The Economist has a good backgrounder on Lebanon. This country is in the process of seeing the democratic reforms of the Cedar Revolution undone by the creeping "direct action" of a street mob in Beirut. And the Western media ignore this attempt by a minority of 40% to seize the government by a coup de pouce while they are in a tizzy of fits and snits because President Bush has put his speech on Iraq off until January.
Enter stage left a bumbling second-rate double-digit IQ misfit from Florida who happens to have stumbled into being re-elected by facing a less-than-competent Republican. The photo of Sen. Bill Nelson sitting with Bashar Assad is comic, in an opera bouffe fashion. As the term implies, both of these fellows are buffoons, but Assad is a murderous buffoon who killed Rafiq Hariri and is exerting every effort to halt the UN Investigative Committee's Inquiry by trying to overthrow the Lebanese government. I wonder if Bill the bland buffoon asked Assad the killer buffoon whether he had anything to do with it? Billy did admit to getting Assad to say he's interested in working with the US on the Iraq border and Iraqi internal security issues. But on the only issue that Bashar has any influence over, this criminal told Nelson that Lebanon and Syria's support for Hezbollah and Hamas were none of the US's business.
The Wall Street Journal has a serious article which makes a case for Congress getting more involved, but unfortunately, Nelson isn't the only buffoon wanting to visit Damascus. A real parade of fools, three more of the most mendacious slippery mike-hogging types in Congress, Sens. Dodd, Specter, and of course, J[ust] F[or] Kerry are eager to demonstrate their heft and gravitas by going to Damascus, getting the photo-op sitting next to the stick-insect [can't wait to see the bouffant Kerry and crew-cut baby-Assad photo], and then coming back to be interviewed by "serious" journalists like Baby-Face Russert and Earnest Brian Williams. And don't forget Matt Lauer.
These solons are ostensibly going to Damascus about Iraq, but the Arab world will interpret their visits as paying homage to Assad, thereby increasing this incompetent blustering nitwit's prestige and emboldening him to more excesses in Lebanon, the only place that Assad has real influence.
So serial recidivist megalo-mikehogs like Dodd, Nelson, Specter and Hairdo are going to visit an all-but-open-and-shut-case murderer of the country next door. And giving American foreign influence in the region an even less enviable profile.
President Bush and Condi Rice are going to have to exercise what little political clout they have left, and use it wisely, to restrain these nitwits on their self-promoting junkets.
Ah, but there's always Dennis Kucinich. That photo-op will be precious as this five-foot wonder stands next to six-six stick-insect Assad!
Subscribe To
Posts
All Comments
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Saudis Jockeying for Post-US Withdrawal Era: The BackStories
Saudi Arabia has told Dick Cheney that an American drawdown of troops or withdrawal will result in the support of the Saudis [and left unsaid, other Sunni countries in the region like Egypt and Jordan] of the beleaguered Sunni tribal elements left stranded in a Shi'ite hegemony. The New York Times column by Helene Cooper says:
Okay, are you ready for an even weirder apercu into what is going on?
The fact is that the al-Saud family, the Sabah family in Kuwait, the ruling family of Bahrain, and the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates are all, are you ready for this? These families are all relatively junior:
MEMBERS OF THE MESALIKH BRANCH OF THE UNAIZA CONFEDERATION which is the main congeries of Sunni tribes in the Syrian Desert stretching all the way down to the Yemeni and Omani borders, more or less. By the way, there are other tribes, other confederations, and many "tribeless" Saudis and other Arab affiliations.
But when I was political officer in Saudi, my Arabic language skills and other assiduous strokings of the local greybeards allowed me a peek into what really drives the dynamics of this ancient group of inhabitants living there since the times of Sargon, the first Semitic conqueror of Mesopotamia 4200 years ago.
The dynamics are tribal, and the senior elder graybeards told me that the most senior tribal groupings to whom the Al-Saud, Al-Sabah, Al-Khalifah, and other peninsular rulers are in Iraq, way up at the head of the notional tribal table. And despite the trillions of dollars among the rulers of SAG, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar: They all owe fealty and allegiance and BayH [my Arabic is rusty] to the tribal leaders of Iraq. That's how it's been for thousands of years and although the tribal ethos has diminished, or some say disappeared, there is evidence that the exquisitely conservative and traditional King Abdullah still upholds those tribal traditions of honor and allegiance.
So there is the backstory, in part, of why the Saudis must come to the aid of their Sunni tribal elders in Iraq if summoned. It's an oath of a concept long forgotten in the West and even throughout the rest of the world, the Middle East included.
And there is more to the Turki al-Faisal story:
Prince Bandar bin Sultan was the natural son of Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz and a Sudanese slave woman [or let's call her a household retainer]. He had no royal standing in the family because of his mixed origins until he proposed to Haifa, the sister of Turki Al-Faisal and Saud Al-Faisal, and she accepted, which was extraordinary since parental permission was usually requested before the girl accepted the proposal. This happened in the late '60s and Bandar sealed his newly-acquired royal status when at a majlis he asked King Faisal, father of his bride, what he should be called from now on, since he was married to the King's daughter. Faisal answered, "Prince" Bandar bin Sultan, conferring him with legitimate birth denied him by his own father.
Bandar thus gained parity with his two brothers and went on to become the Ambassador to the United States, while Turki headed Saudi intelligence and Saud the Foreign Ministry. Now Bandar is head of the Saudi National Security Council, which he revealed the existence of to me back in the mid-'70s after a long dinner and evening at his home in Dammam. I wrote it up in an Airgram to the State Dept and was commended for discovering something even the CIA had not known. Personally, by word of mouth, which is the only way to find out what is really going in Saudi Arabia.
So now Bandar, the consummate brash arriviste upstart, and Turki, the suave polished diplomat, are contending for the post that their brother is departing.
Remember the TV series Dynasty, back in the days of J R Ewing and Joan Collins and scheming and manoeuvering? Multiple the stakes by a thousand and the consequences of the outcomes by ten thousand, and then what is happening among the countries in the Middle East comes into perspective.
The Saudis have been wary of supporting Sunnis in Iraq because their insurgency there has been led by extremists of Al Qaeda, who are opposed to the kingdom’s monarchy. But if Iraq’s sectarian war worsened, the Saudis would line up with Sunni tribal leaders.
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who told his staff on Monday that he was resigning his post, recently fired Nawaf Obaid, a consultant who wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post two weeks ago contending that “one of the first consequences” of an American pullout of Iraq would “be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.”
Mr. Obaid also suggested that Saudi Arabia could cut world oil prices in half by raising its production, a move that he said “would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today’s high oil prices.” The Saudi government disavowed Mr. Obaid’s column, and Prince Turki canceled his contract.
But Arab diplomats said Tuesday that Mr. Obaid’s column reflected the view of the Saudi government, which has made clear its opposition to an American pullout from Iraq.
Okay, are you ready for an even weirder apercu into what is going on?
The fact is that the al-Saud family, the Sabah family in Kuwait, the ruling family of Bahrain, and the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates are all, are you ready for this? These families are all relatively junior:
MEMBERS OF THE MESALIKH BRANCH OF THE UNAIZA CONFEDERATION which is the main congeries of Sunni tribes in the Syrian Desert stretching all the way down to the Yemeni and Omani borders, more or less. By the way, there are other tribes, other confederations, and many "tribeless" Saudis and other Arab affiliations.
But when I was political officer in Saudi, my Arabic language skills and other assiduous strokings of the local greybeards allowed me a peek into what really drives the dynamics of this ancient group of inhabitants living there since the times of Sargon, the first Semitic conqueror of Mesopotamia 4200 years ago.
The dynamics are tribal, and the senior elder graybeards told me that the most senior tribal groupings to whom the Al-Saud, Al-Sabah, Al-Khalifah, and other peninsular rulers are in Iraq, way up at the head of the notional tribal table. And despite the trillions of dollars among the rulers of SAG, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar: They all owe fealty and allegiance and BayH [my Arabic is rusty] to the tribal leaders of Iraq. That's how it's been for thousands of years and although the tribal ethos has diminished, or some say disappeared, there is evidence that the exquisitely conservative and traditional King Abdullah still upholds those tribal traditions of honor and allegiance.
So there is the backstory, in part, of why the Saudis must come to the aid of their Sunni tribal elders in Iraq if summoned. It's an oath of a concept long forgotten in the West and even throughout the rest of the world, the Middle East included.
And there is more to the Turki al-Faisal story:
Prince Bandar bin Sultan was the natural son of Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz and a Sudanese slave woman [or let's call her a household retainer]. He had no royal standing in the family because of his mixed origins until he proposed to Haifa, the sister of Turki Al-Faisal and Saud Al-Faisal, and she accepted, which was extraordinary since parental permission was usually requested before the girl accepted the proposal. This happened in the late '60s and Bandar sealed his newly-acquired royal status when at a majlis he asked King Faisal, father of his bride, what he should be called from now on, since he was married to the King's daughter. Faisal answered, "Prince" Bandar bin Sultan, conferring him with legitimate birth denied him by his own father.
Bandar thus gained parity with his two brothers and went on to become the Ambassador to the United States, while Turki headed Saudi intelligence and Saud the Foreign Ministry. Now Bandar is head of the Saudi National Security Council, which he revealed the existence of to me back in the mid-'70s after a long dinner and evening at his home in Dammam. I wrote it up in an Airgram to the State Dept and was commended for discovering something even the CIA had not known. Personally, by word of mouth, which is the only way to find out what is really going in Saudi Arabia.
So now Bandar, the consummate brash arriviste upstart, and Turki, the suave polished diplomat, are contending for the post that their brother is departing.
Remember the TV series Dynasty, back in the days of J R Ewing and Joan Collins and scheming and manoeuvering? Multiple the stakes by a thousand and the consequences of the outcomes by ten thousand, and then what is happening among the countries in the Middle East comes into perspective.
Holocaust Denial No Joke
Last night I watched Jon Stewart do his inimitable [actually slightly imitable by other professional cynics on-line] schtick with Fareed Zakaria, having a gay old time frisking the prez who is always misunderestimated. I actually thought about how this prancing youngish comic was ignoring the huge threat to his co-religionists, or co-genepoolers, in Israel and elsewhere posed by Iran's Holocaust Denial Meeting.
Anne'>http://www.slate.com/id/2155328/?nav=ais">Anne Applebaum at Slate throws cold water on the blissful Panglossian pundits who discount such moronic nonsense as just harmless flimflammery foisted on the Iranian people for the glorification of Ahmedinnejad.
The Holocaust really did happen, but because of some very nasty backstories like the David Irving saga [Irving still languishes in an Austrian jail] and other hypertrophic overreactions, there is always going to be a libertarian strain of historiography that questions the who, what, where, why, and how. Plus the numbers game. But it is not like the Armenians, who were also murdered in mass numbers during World War I for reasons having as much to do with living in a war zone [between and among the Russian and Ottoman Turkish armies] and having large populations both in Turkey and Russia. This was Hitler's deliberate Nacht und Nebel policy for eliminating the Jews [the name came from Wagner's Ring referring to the helm which made one invisible or disappear]. Applebaum wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag which portrays Stalin's archipelago of slave labor camps and Anne speaks and reads every major European language, so I always take her seriously as when she says:
Read the Slate article linked above to get the acidic flavor and weird pro-Nazi background of Ahmedinejad, who like Yasser Arafat had with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, himself had a mentor heavily influenced by Nazi wartime propaganda, and the previous Shah's contention that Iran was the homeland of the Aryan race, which Hitler himself encouraged.
But I would very much like to see Anne Applebaum write the definitive book on Hitler's involvement in the Jewish Holocaust with the same incredible detail and passion that she did with exposing Stalin's decades-long extermination of millions through forced labor.
Anne'>http://www.slate.com/id/2155328/?nav=ais">Anne Applebaum at Slate throws cold water on the blissful Panglossian pundits who discount such moronic nonsense as just harmless flimflammery foisted on the Iranian people for the glorification of Ahmedinnejad.
the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Thiel, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Töben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers. The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited. One Palestinian scholar, Khaled Ksab Mahamid, was asked to come but was then barred because he holds an Israeli passport—and also perhaps because he, unlike other guests, believes that the Holocaust really did happen.
The Holocaust really did happen, but because of some very nasty backstories like the David Irving saga [Irving still languishes in an Austrian jail] and other hypertrophic overreactions, there is always going to be a libertarian strain of historiography that questions the who, what, where, why, and how. Plus the numbers game. But it is not like the Armenians, who were also murdered in mass numbers during World War I for reasons having as much to do with living in a war zone [between and among the Russian and Ottoman Turkish armies] and having large populations both in Turkey and Russia. This was Hitler's deliberate Nacht und Nebel policy for eliminating the Jews [the name came from Wagner's Ring referring to the helm which made one invisible or disappear]. Applebaum wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag which portrays Stalin's archipelago of slave labor camps and Anne speaks and reads every major European language, so I always take her seriously as when she says:
the near-destruction of the European Jews in a very brief span of time by a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available was, it seems, an event that requires constant re-explanation, not least because it really did shape subsequent European and world history in untold ways. For that reason alone, the archives, the photographs, and the endless rebuttals will go on being necessary, long beyond the lifetime of the last survivor.
Read the Slate article linked above to get the acidic flavor and weird pro-Nazi background of Ahmedinejad, who like Yasser Arafat had with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, himself had a mentor heavily influenced by Nazi wartime propaganda, and the previous Shah's contention that Iran was the homeland of the Aryan race, which Hitler himself encouraged.
But I would very much like to see Anne Applebaum write the definitive book on Hitler's involvement in the Jewish Holocaust with the same incredible detail and passion that she did with exposing Stalin's decades-long extermination of millions through forced labor.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Shell Crumbles on Sakhalin: BP Next Target
Russia is employing its normal brutal methods in breaking contracts signed in the early '90s when the opening up of Russia gave oil internationals like Shell and BP access to great deals.
One of the reasons BP bought Amoco Corp where I used to work was to get the large Russian gas fields and other good plays that Amoco had sagely negotiated.
Russia in its implacable clumsy ham-handed fashion is buying and bribing and strong-arming its way into putting the EU into an energy vise.
No media outlet has noted that Russian pressure on Georgia aims someday to influence or control the Baku/Ceyhan pipeline transiting Georgia and ensuring its energy independence from Russia, along with income from pipeline fees.
But the larger goal would be to pinch off the hose from the Azerbaijan oil spigot and put that country under the Russian sphere of influence.
The Russians are cozying up to Iran for the same reason, and along with China are going to support Iran's nuclear weapon development in the UN for "raisons d'etat" that have more to do with energy than any other goal. Russia has even got Iranian support for its brutal Chechen campaign, although the Muslims in Chechnya are ethnically and linguistically Iranian. Armenia is also an ally with both Iran and Moscow in the Russian near-abroad phalanx moving to take over control of the Caucasus.
Now if the Iranians can somehow control or even preponderantly influence Iraqi energy after the US defeatists manage to cut and depart from that sad country, the Saudis and Gulfies will cower. Believe me, they are afraid of Iran all by itself, and under the combined weight of natural gas powerhouses like Russia, Iran, and tiny Qatar, will bend in the new wind blowing from the north and east. Among the three of them, they have more than 50% of the world's proven gas reserves.
Jonathan Stern of London's OxfordEnergy may disagree, but as Ukraine found out early this year, the Russians play hardball without gloves, in the middle of winter!
Vladimir Putin's may be uttering platitudes that the March 2006 EU Green Energy Policy gurus to the extent that these ostriches don't foresee a problem, but the IEA World Energy Outlook note there is more than one cloud out there on the horizon.
And an OPEC for Natural Gas, with Venezuela hosting this year's Forum [the Venz don't even have a gas export program yet], is in an inchoate nascent stage. This ONGEC might be to the 21st century 20 years down the road, what the Oil Exporter's OPEC was in the twentieth.
Dick Cheney for one is concerned, and a lot of EU countries are starting to stir from their slumber, although German Judas-Goat Gerhard Schroeder at Gazprom's pipeline keeps lulling them back to sleep.
Like a chess player, Putin in his mid-fifties may be planning strategically with a lot of moves already in his head. We'll know for sure what's up if he decides to overthrow the Constitution and run for a third term next year. [Oops, I meant revise the Constitution!]
But to end on a high note, there is one joker in the pack. And that is the continuing development of oil and gas extraction technology far beyond what is anticipated. That has been the case since I first got acquainted with the oil industry and may continue, in the which-case, the entire scenario will be rosier.
Unless Al Gore is elected Prez in '08 and Global Warming hysteria causes the collective collapse of energy exploration and development.
One of the reasons BP bought Amoco Corp where I used to work was to get the large Russian gas fields and other good plays that Amoco had sagely negotiated.
Russia in its implacable clumsy ham-handed fashion is buying and bribing and strong-arming its way into putting the EU into an energy vise.
No media outlet has noted that Russian pressure on Georgia aims someday to influence or control the Baku/Ceyhan pipeline transiting Georgia and ensuring its energy independence from Russia, along with income from pipeline fees.
But the larger goal would be to pinch off the hose from the Azerbaijan oil spigot and put that country under the Russian sphere of influence.
The Russians are cozying up to Iran for the same reason, and along with China are going to support Iran's nuclear weapon development in the UN for "raisons d'etat" that have more to do with energy than any other goal. Russia has even got Iranian support for its brutal Chechen campaign, although the Muslims in Chechnya are ethnically and linguistically Iranian. Armenia is also an ally with both Iran and Moscow in the Russian near-abroad phalanx moving to take over control of the Caucasus.
Now if the Iranians can somehow control or even preponderantly influence Iraqi energy after the US defeatists manage to cut and depart from that sad country, the Saudis and Gulfies will cower. Believe me, they are afraid of Iran all by itself, and under the combined weight of natural gas powerhouses like Russia, Iran, and tiny Qatar, will bend in the new wind blowing from the north and east. Among the three of them, they have more than 50% of the world's proven gas reserves.
Jonathan Stern of London's OxfordEnergy may disagree, but as Ukraine found out early this year, the Russians play hardball without gloves, in the middle of winter!
Vladimir Putin's may be uttering platitudes that the March 2006 EU Green Energy Policy gurus to the extent that these ostriches don't foresee a problem, but the IEA World Energy Outlook note there is more than one cloud out there on the horizon.
And an OPEC for Natural Gas, with Venezuela hosting this year's Forum [the Venz don't even have a gas export program yet], is in an inchoate nascent stage. This ONGEC might be to the 21st century 20 years down the road, what the Oil Exporter's OPEC was in the twentieth.
Dick Cheney for one is concerned, and a lot of EU countries are starting to stir from their slumber, although German Judas-Goat Gerhard Schroeder at Gazprom's pipeline keeps lulling them back to sleep.
Like a chess player, Putin in his mid-fifties may be planning strategically with a lot of moves already in his head. We'll know for sure what's up if he decides to overthrow the Constitution and run for a third term next year. [Oops, I meant revise the Constitution!]
But to end on a high note, there is one joker in the pack. And that is the continuing development of oil and gas extraction technology far beyond what is anticipated. That has been the case since I first got acquainted with the oil industry and may continue, in the which-case, the entire scenario will be rosier.
Unless Al Gore is elected Prez in '08 and Global Warming hysteria causes the collective collapse of energy exploration and development.
Kaus Asks if Clintons Bugged Lady Di for Politics
Mickey Kaus has the real deal on why the US was collecting intercepts on Princess Di. And as the argot of the time would have it, it's "absolutely fabulous."
Mickey surmises that Di's boy-toy billionaire Teddy Forstmann was gearing up to run as the Republican candidate against Hillary in 2000, before Billy Jeff got his knickers in more than a twist with Monica L and scotched Hillary's chances, if she ever had any.
Can you imagine? Clinton and femme using NSA intercepts to spy politically?
Obviously, ABC and CBS are trying to throw dust in the air, as they acutely divine that it had to do with Diana's campaign about land-mines. Oh yeah, land mines! That's the ticket!! We're still waiting for Matt Lauer to weigh in over at NBC!!
And let's bug her about school vouchers, another grave threat to America's national security!
Can you imagine the supersleuth cavalcade of questions had the Bush Administration been implicated in wiretapping and intercepts, with David Gregory in the vanguard after getting his marching orders from Jamie Gorelick, who got his wife a gazillion-dollar-a-year job at Fanny Mae?
Di was a definite terrorist threat---to the Clinton's plans for a dynasty, that is!
Mickey surmises that Di's boy-toy billionaire Teddy Forstmann was gearing up to run as the Republican candidate against Hillary in 2000, before Billy Jeff got his knickers in more than a twist with Monica L and scotched Hillary's chances, if she ever had any.
Can you imagine? Clinton and femme using NSA intercepts to spy politically?
Obviously, ABC and CBS are trying to throw dust in the air, as they acutely divine that it had to do with Diana's campaign about land-mines. Oh yeah, land mines! That's the ticket!! We're still waiting for Matt Lauer to weigh in over at NBC!!
And let's bug her about school vouchers, another grave threat to America's national security!
Can you imagine the supersleuth cavalcade of questions had the Bush Administration been implicated in wiretapping and intercepts, with David Gregory in the vanguard after getting his marching orders from Jamie Gorelick, who got his wife a gazillion-dollar-a-year job at Fanny Mae?
Di was a definite terrorist threat---to the Clinton's plans for a dynasty, that is!
UPDATE Saudi Amb leaves DC as Lebanon Democratic Struggle Ignored by Media
Lebanon is slowly sinking into a quicksand quagmire swamp as the pro-Syrian President Lahoud protects his paymaster stick-insect Assad from UN prosecution. The street movements in Beirut instigated by Hezbollah terrorists and Christian turncoats are trying to subvert:
What's interesting besides the US MSM indifference to the subversion of democracy in a key Middle East state that could serve as a launching pad for nuclear terror into Israel, is the reaction of GCC leaders to the Iranian nuclear menace itself.
The GCC Chief had the following profound observation about:
Whew! Now we can rest easy in our sleep, as can the Israelis. Abdulrahman has assured us there's nothing to worry about. But King Abdullah actually noticed something a bit awry about the situation in the Middle East:
Oh yeah! The West watches without rushing to help the Palestinians, who will not recognize and have vowed to destroy a member of the United Nations and a country that the Saudis themselves recently offered to recognize in the 2002 Ta'if proposals. And Hamas gunmen kill three kids from 3 to 9 years old because they are the children of the PA President Abbas.
How is this the West's fault? Except that Condi Rice had been gulled into allowing Hamas to participate in West Bank elections, which surprised everybody by electing a bunch of terrorists to "govern" legislatively.
But Kofi Annan ignores the rejection of the UN investigation of the Hariri murder last year and points fingers at the USA for 1] interceding militarily in Iraq and 2] NOT interceding militarily in Darfur.
CLUE TO THE ABOVE: The Middle East's a jigsaw puzzle, and most of the parts just don't fit with each other!
Just to make the pot begin the transition from a simmer to a boil, the report comes from Washington that long-time Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal has abruptly departed DC and headed back to Riyadh to "spend more time with his family" which in reality means lobbying for the job of Foreign Minister his ailing brother Saud is about to relinquish.
[Boring anecdote: In the most embarrassing moment of my foreign service career, I was translating between the American Ambassador and then-Crown Prince Abdullah and although I could translate the stuttering Abdullah easily to the US Ambassador, the Crown Prince said he couldn't quite understand my Arabic which had deteriorated in long conversations with my Sudanese houseboy. Turki Faisal was head of intelligence and miraculously appeared and said, "it's okay, Dave, I can take over" and proceeded to rescue the conversation.]
This is good news for the USA, as Turki is an Anglo-Americanophile, if he can get the job. But there are other candidates who reflect the views of the strange GCC SecGen waiting in the wings, and hopefully Turki will be able to outmanoeuver them.
The anti-Syrian leaders who control cabinet say the opposition is trying to stage a coup against Siniora's government to derail plans for an international tribunal to try suspects in the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.
What's interesting besides the US MSM indifference to the subversion of democracy in a key Middle East state that could serve as a launching pad for nuclear terror into Israel, is the reaction of GCC leaders to the Iranian nuclear menace itself.
The GCC Chief had the following profound observation about:
Iran's growing role in Iraq and its standoff with the West over Tehran's nuclear program, although GCC Secretary General Abdulrahman al-Attiyah said the GCC states do not feel threatened by the Islamic republic.
"The United States talks openly of the danger of Iranian military activity in the region, but our countries do not feel threatened by Tehran. Iranian officials assure us that their nuclear program is peaceful," Attiyah said.
Whew! Now we can rest easy in our sleep, as can the Israelis. Abdulrahman has assured us there's nothing to worry about. But King Abdullah actually noticed something a bit awry about the situation in the Middle East:
"Our Arab region is besieged by a number of dangers, as if it was a powder keg waiting for a spark to explode," he told the rulers of the oil-rich monarchies gathered in Riyadh for a two-day meeting to the backdrop of mounting sectarian violence in neighboring Iraq.
The Palestinians were reeling from "a hostile and ugly occupation" by Israel while the international community watched their "bloody tragedy like a spectator," Abdullah said.
But "most dangerous for the (Palestinian) cause is the conflict among brethren," he said in a reference to the differences between Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah faction and the Islamist Hamas movement that have blocked the formation of a unity government.
In Iraq "a brother is still killing his brother," Abdullah said of the tit-for-tat killings between the Sunni Arab former elite and the ruling Shiite majority.
Abdullah also warned that Lebanon, which was rocked by civil war in 1975-1990, risked sliding into renewed civil strife as a result of the current standoff between pro- and anti-Syrian camps. "In Lebanon, we see dark clouds threatening the unity of the homeland, which risks sliding again into... conflict among the sons of the same country," he said.
Oh yeah! The West watches without rushing to help the Palestinians, who will not recognize and have vowed to destroy a member of the United Nations and a country that the Saudis themselves recently offered to recognize in the 2002 Ta'if proposals. And Hamas gunmen kill three kids from 3 to 9 years old because they are the children of the PA President Abbas.
How is this the West's fault? Except that Condi Rice had been gulled into allowing Hamas to participate in West Bank elections, which surprised everybody by electing a bunch of terrorists to "govern" legislatively.
But Kofi Annan ignores the rejection of the UN investigation of the Hariri murder last year and points fingers at the USA for 1] interceding militarily in Iraq and 2] NOT interceding militarily in Darfur.
CLUE TO THE ABOVE: The Middle East's a jigsaw puzzle, and most of the parts just don't fit with each other!
Just to make the pot begin the transition from a simmer to a boil, the report comes from Washington that long-time Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal has abruptly departed DC and headed back to Riyadh to "spend more time with his family" which in reality means lobbying for the job of Foreign Minister his ailing brother Saud is about to relinquish.
[Boring anecdote: In the most embarrassing moment of my foreign service career, I was translating between the American Ambassador and then-Crown Prince Abdullah and although I could translate the stuttering Abdullah easily to the US Ambassador, the Crown Prince said he couldn't quite understand my Arabic which had deteriorated in long conversations with my Sudanese houseboy. Turki Faisal was head of intelligence and miraculously appeared and said, "it's okay, Dave, I can take over" and proceeded to rescue the conversation.]
This is good news for the USA, as Turki is an Anglo-Americanophile, if he can get the job. But there are other candidates who reflect the views of the strange GCC SecGen waiting in the wings, and hopefully Turki will be able to outmanoeuver them.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Reyes A Bit Slow on the Uptake
Speaking of Chairman Nancy, her choice for Intelligence Committee Chairman, Sylvester Reyes who has had just a little time to bone up on terrorists since the 9/11 attacks, allowed today to a Congressional Quarterly interviewer that Al Qaeda were Shi'ites.
That must be news to Usama, who has issued a death fatwa to all Shi'ites, who are to be killed on sight or any occasion when it seems fit to advance the agenda of the Religion of Peace. But UbL might have done a double-secret resignation of his AQ duties and the organization might have changed completely personnel-wise, and only Reyes and Harman and Alcee babester and a few Repubs are party to the secret. Or not?
Or maybe Reyes makes George Bush Jr. look like Henry Kissinger? Is that remotely possible?
Or is someone, as the genteel mataphor employed in Texas to describe such a situation, dumber than a bucket of hair?
That must be news to Usama, who has issued a death fatwa to all Shi'ites, who are to be killed on sight or any occasion when it seems fit to advance the agenda of the Religion of Peace. But UbL might have done a double-secret resignation of his AQ duties and the organization might have changed completely personnel-wise, and only Reyes and Harman and Alcee babester and a few Repubs are party to the secret. Or not?
Or maybe Reyes makes George Bush Jr. look like Henry Kissinger? Is that remotely possible?
Or is someone, as the genteel mataphor employed in Texas to describe such a situation, dumber than a bucket of hair?
Democrats Talking to Terrorists?
The Dems are the party of defeat and they also don't mind yammering with terrorists, as talk is all they ever do. The terrorist-spokesman in this article claims some Dems, senior ones at that [as in senile like Jimmy Carter?], are talking to Hamas concerning their gentle requests, make that harsh demands, to Israel to butt out of everywhere pre-'67. That's when their glorious leader Nasser declared war on Israel and, oops, they call it the Nakhda, if my Arabic serves me well.
But no post would be worthwhile if a little poke at Nancy, the-geopolitical-genius- who's-smarter-than-Jane-Harman, Pelosi weren't part of the festivities. Nancy is the subject of Hamas terrorist mirth because she made another of her egregious solecisms. This one was
and of course the MSM never reflected on that for a moment, as it wouldn't earn David Gregory brownie points with his Dem masters, and the only people to catch the vibe were Mr. Loathesome, who understood Nancy's body language perfectly:
But Nancy represents a city that desires great defeats for America, so that their Panglossian paradise on the Bay is free of US military recruiters and they can sodomize themselves silly until, of course, the Yoom ad-Diin shows up. Then they will have their final frissons as their throats are slit like sheep prior to their heads being removed as trophies to be orally assaulted sexually, just as though they were still alive!
Hope I wasn't too harsh on Nancy's home district and the city on the Bay!
But no post would be worthwhile if a little poke at Nancy, the-geopolitical-genius- who's-smarter-than-Jane-Harman, Pelosi weren't part of the festivities. Nancy is the subject of Hamas terrorist mirth because she made another of her egregious solecisms. This one was
In a recent interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, stated, "The jihadists (are) in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. They'll stay there as long as we're there."
and of course the MSM never reflected on that for a moment, as it wouldn't earn David Gregory brownie points with his Dem masters, and the only people to catch the vibe were Mr. Loathesome, who understood Nancy's body language perfectly:
WND read Pelosi's remarks to the terror leaders, who unanimously rejected her contention an American withdrawal would end the insurgency.
Islamic Jihad's Saadi, laughing, stated, "There is no chance that the resistance will stop."
He said an American withdrawal from Iraq would "prove the resistance is the most important tool and that this tool works. The victory of the Iraqi revolution will mark an important step in the history of the region and in the attitude regarding the United States."
Jihad Jaara said an American withdrawal would "mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (U.S.)."
"Therefore, a victory in Iraq would be a greater defeat for America than in Vietnam."
But Nancy represents a city that desires great defeats for America, so that their Panglossian paradise on the Bay is free of US military recruiters and they can sodomize themselves silly until, of course, the Yoom ad-Diin shows up. Then they will have their final frissons as their throats are slit like sheep prior to their heads being removed as trophies to be orally assaulted sexually, just as though they were still alive!
Hope I wasn't too harsh on Nancy's home district and the city on the Bay!
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Baker & Co Inane Second-Rate Gran'pa's Engendering Surrender?
Mark Steyn has brilliantly distilled the ISG for what it is, a mixtum-gatherum of every placebo and nostrum available except common sense. First Mark notes the terrific squad of talented senior UN officials who for the moment are grabbing bench:
Not that there aren't a lot of interested carrion-corps in the carcass-munching menagerie collecting around and vultures above the remnants of a faltering democratic Iraq, but there is one notable exception:
Instapundit notes that "looks like the sellout isn't selling."
Flopping Aces appreciates Steyn's crushing punch-line: "the reductio-ad-absurdum of diplomatic self-adulation: [Baker] has become less rational than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad." and then points out Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's characterization of the ISG Study as "an insult to the people of Iraq."
Steyn continues:
Dar4.1 is the best description of the so-called international consensus I have read for many a moon. Encapsulates the feckless incompetence and hectoring impotence of Kofi Annan multiplied a hundredfold by condescending censorious inaction by everyone in the UN & EU arena, and endless lip-flapping by the chattering nabobs of niggling nitwittery. The system's broke, flat broke and en panne and broken down and no collection of fuddie-duddies recommending everyone except Israel into the fun and games---Israel gets to give Palestinians the right of return---are going to fix it. Not Ban-ni-Moon nor the fiats of the MSM nomenklaturas and their lap-preppies can conjure up a solution. Except surrender, which is what the ISG is trying to engender.
Powerline has a skeptical photo of Hillary and her comment "We need an Iraq Results Group" as indicating less than complete happiness with the ISG recommendations.
Jules Crittenden notes that George W. Bush, for one, is not going to be browbeaten by a collection of has-beens who never ventured out of the Green Zone.
Despite the insects buzzing in his ears and the mongrels barking at his heels, GWB is still a majority of one.
". . . the Support Group should call on the participation of the United Nations Secretary-General in its work. The United Nations Secretary-General should designate a Special Envoy as his representative . . ."
Indeed. But it needs to be someone with real clout, like Benon Sevan, the former head of the Oil for Food Program, who recently, ah, stepped down; or Maurice Strong, the Under-Secretary-General for U.N. Reform and godfather of Kyoto, who for one reason or another is presently on a, shall we say, leave of absence; or Alexander Yakovlev, the senior procurement officer for U.N. peacekeeping, who also finds himself under indictment -- er, I mean under-employed. There's no end of top-class talent at the U.N., now that John Bolton's been expelled from its precincts.
Not that there aren't a lot of interested carrion-corps in the carcass-munching menagerie collecting around and vultures above the remnants of a faltering democratic Iraq, but there is one notable exception:
"Arabs, Persians, Chinese commies, French obstructionists, Russian assassination squads. But no Jews. Even though Israel is the only country to be required to make specific concessions -- return the Golan Heights, etc. Indeed, insofar as this document has any novelty value, it's in the Frankenstein-meets-the-Wolfman sense of a boffo convergence of hit franchises: a Vietnam bug-out, but with the Jews as the designated fall guys."
Instapundit notes that "looks like the sellout isn't selling."
Flopping Aces appreciates Steyn's crushing punch-line: "the reductio-ad-absurdum of diplomatic self-adulation: [Baker] has become less rational than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad." and then points out Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's characterization of the ISG Study as "an insult to the people of Iraq."
Steyn continues:
So there you have it: an Iraq "Support Group" that brings together the Arab League, the European Union, Iran, Russia, China and the U.N. And with support like that who needs lack of support? It worked in Darfur, where the international community reached unanimous agreement on the urgent need to rent a zeppelin to fly over the beleaguered region trailing a big banner emblazoned "YOU'RE SCREWED." For Dar4.1, they can just divert it to Baghdad.
Dar4.1 is the best description of the so-called international consensus I have read for many a moon. Encapsulates the feckless incompetence and hectoring impotence of Kofi Annan multiplied a hundredfold by condescending censorious inaction by everyone in the UN & EU arena, and endless lip-flapping by the chattering nabobs of niggling nitwittery. The system's broke, flat broke and en panne and broken down and no collection of fuddie-duddies recommending everyone except Israel into the fun and games---Israel gets to give Palestinians the right of return---are going to fix it. Not Ban-ni-Moon nor the fiats of the MSM nomenklaturas and their lap-preppies can conjure up a solution. Except surrender, which is what the ISG is trying to engender.
Powerline has a skeptical photo of Hillary and her comment "We need an Iraq Results Group" as indicating less than complete happiness with the ISG recommendations.
Jules Crittenden notes that George W. Bush, for one, is not going to be browbeaten by a collection of has-beens who never ventured out of the Green Zone.
Despite the insects buzzing in his ears and the mongrels barking at his heels, GWB is still a majority of one.
Carter book reviewed in WaPo: Readers React
The Washington Post has done the nation a favor, given one of America's best writers the task of :
I'm so glad that Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the NEW YORKER's best writers and the author of a moving book on Arabs and Israelis living together in peace, unmasks this petty little fraud again pretending to be a foreign policy guru. The serial eff-up peanut-farmer who managed to deny the Shah rubber bullets, so that his police slaughtered hundreds of students and ignited the return of the Ayatollah, is again plying his foreign policy nostrums for the ultra-left Jew-bashing [including many self-bashing Jews] Israel-hating, America-loathing haters. [Oh yeah, I forgot that Carter's perceived lack of testoserone induced Brezhnev and his buddies to invade Afghanistan, correctly divining that Carter would respond symbolically and shambolically.] Then there were the double-digit interest rates and inflation rates.
Carter hates Israel and intensely dislikes American Jews who support Israel. He is a whinging egomaniac who is an asteroid pretending to be a planet.
Thank God the American people correctly jettisoned this impostor and elected a real leader, Ronald Reagan, who along with Maggie Thatcher and the Pope greased the skids for the USSR.
Think lil Gee-Mah could have managed that? He was too busy micro-managing the White House tennis courts.
Carter is worse that GWB or Clinton or any US president since LBJ.
A couple of comments on Jimmy are rich and on-the-mark:
Another blogger notes this little hypocrite's two-faced nature:
Another reader comments on the swarm of ultra-left Arab-loving, terrorist-supporters who have bashed Goldberg, one of America's best writers, and spewed their hatred of Israel, the only effectively-functioning democracy in the region [Lebanon is hanging on by its fingernails]:
A final salvo:
Carter is convinced that the Israelis and their American friends collaborated in getting Teddy Kennedy, John Anderson, and Ronald Reagan together in a cabal to disallow a second term for him, and he has been prancing about for decades trying to get back into the limelight.
His hilarious election-monitoring mishaps anger NGO professionals, who watched him prance into Ethiopia last year, declare an election hunky-dory, and leave while the post-election disputes turned bloody---because of widespread election fraud.
His Iranian hostage gene is still operating on overdrive, and his wrong-headed take on the world makes him appear ridiculous and self-referential.
This is an untalented, meddlesome, intrusive second-rater who somehow fluked into become a one-term wonder. That will be history's epitaph, and all his poseur and hypocritical "Christian" twaddle simply makes evangelical Christians despise him as much as Catholics and thoughtful Protestant High Church types do.
I'm so glad that Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the NEW YORKER's best writers and the author of a moving book on Arabs and Israelis living together in peace, unmasks this petty little fraud again pretending to be a foreign policy guru. The serial eff-up peanut-farmer who managed to deny the Shah rubber bullets, so that his police slaughtered hundreds of students and ignited the return of the Ayatollah, is again plying his foreign policy nostrums for the ultra-left Jew-bashing [including many self-bashing Jews] Israel-hating, America-loathing haters. [Oh yeah, I forgot that Carter's perceived lack of testoserone induced Brezhnev and his buddies to invade Afghanistan, correctly divining that Carter would respond symbolically and shambolically.] Then there were the double-digit interest rates and inflation rates.
Carter hates Israel and intensely dislikes American Jews who support Israel. He is a whinging egomaniac who is an asteroid pretending to be a planet.
Thank God the American people correctly jettisoned this impostor and elected a real leader, Ronald Reagan, who along with Maggie Thatcher and the Pope greased the skids for the USSR.
Think lil Gee-Mah could have managed that? He was too busy micro-managing the White House tennis courts.
Carter is worse that GWB or Clinton or any US president since LBJ.
A couple of comments on Jimmy are rich and on-the-mark:
The review offers an excellent insight. Carter`s insufferable sanctimony and megalomaniacal messiah complex are always annoying, but in this case are downright dangerous. He is in point of fact a dolt and a boob and should please just shut up. [P.S. Apparently Rev. Jimmy considers himself exempt from the commandment against stealing, at least when it comes to others` intellectual property.] zjr98xva
Another blogger notes this little hypocrite's two-faced nature:
it nails the reason for Carter to write this book: the attempt to make a Christian case for throwing Israel to the dogs. It also highlights the central problem with Carter from day one: He basically ran as an evangelical Christian, while rejecting most of what evangelical Christians believe to be true, at least politically. Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly are patriotic, anti-abortion, conservative, free-market oriented, favorably disposed to Israel, in favor of a strong defense, and always saw Communism as a totalitarian and inhumane system. Carter, on the other hand, never met a dictator he didnt worship, cared nothing for defending American interests, didnt even attempt to discourage abortion, had no use for welfare reform, was always hostile to Israel, and spent the four years of his administration trying to appease the Palestinians, the Communists, the radical Shiites, and basically every two-bit dictator that came along. He tried to cast himself as the Human Rights president, but cozied up to the worst human rights offenders. Though talking like an evangelical, he in every way aligned himself against them. And as an ex-president, he's worse.
Another reader comments on the swarm of ultra-left Arab-loving, terrorist-supporters who have bashed Goldberg, one of America's best writers, and spewed their hatred of Israel, the only effectively-functioning democracy in the region [Lebanon is hanging on by its fingernails]:
I cannot even begin to comprehend the continued unwavering criticism of Israel by the posters here. An overwhelming majority of Leadership and populace in the Arab world openly states to the entire world that it seeks only the complete destruction of Israel. No negotiations for peace, no demands that Israel treat the Palestenians fairly and equally. Just complete and total destruction. Is Israel perfect? No. But they attempt to live peacefully and isolated on land provided by world authority. They do not boast of only a world with complete and total Arab and Palestenian destruction. They are trying to live safely on land given to them and taken in defense during an overwhelming agression by its neighbors. Israels use of force and militarization is a result of defense of itself, not a landgrab. Have your local neighborhoods seek your neighborhoods complete and total destruction while sending suicide bombers and missles into your front lawn. You might tighten up security too.
A final salvo:
I agree that Jimmy Carter is senile and, for whatever reason, an embittered anti semite. But I disagree that Bill Clinton or Carter or Bush or Reagan or any American politician have made any significant difference in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Things there seem to be basically unchanged after 40 years.
Carter is convinced that the Israelis and their American friends collaborated in getting Teddy Kennedy, John Anderson, and Ronald Reagan together in a cabal to disallow a second term for him, and he has been prancing about for decades trying to get back into the limelight.
His hilarious election-monitoring mishaps anger NGO professionals, who watched him prance into Ethiopia last year, declare an election hunky-dory, and leave while the post-election disputes turned bloody---because of widespread election fraud.
His Iranian hostage gene is still operating on overdrive, and his wrong-headed take on the world makes him appear ridiculous and self-referential.
This is an untalented, meddlesome, intrusive second-rater who somehow fluked into become a one-term wonder. That will be history's epitaph, and all his poseur and hypocritical "Christian" twaddle simply makes evangelical Christians despise him as much as Catholics and thoughtful Protestant High Church types do.
UN, Yes, UN decides Global Warming May be Oversold
The Daily Telegraph reports that the UN is coming out with a report next year which will ratchet down estimates on the effect that man-made carbon dioxide and other emissions have on global climate.
The UN thinks the doom-and-gloom crowd may protest too much:
However, the Big Science Show Me the Money Crowd still continues the Chicken Little strut with its scary flamboyant metaphors:
Yes, the oceans are masking a "time-bomb," says Rick [a nickname on a scientist always means he's eccentric and a bit loony, as is Jimmy Carter for a politician] and about a generation from now, a veritable environmental Godzilla will emerge from the waters to purge and pillage our industrial emitters. And Malcolm Gladwell is trotted out to seal the argument with his tipping-point yadda yadda.
There are still many sane people out there who are not convinced we must all convert immediately to bicycles and nuclear reactors and hydro just yet:
An ironic point of light, as W. H. Auden would put it.
The UN thinks the doom-and-gloom crowd may protest too much:
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent.
However, the Big Science Show Me the Money Crowd still continues the Chicken Little strut with its scary flamboyant metaphors:
Prof Rick Battarbee, the director of the Environmental Change Research Centre at University College London, warned these masking effects had helped to delay global warming but would lead to larger changes in the future.
He said: "The oceans have been acting like giant storage heaters by trapping heat and carbon dioxide. They might be bit of a time-bomb as they have been masking the real effects of the carbon dioxide we have been releasing into the atmosphere.
"People are very worried about what will happen in 2030 to 2050, as we think that at that point the oceans will no longer be able to absorb the carbon dioxide being emitted. It will be a tipping point and that is why it is now critical to act to counter any acceleration that will occur when this happens."
Yes, the oceans are masking a "time-bomb," says Rick [a nickname on a scientist always means he's eccentric and a bit loony, as is Jimmy Carter for a politician] and about a generation from now, a veritable environmental Godzilla will emerge from the waters to purge and pillage our industrial emitters. And Malcolm Gladwell is trotted out to seal the argument with his tipping-point yadda yadda.
There are still many sane people out there who are not convinced we must all convert immediately to bicycles and nuclear reactors and hydro just yet:
Julian Morris, executive director of the International Policy Network, urged governments to be cautious. "There needs to be better data before billions of pounds are spent on policy measures that may have little impact," he said.
An ironic point of light, as W. H. Auden would put it.
Saturday, December 09, 2006
NYT Play Reviewer: We've Lost!
Pinch Sulzberger has sunk so far into the demented sophomoric funk he dwells in that his Broadway reviewer turned geopolitical pundit now declares the Iraq Expedition a failure. Just like Matt Lauer declaring Iraq a Civil War.
The New York Times was better in the Walter Duranty days when their commentary was tragically wrong. This time, the second time around, it is farcically wrong.
Wonder if the failed economist Krugboy will mimic the failed reviewer of the Great White Way and deliver his profound judgement?
Where is Walter Lippmann? Or even Tom Friedman?
The New York Times was better in the Walter Duranty days when their commentary was tragically wrong. This time, the second time around, it is farcically wrong.
Wonder if the failed economist Krugboy will mimic the failed reviewer of the Great White Way and deliver his profound judgement?
Where is Walter Lippmann? Or even Tom Friedman?
Rosie O'Donnell is a bigoted racist hypocrite
Michelle Malkin slaps down TV's most obnoxious big-mouthed hypocrite [Oh yeah, she's an ultra-lefty!] for imitating a Chinese newscast of drunken Danny DeVito, to the evident amusement of her oh so liberal colleagues on the brain-dead daily hate called the View [apologies to Orwell, but he could never imagine such a travesty on the human mind as these five nattering niggling orifices becoming a cultural fixture---using culture in an ironic trope, to be sure].
O'Donnell's boorish antics appear to give the lie to the mantra that feminism would raise the level of public discourse. Of course, she and her screeching lefty harridan-crone collective have considerably coursened the discussions of what makes life and love a meaningful experience in our everyday lives.
Instead, the Kaffee-klatsch yakkers yammer endlessly about trendy socialist nostrums and how nasty Mel Gibson was in his 3AM police-blotter rant. Not a word about Michael Richards, one of their own who went ballistic on video in a comedy club---the Seinfeld whack-job gets automatic absolution for being a Jewish liberal who "made a mistake."
These self-absorbed creatures appear to have no self-awareness or interest in obtaining a wider view of the world than their off-the-shelf liberal canned bolshie agitprop that, like the Commie aspersions of Pope Pius XII and the Jewish Holocaust eventually becomes received wisdom that defrocked frauds like James Carroll can employ to vent their own self-hatred against established religions. [The Myth of Hitler's Pope, by David G. Dalin, an American rabbi]. Of course, Hitler's best friend in the world of religion was Hajj al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat's early mentor. A fact you will never read in the New York Times.
Pop culture is an oxymoron, as The View proves on a daily basis, but demogogues like O'Donnell and her posse of aggressive fellow-travellers exulting in their brave attacks on Christianity and Judeo-Christian morality should be publicly spanked by Michelle and other bloggers as frequently as possible, just to let them know that there is an active opposition to these wreckers. [pace Joseph Stalin]
O'Donnell's boorish antics appear to give the lie to the mantra that feminism would raise the level of public discourse. Of course, she and her screeching lefty harridan-crone collective have considerably coursened the discussions of what makes life and love a meaningful experience in our everyday lives.
Instead, the Kaffee-klatsch yakkers yammer endlessly about trendy socialist nostrums and how nasty Mel Gibson was in his 3AM police-blotter rant. Not a word about Michael Richards, one of their own who went ballistic on video in a comedy club---the Seinfeld whack-job gets automatic absolution for being a Jewish liberal who "made a mistake."
These self-absorbed creatures appear to have no self-awareness or interest in obtaining a wider view of the world than their off-the-shelf liberal canned bolshie agitprop that, like the Commie aspersions of Pope Pius XII and the Jewish Holocaust eventually becomes received wisdom that defrocked frauds like James Carroll can employ to vent their own self-hatred against established religions. [The Myth of Hitler's Pope, by David G. Dalin, an American rabbi]. Of course, Hitler's best friend in the world of religion was Hajj al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat's early mentor. A fact you will never read in the New York Times.
Pop culture is an oxymoron, as The View proves on a daily basis, but demogogues like O'Donnell and her posse of aggressive fellow-travellers exulting in their brave attacks on Christianity and Judeo-Christian morality should be publicly spanked by Michelle and other bloggers as frequently as possible, just to let them know that there is an active opposition to these wreckers. [pace Joseph Stalin]
Rosie O'Donnell is a bigoted racist hypocrite
Michelle Malkin slaps down TV's most obnoxious big-mouthed hypocrite [Oh yeah, she's an ultra-lefty!] for imitating a Chinese newscast of drunken Danny DeVito, to the evident amusement of her oh so liberal colleagues on the brain-dead daily hate called the View [apologies to Orwell, but he could never imagine such a travesty on the human mind as these five nattering niggling orifices becoming a cultural fixture---using culture in an ironic trope, to be sure].
O'Donnell's boorish antics appear to give the lie to the mantra that feminism would raise the level of public discourse. Of course, she and her screeching lefty harridan-crone collective have considerably coursened the discussions of what makes life and love a meaningful experience in our everyday lives.
Instead, the Kaffee-klatsch yakkers yammer endlessly about trendy socialist nostrums and how nasty Mel Gibson was in his 3AM police-blotter rant. Not a word about Michael Richards, one of their own who went ballistic on video in a comedy club---the Seinfeld whack-job gets automatic absolution for being a Jewish liberal who "made a mistake."
These self-absorbed creatures appear to have no self-awareness or interest in obtaining a wider view of the world than their off-the-shelf liberal canned bolshie agitprop that, like the Commie aspersions of Pope Pius XII and the Jewish Holocaust eventually becomes received wisdom that defrocked frauds like James Carroll can employ to vent their own self-hatred against established religions. [The Myth of Hitler's Pope, by David G. Dalin, an American rabbi]. Of course, Hitler's best friend in the world of religion was Hajj al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat's early mentor. A fact you will never read in the New York Times.
Pop culture is an oxymoron, as The View proves on a daily basis, but demogogues like O'Donnell and her posse of aggressive fellow-travellers exulting in their brave attacks on Christianity and Judeo-Christian morality should be publicly spanked by Michelle and other bloggers as frequently as possible, just to let them know that there is an active opposition to these wreckers. [pace Joseph Stalin]
O'Donnell's boorish antics appear to give the lie to the mantra that feminism would raise the level of public discourse. Of course, she and her screeching lefty harridan-crone collective have considerably coursened the discussions of what makes life and love a meaningful experience in our everyday lives.
Instead, the Kaffee-klatsch yakkers yammer endlessly about trendy socialist nostrums and how nasty Mel Gibson was in his 3AM police-blotter rant. Not a word about Michael Richards, one of their own who went ballistic on video in a comedy club---the Seinfeld whack-job gets automatic absolution for being a Jewish liberal who "made a mistake."
These self-absorbed creatures appear to have no self-awareness or interest in obtaining a wider view of the world than their off-the-shelf liberal canned bolshie agitprop that, like the Commie aspersions of Pope Pius XII and the Jewish Holocaust eventually becomes received wisdom that defrocked frauds like James Carroll can employ to vent their own self-hatred against established religions. [The Myth of Hitler's Pope, by David G. Dalin, an American rabbi]. Of course, Hitler's best friend in the world of religion was Hajj al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat's early mentor. A fact you will never read in the New York Times.
Pop culture is an oxymoron, as The View proves on a daily basis, but demogogues like O'Donnell and her posse of aggressive fellow-travellers exulting in their brave attacks on Christianity and Judeo-Christian morality should be publicly spanked by Michelle and other bloggers as frequently as possible, just to let them know that there is an active opposition to these wreckers. [pace Joseph Stalin]
AP a Disgrace to Journalism
The Associated Press is basically suffering what happens to all large corporations with a virtual monopoly, it is becoming sloppy, incompetant, and unaccountable. The New York Post link above puts Robert Bateman, an historian and reporter, giving one man's story of how the AP covered up evidence that its Pulitzer-Prize nominated story about an incident in the Korean War was completely falsified by a man later convicted for getting PTSD treatment for combat that he did not endure.
Not only that, but this spurious news organization tried to wreck Bateman's career by attempting to stop his academic research and then the publishing of his book. More lately, this fraudulent excuse for journalism had an article out yesterday that neglected to give the state country or any relevant details about the woman who had three dead fetuses in her refrigerator! Whatever happened to who, what, when, where, etc.?
More serious, the Iraqi government and the U.S. Army have long warned the AP about
Bizarrely, it seems that not even Iraqi Sunni politicians believe the AP story; even the radical Association of Muslim Scholars hasn't embraced the account. But we here are supposed to anyway. After all, AP doesn't make mistakes.
The AP has a number of executives, including Kathleen Carroll, who are simply giving disinformation and false sourcing in their stories. For that, the CSJ, whose students nowadays cheat on take-home ethics exams to practice for their Pulitzer scams, are predictably taking notes on just how to Mau-mau the flak-catchers, Kathleen Carroll style.
Not only that, but this spurious news organization tried to wreck Bateman's career by attempting to stop his academic research and then the publishing of his book. More lately, this fraudulent excuse for journalism had an article out yesterday that neglected to give the state country or any relevant details about the woman who had three dead fetuses in her refrigerator! Whatever happened to who, what, when, where, etc.?
More serious, the Iraqi government and the U.S. Army have long warned the AP about
its use of "spokesmen" who don't exist. Indeed this time it appears that there is no such officer in the Iraqi police force in Baghdad. More, they could find no evidence of such an attack (though they did see that one mosque had been hit with some gasoline and had some smoke and scorching damage in the entryway).
Did the AP retract or reinvestigate? Nah. Instead, in a follow-up story a few days later, it simply noted the old (2005) news about efforts to plant Coalition press releases in the Iraqi media, accused the Iraqis of censorship and claimed that it had found three more (anonymous, naturally) witnesses. In effect, AP said that, no matter what the Iraqi police headquarters said, Hussein is one of its spokesmen after all.
Bizarrely, it seems that not even Iraqi Sunni politicians believe the AP story; even the radical Association of Muslim Scholars hasn't embraced the account. But we here are supposed to anyway. After all, AP doesn't make mistakes.
The AP has a number of executives, including Kathleen Carroll, who are simply giving disinformation and false sourcing in their stories. For that, the CSJ, whose students nowadays cheat on take-home ethics exams to practice for their Pulitzer scams, are predictably taking notes on just how to Mau-mau the flak-catchers, Kathleen Carroll style.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Ambassador Ross Accuses Jimmy Carter of Property-Theft
Jimmy Carter has continued his track record for bumbling and incompetence. This time it concerns what may have been an inadvertant misuse of a proprietary map devised by Ambassador Dennis Ross.
In addition, Kenneth Stein, the director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, resigned Tuesday as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University, citing:
Besides the statement above, Dr. Stein pointed out a gross factual error that Carter used to bolster the argument that people "weren't listening to [him]."
Carter claimed that people "in the real world" have been buying his book. However, Carter's allegations that people don't listen to him may indicate that he is aware of the fact that most Americans regard him as hopelessly addicted to self-promotion, mouthing platitudes of ultra-left sloganeers and sounding like Cindy Sheehan on a particularly bad day. His statements are disregarded because of his foolish policies and incompetent administration during his [thankfully] short tenure in the Oval Office. He managed to get double-digit inflation and interest rates at the same time as running the country into a recession after his seven economic plans---a true Trifecta of ineptitude.
His foreign policy was so badly-conceived and poorly-executed that Iran spiraled into Islamic Revolution, largely because this inept peanut farmer's Human Rights chief in the State Department, Pat Derian, refused to sign off on allowing the Shah's police rubber bullets---months later the Shah's police used live ammunition on students, killing hundreds, and then even the bazaari middle class opted for ridding Iran of the Shah. Another tale of Carter's serial brainlessness.
And his fact-checking makes even the third-rate New Yorker look competent by comparision, although Carter does not commit the solecism of "Saudia Arabia" in a Hertzberg column a while back.
And I must, while I'm at it, again express my sadness at the passing early this year of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who was one of the sole sane influences at Columbia University's Middle East department and was my mentor on the Middle East while I served as a Middle East consultant for John Anderson in the [ultimately successful] national effort to rid the country of the bane of the Carter Presidency.
I thank God every day for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who saved the US and UK from eventual capitulation to the Eurocommunism that Carter and his Labour analogues in Britain aspired to. And greased the skids for the final downfall of the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history.
In addition, Kenneth Stein, the director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, resigned Tuesday as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University, citing:
"President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments."
Besides the statement above, Dr. Stein pointed out a gross factual error that Carter used to bolster the argument that people "weren't listening to [him]."
Stein alleged an inaccuracy on page 131 in the book of a 1990 White House meeting where Carter cites that Washington was mostly preoccupied with the Iraq/Kuwait conflict. Stein said that was in 1980, not 1990.
"He makes it appear that the reasons people didn't pay attention to what he was saying was because of the invasion," Stein said. "How was that possible? I was there."
"Carter can disagree with me. I don't think if you're president of the United States you have a specific privilege to overstate," he added.
Carter claimed that people "in the real world" have been buying his book. However, Carter's allegations that people don't listen to him may indicate that he is aware of the fact that most Americans regard him as hopelessly addicted to self-promotion, mouthing platitudes of ultra-left sloganeers and sounding like Cindy Sheehan on a particularly bad day. His statements are disregarded because of his foolish policies and incompetent administration during his [thankfully] short tenure in the Oval Office. He managed to get double-digit inflation and interest rates at the same time as running the country into a recession after his seven economic plans---a true Trifecta of ineptitude.
His foreign policy was so badly-conceived and poorly-executed that Iran spiraled into Islamic Revolution, largely because this inept peanut farmer's Human Rights chief in the State Department, Pat Derian, refused to sign off on allowing the Shah's police rubber bullets---months later the Shah's police used live ammunition on students, killing hundreds, and then even the bazaari middle class opted for ridding Iran of the Shah. Another tale of Carter's serial brainlessness.
And his fact-checking makes even the third-rate New Yorker look competent by comparision, although Carter does not commit the solecism of "Saudia Arabia" in a Hertzberg column a while back.
And I must, while I'm at it, again express my sadness at the passing early this year of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who was one of the sole sane influences at Columbia University's Middle East department and was my mentor on the Middle East while I served as a Middle East consultant for John Anderson in the [ultimately successful] national effort to rid the country of the bane of the Carter Presidency.
I thank God every day for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who saved the US and UK from eventual capitulation to the Eurocommunism that Carter and his Labour analogues in Britain aspired to. And greased the skids for the final downfall of the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Mel Sixth of Thirteen top Stars, Cruise is Thirteenth
Mel Gibson may have had a bad moment, which TMZ and the Hollyweirdo peanut gallery, tried to parlay into a career wrecker. But the Grinches who are trying to steal Christmas fell far short. Mel is still a must-see for 26% in a poll of a thousand, and only a never-see for 15%.
Tom Cruise is just beneath Angelina Jolie in dead last in the negativity, with 34% avoiding all Cruise films, and 18% avoiding Jolie's as a never-see. Only 12% will must-see Cruise.
There is a subtle Catholic subtext at work here. Tom Cruise's original resume had him as a member of the "12th Grade St. Francis Seminary Choir." Unless there is a Scientology seminary named after the friar of Assisi, Tommy boy was studying to be an RC cleric before he went for the limelight. A self-defrocked and now flamboyantly heretical outcast from Holy Roman writ!
Angelina's father Jon Voight had a stint in the Catholic seminary before his stage and screen career, and AJ's mom is a French Canadian [just like Madonna, another very un-Roman ex-Catholic]. AJ now spurns her daddy, although he got her into films early on, and she is making a run for secular-humanist Uber-ogress of the planet.
Mel Gibson is very much more Catholic than the Pope, if that's possible. His gig on Jay Leno's a short while ago was good, as Jay raved about Apocalypto in great detail. Mel has not mellowed much and seemed a bit hyper, verging on the manic, as Jay grilled him on how his AA rehab had gone. But Mel's aware of his shortcomings, and I don't think his long-term career has foundered, but we'll get another indication of that question by the returns on his movie opening this weekend.
Tom Cruise is just beneath Angelina Jolie in dead last in the negativity, with 34% avoiding all Cruise films, and 18% avoiding Jolie's as a never-see. Only 12% will must-see Cruise.
There is a subtle Catholic subtext at work here. Tom Cruise's original resume had him as a member of the "12th Grade St. Francis Seminary Choir." Unless there is a Scientology seminary named after the friar of Assisi, Tommy boy was studying to be an RC cleric before he went for the limelight. A self-defrocked and now flamboyantly heretical outcast from Holy Roman writ!
Angelina's father Jon Voight had a stint in the Catholic seminary before his stage and screen career, and AJ's mom is a French Canadian [just like Madonna, another very un-Roman ex-Catholic]. AJ now spurns her daddy, although he got her into films early on, and she is making a run for secular-humanist Uber-ogress of the planet.
Mel Gibson is very much more Catholic than the Pope, if that's possible. His gig on Jay Leno's a short while ago was good, as Jay raved about Apocalypto in great detail. Mel has not mellowed much and seemed a bit hyper, verging on the manic, as Jay grilled him on how his AA rehab had gone. But Mel's aware of his shortcomings, and I don't think his long-term career has foundered, but we'll get another indication of that question by the returns on his movie opening this weekend.
BlastFromMyPast Part Un Revisited
After a very perceptive reader read my blog on the '82 price decline, he asked me about the 1986 price decrease to much lower levels and I realized that I may have conflated the numbers between '83 and '86. I wrote the piece way after my bedtime, and my enthusiasm may have exceeded my memory. Be that as it may, I do recall the Saudis being vexed about both the Iran Fao Peninsula campaign and the Afghan Mujahideen War, and perhaps these events may have contributed to diminishing the price.
But my interlocutor asked for inside baseball, and I can recall that I forecast in the early Fall that the Saudis would again lower production and manipulate prices to get GHWBush elected in November 1988. I can recall one oil industry expert remarking to me that I was the only oil writer to forecast the price decrease to about $10/barrel in '88 as being due to Saudi support for VP Bush's run at the presidency. I had been more or less corraborated in this forecast, if I remember correctly, by Nat Kern at Foreign Reports, though my own Saudi contacts in the Oil Ministry had let me know at an OPEC meeting that a price fall was in the cards.
But my interlocutor asked for inside baseball, and I can recall that I forecast in the early Fall that the Saudis would again lower production and manipulate prices to get GHWBush elected in November 1988. I can recall one oil industry expert remarking to me that I was the only oil writer to forecast the price decrease to about $10/barrel in '88 as being due to Saudi support for VP Bush's run at the presidency. I had been more or less corraborated in this forecast, if I remember correctly, by Nat Kern at Foreign Reports, though my own Saudi contacts in the Oil Ministry had let me know at an OPEC meeting that a price fall was in the cards.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Blast From My Past: Part Two
Just one more anecdote and then I have to run: When I was Pol/Mil and Econ back-up in the Saudi Embassy, the Saudi Foreign Minister was Saud al-Faisal. He came back from his first visit to Teheran and called the US Ambassador to vent his anger, and the Ambassador told me this story. Henry Kissinger came through Saudi right after the Oil Shock of '73 at Nixon's instructions to jawbone the Saudi oil price back to what it was before the October War [Ramadhan or Yom Kippur, depending on your POV] and the Saudis agreed to cut back, but only if the Shah also agreed. HK told the Saudis later that the Shah would not go along with a lower oil price. The Saudis and the Iranians were not talking to each other at the time and did not have diplomatic relations. But three years later, when the Saudi Minister finally went to Teheran after relations were restored, Saud al-Faisal asked the Shah why he didn't agree to lower the price of oil when Kissinger asked him. The Shah looked at the Saudi blankly and said "Kissinger never asked me to lower the price of oil."
As a result, among many consequences, the price of oil stayed high and oil men in Texas and the oil patch stayed rich, and possibly started to turn Republican according to Nixon's strategy to turn the entire South Republican. Also, because of the high price of oil, the Europeans were handed a huge economic blow. Remember the North Sea oil that made Maggie Thatcher such a success had not come onstream yet and Europe had to pay premium prices for its oil from elsewhere, while the USA was still largely self-sufficient. The downside, of course, was that Brezhnev started feeling his geopolitical muscle with the oil price steroids kicking into gear. He decided after the price stayed high to invade Afghanistan, and the rest, as they say, is the downward spiral of the USSR, with Ronald Reagan, the Pope, and Maggie Thatcher all giving it a good shove.
London School of Economics types would not agree, but they don't know sh!t!
As a result, among many consequences, the price of oil stayed high and oil men in Texas and the oil patch stayed rich, and possibly started to turn Republican according to Nixon's strategy to turn the entire South Republican. Also, because of the high price of oil, the Europeans were handed a huge economic blow. Remember the North Sea oil that made Maggie Thatcher such a success had not come onstream yet and Europe had to pay premium prices for its oil from elsewhere, while the USA was still largely self-sufficient. The downside, of course, was that Brezhnev started feeling his geopolitical muscle with the oil price steroids kicking into gear. He decided after the price stayed high to invade Afghanistan, and the rest, as they say, is the downward spiral of the USSR, with Ronald Reagan, the Pope, and Maggie Thatcher all giving it a good shove.
London School of Economics types would not agree, but they don't know sh!t!
Blast From My Past: Part One
Back at the end of the eighties when I was International Editor of The Oil Daily, I found out from a guy who was in the meeting that in a visit to Riyadh in 1982, VP George H W Bush was asked by Crown Prince Fahd what the "right and fair" price for oil would be. Remember, Bush was an oil man, and he could have said keep the price high so his Texas friends would prosper. That's what Democrats would expect.
Instead Bush told CP Fahd that a fair price would be around $18/barrel, given all the economics. This was partly said to get the US out of the Carter Recession, but also because Ronald Reagan had a plan. Everyone was taking him for a dummy, but he knew what he knew and he was aware that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and were back at their "Wars of National Liberation" because the USSR was getting rich on the oil boom, with oil at $35/barrel and Russia exporting eight million b/d. So Bush said $18/b and my friend got rich, literally Marc Rich as a client, from predicting that prices would fall imminently---he had just been the CIA oil chief for the Middle East. In six months, the Saudis opened the spigots and oil prices crashed to $18/b, the US economy rebounded, the USSR started its death spiral as its Eurodollar horde evaporated and soon Gorbachev was in charge decommissioning the Communist Empire. Ronald Reagan also threw Star Wars into the hopper, just to make the Sovs waste their military money on high-tech rubbish. You won't read about this in a book, because my friend who became Marc Rich's [parenthetical note: whom Bill Clinton pardoned after Rudy Giuliani busted him for treason for buying Iranian oil---the pardon reportedly due to Rich's wife Debra sleeping with Billy Jeff and giving umpty millions to the Clinton library] advisor will deny it all---as an ex-spook, that's what he'd have to do.
Debbie Rich is now a Palm Beach stalwart right up the road from Boca.
Instead Bush told CP Fahd that a fair price would be around $18/barrel, given all the economics. This was partly said to get the US out of the Carter Recession, but also because Ronald Reagan had a plan. Everyone was taking him for a dummy, but he knew what he knew and he was aware that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and were back at their "Wars of National Liberation" because the USSR was getting rich on the oil boom, with oil at $35/barrel and Russia exporting eight million b/d. So Bush said $18/b and my friend got rich, literally Marc Rich as a client, from predicting that prices would fall imminently---he had just been the CIA oil chief for the Middle East. In six months, the Saudis opened the spigots and oil prices crashed to $18/b, the US economy rebounded, the USSR started its death spiral as its Eurodollar horde evaporated and soon Gorbachev was in charge decommissioning the Communist Empire. Ronald Reagan also threw Star Wars into the hopper, just to make the Sovs waste their military money on high-tech rubbish. You won't read about this in a book, because my friend who became Marc Rich's [parenthetical note: whom Bill Clinton pardoned after Rudy Giuliani busted him for treason for buying Iranian oil---the pardon reportedly due to Rich's wife Debra sleeping with Billy Jeff and giving umpty millions to the Clinton library] advisor will deny it all---as an ex-spook, that's what he'd have to do.
Debbie Rich is now a Palm Beach stalwart right up the road from Boca.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Two percent control 50% of world's wealth
The Financial Times has a headline that will probably get the lefties up into Arianna Huffington arm-waving helicopter mode.
Two percent of the world's population sounds like a tiny fraction, but factored into the world's six billion people, it turns out to be 120 million people. And whole continents like Latin America and Africa have a tiny fraction of two percent controlling the total wealth of the area.
Know-nothing tabloids like The Independent and The Guardian and the BBC will tut-tut and shake their heads in dismay, but of course, the old lies, damned lies, and statistics rule is out there weaving its illusionary delusions. The BBC adopts its characteristic numbnut perspective:
Duh.... Are these BBC types the ones Gwyneth Paltrow believes are conversational show-stoppers? It's called division of labor.
Centuries of capitalism in Europe and North America have produced most of the world's wealth. That's history, not some sort of unfair distribution system. Working hard and building assets and wise investments and thinking ahead and studying hard produce long-term results. Also, property is worth more when it is developed or can produce crops or tourism, something lacking in the sweltering hellholes of the Dark Continent and much of the Arab countries' trackless desert wastes.
Two percent of the world's population sounds like a tiny fraction, but factored into the world's six billion people, it turns out to be 120 million people. And whole continents like Latin America and Africa have a tiny fraction of two percent controlling the total wealth of the area.
Know-nothing tabloids like The Independent and The Guardian and the BBC will tut-tut and shake their heads in dismay, but of course, the old lies, damned lies, and statistics rule is out there weaving its illusionary delusions. The BBC adopts its characteristic numbnut perspective:
The analysis shows, as have many other less comprehensive studies, striking divergences in wealth between countries. Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and some countries in the Asia Pacific region, such as Japan and Australia. In richer nations, landowners can afford not to farm their properties. These countries account for 90% of household wealth.
Duh.... Are these BBC types the ones Gwyneth Paltrow believes are conversational show-stoppers? It's called division of labor.
Centuries of capitalism in Europe and North America have produced most of the world's wealth. That's history, not some sort of unfair distribution system. Working hard and building assets and wise investments and thinking ahead and studying hard produce long-term results. Also, property is worth more when it is developed or can produce crops or tourism, something lacking in the sweltering hellholes of the Dark Continent and much of the Arab countries' trackless desert wastes.
GHWBush Sobs at Jeb's Farewell
George Bush 41 is correct in that his son Jeb is a class act who did not get depressed when he was beaten by a populist fraud named Walkin' Lawton Chiles in Florida through lots of the usual Dem chicanery.
But his sobs are for what might have been. Jeb was supposed to be Guv of Florida and then the timetable had it that he would run for prez in 2000. Instead, his loss and GWB's win in Texas in '96 put George rather than Jeb in the Bush dynastic cockpit.
The Bush family and its galaxy of supporters all believed that Jeb was the real political talent in the next generation and that GWB had a tendency to get into jams. Jams that he had to be extricated from through the good services of James Baker, Robert Gates, et al......
The most hilarious part of the whole event is that the cheating by Florida Dems in '94 led to the karmic comeupance of 2000 when the Dems, because of Janet the Ogress's expulsion of Elian Gonzalez back to the worker's paradise, paid the price of overweening arrogance and though they tried mightily to cheat their way into victory, Al Bore just lost by 537 votes.
So the joke is on those cheatin' Dems, but the country may have also lost an absolutely first-class political leader when Jeb's presidential ambitions were postponed by that loss in '94.
And maybe that is why GHWB was crying up in Tallahassee.
But his sobs are for what might have been. Jeb was supposed to be Guv of Florida and then the timetable had it that he would run for prez in 2000. Instead, his loss and GWB's win in Texas in '96 put George rather than Jeb in the Bush dynastic cockpit.
The Bush family and its galaxy of supporters all believed that Jeb was the real political talent in the next generation and that GWB had a tendency to get into jams. Jams that he had to be extricated from through the good services of James Baker, Robert Gates, et al......
The most hilarious part of the whole event is that the cheating by Florida Dems in '94 led to the karmic comeupance of 2000 when the Dems, because of Janet the Ogress's expulsion of Elian Gonzalez back to the worker's paradise, paid the price of overweening arrogance and though they tried mightily to cheat their way into victory, Al Bore just lost by 537 votes.
So the joke is on those cheatin' Dems, but the country may have also lost an absolutely first-class political leader when Jeb's presidential ambitions were postponed by that loss in '94.
And maybe that is why GHWB was crying up in Tallahassee.
Hollyweird and Apocalypto: Can Jews Blackball Gibson?
The New York Times is beginning to cover real news out of Hollyweird, long run by aggressive secularist haters of religion and defenders of PC. Also well known to be dominated or at least influenced by Jews of the left-wing, pro-Marxist, pro-Arab, anti-Israel agenda variety. Himself Jewish, Michael Medved has long inveighed against these hypocrites, who have hardly raised a peep about Michael Richards' ten-minute diatribe on tape of his using the N-word. But Michael Richards is Jewish, and part of the liberal Hollyweird cabal, so this vicious hate-ranter gets a pass, though it's been seen on YouTube a million times. But Oprah's couch awaits Richards and absolution will follow. Roman Polanski did a brilliant set of movies, but all he did was child-molesting, so Roman is just a perv like many of the Academy Award voters.
But Richards and Polanski are just petty misdemeanors, oh yeah. Mark Foley e-mails an adult page and gets reamed. A DUI pullover at 3AM and Gibson saying bad things about Jews to a couple of cops! No record on video or tape-recorder. Just a police report. Omigod! Blackball him forever. He's a gentile, he's a gentile....ooooohhh [with apologies to Richards]. And he's a religious conservative! a religious conservative! OOhhhhhhhhhhh. You'll never eat lunch in this town again, Gibson, even though it's a police report and no one else heard it.
It appears the mighty Wurlitzer of the ultra-left secularist hacks who churn out garbage like "Deck the Halls" and "Happy Feet" full of hysterical agendas just can't stand the fact that Gibson has more cinematic talent than just about anyone else in the moral sewage septic swamp of Hollyweird.
Not that that will stop the Barbra Doll airhead left from spewing mis-spelled e-mails calling for a boycott of what may be the best film of the year. Let's see what the Arianna human-helicopter swirls up in her witless twit-list of twittering
natter-meisters. Or Nikki Finke in her poison-brain rant-a-thon.
Saner observers like Richard Schickel note:
Gibson as primitive gave the best Hamlet I've seen on film and directed Braveheart and Passion of the Christ. I'd call Gibson a realist and the human sewage in Hollyweird fever swamps hyperventilating over-sophisticated rubbish-lovers. Danny De Vito types who are so self-indulgent and solipsistic that they make the Capote of Philip Seymour Hoffmann's performance appear to be a philanthropist.
I give Gibson the same chance for an academy award nomination as I do Florida a chance to win the BCS over Ohio State. Slim to none.
But at least Gibson may have the best performance and performers, according to critics I respect---which don't include the Finke's of the Hollyweird galaxy of black holes.
But Richards and Polanski are just petty misdemeanors, oh yeah. Mark Foley e-mails an adult page and gets reamed. A DUI pullover at 3AM and Gibson saying bad things about Jews to a couple of cops! No record on video or tape-recorder. Just a police report. Omigod! Blackball him forever. He's a gentile, he's a gentile....ooooohhh [with apologies to Richards]. And he's a religious conservative! a religious conservative! OOhhhhhhhhhhh. You'll never eat lunch in this town again, Gibson, even though it's a police report and no one else heard it.
It appears the mighty Wurlitzer of the ultra-left secularist hacks who churn out garbage like "Deck the Halls" and "Happy Feet" full of hysterical agendas just can't stand the fact that Gibson has more cinematic talent than just about anyone else in the moral sewage septic swamp of Hollyweird.
Not that that will stop the Barbra Doll airhead left from spewing mis-spelled e-mails calling for a boycott of what may be the best film of the year. Let's see what the Arianna human-helicopter swirls up in her witless twit-list of twittering
natter-meisters. Or Nikki Finke in her poison-brain rant-a-thon.
Saner observers like Richard Schickel note:
"Gibson is a primitive all right, but so were Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith, and somehow we survived their idiocies."
Gibson as primitive gave the best Hamlet I've seen on film and directed Braveheart and Passion of the Christ. I'd call Gibson a realist and the human sewage in Hollyweird fever swamps hyperventilating over-sophisticated rubbish-lovers. Danny De Vito types who are so self-indulgent and solipsistic that they make the Capote of Philip Seymour Hoffmann's performance appear to be a philanthropist.
I give Gibson the same chance for an academy award nomination as I do Florida a chance to win the BCS over Ohio State. Slim to none.
But at least Gibson may have the best performance and performers, according to critics I respect---which don't include the Finke's of the Hollyweird galaxy of black holes.
Words of Wisdom This Christmas Season
If they know of him at all, many folks think Ben
Stein is just a quirky actor/comedian who talks in a
monotone. He's also a very intelligent attorney who
knows how to put ideas and words together in such a
way as to sway juries and make people think clearly.
The following was written by Ben Stein and
recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Herewith at this happy time of year, a few
confessions from my beating heart: I have no freaking
clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover
of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog
biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at
the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and
Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my
life if I know who they are and why they have broken
up? Why are they so important?
I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is either, and I
do not care at all about Tom Cruise's wife.
Am I going to be called before a Senate
committee and asked if I am a subversive? Maybe, but I
just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are.
If this is what it means to be no longer young.
It's not so bad.
Next confession:
I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors
was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little
bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled
trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don'
t feel discriminated against. That's what they are:
Christmas trees.
It doesn't bother me a bit when people say,
"Merry Christmas" to me. I don't think they are
slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto.
In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all
brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of
year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a
manger scene on display at a key intersection near my
beach house in Malibu . If people want a creche, it's
just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred
yards away.
I don't like getting pushed around for being a
Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed
around for being Christians. I think people who
believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed
around, period. I have no idea where the concept came
from thatAmerica is an explicitly atheist country. I
can't find it in the Constitution, and I don't like it
being shoved down my throat.
Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the
idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica
and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand
Him?
I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too.
But there are a lot of us who are wondering
where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America
we knew went to.
In light of the many jokes we send to one
another for a laugh, this is a little different: This
is not intended to be a joke; it's not funny, it's
intended to get you thinking.
Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the
Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her "How could God
let something like this Happen?" (regarding Katrina)
Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and
insightful response. She said, "I believe God is
deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years
we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to
get out of our government and to get out of our lives.
And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has
calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us
His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave
us alone?"
In light of recent events...terrorists attack,
school shootings, etc. I think it started when
Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body
found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in
our schools, and we said OK.
Then someone said you better not read the Bible
in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou
shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself.
And we said OK.
Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank
our children when they misbehave because their little
personalities would be warped and we might damage
their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide).
We said an expert should know what he's talking about
and we said OK.
Now we're asking ourselves why our children have
no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong,
and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers,
their classmates, and themselves.
Probably, if we think about it long and hard
enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great
deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."
Funny how simple it is for people to trash God
and then wonder why the world's going to hell.
Funny how we believe what the newspapers say,
but question what the Bible says.
Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail
and they spread like wildfire but when you start
sending messages regarding the Lord, people think
twice about sharing.
Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene
articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public
discussion of God is suppressed in the school and
workplace.
Stein is just a quirky actor/comedian who talks in a
monotone. He's also a very intelligent attorney who
knows how to put ideas and words together in such a
way as to sway juries and make people think clearly.
The following was written by Ben Stein and
recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Herewith at this happy time of year, a few
confessions from my beating heart: I have no freaking
clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover
of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog
biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at
the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and
Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my
life if I know who they are and why they have broken
up? Why are they so important?
I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is either, and I
do not care at all about Tom Cruise's wife.
Am I going to be called before a Senate
committee and asked if I am a subversive? Maybe, but I
just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are.
If this is what it means to be no longer young.
It's not so bad.
Next confession:
I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors
was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little
bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled
trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don'
t feel discriminated against. That's what they are:
Christmas trees.
It doesn't bother me a bit when people say,
"Merry Christmas" to me. I don't think they are
slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto.
In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all
brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of
year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a
manger scene on display at a key intersection near my
beach house in Malibu . If people want a creche, it's
just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred
yards away.
I don't like getting pushed around for being a
Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed
around for being Christians. I think people who
believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed
around, period. I have no idea where the concept came
from thatAmerica is an explicitly atheist country. I
can't find it in the Constitution, and I don't like it
being shoved down my throat.
Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the
idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica
and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand
Him?
I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too.
But there are a lot of us who are wondering
where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America
we knew went to.
In light of the many jokes we send to one
another for a laugh, this is a little different: This
is not intended to be a joke; it's not funny, it's
intended to get you thinking.
Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the
Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her "How could God
let something like this Happen?" (regarding Katrina)
Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and
insightful response. She said, "I believe God is
deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years
we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to
get out of our government and to get out of our lives.
And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has
calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us
His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave
us alone?"
In light of recent events...terrorists attack,
school shootings, etc. I think it started when
Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body
found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in
our schools, and we said OK.
Then someone said you better not read the Bible
in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou
shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself.
And we said OK.
Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank
our children when they misbehave because their little
personalities would be warped and we might damage
their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide).
We said an expert should know what he's talking about
and we said OK.
Now we're asking ourselves why our children have
no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong,
and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers,
their classmates, and themselves.
Probably, if we think about it long and hard
enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great
deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."
Funny how simple it is for people to trash God
and then wonder why the world's going to hell.
Funny how we believe what the newspapers say,
but question what the Bible says.
Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail
and they spread like wildfire but when you start
sending messages regarding the Lord, people think
twice about sharing.
Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene
articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public
discussion of God is suppressed in the school and
workplace.
Monday, December 04, 2006
World's Stupidest Public Figure on Iraq
The bigger fool is one of those economics 101 paradigms: there's always someone out there who will buy into a Ponzi scheme who is dumber than the original investors, until it all comes tumbling down.
Jimmy Carter is long behind us and so the biggest fool in active public life has to be Kofi Annan, who managed to mismanage Rwanda into close to a million deaths. So he has a reason to admire his companion in death-dealing, although much more proactive, Saddam Hussain. Taranto at WSJ begs to enter a contrarian view:
Annan comes from a continent where being ignorant comes with the gene pool, and being depraved comes from being in public life. So it's both.
Jimmy Carter is long behind us and so the biggest fool in active public life has to be Kofi Annan, who managed to mismanage Rwanda into close to a million deaths. So he has a reason to admire his companion in death-dealing, although much more proactive, Saddam Hussain. Taranto at WSJ begs to enter a contrarian view:
Iraq today certainly has its problems, here, from the U.S. State Department, is a reminder of what is not going on in Iraq today:
Saddam Hussein is the first world leader in modern times to have brutally used chemical weapons against his own people. His goals were to systematically terrorize and exterminate the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, to silence his critics, and to test the effectiveness of his chemical and biological weapons. Hussein launched chemical attacks against 40 Kurdish villages and thousands of innocent civilians in 1987-88, using them as testing grounds. The worst of these attacks devastated the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988.
5,000 civilians, many of them women, children, and the elderly, died within hours of the attack. 10,000 more were blinded, maimed, disfigured, or otherwise severely and irreversibly debilitated.
And here's a report from PBS of how Saddam responded to the Shiite uprising in 1991:
Saddam's Republican Guard fought the resistance in Karbala. Civilians and rebels fled the city. On the roads leading out, Iraqi army helicopter crews poured kerosene on the refugees, then set them on fire. . . . There were mass executions of civilians, some of whom were tied to tanks and used as human shields. In Karbala, some of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines were destroyed. Others were used as centers for murder, torture and rape. In Najaf, residential areas were bombed, and hospital staff and patients were murdered.
Let's just repeat Annan's description of Iraq under Saddam:
They had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, "Am I going to see my child again?"
Annan isn't just claiming that Saddam, though brutal, made the trains run on time. He is saying that Saddam actually looked out for the safety of the Iraqi people, the very people his regime was gassing, setting ablaze, tying to tanks, torturing and raping. Is Annan just ignorant, or is he depraved? We suppose it could be a little of both.
Annan comes from a continent where being ignorant comes with the gene pool, and being depraved comes from being in public life. So it's both.
Commissars Rockefeller and Snowe Browbeat Exxon
The Soviet Union may have ended up in the dustbin of history, but the tradition of political commissars has not ended. One with the ludicrous name of Rockefeller and the other a transgendered Republican have sent Exxon a threatening letter saying that the debate on Global Warming is hereby over.
The High Church of GW does not permit latitudinarian dalliances with the scientific method. The Holy Curia of the Royal Academicides and pseudo-scientists like the inventor of the Information Highway and also the Lockbox, Earthtones Al Bore, have declared ex cathedra that whomsoever shall disagree with their exalted opinionations shall be subject to Inquisition and even "Windfall Taxes."
What used to be a democracy in DC is now evolving into a populist revival along the lines of Malthusian prophecies, Luddite wrecking crews, etc, as the WSJ opines:
Often wrong but never in doubt, say the doctrinal heirs to Suslov in the old USSR and Cardinal Ottaviani in the ancient College of Cardinals. Or as the Wahhabis like to put it, ijtihad, their greatest enemy, as it is the Islamic struggle for the truth outside rigid categories defined by rigid strictures on independent thinking.
Richard Feynman is possibly the most multi-talented Nobel Prize winner the US has ever produced, and is revered among seekers of truth as a prophet of the pitfalls of Big Science, which subsists on Big Problems. Feynman got his Nobel at 47, but went on to write peerless and eccentric analyses of the problems of science. His most famous, perhaps, was a lecture on what he called "Cargo Cult Science" and here is an extract illustrating Feynman's point, amusingly, with a SENATOR, those revered fonts of utter integrity!:
Back then, big science was able to get to the moon in no time flat. Feynman had a famous argument with NASA, one of the perps in the current Big Science call for GW Kyoto Kabuki. NASA had tested the O-rings and other paraphrenalia on its Shuttles and predicted that one out of 100.000 flights would be catastrophic.... Feynman had done his own calculations and predicted one out of fifty. So far, two catastrophic accidents out of 116 Shuttle flights. Who's more reliable? Feynman, or the frauds at NASA who will say anything and pose as scientists to get impostors like Rockefeller and Snowe to take their political agenda seriously.
Feynman's punch line is as follows:
The fake science at NASA behind Shuttle reliability killed two crews. The Global Warming fiasco these fraudulent impostors, who incidentally want to erase The Middle Age Warming Period as irrelevant or even statistically unprovable, are akin to the professor at the University of Wisconsin who says the that 9/11 was a US/Israeli plot. Pretty soon he might have as many believers as the Royal Academicides and the NASA Shuttle Reliablity cult have on Global Warming.
Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is online in its entirety, and I would commend the gentle reader if he simply clicks the link. Here's the first line in English:
Yes, it does read a bit like Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But come to think of it, the delirious supporters of Global Warming hysteria have much the same agenda for the United States economic system.
Malthus and the Luddites have nothing on Rockefeller and the Snowe-jobbers attacking Exxon.
The High Church of GW does not permit latitudinarian dalliances with the scientific method. The Holy Curia of the Royal Academicides and pseudo-scientists like the inventor of the Information Highway and also the Lockbox, Earthtones Al Bore, have declared ex cathedra that whomsoever shall disagree with their exalted opinionations shall be subject to Inquisition and even "Windfall Taxes."
What used to be a democracy in DC is now evolving into a populist revival along the lines of Malthusian prophecies, Luddite wrecking crews, etc, as the WSJ opines:
environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.
Often wrong but never in doubt, say the doctrinal heirs to Suslov in the old USSR and Cardinal Ottaviani in the ancient College of Cardinals. Or as the Wahhabis like to put it, ijtihad, their greatest enemy, as it is the Islamic struggle for the truth outside rigid categories defined by rigid strictures on independent thinking.
Richard Feynman is possibly the most multi-talented Nobel Prize winner the US has ever produced, and is revered among seekers of truth as a prophet of the pitfalls of Big Science, which subsists on Big Problems. Feynman got his Nobel at 47, but went on to write peerless and eccentric analyses of the problems of science. His most famous, perhaps, was a lecture on what he called "Cargo Cult Science" and here is an extract illustrating Feynman's point, amusingly, with a SENATOR, those revered fonts of utter integrity!:
I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision."
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice........So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
Back then, big science was able to get to the moon in no time flat. Feynman had a famous argument with NASA, one of the perps in the current Big Science call for GW Kyoto Kabuki. NASA had tested the O-rings and other paraphrenalia on its Shuttles and predicted that one out of 100.000 flights would be catastrophic.... Feynman had done his own calculations and predicted one out of fifty. So far, two catastrophic accidents out of 116 Shuttle flights. Who's more reliable? Feynman, or the frauds at NASA who will say anything and pose as scientists to get impostors like Rockefeller and Snowe to take their political agenda seriously.
Feynman's punch line is as follows:
Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
The fake science at NASA behind Shuttle reliability killed two crews. The Global Warming fiasco these fraudulent impostors, who incidentally want to erase The Middle Age Warming Period as irrelevant or even statistically unprovable, are akin to the professor at the University of Wisconsin who says the that 9/11 was a US/Israeli plot. Pretty soon he might have as many believers as the Royal Academicides and the NASA Shuttle Reliablity cult have on Global Warming.
Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is online in its entirety, and I would commend the gentle reader if he simply clicks the link. Here's the first line in English:
"In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
Yes, it does read a bit like Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But come to think of it, the delirious supporters of Global Warming hysteria have much the same agenda for the United States economic system.
Malthus and the Luddites have nothing on Rockefeller and the Snowe-jobbers attacking Exxon.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
AP Becoming Agency for Iraqi Insurgents
Jules Crittenden commits the crime of journalism at the Boston Herald on a frequent basis, something his fellow-hacks at the Boston Globe rarely if ever permit themselves the liberty of indulging.
Jules reveals the Associated Press's knowingly [unless the senior AP brass is totally a bunch of nitwits, which also might be the case] publishing accounts of questionable events implicating US forces in what might be contrued to be criminal activity, or even war crimes. Jules says it better:
And this factory of enemy propaganda has a monopoly in the US mainstream media, which is already susceptible to liberal and ultra-left lies and prevarications because of its ideological imbalance toward the far left.
The internet, talk radio, and FNC are the only alternatives to the Ministry of Truth which grinds out disinformation, misinformation, and lies on an alarmingly vigorous timetable.
The other day I saw the pious fraud Marvin Kalb pontificating on C-Span to approving reporters on how Fox News has the audacity to support the Bush Administration in its policy on Iraq. This ancient impostor is on Fox very often, and is allowed his point of view without interruption.
But he evidently does not believe Fox News is committing good journalism when it espouses a viewpoint that differs from his own and that of the other networks, cable news outlets and print media of the USA, which are preponderantly tilted to the left [according to a three-year study by UCLA School of Journalism/U. of Missouri, two schools whose journalism students don't cheat on ethics exams and who actually grade their students, unlike the Columbia School of Jackassery which gives a pass/fail on take-home exams which their jackass students still manage to cheat on].
Marvin Kalb, the Shorenstein Center and the CSJ subversive training academy stalwarts are all hoping to undermine capitalism and nannify social norms until the US is so feminized, weakened and demoralized, that their final nihilist suicide-in-disguise agenda will be realized---the destruction of values and revolt of the artists that Nietszche was calling for just before he became completely and terminally insane.
AP and Reuters and the MSM are just helpers and minders and monitors of the journey to the asylum where Friedrich spent his last years.
Jules reveals the Associated Press's knowingly [unless the senior AP brass is totally a bunch of nitwits, which also might be the case] publishing accounts of questionable events implicating US forces in what might be contrued to be criminal activity, or even war crimes. Jules says it better:
The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.
And this factory of enemy propaganda has a monopoly in the US mainstream media, which is already susceptible to liberal and ultra-left lies and prevarications because of its ideological imbalance toward the far left.
This is the point at which, another big American industry learned, people start buying Japanese. But as an American newspaper, if you want to provide your readers with affordable regional, national and international news, you have to deal with the AP. If newspapers don’t have an alternative, readers do. It’s called the Internet. That’s why newspapers, if they don’t want to be dragged further into irrelevance and disrepute, have to tell The Associated Press they are dissatisfied with its product.
The internet, talk radio, and FNC are the only alternatives to the Ministry of Truth which grinds out disinformation, misinformation, and lies on an alarmingly vigorous timetable.
The other day I saw the pious fraud Marvin Kalb pontificating on C-Span to approving reporters on how Fox News has the audacity to support the Bush Administration in its policy on Iraq. This ancient impostor is on Fox very often, and is allowed his point of view without interruption.
But he evidently does not believe Fox News is committing good journalism when it espouses a viewpoint that differs from his own and that of the other networks, cable news outlets and print media of the USA, which are preponderantly tilted to the left [according to a three-year study by UCLA School of Journalism/U. of Missouri, two schools whose journalism students don't cheat on ethics exams and who actually grade their students, unlike the Columbia School of Jackassery which gives a pass/fail on take-home exams which their jackass students still manage to cheat on].
Marvin Kalb, the Shorenstein Center and the CSJ subversive training academy stalwarts are all hoping to undermine capitalism and nannify social norms until the US is so feminized, weakened and demoralized, that their final nihilist suicide-in-disguise agenda will be realized---the destruction of values and revolt of the artists that Nietszche was calling for just before he became completely and terminally insane.
AP and Reuters and the MSM are just helpers and minders and monitors of the journey to the asylum where Friedrich spent his last years.
Florida or Michigan Versus Ohio State in BCS Nat'l Championship
Conflicted am I as I look at the reasons for each team.
I personally grew up a Wisconsin fan in the fifties when Alan Ameche was fullback and Wisconsin kept losing the Rose Bowl when it got there. But the Badgers didn't get there often because Ohio State used to beat them EVERY YEAR. So I exult every time the Buckeyes lose. So get the BEST TEAM in the BCS Championship versus OSU!
And this U. of Michigan grad believes that Michigan actually has a better team than Florida, and I have watched almost all the TV games both teams have played this year, so I have some sort of subjective database. Not by much, and Florida played a tougher schedule, but Michigan may have the better eleven.
That said, I also want the Big Ten to win the Rose Bowl, and I believe Michigan will clean USC's clock, while my old Wisconsin team might succumb to the fast and furious Trojans. And it would be as good a game as the Ohio State/Florida game in the BCS if Michigan played in the Granddaddy of all Bowl games.
But I think Miami got screwed on that end-zone call in the OSU BCS game four years ago when OSU scraped by. And the SEC is a tougher conference than the Big Ten this year. And Florida beat six ranked opponents this year, while Michigan beat powder puff squads like Indiana, Illinois, MSU, Minnesota and Northwestern in-conference. Mich did vaporize Notre Dame and did give OSU the fight of its life on the tricky turf in Columbus, but even the Auburn game, which had a fluke call against Florida, was a very close call despite the 10-point difference in the score.
So Florida, the state and the school, deserves recompense in a way. And the SEC deserves recognition as a kick-ass conference. But the fact remains that I still think Michigan has the slightly better team, and the BCS was inaugurated to get the two best teams in a Nat'l Championship format. Beat the Buckeyes remains my mantra.
All this yadda, yadda obscures the fact that college football this year has been the best that I can remember for terrific games, and the USC/UCLA game yesterday was fantastic, only to be exceeded by the Florida/Arkansas roller-coaster antics!
I wish the NFL was half this exciting!
I personally grew up a Wisconsin fan in the fifties when Alan Ameche was fullback and Wisconsin kept losing the Rose Bowl when it got there. But the Badgers didn't get there often because Ohio State used to beat them EVERY YEAR. So I exult every time the Buckeyes lose. So get the BEST TEAM in the BCS Championship versus OSU!
And this U. of Michigan grad believes that Michigan actually has a better team than Florida, and I have watched almost all the TV games both teams have played this year, so I have some sort of subjective database. Not by much, and Florida played a tougher schedule, but Michigan may have the better eleven.
That said, I also want the Big Ten to win the Rose Bowl, and I believe Michigan will clean USC's clock, while my old Wisconsin team might succumb to the fast and furious Trojans. And it would be as good a game as the Ohio State/Florida game in the BCS if Michigan played in the Granddaddy of all Bowl games.
But I think Miami got screwed on that end-zone call in the OSU BCS game four years ago when OSU scraped by. And the SEC is a tougher conference than the Big Ten this year. And Florida beat six ranked opponents this year, while Michigan beat powder puff squads like Indiana, Illinois, MSU, Minnesota and Northwestern in-conference. Mich did vaporize Notre Dame and did give OSU the fight of its life on the tricky turf in Columbus, but even the Auburn game, which had a fluke call against Florida, was a very close call despite the 10-point difference in the score.
So Florida, the state and the school, deserves recompense in a way. And the SEC deserves recognition as a kick-ass conference. But the fact remains that I still think Michigan has the slightly better team, and the BCS was inaugurated to get the two best teams in a Nat'l Championship format. Beat the Buckeyes remains my mantra.
All this yadda, yadda obscures the fact that college football this year has been the best that I can remember for terrific games, and the USC/UCLA game yesterday was fantastic, only to be exceeded by the Florida/Arkansas roller-coaster antics!
I wish the NFL was half this exciting!
Bush the Worst President?
Eric Foner is a Marxist prof from Columbia who wrote a book on Reconstruction about four decades ago and has been dining out on it forever.
Leftist nepotism has placed his son Frederic on the masthead of a leftist magazine whose name I forget.
LBJ and Jimmy Carter are the two worst presidents of the twentieth century and phoney Foner doesn't go into these two one-term wonders at all, because they're Dem failures. As far as avoiding terrorist plots, Clinton is below GWB, but since Foner and his ilk support anything opposing Bush Jr., they are more pro-Al-Qaeda than for anything that would support GWB or his policies.
Marxists like Foner and the far-left bloggers who are his claque on this article simply want to adopt the values of Euro-nanny-state paternalistic anti-family statism.
These are the types who clog the arteries of the so-called Northeast Corridor.
Leftist nepotism has placed his son Frederic on the masthead of a leftist magazine whose name I forget.
LBJ and Jimmy Carter are the two worst presidents of the twentieth century and phoney Foner doesn't go into these two one-term wonders at all, because they're Dem failures. As far as avoiding terrorist plots, Clinton is below GWB, but since Foner and his ilk support anything opposing Bush Jr., they are more pro-Al-Qaeda than for anything that would support GWB or his policies.
Marxists like Foner and the far-left bloggers who are his claque on this article simply want to adopt the values of Euro-nanny-state paternalistic anti-family statism.
These are the types who clog the arteries of the so-called Northeast Corridor.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Jesuit Paraguayan Reducciones
The New York Times isn't always purveying evil through its journalistic endeavors, as this piece on the social experiment called the reductions in English in what is now Paraguay.
The destruction of the Jesuit Order in the 1760s sealed the fate of the Catholic Church as a victim of Enlightenment excesses that led to the French Revolution, atheism as a philosophy and a whole host of evils. The miraculous revival of the Jesuits thanks to Catherine the Great is a miracle of God's providence.
The Jesuits were simply too smart and too skilled for a bunch of benighted Italian prelates who dominated the Papacy, and when Matteo Ricci, SJ, convinced the Chinese Emperor to convert to Catholicism, the Pope vetoed the one proviso the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom had stipulated, the use of the Chinese language in the Roman liturgy.
The Jesuit Relations covered the entire known world in the 17th and early 18th centuries, including the discovery of ginseng growing wild in the American Middle West which the Jesuits speculated could be marketed in their Chinese missions, where a shortage of ginseng was driving up prices. Their worldwide intelligence network was one of the reasons for their downfall.
The Italian popes venality and parochial POV doomed the Church to its present marginal position in world affairs, although two non-Italian popes in succession indicate the dead hand of the Curia has not yet squelched Catholic thought and philosophy.
Right now, I'm trying to get my daughter into Boston College or Georgetown, and the Jesuits' monumental acheivements persist today in their outstanding educational efforts.
Ask Jesuit grad Charles de Gaulle, now deceased, or the very alive Bill Clinton, a perfect example of Jesuitical thinking!
The destruction of the Jesuit Order in the 1760s sealed the fate of the Catholic Church as a victim of Enlightenment excesses that led to the French Revolution, atheism as a philosophy and a whole host of evils. The miraculous revival of the Jesuits thanks to Catherine the Great is a miracle of God's providence.
The Jesuits were simply too smart and too skilled for a bunch of benighted Italian prelates who dominated the Papacy, and when Matteo Ricci, SJ, convinced the Chinese Emperor to convert to Catholicism, the Pope vetoed the one proviso the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom had stipulated, the use of the Chinese language in the Roman liturgy.
The Jesuit Relations covered the entire known world in the 17th and early 18th centuries, including the discovery of ginseng growing wild in the American Middle West which the Jesuits speculated could be marketed in their Chinese missions, where a shortage of ginseng was driving up prices. Their worldwide intelligence network was one of the reasons for their downfall.
The Italian popes venality and parochial POV doomed the Church to its present marginal position in world affairs, although two non-Italian popes in succession indicate the dead hand of the Curia has not yet squelched Catholic thought and philosophy.
Right now, I'm trying to get my daughter into Boston College or Georgetown, and the Jesuits' monumental acheivements persist today in their outstanding educational efforts.
Ask Jesuit grad Charles de Gaulle, now deceased, or the very alive Bill Clinton, a perfect example of Jesuitical thinking!
Paltrow Life Coach is Madonna
Airhead Gwynethtb hangs around the most interesting people. She doesn't like to talk about capitalism, so she hangs with social workers like Madonna, who coach her in African poses and adoption scenarios.
Read the link to see why she is projecting "Shallow Hal" during this interview.
Read the link to see why she is projecting "Shallow Hal" during this interview.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Tancredo Immigration Talk Attacked at MSU
Moo U has a reputation for being a second-rate institution whose football team has become almost as second-rate putrid as Columbia U's, which set an NCAA record a few years back for consecutive losses. MSU is merely competing for consecutive years in the bottom half of the Big Ten, a conference where real men play football, not like the Columbia U. conference for cocktail party athletes [Chuck Shumer told me at a cocktail party that he was the first Jew to play on Harvard's basketball team.] When Tom Tancredo came to talk about immigration at the Law School, it wasn't supposed to be a big deal.
Still, MSU should be able to have free speech, as the school is subsidized by state tax-payers. Columbia is run by a soi-disant "free speech expert" named Bollinger who doesn't seem to recognize free speech for opinions differing from his own or his leftist faculty's. And Columbia is subsidized by private foundations and its own alumni bequests, although many are spinning in their graves at the mess that Bollinger has allowed the school to become. So the disruption of the Columbia speech on immigration last month has the context of being in a hyper-flaky lefty echo-chamber environment.
Tancredo's speech and its sponsors had multiple problems:
This sort of behavior fits the whole episode into the MSU rowdy rep as a second-rate school. [I must confess to being a U. of Mich Ann Arbor grad.] At least the wimpy effete types disrupting the Columbia event didn't get physically violent.
Can you imagine what an ignorant third-rate scammer like Diane McWhorter would screech and howl if rowdy Young Repubs had disrupted a well-behaved left-wing function [excuse the dialectical impossibility]? This double-digit IQ Pulitzer Prize Winner [Walter Duranty division] would call them Nazis and accuse them of being Hitler-Youth wannabes.
But Tancredo has now earned a platform in the national media thanks to the rubes up in East Lansing. A fellow Karl Rove would not allow into the Bush White House can portray himself as a victim and a martyr for free speech.
Of course, the ignoramuses in East Lansing probably never thought that far ahead, but the leftist haters are stupider than any Young Repubs could ever be.
Still, MSU should be able to have free speech, as the school is subsidized by state tax-payers. Columbia is run by a soi-disant "free speech expert" named Bollinger who doesn't seem to recognize free speech for opinions differing from his own or his leftist faculty's. And Columbia is subsidized by private foundations and its own alumni bequests, although many are spinning in their graves at the mess that Bollinger has allowed the school to become. So the disruption of the Columbia speech on immigration last month has the context of being in a hyper-flaky lefty echo-chamber environment.
Tancredo's speech and its sponsors had multiple problems:
Police were called after protestors pulled a fire alarm prior to the speech on immigration policies. There were at least three violent incidents with protestors targeting student backers of the event, Tancredo, R-Littleton, said today.
"One was spit on, one was kicked, and one was punched," Tancredo said in an e-mail. "Tires were also slashed."
This sort of behavior fits the whole episode into the MSU rowdy rep as a second-rate school. [I must confess to being a U. of Mich Ann Arbor grad.] At least the wimpy effete types disrupting the Columbia event didn't get physically violent.
College newspaper The State News reported that protesters carried signs reading "Ignorant Racist" outside the room where the speech was held. They were not allowed in with the signs, the paper said. It also reported that about 40 people attended the speech.
Tancredo said in the email that protestors organized on the Internet social networking site Facebook. "They declared ahead of time on facebook that they would not allow me to speak," Tancredo said in the e-mail.
Can you imagine what an ignorant third-rate scammer like Diane McWhorter would screech and howl if rowdy Young Repubs had disrupted a well-behaved left-wing function [excuse the dialectical impossibility]? This double-digit IQ Pulitzer Prize Winner [Walter Duranty division] would call them Nazis and accuse them of being Hitler-Youth wannabes.
But Tancredo has now earned a platform in the national media thanks to the rubes up in East Lansing. A fellow Karl Rove would not allow into the Bush White House can portray himself as a victim and a martyr for free speech.
Of course, the ignoramuses in East Lansing probably never thought that far ahead, but the leftist haters are stupider than any Young Repubs could ever be.
Diane McWhorter is a Cretinette, or a Cretine, or an Idiot
Frederic Smoler has a good takedown of one of the stupidest articles I have read this century, or this millennium for that matter. Proof that the Pulitzer Prize is for attitude rather than brains need be sought no further than the fact that the stupidest idiot in the country, judging from a recent Slate piece, received the so-called Walter Duranty Prize in 2002.
Ms. McWhorter is stuck on stupid, as the Louisiana general said of the press after Katrina, and there's no chance this creature can ever look dumber than she did in her Slate piece. Smoler's commentary:
Sounds like this creature got a fail on her Columbia Journalism School pass/fail for ethics. Or maybe she never went to school?
Smoler does not dance around his opinion of the quality of McWhorter's analysis, which actually had a Slate "correction" attached since this distinguished prize-winning dodette did not understand or wilfully misinterpreted the law she used to make her non-point. Smoler elaborates:
Ann Coulter does do outlandish tropes to make points that sell her books at an outlandish pace. But Ann has brains, understands the laws of the land, and has some sort of moral compass which prevents her from making a compleat, total, utter fool of herself---plus she is good looking.
McWhorter, alas, is not good-looking and, unlike Ann Coulter who has looks and brains along with her mischevious nature, remains a complete, utter, total fool and guttersnipe, thus qualifying her as just the poster-creature for the ridiculous impostors at Slate, Salon, HuffPo and other fashionable cloaca of the left.
Gosh, I missed her on Tavis Smiley. Too bad.
Ms. McWhorter is stuck on stupid, as the Louisiana general said of the press after Katrina, and there's no chance this creature can ever look dumber than she did in her Slate piece. Smoler's commentary:
On Tuesday, Diane McWhorter published a piece sneering at the tendency to avoid comparing the Bush administration to the Nazis. She wonders why “nobody seems eager to delve too deeply into what exactly it was about George W. Bush that the voters so roundly rejected . . . polite discussion of that question does not contain any derivative of the words fascism, propaganda, or dictatorship. God forbid Nazi or Hitler.” Early on, Ms. McWhorter points out that the Bush administration, like the Nazis, engages in propaganda. I do not think this successfully isolates the more distinctive qualities of National Socialism.
Sounds like this creature got a fail on her Columbia Journalism School pass/fail for ethics. Or maybe she never went to school?
Ms. McWhorter handsomely acknowledges that the Bush people have avoided exterminating the Jews, but insists that this does not get them off the hook. She concludes by assuming the point at issue: The United States is like Nazi Germany because ordinary Americans went along with Bush for a number of years. Before that dazzling display of circular reasoning, she makes a number of other comparisons, and one core of her argument focuses on the brief threat to change the Senate’s rules on the filibuster, which, had it happened, “struck me as a functional analog of the Enabling Act of 1933, which consolidated the German government under Chancellor Hitler and effectively dissolved the Reichstag as a parliamentary body.” For this analogy to hold, you have to assume, at a minimum, that in the event the Republicans had changed the filibuster rules on confirming Federal judges, there would never again have been an election in the United States. And to assume this, you have to be an idiot.
Smoler does not dance around his opinion of the quality of McWhorter's analysis, which actually had a Slate "correction" attached since this distinguished prize-winning dodette did not understand or wilfully misinterpreted the law she used to make her non-point. Smoler elaborates:
An idiot comparing Bush to Hitler is not news. An idiot making this comparison after the opposition wins a national election isn’t news, but it is peculiar. A respectable Internet news and comment outlet publishing a piece elaborating this grotesque analogy, and doing it with stunning ineptitude, may verge on news. Editors at mainstream outlets serve as gatekeepers and tend to exclude at least some sorts of vicious nonsense; descend to a certain level, and you usually become marginalized as a crank or a clown. When a certain sort of vicious nonsense makes it way past the gatekeepers, something may be happening; when previously acceptable if very nasty voices are pushed out of the mainstream, something else is happening. Ann Coulter, for example, pretty swiftly devolved into a clown. Is McWhorter the left’s Ann Coulter? I don’t think so. Slate wouldn’t publish Ann Coulter.
Ann Coulter does do outlandish tropes to make points that sell her books at an outlandish pace. But Ann has brains, understands the laws of the land, and has some sort of moral compass which prevents her from making a compleat, total, utter fool of herself---plus she is good looking.
McWhorter, alas, is not good-looking and, unlike Ann Coulter who has looks and brains along with her mischevious nature, remains a complete, utter, total fool and guttersnipe, thus qualifying her as just the poster-creature for the ridiculous impostors at Slate, Salon, HuffPo and other fashionable cloaca of the left.
Gosh, I missed her on Tavis Smiley. Too bad.
Columbia Journalism School Ethics Exam Cheated on by J-students.
The preposterous joke of a university whose reputation has sunk as low as the fortunes of its spectacularly inept football team, Columbia U., has a journalism school which is run by Nicholas Lemann, whose reputation as a journalist used to be peerless.
The Peter Principle of Yore has caught up with Lemann, and with the craven coward Lee Bollinger who is the President of this woebegone institution. Bollinger is an expert on free speech, but is keeping mum about the spectacular acts of radicals disrupting free speech on his campus.
This is an example of the hopeless decadence at many Ivy League institutions and of the general moral free-fall America is experiencing during the Clinton and even the Bush years, as a corrupt and biased media destroys all values and breaks every law and rule of ethics in its attempt to wrest control of the national agenda out of the hands of responsible politicians.
Rush Limbaugh had a lot of fun with this ridiculous situation today, saying that all the students were doing was the same thing that Columbia's Pulitzer Committee awards prizes for. Cheating and leaking and breaking one's word and lying are all part and parcel of the journalists of the WaPo and NYT and the corrupt civil servants and government officials they seduce and suborn.
Rush believed that despite the fact that the course is a ridiculous pass/fail parody of education, the students should all get an "A" for Attitude.
Attitude rather than ethics and hard work is what gets hacks to the top of their fields.
The Peter Principle of Yore has caught up with Lemann, and with the craven coward Lee Bollinger who is the President of this woebegone institution. Bollinger is an expert on free speech, but is keeping mum about the spectacular acts of radicals disrupting free speech on his campus.
This is an example of the hopeless decadence at many Ivy League institutions and of the general moral free-fall America is experiencing during the Clinton and even the Bush years, as a corrupt and biased media destroys all values and breaks every law and rule of ethics in its attempt to wrest control of the national agenda out of the hands of responsible politicians.
Rush Limbaugh had a lot of fun with this ridiculous situation today, saying that all the students were doing was the same thing that Columbia's Pulitzer Committee awards prizes for. Cheating and leaking and breaking one's word and lying are all part and parcel of the journalists of the WaPo and NYT and the corrupt civil servants and government officials they seduce and suborn.
Rush believed that despite the fact that the course is a ridiculous pass/fail parody of education, the students should all get an "A" for Attitude.
Attitude rather than ethics and hard work is what gets hacks to the top of their fields.
Russia and China in the Far East: How Long Can the Honeymoon Last?
The Economist and The Financial Times feed off each other and it is usually The Economist that does the hunting and the FT that feeds off the rest of the carcass. The two links above concern a subject also in Mark Steyn's brilliant book America Alone, which charts the demographic decline of Russia as a reason that its population in its Far East will wither away. America might take some lessons from the Russians.
The hard-working Chinese have been in Siberia since Anton Chekhov visited in the 19th century, but the Russian police have been good at keeping them under control and from overpopulating the vast empty stretches of frozen tundra. When I was in the State Dept., I had to forward Top Secret docs to Vance at the UN over the only fax machine so enabled, and they invariably had ELINT and UMBRA headings with descriptions of Russian and Chinese troop manoeuvers and outbreaks of open fighting along the Ussuri and Amur Rivers. The Russo-Chinese struggle has now ceased, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, and Putin and Hu are on amicable terms.
However, demography is destiny and the continuing diminishment of the Russian population, largely due to the lack of investment incentives offered by the torpid listless Russian bureaucracy to settle in the Far East as well as national tendencies to abort pregnancies, predictably means that eventually a lot of Chinese will be eyeing the empty spaces to the North for settlement.
Actually, the Chinese policy of only one child per couple will cause some sort of slowdown in the final quest for Lebensraum, but it is hard to imagine a sluggish Russian work ethic sustaining its hold over the vast Siberian resource base forever. But unlike the US, in Russia politicians are doing something about rampant immigration:
Unlike Washington, some Russian politicians have spines down their backs when illegal immigration is concerned.
The hard-working Chinese have been in Siberia since Anton Chekhov visited in the 19th century, but the Russian police have been good at keeping them under control and from overpopulating the vast empty stretches of frozen tundra. When I was in the State Dept., I had to forward Top Secret docs to Vance at the UN over the only fax machine so enabled, and they invariably had ELINT and UMBRA headings with descriptions of Russian and Chinese troop manoeuvers and outbreaks of open fighting along the Ussuri and Amur Rivers. The Russo-Chinese struggle has now ceased, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, and Putin and Hu are on amicable terms.
However, demography is destiny and the continuing diminishment of the Russian population, largely due to the lack of investment incentives offered by the torpid listless Russian bureaucracy to settle in the Far East as well as national tendencies to abort pregnancies, predictably means that eventually a lot of Chinese will be eyeing the empty spaces to the North for settlement.
Actually, the Chinese policy of only one child per couple will cause some sort of slowdown in the final quest for Lebensraum, but it is hard to imagine a sluggish Russian work ethic sustaining its hold over the vast Siberian resource base forever. But unlike the US, in Russia politicians are doing something about rampant immigration:
Already, Russian politicians exploit the "yellow peril" fear. New federal rules limiting the role of non-Russians in retail markets, aimed at Caucasians in European Russia, will hit Chinese markets in the Far East too. But outsiders should not take heart: if warm Sino-Russian relations raise eyebrows in some quarters, a big falling out could be far be more troubling.
Unlike Washington, some Russian politicians have spines down their backs when illegal immigration is concerned.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)