allah on the flag

hey! wait those stupid fugs put their diety's name on the flag.

everyone knows you got to burn flags, what is the diff in kicking them?



http://www.jihadwatch.org/

US military regrets 'blasphemous' balls
"Captain Vanessa Bowman said the military had been unaware of the sensitivity of the issue." Indeed. There is so much about Islam and jihad about which they are unaware. And is that really excusable given today's world climate? An update on this story.
By Hamid Shalizi for Reuters (thanks to JE):
THE US military in Afghanistan has expressed regret over a campaign aimed at winning hearts and minds but which offended scores of Muslims when it dropped dozens of soccer balls bearing the name of Allah and the prophet Mohammed from helicopters.
The idea of kicking something bearing their names is considered deeply offensive to Muslims.
"This ball ... carries a message with it which, like an atom bomb, can cause carnage and insecurity in all parts of Afghanistan,'' a leading Afghan newspaper, Cheragh, said today.
US troops on Friday dropped dozens of free footballs for soccer-mad Afghan children from helicopters in an area of southeastern Afghanistan, all marked with flags of various countries.
But the balls depicted the Saudi Arabian flag, which features the Islamic declaration of faith and includes the names of Allah and the prophet Mohammed.
Fawad Ahmad, a shopkeeper in Kabul, said: "Americans themselves create insecurity by ignoring religious sensitivity, it is against Islam."
A spokeswoman for the US military in Afghanistan said the ball distribution was part of a goodwill humanitarian aid mission ... for the enjoyment of Afghan children''.
Captain Vanessa Bowman said the military had been unaware of the sensitivity of the issue.
"We do regret any disturbances caused,'' she said today.

Kellogg-Briand Pact 1928

Got remembered from NRO. Looks like stupidity runs accross generations. Some fuggles wanted to ban war.

psst.......it really didn't work, see WW2


double psst, war just is


here you go


http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/kbpact.htm

Kellogg-Briand Pact 1928
Art 1
Art 2
Art 3
Treaty between the United States and other Powers providing for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. Signed at Paris, August 27, 1928; ratification advised by the Senate, January 16, 1929; ratified by the President, January 17, 1929; instruments of ratification deposited at Washington by the United States of America, Australia, Dominion of Canada, Czechoslovkia, Germany, Great Britain, India, Irish Free State, Italy, New Zealand, and Union of South Africa, March 2, 1929: By Poland, March 26, 1929; by Belgium, March 27 1929; by France, April 22, 1929; by Japan, July 24, 1929; proclaimed, July 24, 1929.
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.A PROCLAMATION.
WHEREAS a Treaty between the President of the United States Of America, the President of the German Reich, His Majesty the King of the Belgians, the President of the French Republic, His Majesty the King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, His Majesty the King of Italy, His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, the President of the Republic of Poland, and the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, providing for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, was concluded and signed by their respective Plenipotontiaries at Paris on the twenty-seventh day of August, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight, the original of which Treaty, being in the English and the French languages, is word for word as follows:
THE PRESIDENT OF THE GERMAN REICH, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS, THE PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF GREAT BRITAIN IRELAND AND THE BRITISH DOMINIONS BEYOND THE SEAS, EMPEROR OF INDIA, HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF ITALY, HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND THE PRESIDENT OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC,
Deeply sensible of their solemn duty to promote the welfare of mankind;
Persuaded that the time has, come when a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of na tional policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated;
Convinced that all changes in their relations with one another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful and orderly process, and that any signatory Power which shall hereafter seek to promote its ts national interests by resort to war a should be denied the benefits furnished by this Treaty;
Hopeful that, encouraged by their example, all the other nations of the world will join in this humane endeavor and by adhering to the present Treaty as soon as it comes into force bring their peoples within the scope of its beneficent provisions, thus uniting the civilized nations of the world in a common renunciation of war as an instrument of their national policy;
Have decided to conclude a Treaty and for that purpose have appointed as their respectivePlenipotentiaries:THE PRESIDENT OF THE GERMAN REICH:Dr Gustav STRESEMANN, Minister of Foreign Affairs;THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:The Honorable Frank B. KELLOGG, Secretary of State;HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS:Mr Paul HYMANS, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister of State;THE PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC:Mr. Aristide BRIAND Minister for Foreign Affairs;HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF GREAT BRITAIN, IRELAND AND THE BRITISH DOMINIONS BEYOND THE SEAS, EMPEROR OF INDIA:For GREAT BRITAIN and NORTHERN IBELAND and all parts of the British Empire which are not separate Members of the League of Nations:The Right Honourable Lord CUSHENDUN, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Acting-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs;For the DOMINION OF CANADA: The Right Honourable William Lyon MACKENZIE KING, Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs;For the COMMONWEALTH of AUSTRLIA:The Honourable Alexander John McLACHLAN, Member of the Executive Federal Council;For the DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND:The Honourable Sir Christopher James PARR High Commissioner for New Zealand in Great Britain;For the UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA:The Honourable Jacobus Stephanus SMIT, High Commissioner for the Union of South Africa in Great Britain;For the IRISH FREE STATE:Mr. William Thomas COSGRAVE, President of the Executive Council;For INDIA:The Right Honourable Lord CUSHENDUN, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Acting Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs;HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF ITALY:Count Gaetano MANZONI, his Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Paris.HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN:Count UCHIDA, Privy Councillor;THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND:Mr. A. ZALESKI, Minister for Foreign Affairs;THE PRESIDENT OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC:Dr Eduard BENES, Minister for Foreign Affairs;
who, having communicated to one another their full powers found in good and due form have agreed upon the following articles:
ARTICLE I
The High Contracting Parties solemly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.
ARTICLE II
The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.
ARTICLE III
The present Treaty shall be ratified by the High Contracting Parties named in the Preamble in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements, and shall take effect as between them as soon as all their several instruments of ratification shall have been deposited at Washington.
This Treaty shall, when it has come into effect as prescribed in the preceding paragraph, remain open as long as may be necessary for adherence by all the other Powers of the world. Every instrument evidencing the adherence of a Power shall be deposited at Washington and the Treaty shall immediately upon such deposit become effective as; between the Power thus adhering and the other Powers parties hereto.
It shall be the duty of the Government of the United States to fumish each Government named in the Preamble and every Government subsequently adhering to this Treaty with a certified copy of the Treaty and of every instrument of ratification or adherence. It shall also be the duty of the Government of the United States telegraphically to notify such Governments immediately upon the deposit with it of each instrument of ratification or adherence.
IN FAITH WHEREOF the respective Plenipotentiaries have signed this Treaty in the French and English languages both texts having equal force, and hereunto affix their seals.
DONE at Paris, the twenty seventh day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight.[SEAL] GUSTAV STRESEMANN[SEAL] FRANK B KELLOGG[SEAL] PAUL HYMANS[SEAL] ARI BRIAND[SEAL] CUSHENDUN[SEAL] W. L. MACKENZIE KING[SEAL] A J MCLACHLAN[SEAL] C. J. PARR[SEAL] J S. SMIT[SEAL] LIAM T.MACCOSGAIR[SEAL] CUSHENDUN[SEAL] G. MANZONI[SEAL] UCHIDA[SEAB] AUGUST ZALESKI[SEAE1 DR EDWARD BENES
Certified to be a true copy of the signed original deposited with the Government of the United States of America.FRANK B. KELLOGGSecretary of State of the United States of America
AND WHEREAS it is stipulated in the said Treaty that it shall take effect as between the High Contracting Parties as soon as all the several instruments of ratification shall have been deposited at Washington;
AND WHEREAS the said Treaty has been duly ratified on the parts of all the High Contracting Parties and their several instruments of ratification have been deposited with the Government of the United States of America, the last on July 24, 1929;
NOW THEREFORE, be it known that I, Herbert Hoover, President of the United States of America, have caused the said Treaty to be made public, to the end that the same and every article and clause thereof may be observed and fulfilled with good faith by the United States and the citizens thereof.
IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
DONE at the city of Washington this twenty-fourth day of July in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and fifty-fourthHERBERT HOOVERBy the President:HENRY L STIMSONSecretary of State
NOTE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE
ADHERING COUNTRIES
When this Treaty became effective on Jury 24, 1929, the instruments of ratification of all of the signatory powers having been deposited at Washington, the following countries, having deposited instruments of definitive adherence, became parties to it:
Afghanistan
Finland
Peru
Albania
Guatemala
Portugal
Austria
Hungary
Rumania
Bulgaria
Iceland
Russia
China
Latvia
Kingdom of the Serbs
Cuba
Liberia
Croats and Slovenes
Denmark
Lithuania
Siam
Dominican Republic
Netherlands
Spain
Egypt
Nicaragua
Sweden
Estonia
Norway
Turkey
Ethiopia
Panama
Additional adhesions deposited subsequent to July 24, 1929. Persia, July 2, 1929; Greece, August 3, 1929; Honduras, August 6, 1929; Chile, August 12, 1929; Luxemburg August 14, 1929; Danzig, September 11, 1929; Costa Rica, October 1, 1929; Venezuela, October 24, 1929.

will to fight

Watching the Military Channel this evening......

The West has by far the best equipment and personal..................does The West have the will to fight to keep its culture?

Bring it on!

Sucks to be unarmed. Glad I'm an armed American.

http://www.cphpost.dk/get/103197.html
Insurgents apply home front terror to soldiers’ families

Internet telephone directories make it easy for insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan to track down family members of soldiers

A growing number of families of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are receiving calls in the dead of the night that include loud shouting and expletives yelled in English.

According to the Danish Defence Intelligence Agency (FE), insurgent groups in Iraq have managed to tap into soldiers’ mobile phones to call Denmark and hack into email accounts, enabling the groups to trace soldiers’ family members and issue the threats.

The calls signal a shift in tactics by the insurgent groups, according to Steen Kjærgaard, a captain at the Defence Academy who has conducted research in psychological warfare.

‘They realise that if they want to have success, then they need to win the fight in the arena of the Information Age,’ Kjærgaard told Nyhedsavisen.

‘By contacting family members, the groups hope to spread so much fear that the soldiers are incapacitated,’ he said.

‘The terrorists hit the soldiers hard by contacting their families because they can’t help them when they are in Iraq or Afghanistan,’ Kjærgaard said. ‘It shifts the soldiers’ focus from the task at hand and creates unease. So the strategy is actually quite effective.’

According to Ralf Clemmesen, a soldier who served in Iraq and has received such calls, the tactic worked on him.

‘I couldn’t fight when my family was threatened,’ said Clemmesen. ‘I can take care of myself, but it was unbearable to think about what could have happened to my family.’

Although the calls have taken their toll on soldiers and their families, the defence minister, Søren Gade, said Denmark would not follow in the footsteps of the US and Great Britain and ban their soldiers from using mobile phones.

‘We could of course shut down all communication, as some countries have done, but that would violate the soldiers’ right to talk with their families,’ said Gade.

The Danish defence forces have instead recommended that soldiers limit their communication to the military’s secure telephone lines to protect their privacy.

mohammed needs a kick in his teeny nads

Spark in Antwerp? How can soceity allow this to continue?



http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2340
Scenes from Eurabia: Women Should Know Their Place
From the desk of Marij Uijt den Bogaard on Tue, 2007-08-21 10:31
“Women are simply not accepted by the Muslim community,” says Mohammed. “So women had also better not do this work.” Mohammed is my colleague social worker [integration civil servant] in Antwerp’s immigrant quarters. He looks at me gravely. “That is just the way it is, and that is why I prefer not to work with a woman, that simply doesn’t work.” He is complaining about another colleague, a Flemish woman who is his superior.
Mohammed does not think that this mentality about women and work is wrong. In fact, whoever questions this attitude is wrong because it is his culture and belief, which is why he accepts it, he “understands” it and we, Flemings, do not. Consequently we must accept it, until we “understand” as well.
He sighs. Yesterday it came to a clash with his female Flemish superior. Together with a team of mostly immigrant co-workers, she organizes meaningful recreational activities for the mostly Moroccan youths in the neighborhood. The Flemish superior is also close to despair. Working together with Mohammed is not plain sailing.
She has no support from her Moroccan colleagues. On the contrary, slowly but surely she is being frozen out. Whenever she appears in the square several older man gather round her and start speaking the Berber language with her male colleagues. “They want to marry you,” her male colleagues of Moroccan origin laugh, “because we said that you’re not married.” In the evening the men wait for her and bother her, why won’t she? Several girls of Moroccan origin grab her phone. Her Moroccan colleagues look the other way, also when older kids who always start arguments with her kick her shins until they are blue and threaten her.
She did not want to discuss the complete lack of fellowship, the negative attitude of the Moroccan colleagues. Her problem was Mohammed. He didn’t want to work together with her. He walked away during a conversation with her and went to pray in the meeting room, calling on Allah to stand by him in the discussion with a woman! Perplexity on the part of his female colleague.
Naturally she submitted her conflict with Mohammed, and his praying in the meeting room, to the management. Yes, it’s annoying, but now what? The problem was bought before the staff manager. Who, strangely enough, made a completely absurd accusation. Not Mohammed, but rather the female co-worker, had overstepped her bounds. She had threatened Mohammed and provoked aggression.
How? By questioning his actions. Yes, that’s what Mohammed had said. To the staff manager of course. The female colleague stands as if hit by lighting. She doesn’t weigh half as much as Mohammed, she would be mad to wake up aggression by somebody who could wipe her off the map, Mohammed is also a kickboxer, she is not that crazy! She is left with her feeling of powerlessness. Not Mohammed. In this conflict she is getting picked on.
Her complaint about Mohammed’s behavior was not taken seriously anywhere. It should be, since Mohammed discriminates against women in the workplace, he is being accused by female colleagues of sexual intimidation, and above all he doesn't offer help to a colleague who is being assaulted by the target group. All for the simple reason that women shouldn’t be doing this work, because they are unacceptable for Mohammed and the target group, we must understand that, end of story.
Nobody confronts Mohammed about this utterly wrong attitude towards women. Worse still: the Antwerp authorities assume that by employing Mohammed they have “easier access” to the target group. In fact, the effect is usually the opposite. Mohammed supports the target group, shares a wrong attitude and doesn’t think of doing anything differently.
Because nobody has the courage to approach Mohammed about behavior that would be unacceptable in any other civil servant, we make no progress. Polarization and segregation increase and within a welfare system that employs thousands of social workers we are unable to achieve a change of attitude, which respects everybody regardless of origin, sex or belief.
If the politicians procrastinate any longer, there will soon be huge protest marches in Brussels by everybody who has had enough. Because these disparities disrupt society: not skin color, but the behavior of target groups is why people are being excluded at work, from discos and swimming pools. It is time for everyone who has had enough to get together, in everybody’s interest.

Military History and all that

VDH is the bomb.

"Carnage and Culture" is THE book to read to learn about the aspects of Western Civ. that has made it lethal and how we got here today.

My concern is we have more blockheads who are unwilling to fight for the WEST than those who will.

The West is under assault by Political Correctness, Islam, Multi-Culturism, ignorance.

I'm not nearly as versed in Military history as I would like to be. For example I didn't know that 7,000 troops were killed in 20 minutes at Cold Harbor until I read this.

"Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it"
That includes military affairs, know idea who said that but it rings of truth.

Secondly, wars and other violence almost never break out because someone is too strong/powerful, etc.

read the whole thing


http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_military_history.html

Why Study War?
Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.Victor Davis HansonSummer 2007

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.

It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.

This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.
I came to the study of warfare in an odd way, at the age of 24. Without ever taking a class in military history, I naively began writing about war for a Stanford classics dissertation that explored the effects of agricultural devastation in ancient Greece, especially the Spartan ravaging of the Athenian countryside during the Peloponnesian War. The topic fascinated me. Was the strategy effective? Why assume that ancient armies with primitive tools could easily burn or cut trees, vines, and grain on thousands of acres of enemy farms, when on my family farm in Selma, California, it took me almost an hour to fell a mature fruit tree with a sharp modern ax? Yet even if the invaders couldn’t starve civilian populations, was the destruction still harmful psychologically? Did it goad proud agrarians to come out and fight? And what did the practice tell us about the values of the Greeks—and of the generals who persisted in an operation that seemingly brought no tangible results?

I posed these questions to my prospective thesis advisor, adding all sorts of further justifications. The topic was central to understanding the Peloponnesian War, I noted. The research would be interdisciplinary—a big plus in the modern university—drawing not just on ancient military histories but also on archaeology, classical drama, epigraphy, and poetry. I could bring a personal dimension to the research, too, having grown up around veterans of both world wars who talked constantly about battle. And from my experience on the farm, I wanted to add practical details about growing trees and vines in a Mediterranean climate.
Yet my advisor was skeptical. Agrarian wars, indeed wars of any kind, weren’t popular in classics Ph.D. programs, even though farming and fighting were the ancient Greeks’ two most common pursuits, the sources of anecdote, allusion, and metaphor in almost every Greek philosophical, historical, and literary text. Few classicists seemed to care any more that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen—from Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophon—had served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea. Dozens of nineteenth-century dissertations and monographs on ancient warfare—on the organization of the Spartan army, the birth of Greek tactics, the strategic thinking of Greek generals, and much more—went largely unread. Nor was the discipline of military history, once central to a liberal education, in vogue on campuses in the seventies. It was as if the university had forgotten that history itself had begun with Herodotus and Thucydides as the story of armed conflicts.

What lay behind this academic lack of interest? The most obvious explanation: this was the immediate post-Vietnam era. The public perception in the Carter years was that America had lost a war that for moral and practical reasons it should never have fought—a catastrophe, for many in the universities, that it must never repeat. The necessary corrective wasn’t to learn how such wars started, went forward, and were lost. Better to ignore anything that had to do with such odious business in the first place.

The nuclear pessimism of the cold war, which followed the horror of two world wars, also dampened academic interest. The postwar obscenity of Mutually Assured Destruction had lent an apocalyptic veneer to contemporary war: as President Kennedy warned, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” Conflict had become something so destructive, in this view, that it no longer had any relation to the battles of the past. It seemed absurd to worry about a new tank or a novel doctrine of counterinsurgency when the press of a button, unleashing nuclear Armageddon, would render all military thinking superfluous.
Further, the sixties had ushered in a utopian view of society antithetical to serious thinking about war. Government, the military, business, religion, and the family had conspired, the new Rousseauians believed, to warp the naturally peace-loving individual. Conformity and coercion smothered our innately pacifist selves. To assert that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because good men had done too little to stop them, was now seen as antithetical to an enlightened understanding of human nature. “What difference does it make,” in the words of the much-quoted Mahatma Gandhi, “to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.

Those who want to study war in the traditional way face intense academic suspicion, as Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” suggests:
Confess: it’s my profession that alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.

Historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering. Why not figure out instead how to outlaw war forever, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence? Hence the recent surge of “peace studies” (see “The Peace Racket”).

The university’s aversion to the study of war certainly doesn’t reflect public lack of interest in the subject. Students love old-fashioned war classes on those rare occasions when they’re offered, usually as courses that professors sneak in when the choice of what to teach is left up to them. I taught a number of such classes at California State University, Stanford, and elsewhere. They’d invariably wind up overenrolled, with hordes of students lingering after office hours to offer opinions on the battles of Marathon and Lepanto.

Popular culture, too, displays extraordinary enthusiasm for all things military. There’s a new Military History Channel, and Hollywood churns out a steady supply of blockbuster war movies, from Saving Private Ryan to 300. The post–Ken Burns explosion of interest in the Civil War continues. Historical reenactment societies stage history’s great battles, from the Roman legions’ to the Wehrmacht’s. Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores boast well-stocked military history sections, with scores of new titles every month. A plethora of websites obsess over strategy and tactics. Hit video games grow ever more realistic in their reconstructions of battles.

The public may feel drawn to military history because it wants to learn about honor and sacrifice, or because of interest in technology—the muzzle velocity of a Tiger Tank’s 88mm cannon, for instance—or because of a pathological need to experience violence, if only vicariously. The importance—and challenge—of the academic study of war is to elevate that popular enthusiasm into a more capacious and serious understanding, one that seeks answers to such questions as: Why do wars break out? How do they end? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? How best to avoid wars or contain their worst effects?

A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. So it’s no surprise that today so many seem to think that the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Roughly 3,000 combat dead in Iraq in some four years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And it has provoked national outrage to the point of considering withdrawal and defeat, as we still bicker over up-armored Humvees and proper troop levels. But a previous generation considered Okinawa a stunning American victory, and prepared to follow it with an invasion of the Japanese mainland itself—despite losing, in a little over two months, four times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq, casualties of faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and suicidal head-on assaults against fortified positions.

It’s not that military history offers cookie-cutter comparisons with the past. Germany’s World War I victory over Russia in under three years and her failure to take France in four apparently misled Hitler into thinking that he could overrun the Soviets in three or four weeks—after all, he had brought down historically tougher France in just six. Similarly, the conquest of the Taliban in eight weeks in 2001, followed by the establishment of constitutional government within a year in Kabul, did not mean that the similarly easy removal of Saddam Hussein in three weeks in 2003 would ensure a working Iraqi democracy within six months. The differences between the countries—cultural, political, geographical, and economic—were too great.
Instead, knowledge of past wars establishes wide parameters of what to expect from new ones. Themes, emotions, and rhetoric remain constant over the centuries, and thus generally predictable. Athens’s disastrous expedition in 415 BC against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. But the story of the Sicilian calamity does instruct us on how consensual societies can clamor for war—yet soon become disheartened and predicate their support on the perceived pulse of the battlefield.

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren’t necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them—which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Wars—or threats of wars—put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

Military history is as often the story of appeasement as of warmongering. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler would all have ended early had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them. Western air power stopped Slobodan Milošević’s reign of terror at little cost to NATO forces—but only after a near-decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands. Affluent Western societies have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater future violence. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.

Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Bin Laden attacked on September 11 not because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to dialogue with him in the Hindu Kush. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with no meaningful reprisals, and concluded that decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—or that, if we did, we would withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.
In the twenty-first century, it’s easier than ever to succumb to technological determinism, the idea that science, new weaponry, and globalization have altered the very rules of war. But military history teaches us that our ability to strike a single individual from 30,000 feet up with a GPS bomb or a jihadist’s efforts to have his propaganda beamed to millions in real time do not necessarily transform the conditions that determine who wins and who loses wars.
True, instant communications may compress decision making, and generals must be skilled at news conferences that can now influence the views of millions worldwide. Yet these are really just new wrinkles on the old face of war. The improvised explosive device versus the up-armored Humvee is simply an updated take on the catapult versus the stone wall or the harquebus versus the mailed knight. The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive, or of one sort of weapon over the other, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.

So it’s highly doubtful, the study of war tells us, that a new weapon will emerge from the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very nature of armed conflict—unless some sort of genetic engineering so alters man’s brain chemistry that he begins to act in unprecedented ways. We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that we need to fight wars with political objectives in mind and that, to conclude them decisively, we must defeat and even humiliate our enemies, so that they agree to abandon their prewar behavior. For some reason, no American general or diplomat seemed to understand that crucial point 16 years ago, with the result that, on the cessation of hostilities, Saddam Hussein’s supposedly defeated generals used their gunships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while Americans looked on. And because we never achieved the war’s proper aim—ensuring that Iraq would not use its petro-wealth to destroy the peace of the region—we have had to fight a second war of no-fly zones, and then a third war to remove Saddam, and now a fourth war, of counterinsurgency, to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.
Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. They didn’t—but a plague that broke out unexpectedly did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers did. Twenty-seven years later, a maritime Athens lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasn’t evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy—to say the least.
The size of armies doesn’t guarantee battlefield success: the victors at Salamis, Issos, Mexico City, and Lepanto were all outnumbered. War’s most savage moments—the Allied summer offensive of 1918, the Russian siege of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima—often unfold right before hostilities cease. And democratic leaders during war—think of Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon—often leave office either disgraced or unpopular.

It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice ensures public support for war. But military history shows that far more often the perception of winning is what matters. Citizens turn abruptly on any leaders deemed culpable for losing. “Public sentiment is everything,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.” Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincoln’s previously shaky credibility. But a year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor battles—Cold Harbor claimed 7,000 Union lives in 20 minutes—the public reviled him. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had.

Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs—including the perception of the ups and downs—of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most zealous zealot. After the defeat of France, the losses to Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Dunkirk, Churchill took the blame for a war as seemingly lost as, a little later, it seemed won by the brilliant prime minister after victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, over 70 percent of the American people backed it, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. Four years of insurgency later, Americans oppose a now-orphaned war by the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore but because it felt that the battlefield news had turned uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform was too dear.

Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosun, the crosses in our military cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green lawns. They no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish on our iPods and to shop at Wal-Mart in safety—or that they expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born. The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, should escape that terrible knowledge.

What, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge isn’t just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help. On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military history—of war itself. We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never be gods. We will always just be men, it tells us. Some men will always prefer war to peace; and other men, we who have learned from the past, have a moral obligation to stop them.

Studying War: Where to Start

While Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the three-decade war between Athens and Sparta, establishes the genre of military history, the best place to begin studying war is with the soldiers’ stories themselves. E. B. Sledge’s memoir of Okinawa, With the Old Breed, is nightmarish, but it reminds us that war, while it often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiner’s tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II, is an unrecognized classic.

From a different wartime perspective—that of the generals—U. S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Patton’s War As I Knew It is not only a compilation of the eccentric general’s diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself.

Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and August 1914, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides’ Trojan Women.

Although many contemporary critics find it passé to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, by Edward S. Creasy, and A Military History of the Western World, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbrück’s History of the Art of War and Russell F. Weigley’s The Age of Battles center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo as tools to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runciman’s spellbinding short account The Fall of Constantinople 1453 and Donald Morris’s massive The Washing of the Spears, about the rise and fall of the Zulu Empire. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of history’s most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.

Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Horne’s superb A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Anything John Keegan writes is worth reading; The Face of Battle remains the most impressive general military history of the last 50 years.
Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarch’s lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington is a classic study of England’s greatest soldier. Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by Douglas Southall Freeman, has been slighted recently but is spellbinding.

If, as Carl von Clausewitz believed, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. For a contemporary J’accuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime is purportedly a favorite read of President Bush’s. It argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers’ esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.
In The Mask of Command, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In The Soul of Battle, I took that argument further and suggested that three of the most audacious generals—Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton—were also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.
How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis. Mark Moyar’s first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, is akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. Horne has written a half-dozen classics, none more engrossing than his tragic To Lose a Battle: France 1940.

Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom does, and his volume began the recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August describes the first month of World War I in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough, Truman and 1776, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941. Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric with no military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new but rather helps explain more than two centuries of both wise and ill-considered intervention abroad.

Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war. Principles of War by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works, War: Ends and Means, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.
—Victor Davis Hanson

Danes and stupid foreigners

Well durr, when you only let 3rd world moslim immigrants in what do you think??


http://www.cphpost.dk/get/103116.html

A new poll shows that immigration and care services are the most important issues amongst voters

Immigration is by far the nation’s most important issue to voters, according to a new Rambøll/Jyllands-Posten poll taken between 6-9 August.
Of the 1023 people questioned, over 25 percent responded that the government’s immigration and integration policies were the issues most crucial to voters in a time when rumours of a coming election have been bandied about.
The issue was also number one just prior to the 2001 and 2005 elections.
Other principal issues for voters according to the poll were the health care system and climate change, both considered the primary issue for just under 10 percent of those questioned. Foreign policy was also important in wake of the country’s withdrawal from Iraq, being the fifth most important topic on the poll’s list.
Ironically, the most talked about issue in the news and by the government in recent weeks - taxes - was only considered to be most important by 1.9 percent of those polled. Perhaps just as ironically was that the issue of growing social and financial inequality among the population also scored low among voters, Denmark being a country typically considered as one that strives for parity.
When it came to the nation’s two largest parties -the ruling Liberals and the opposition Social Democrats - the Social Democrats were seen as being far better suited to deal with the social welfare system, but the Liberals received a slight edge on immigration policy.

It is called modernity

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDY0NzkwZmIyY2IyYTFmMzQ3NGQzOWNjMDk2ZDk4ODY=
President Bush doesn’t appear to have entirely absorbed this. He still insists that Muslims desire freedom as much as Methodists do. This may well be true of Muslims who are as deracinated as most Methodists are — living in societies that have dissolved traditional ties of clan and sect to make possible the individualism upon which modern liberal democracies are built. Most Muslims in the Middle East don’t live in such societies, of course, and creating them would represent a radical social revolution almost as threatening to tribal sheiks as the vision of al Qaeda.

Fixing health care.

Going to bounce off my man Steyn's post below, working towards the day when I can write as smartly as he can.

So................. socialized medicine, single payer health care, government run health care. They are all the same animal with a different name.

So why does it not work?

Well for starters it is run by the same folks who run the DMV(Department of Motor Vehicles) which in its self says it all.

To pile on we need to separate health insurance from employers. Employer subsidized health "insurance" is a rolly polly pig. and not much of a "benefit" to the employee, even if it is non taxable compensation.

I dream of a day when health insurance companies advertise on TV and radio like Geico, State Farm, All State, etc.

Cropping this post down cause I could hammer on the keyboard for hours about Health Care.

What we need in the USA is more market based health insurance and more choices for the health care consumer.

NOT less choices like the govmt' has.

The only way to ration health care once the govmt' get too involved is reduce access.





http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmJlMTI3YTc2YTkxMTA2YzJhMGQ0ZDk3Y2EwZmY3NDY=

Bed lam [Mark Steyn]
A number of aficionados of socialized health care took objection to my post yesterday on the Canadian mother obliged to give birth in Montana. This was one of the responses from north of the border:

Presumably you know that the shortage of hospital beds in Calgary, like the shortage of apartments is due to the fact that the oil patch is attracting just a few more new residents than Armageddon, Montana or wherever it was exactly that she found a vacant room...There are literally tens of thousands of things that government tries to do and shouldn't, but health care is a fundamental of any civilized society and the US version provides a pretty good argument that government does indeed have a role to play in it.

Sorry, no sale. The explanation that Calgary's success logically leads to a lack of hospital beds demonstrates only the perverse government inversion of normal laws of supply and demand. But, more to the point, there is no unforeseen boom in Swift Current, Saskatchewan or Trois Rivieres, Quebec, is there? Yet not only was there no bed available for this mother-to-be at the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, but there was no bed available at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, no bed available at the Toronto General, no bed available at the Royal Victoria in Montreal. There was no bed available in Canada coast to coast.

Anyway you slice it, that's a failure of the system. Or look at it this way: Where would she have given birth were America not next door? In the toilet?
08/18 01:25 PM

Al Queds

Tag teaming on this listed below. If our enemy has this type of Admin. support, it will be awhile till we eliminate them. The good news is that this admin stuff gets left behind when good young lads from the US Army or Marines kick down the doors and kick some ass.




http://tank.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTBiMjY3ZmI4ZWVkNTU0NGFiY2E3MGUxMWI1YTBiMWU=
Al-Qaeda In Pakistan -- Blades Of A Fan [Steve Schippert]
If the latest National Intelligence Estimate left anyone unconvinced, rest assured that al-Qaeda is most certainly not a cave-dwelling and decentralized movement. (Newest NIE is not to be confused with this one, nearly schizophrenic by comparison, dated April 2006 & released [unclass] in September 2006.)

What brings this to mind? The Jose Padilla conviction.

A key piece of evidence used by prosecutors against Padilla was a form that he allegedly signed in Afghanistan to join an al-Qaida training camp in 2000.

An application form. Quite an administrative undertaking for a decentralized movement. Yes, their camps were destroyed in Afghanistan in 2001 & 2002.

But al-Qaeda has rebuilt in Pakistan, in many ways stronger than they were in Afghanistan. They have constructed at least 29 training camps there. 28 of them abandoned recently, yes. But with so many camps and so many recruits over the past 12-24 months, it would be safe to presume that al-Qaeda is managing them the way they know how — with significant administrative organization and structure, including application forms, just to cite an example.

Most have probably heard of the application forms and the administrative guidelines that delineate pay levels, vacation allowances for different types of jihadists, etc. (PDF translations currently no longer available from the Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point.) My point is simply to remind that, while there is most certainly a decentralized global jihadist movement that al-Qaeda has inspired but does not directly manage, they most certainly operate with a functional central authority and exercise a definite influence toward a global strategy (relative to both geographical and ideological proximity).

The 2006 NIE stated that the US had "seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations." Yet, only months later, a new NIE — one in which another 'view' clearly won the internal IC debate — significantly toned down the language to read that US counterterrorism efforts had only "constrained the ability of al-Qa’ida to attack the US Homeland again." It went on to note the resurrection (my language) of al-Qaeda's global headquarters, this time inside Pakistan. Nearly all of this infrastructure was in place at the time the 2006 NIE was written and released (hence the heated internal IC/CT debate).

So while the 2006 NIE also assessed that "the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse," let's not confuse the 'global jihadist movement' at al-Qaeda's periphery with the al-Qaeda central command structure clearly in place inside Pakistan. Al-Qaeda most certainly operates with a "coherent strategy." They simply exercise little direct control of the periphery they in large part have inspired, but rather trust that their message (as-Sahab videos, etc, etc.) will rightly guide those fellow travelers beyond their direct management.

The al-Qaeda infrastructure and senior leadership (AQSL) in Pakistan are like the spinning blades of a fan. The "global jihadist movement" is then the air before it, beyond the blades' direct reach but influenced, pushed and guided nonetheless.

They are not one and the same, per se. Likewise, be careful not to dismiss one for the other. They both exist, which is my point here via the Padilla trial reference to his al-Qaeda employment application form.
08/17 12:01 AM

Daily rituals and Islam

I've been pondering this and just getting to jotting it down.

It seems to me that islam regulates the day to day activities of people waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! more than Christianity and Judaism from what I remember of the Old Testament.

Maybe Slavery is Freedom type of thing. I don't know.

Submission to absolutely nitty gritty details of life that the god of islam, allah, demands.

also trying to sort out the whole foot washing thing, pre-prayer.


for example:

This is a sub-article to Hygiene in Islam and Toilet
The Islamic faith has particular rules regarding personal hygiene when going to the toilet. This code is known as Qadaahul Haajah [1] and is extremely prescriptive. The rules were established during times before the invention of toilet paper or toilet seats. In many parts of the Muslim World, squat toilets are the norm and toilet paper remains rare and its use a matter of dispute.
The following points, including issues of sidedness such as whether one uses the left or right hand, order of stepping into or out of toilet areas, or which foot stress is placed upon, are derived from hadith sources and the collected opinions of people throughout history.[citation needed] The only issue which the Koran does touch upon in relation to toileting, is the one of washing one's hands especially following going to the toilet which is mentioned in verse 5:6 of the Koran.
from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_toilet_etiquette

and this


Supreme Leader speaks on roadkill [Michael Rubin]
Just going through the Supreme Leader's web page for tomorrow's Iran News Round Up, came across his religious questions-and-answer section, and found this snippet about whether and under what conditions tires are made impure by rolling over a dead cat in the street. The point here isn't to make fun of Shi'ism, for all religions get down into the nitty-gritty, but rather to illustrate the all-pervasive authority of the Supreme Leader, ruling on everything from Iran's nuclear weapons program to rules about roadkill.
At any rate, for the curious:
To Crush Cat’s Dead Body with Car Tires
Question: A car’s tires crushed a cat’s dead body in the street:
a) Are car tires made najis [impure] by that? Knowing that the street is not wet.
b) If tires become najis with the cat’s blood, do they become pure by going on street asphalt immediately after crushing the body?
c) If these tires becomes najis with the cat’s blood and then go on water present on the street:
1- Is water here considered a second medium that became najis?
2- If this water falls on one’s body or clothes, would they become the third medium that becomes najis?
3- If we want to make them pure using water and the used water — after flowing on them — flows on other spots on the body or clothes, does the latter become najis?
Answer:
a) Unless the dead body or the tires are wet, tires do not become najis by crushing it, while if transmitting moisture is there, of course they become najis.
b) If tires become najis, they do not become pure just by moving on the street paved with asphalt.
c) Water becomes najis by moving the najis tires on it and if this water sprinkles on an object, clothes or one’s body, it becomes najis. Upon purifying it with water, the ruling of the water that flows from it on other parts of the body or clothes will be that of the water used for purifying a thing that becomes najis. Then, if qalīl water was used for purification, the thing touched with the used water will be ruled as that contacting the used qalīl water but if it was purified with running/kurr water or the like, then the place moistened with the used water will not be ruled as najis.
from
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTM0YjNmYmQ0ODkzZTRjNWVjODJhOTU4ODdjMzI3MmY=

Scratch a liberal, find a dhimmi.

This sums it all up.
Too bad I couldn't come up with it.



http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2E3ZWU4M2Y1NmJjYzg1MjViY2RlYmIwNGZiOWVmNzE=


Unidirectional multiculturalism [Mark Steyn]
Andrew's post on Scottish hospitals telling infidel doctors to cut out working lunches during Ramadan and Kathryn's post on Dutch bishops telling European Catholics to call God "Allah" are two small examples of the remorseless incremental concessions we make every day in the name of "cultural sensitivity".
The question is: At what point do you stop? If it's only being "sensitive" to insist that Belgian police officers not be seen eating donuts during Ramadan, when will sensitivity require that female police officers adopt Muslim-sensitive headscarves? If it's only being "sensitive" to ask Catholic worshippers in the heart of European Christendom to call God "Allah", why not rename churches "mosques" and disavow Jesus' divinity? These small groveling unreciprocated concessions that do nothing but provoke further demands communicate the same big message: We're losers, and the best we can hope for is that you'll let us lose gradually.
I think this sums it up best:
Scratch a liberal, find a dhimmi.

Fuck being a victim!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No idea who this Dr. is in CT. I'm guessing he was unarmed or at least had his weapons stored in such a way his family could not access them.

Me? As I post this I have a 9mm Glock with 3 magazines handy.

Me and the Mrs. don't believe in criminality hence we believe in shooting back. (hint we don't live in unarmed future ghettos like NY,CA, HI, WI etc.

breaks my heart this does

who wants their wife and children raped and burned alive?

http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/625119ad-82df-42e2-b85c-067fbdcd0e45

Thursday, August 09, 2007
Liberal, Anti-Bush Editor Wonders, 'What if the Second Amendment is for real?'
Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 11:46 AM

In light of the sexual assualt and murders of the women of the Petit family at the hands of brutal home invaders who also happened to be repeat offenders, Keith C. Burris says, "Time to admit the 'gun nuts' are right.":

What if the Second Amendment is for real? Is it possible that it should it be revered, just like the First Amendment?...Is it possible that the Second Amendment is not a quaint and antiquated remnant of a world that will never return, but an idea as relevant and sound today as when it was written?Is it possible that we are not talking about the right of the government to form a militia when there is no standing army, but the right of the individual to defend himself, or herself, against both tyranny and lawlessness? Maybe we are talking about the right of self-defense -- the right of the individual to take up arms against a government that wants to oppress, be it foreign or domestic. And the right of the individual to defend himself against criminals, brutes, and barbarians when local police seem unable to stop them.Might the Second Amendment matter almost as much as the First?I think the answer is yes.And just like the First, the Second is practical, newly relevant, and far wiser than the watered-down alternatives.I don't think George Bush wants to impose martial law on his fellow citizens. But he has diluted habeas corpus. And he has enlarged Big Brother. You have to stop and think about a government that wants to control the thoughts and behavior of its people.Should such a government be permitted to disarm them as well? Hey, whether it's an irrational fear of George Bush's America or the legitimate fear of recidivist brutes that convinces you that you should support the Second Amendment, I applaud it.Here's the rest of the story on the Petit family:

Dr. William A. Petit Jr., his head bloodied and legs bound, stumbled out of a rear basement door of his two-story home here into a pouring rain, calling the name of a neighbor for help.

The neighbor heard the shouting, but so did the two men inside the house, who peeked outside from an upstairs window. They were both serial burglars with drug habits, having racked up numerous convictions for stealing car keys and pocketbooks.

This time, they took something far more precious.

The men, the authorities say, had already strangled Dr. Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and in short order would also kill the couple’s two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. The elder suspect, Steven J. Hayes, 44, had poured gasoline on the girls and their mother, according to a lawyer and a law enforcement official involved in the case, in hopes of concealing DNA evidence of sexual assault. He had raped Ms. Hawke-Petit, and his partner, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, had sexually assaulted Michaela.

Moments after Dr. Petit escaped, as the house was being surrounded by police officers, the men lighted the gasoline. The girls were tied to their beds but alive when the gas Mr. Hayes had spread around the house was set aflame.

Carry a Concealed Weapon! part 4

So I indicated a "Shoot me First Vest!". Here is how it works.

Heavy canvass safari or photographer vests are super for concealing a handgun worn on the belt. The problem is unless you look like a tourist it just scream "GUN!" to anyone familiar with concealed carry.

And criminals aren't always stupid when it comes to their own survival.

So if you do choose to wear a vest for gun concealment be aware that others not on your side can see also.

Support the troops!

(And hot chicks, also)

Since I've had 4 mates of mine (3 of them were at Mrs. Norskcafee and I's wedding) deployed to islamo-land, thought I'd link to this.

http://www.rangerup.com/

Culture, Pride??

Ultimately this blog is all about Culture, everything boiled down.

Culture is what separates us as humans. In the USA culture is a determining factor in earnings (see welfare women's culture compared to a computer geek culture, or the culture of high school drop outs compared to say a teacher with a BA in education.)

Unfortunately race and culture are intertwined somehow, the links are not always identifiable.

Since I'm white and between 35 and 45 years old, my entire life I've been blamed for all the worlds problems. Being a free thinking guy I have tried to sort it all out over the years. You know, slavery, colonialism, capitalism, et.

Anyway since in The West the supposed absolute insult is to be called, racist, sexist, homophobic or islamophobic, let's look into all these supposed slurs.

Racist- up till 1950 race and culture were one and the same I think, so the supposed old time racists were discriminating based on culture ultimately. You know those foreign devils.

Ultimately everyone is some what of a culturalist. We all hang out with those of the same culture, race is secondary. You know a white marxist, a black marxist and an Asian marxist will get along swimmingly, but put a white Marxist, a white Conservative and a a white libertarian together and eventually you get a squabble.

Sexist-Yep, men and women are different, they should be equal under the law and allowed to act as individuals. No women should be treated as property as muslim and some other cultures do.

Homophobe- this is a huge mischaracterization, I don't like to be around gay guys or gay girls for that matter. I'm not scared or 'phobic' of them, but don't try to rub it in my face.

Islamophobe- yeh, right. Actually most major media are actually scared or 'phobic' of islam. See the Danish cartoon, koran flushing, tepid response to islamic bulling.

Final thought. European whites are a minority on this planet. Those with 'LIBERAL WHITE GUILT' need to sod off!

Western Culture is by far superior to any other on the planet. For proof just look and the people who vote with their feet and immigrate legally or illegally to The West. Who immigrates to Uganda, Senegal, Saudi from the West in 2007?