous European women who don bikinis during a summer trip to the beach. It could be anything really -- militant Islamists will always find something. But the response needs to be firm.
Big Supermarket is Watching You. How stores study buying behavior to get you to buy more. Science News
My father asks for nothing. He was a ball gunner on a Liberator. Sippican
Dennis Prager interviews Howard Zinn. I won't quote from it, but you have to read it. Unbelievable. They let this bozo write textbooks? His knowledge of history seems so...um... incomplete. Or selective? Almost like he had an agenda or something?
And we feature yet another supposed historian with selective memory of what he learned in school. This is Rick Moran quoted from his piece on Juan Cole's comments on "Moslem sensibilities":
Shooting old women in the back, burning churches, and threatening the life of the leader of a billion Catholics is an excellent demonstration of Muslim “sensibilities” I must say. Cole’s analysis is spot on. Who woulda thunk it? All the burning, and killing, and screaming, and gouging, and stabbing is the fault of the West and our mean old ancestors who told the fanatic’s ancestors that their religion was dirt. Failing that, it is the legacy of those superior airs put on by the Brits and the Frogs that is causing our Muslim brothers so much pain.
Of course, the good professor conveniently forgot to mention the most famous footstools in history – the Ottomans – and their bloody, inhuman rule over the Middle East. By the time Napoleon saw the pyramids, the Ottoman’s had made themselves at home in the region for nearly 300 years. Known as “the sick man of Europe” the Ottoman’s proved that they not only could out-atrocity the west on any given day, but also proved that they could be pretty damn good colonial oppressors themselves even when they weren’t feeling 100%.
Of course, the Ottomans didn’t worship Jesus. They didn’t recognize the Pope’s authority. They never saw the inside of a synagogue (except to set fire to one), nor did they worship, Bal, Babel, Ra, Isis, or any other regional deity. They followed the teachings of the Prophet Muhammed.
Don Surber makes the case FOR pork-barrel spending. Don - that argument is 100 years old, from the days when they didn't have so much of our money to play games with. It is ours, remember. We earned it. Your argument, Don, is that politicians are slimy jerks for whom the pork greases the wheels. I am sure that that is true.
To think like an Islamist, you have to take a time machine to the Dark Ages. Few of us can do this. Quote from a piece by Eric at Classical Values:
There's a crucial difference between the West and its attackers:
the bottom line is simply that we in the western world don't act that way. We don't riot when insulted; we don't burn when inflamed.
That difference is what we in the West naively call civilization. We tend to assume that all people want to be civilized. The enemies of civilization don't. They want to kill us. For things like looking at the wrong pictures. For quoting obscure Byzantine emperors. And what do we do?
We apologize, because among civilized people, an apology is seen as the civilized thing to do when someone is offended. The problem is, uncivilized people see apologies as weakness. No number of apologies is ever enough. Which means one is too many.
Image: That would be a Jersey Cow. A good looking, smaller, and manageable breed of dairy cattle. Read about their history here.
