LOL!
Been arguing with commies all morning - great fun.
Most amusing, thoroughly enjoyed. I wouldn't worry about anything except that I find you as funny as northanger, who says 'you have no idea what makes Americans tick.' She's nicer than I am, of course, because you've bullshitted about Cheney, Bush Doctrine and Rumsfeld ad nauseum, and I thought you put off 'your thoughts' about the election a little too long. Pardon the deep Kurzweilian robot-ready surveillance...
You see, nick, you are a nice but extremely rude person without knowing it. You can't remember all the excessive praise you've heaped on the failed Iraqi program apparently, and considering that you consider all left-leaning people exactly the same, I don't know why you wouldn't expect to fall under a monochromatic assessment at the opposite end of some political spectrum: after all, what you always said would redeem Rumsfeld (but even freaks out all Republicans by now, viz., not having the largesse to go into Iraq with enough manpower and proper armour) is never going to be realizable now--if only because the memo he wrote three days before his unceremonious trashing negates and cancels out this Doctrine, reducing everything to 'what will politically work, change it however necessary to make us look better.' You may not know that only a couple of people knew that Bush was definitely going to execute this dismissal, and that even Cheney thought that it was somehow shocking.
I see why the adorable northanger puts up with you though, you are like Inspector Clouseau and Peter Cook somehow combined...
Weird...
Oh, I'm weird all right, but I am just am not in the business of pleasing people of various parties. My one great success in the blogosphere has been to single out the 9/11 truthies whose manias have been infecting all political and intellectual thought of a number of intelligent people, and my single-minded devotion to silencing the conspiracy theorists and their determination that nothing was important unless you accept that 9/11 was an 'inside job'; and my attack on their insult to all decent thought was joined by several smart people who would be described by Nick as 'leftist scum' and 'losers' (many leftists are losers, of course, and many of them are even attracted by that unattractive notion--what Nick and others do is to determine that all leftists are losers, so it is therefore necessary to rub the noses of the right just as viciously when they've LOST...I'm sure you'll get my point here). Together we forced them back to the solitary confinement of their own paranoid toilet blogs.
It doesn't really matter whether the insults come during an election, before one, during this, that and the other, the left and right insult each other about equally, most likely; but their different styles just are naturally formed by their different approaches to life and politics. In any case, there was some voter fraud in Florida.
Outside the U.S., lovers of pure capitalism seem to think it works more or less equally anywhere, no matter what kind of national character begins to be missing, etc. But this is not so. To say that the sinosphere would be an acceptable subsitute for the anglosphere is not 'to love America', both of which Nick purports to believe (but they orwellianly cancel each other out). I live in the Anglosphere and support the U.S. and hope we can prevail over the sinosphere, by which I feel quite threatened as an American. This is not very selfless, as I am not interested in the future of capitalism if it is controlled by the Chinese and not the Americans. I guess I'd feel differently if I lived in China, but it's also my guess that the U.S. will become the new 'Old Europe' the more gains that are made by the Chinese.
As for my referencing of nick's bloodthirstiness, there was an exchange between SD and Nick a while back in which Nick admitted to something like enjoying the bloody slaughters even when they were not absolutely necessary for defeating Islamic fanatics. Well, that's an important subtlety, and I'm glad to see that it's in check, along with the good sportsmanship. However, feel free to deride my writing style, as I am tough as nails and as thick-skinned as anybody you'll find in the blogosphere, and just do not let it get in the way of anything I've set my sights on at the moment.
You see, now, Nick, you can go on and be somewhat more centrist now, since Bush and Cheney are being forced to while pretending they don't mind, and realize your true genius as a fine writer.
I am totally lost.
yowww!!!! "Pardon the deep Kurzweilian robot-ready surveillance..." --- that's gotten the longest laugh out of me since .. .. months.
you're still not convinced AlQaida isn't so 'outside' after all i see.
.. .seen that NatGeo Ali Muhammed docu yet?
tim, for some dynamite partee and repartee go search with 'patrick warszawa'
If Piet and I do not achieve World Peace, we will nevertheless do wonders toward improvement of the entire globe with our promotion of World Pleach. That I first heard of 'pleached lime trees' in a BBC docu about the Duchess of Chatsworth is of no importance--she'll be forced to prove the reality-based version of 'trickle-down Reaganomics' yet.
No, Al Qaida definitely outside and Wazaristan still must be scourged. I have no sympathy for Bin Laden and none for the shoddy job of 'searching' for him that has been overseen by this administration. Most of the extended Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia long ago rejected him, which probably explains why they needed to be whisked away in the first days after 9/11. They simply had nothing to do with any of it. Now, the wives and kids in Tora Bora are not exactly complicit or accessories, but neither are they really in a position to put the screws on that horrid worm-looking thing.
he's kinda like that dune sandworm thingy.
artist - you're a whole lot more interesting when you're not trolling (and fun too - Piet seems to have wet himself).
Among your many points of note, I definitely have to protest your conviction that sinophilia and adoration of America are essentially incompatible. China+USA are the twin-pillars of the global economy and as such compose the basics of a system that is far more coherent than inconsistent. Is Walmart a US or Chinese phenomenon? How about the contemporary chip industry? Synergy doesn't presuppose harmony at any subjective level.
America always thrives on competition - that's a great part of its glory - and China does too, however reluctant it might be to accept the fact. The emergent planetary capitalist mega-intelligence evidently loves both cultures quite frenziedly (Islamarxist militant loserism not so much, but even in that case the competition could be productive - so long as free societies liberate themselves from PC cringing and learn to fight back).
nick. are you giving boxing lessons. lol. wait, this peterson guy was on in the money the other day. lemme find the quote.
in the money—
CAFFERTY: Black Friday marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season when stores, hopefully, go into the black and you and I go into the red because we're helping stores go into the black. As a consolation prize, though, all of that spending we began last week supposedly helps the economy. That's the conventional wisdom. Not so fast.
Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson is here to tell us why that argument is bogus, perhaps as much as those flying reindeer. He's the senior chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group, which is a private investment banking firm and knows of which he speaks.
What about this idea it's our patriotic duty to rush out to the mall and go deeply in debt during the month of December because two- thirds of the economy in this country is consumer-driven?
PETE PETERSON, CHAIRMAN, THE BLACKSTONE GROUP: It's our patriotic duty, as I understand it, to put a country in even more debt that it all is now. We currently have a so-called current account deficit, animated by the trade deficit, of nearly seven percent of the GDP. And when I was Richard Nixon's economic adviser we would have had heart palpitations at that idea.
. . . . . . .
PETERSON: Yeah, we're spending something like 45 percent more then...
CAFFERTY: Forty-five percent.
PETERSON: ...the growth. The growth rate is 45 percent higher than it was in the Democratic administration. We used to have something called pay as you go rules. They got rid of those. We use to have something called pending caps, we got rid of those. And we call ourselves a party of fiscal conservatism. I just don't get it at all.
CAFFERTY: Talk to me about china for a few minutes. They own us, they've got their hands around our throat when you talk about debt and the amount of investment instruments in the hands of Beijing.
PETERSON: Well, China's the other side of us. We have a seven percent current account deficit. They have a nine percent of the GDP surplus. We consume about 70 percent of the GDP. When I last checked they were 40 percent or a little more hand that. So, they're saving much too much and consuming too little, and we are saving far too little and consuming too much.
http://www.sargasso.nl/archief/2...en-het-wel-
goed
santa day pakjesavond, giftpackage evening
my contributions delve into the history of santa and his helper black peter all the way back past the historic figure they split at their own cost into good and evil; this year's variant on the troubles with black peters (increasingly taken to be the slaves ((shamen as per Rhentergem)) subjected by the church) is 'regenboogpieten' (rainbow petes) which come in colours cause the boat sinterklaas traditionally arrives on from spain sailed through a rainbow.
SAMPLE:
Perhaps most interesting about this print is the special gift in Santa's hand. Santa is holding a dancing puppet of none-other-than Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. The likeness to Jefferson Davis is unmistakable. Even more interesting, Davis appears to have the string tied around his neck, so Santa appears to by Lynching Jefferson Davis! This is a classic Thomas Nast illustration.
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/
Ori...anta_Claus_.htm
schmutzli
pelzbock
leutfresser
belsnickel
http://tryworks.org/blog/2006/12...same-old-story/
dig this place
piet - that stuff deserves a post (might even get one)
viz artist's Iraq II questions, I confess to feelings of extreme mystification about the way this is all panning-out spin-wise. Everywhere I go on the web, it seems that triumphalist left-pacifists are baying for 'monger contrition.
Sorry to disappoint, but the justification for this entirely escapes me. It's not as if the assertive right was in any doubt about the flakiness of domestic support for fighting jihadis - roughly a third of the US population is happy to get its ass in the air ASAP and another third is exemplifying typical 'get it over with or get out' attitudes which no observer of US politico-military history could be surprised by. (It goes without saying that things are far worse in Eurabia and elsewhere.)
So is the war - or more accurately Iraq Front - a fiasco in its own terms? Toppling the world's most uninhibtedly anti-US regime still makes sense to me, but the subsequent democratization and reconstruction project has obviously been fairly messy. I certainly over-estimated the popular support in Iraq for the construction of a sane and prosperous society, but I also think it was inevitable that a 'neocon' generosity of interpretation had to prevail, whatever the disillusionment to follow. A cynical plan to install a pro-American strongman just wouldn't have flown without learning the hard way about the profound depravity of Islamo-despotic societies, and on the upside:
a) Good stuff is happening in Kurdistan.
b) Islamist violence has been introverted into its homelands (away from US cities).
c) The US military has undergone a tough educational process, reforging its counter-insurgency capabilities (which will be badly needed in years to come).
d) Middle Eastern whinging about the causes of their tyrannical regimes has been radically dispelled: In the final analysis, brutal demagogic dictators express the region's popular will.
e) The Shi'ite genii has been unbottled, which will tie up much jihadi energy in savage in-fighting (a proxy Iran-Saudi punch-up sounds good to me).
f) Better a collapsed overall-neutral Iraq than an erect hostile (or even a collapsed hostile) one.
So I'm pretty immune to the call for mea culpas and more interested in seeing how things move forward with WWIV.
Oops, that should be:
f) Better a collapsed overall-neutral (or even a collapsed hostile) Iraq than an erect hostile one.
'b) Islamist violence has been introverted into its homelands (away from US cities).'
I don't believe that has any meaning at all, just because US cities haven't gotten any more up the ass. They still can and probably will. I consider this the lamest of all justifications for the Iraq War, except for the out-and-out lies, which are that Saddam Hussein had WMD and that Al Qaeda and Iraq were at all associated.
Al Qaeda and Iraq were not at all allied with each other in 9/11 and Iraq had nothing to do with it. Take your long view and overview of Islam all you want. I've heard it before and I will never buy it. As far as mea culpas, I don't care that much about them personally, so you needn't bother as it would give me no flutter, but I just fail to see the beauty of the extreme right quite as easily as I fail to see the beauty of the extreme left--and I am NO friend of moderation, generally speaking.
fairly messy?
'the subsequent democratization and reconstruction project has obviously been fairly messy.'
Oh, raaaeeellly? I think one could call it messy to the point of being nonexistent. The only way you can rationalize that any of the Iraq project has been a success is to see it in a larger view, which I am aware that you try to do. But there is no point at all in seeing it as a success within the nation of Iraq and as an American-authored project. For whatever reasons, it is an enormously, clangorous failure. This has nothing to do with anything partisan, even though I hate the Republicans for ruining the 'domestic tranquillity' and expect them to pay dearly for this. You could see this in the abstract from China, which means you can't feel it. I can't 'feel Iraqi deaths' the way I 'can feel' the shit that went down with New Orleans. And it is Katrina that was the second most important reason why the American populace cared not to put faith in a party which cared nothing whatever for it. So you don't care what happens to certain people? Well, that's all well and good. But don't expect them not to smarten up and decide they don't care about how you can talk like a 'good ole boy' with hick talk the way Bush did it till he was indigo in the face.
You will show you care about what happens to the U.S. if you support programs that help the U.S. no matter what the party--and apparently Americans thought there was good reason why there was no faith to be had in parties which run as a self-operating and self-profit-only business. They even tried to destroy Social Security, and that was about people, Nick. That was not about abstract formulas that look nice the way they work out mathematically. As for your WWIV, of course we'll watch it as it plays out, but it does seem to me that Iran was a lot more serious threat than Iraq ever was, and Saddam Hussein not liking the U.S. very much doesn't amount to a hill of beans. He did NOT have the WMD, and Bush even joked about this as though he knew all along (which, of course, he did.)
However, as the new revelations have come out in Suskind's and Woodward's books and in Lawrence Wright's brilliant book about Al Qaeda, what is so inexcusable about this regime is that, well, of course, they didn't want the Pentagon and WTC to be blown up by terrorists, but they were warned and very seriously. Tenet met with the Rice woman and CIA went to Crawford to tell Bush personally, only for the lazy brush-cutting frat boy to say 'Well, you've covered your ass.' They were negligent, because they were short-sighted people who did not realize that such a thing could really happen even when the intelligence was screaming. They had profit on the brain, and it is just not enough for a government to be in business as 'in a private business for itself.' And that's what they were doing, that's why they wouldn't pay attention. And that's why they're not even contrite about ignoring all the warnings that were given to them. And CIA and FBI, notoriously at war at all times, didn't share information with each other (the fault mainly at CIA) that could have coordinated a response to this act of terrorism which has changed the way everything is done. That's because the U.S. sometimes is cheaply sentimental and will NOT be businesslike. This is something, like it or not, they could learn from 'old Europe.' European nations, if threatened in this way, wouldn't have been stupid about it, they would have rather been practical and not 'trusted in God' the way that little mouse Bush keeps moaning on and on about. They would have taken the intelligence seriously and acted on it. And if, once they had let it happened, they wouldn't have turned it into a fool 'holy war' with GWBush at the helm of one fool religion and Zawahiri/Bin Laden at the helm of an even more primitive one. They would have sought Bin Laden and not just tried to turn Iraq into another Hanging Gardens (they'd already done that, as is well-documented.)
artist - well, your talking points are not especially original either, this "no connection" meme is surely just spin, anyone effectively at war with the US is "connected" by that fact alone (feel free to throw in Hugo Chavez and Kim Il Jong, they all contribute whatever they can to the global onslaught against the free world). By forcing the US to station forces in the Arabian peninsula, Saddam directly fed into the Al Qaeda grievance and mobilization machine, while also tying up US resources needed elsewhere and posing as a new Saladin rallying anti-western sentiment. He had an established terrorist training infrastructure (Salman Pak etc). He directly funded suicide terrorist attacks on Israel. The sanctions regime was being spun iinto an "evil americans starving Iraqi babies" storyline (remember that?) - yet more jihadi recruiting. He was shooting at US/British aircraft enforcing the armistice (quite sufficient reason to topple him on its own). It's pure sophistry to ignore this strategic landscape and simply reiterate a lawyerly point ("Osama and Saddam were never proven to have had penetrative intercourse") - politically understandable for demagogic purposes but of no analytical plausibility.
northanger - wait 'til we really see messy (Pakistan for e.g.)
artist - we crossed over.
I'm more appreciative of the stuff in your last two comments - I certainly have no special faith in Bush (although largely because he seems to have trashed the Goldwater legacy that is the type of Republicanism I respect). Unfortunately, democratic politics is a lesser-of-two-evils process, and Bush's manifold sins pale beside the eco-hysterical managerialism of an Al Gore or the raw treachery of a John Kerry.
Saddam's Iraq was a Sunni (20%) tyranny, so there's no imaginable way the Shi'a are not pleased to see it toppled. The fact they turn out to be theocratic maniacs themselves, rather than civilized people deserving of a decent society, is extremely unfortunate. I don't really see what anyone outside the country can do about that, beyond what they're already doing.
No, yours is pure sophistry except I don't know if sophistry usually applies to the crude. There are all sorts of free-world haters in nations all over the world. So after a terrorist organization hits the U.S., shall we just not pick one, especially good will be Iraq where li'l dubya can go prove Big Daddy Bush wasn't nearly as butch as his li'l dickens can be. How about Iraq?
Not a goddam thing original about what I said, it's true--how could something so starkly factual be original when everybody knows it. 'Lawyerly' my ass--load of crap that it. It's a fact Osama bin Laden had no love for Saddam's regime and was in no way allied with it--ever. Except maybe now when new Al Qaida in Iraq had obviously come to exist. You haven't read Wright's book about Al Qaida, I suppose because you must imagine it was written by a leftist (it wasn't, but that will worry you none, I'm quite sure.)
One has to get all 'Big Islam Overview' to get off track--which is, it makes no sense to pay attention to terrorists at all if you don't even no how to concentrate (at first at least) on the terrorists who did the work. Iraq didn't do it, and you call it a 'lawyerly point' all you want. And anyway, if you think their strategy was so wonderful, why do almost all conservatives and right-wing Americans think it hasn't worked? Doesn't something have to work to be wonderful? Iraq has not worked unless one takes the Dreamy Long View of a World Without Islam (So Let's Get Started Somewhere--ANYWHERE! Please, let's not get involved with minor things like culpability. There are plenty of mean people to go shoot at.)
And you see, the U.S. learned from Old Europe already, and has improved thereby. Monica Lewinsky gave Bill Clinton Oval Blow Jobs and Americans said, well, you know, the economy seems to be going pretty well, so let's just go around and start using words like 'cum-stained dress' just like those whorish Parisians do. It's got to be better than losing our jobs, even if we don't think our President's behaviour is all that respectable, and even if some of our useless aesthetes don't like it the Bill Clinton tried to prove that fellatio isn't sex (so that next time we're engaged in it, we can think 'how odd! A cock in the mouth may be worth two in the bush, but it sure ain't having sex as we all know it!' And by God, then the priggish Republicans all ran the 2000 Prez race on 'moral character', and even though Gore was never as much of a reputed 'cuntsman' as Dubya, Ole Ken Starr had made his work stick, the ugly Old Fart sho' had.
I mean, have you actually read The Starr Referral? This is some weird piece of material. He's got it divided up into 'Sexual Encounter Sep. , 1997', and 'Sexual Encounter
October, 1997', and when I read it the day it was published all I could think of was our lewd novelist from the 50's Harold Robbins. My Gawd, Ken Starr can't write. And then he got on Diane Sawyer's show and wagged his finger at her and said 'You must nooooootttt perjur yourself!!!' Why, it was straight out of Nathaniel Hawthorne before and after they burned the witches.
Wright book is on my reading list - from what I've seen it looks great.
The whole WWIV vs focused police actions 'debate' is ultimately an empirical issue. Since military options are being scaled-back, we'll soon see with planetary jihad can be stopped without all-out confrontation (you know I doubt it, but then we're not going to see my preferred solution tried until at least one western city goes radioactive, so it's pretty much an academic point).
As to the dire state of US security bureaucracy - who's to argue. I just don't see an easy solution. Gov't bureaucracies are intrinsically inefficient. Sad.
"Osama and Saddam were never proven to have had penetrative intercourse"
lol.
what's your "preferred solution", nick?
1) Clearly acknowledge jihadism as the totalitarian threat of the age, to be met with implacable hostility.
2) Full spectrum mobilization for global conflict, with substantial hikes in defence and related expenditures (more infantry divisions, more robotic warfare R&D).
3) Let intelligence and special ops off the leash, encourage entrepreneurial assasinations and sabotage, eradicate PC from thinking of all relevant organizations.
4) Target Islamist ideological apparatus (madrassas etc.) as hostile assets.
5) Wage Reagan-style contra wars against terror-supporting regimes.
6) Build alliances with jihadi-menaced regimes and provide military / intelligence support where possible.
7) Suppress all domestic jihadi activism by whatever means necessary.
8) Move to energy independence by drilling like crazy and promoting post-petroleum energy sources.
9) Put enemies on warning that they will be held culpable for terror attacks and subjected to retaliation on the basis of even the weakest connection. If they want to get off the s**t list, total co-operation with anti-terror operations is a non-negotiable condition.
Stanley Kurtz at The Corner:
"At it’s core, what distinguishes left from right in the war on terror? In part it’s a question of tactics. But I think the deeper disagreement is over the scope of the threat."
http://
corner.nationalreview.com...kyNzE4YzRhMGM=I don't see any reason for anybody here to dissent from that.
bad link, it's:
http://
corner.nationalreview.com...DkyNzE4YzRhMGM=
nick. only you can appreicate this, i think.
AQ 999 = HOW TO DEVISE A BETTER SYSTEM REMAINS A NAGGING QUESTION = HTTP:\EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/
LIST_OF_CRAYOLA_CRAYON_COLORS
AQ 259 = 1-STEREOTYPY (behaviour always occurs in the same form; Tinbergen) = ABDUL QADEER KHAN.
AQ 389 = LUCK PLAYED A LARGE PART (Shopping for Bombs by Gordon Corera, Bret Stephens) = WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY.
AQ 396 = PROXIMATE MECHANISMS (Causation, Development; Tinbergen) = URANIUM HEXAFLUORIDE.
AQ 424 = CENTRIFUGE BLUE-PRINTS (Shopping for Bombs by Gordon Corera, Bret Stephens) = STATE TRANSITION TABLE.
AQ 1067 = COULD HARDLY HAVE BEEN IN THE DARK AS TO ITS ULTIMATE PURPOSES (Shopping for Bombs by Gordon Corera, Bret Stephens) = VOOR HET BLOK GEZET EN MET VOLDONGEN FEITEN OPGESCHEEPT ZIJN (piet).
AQ 1435 = EFFORTS THAT FOR ONCE WERE NOT HINDERED BY POLITICAL OR DIPLOMATIC CONSIDERATIONS (Shopping for Bombs by Gordon Corera, Bret Stephens) = IN THE SEASON OF FLOWERS, AND OF NEW LOVES, THE GENTLE BREATH OF A LIGHT BREEZE IS WELCOME (Pietro Metastasio) = THE DISILLUSIONED ANIMAL FOR WHOM THE MERCHANDISE IS THE ONLY MEANS OF ORIENTATION (The disillusioned animal for whom merchandise is the only means of orientation – we are only consigned to its form if we consent to it. But we protect the Idea of this consent, mystery of the pure present. —The New Badiou).
Just re-read this classic:
http://www.hudson.org/files/
publ...logical_war.pdf
John Fonte on the menace of Transnational Progressivism. Crucial reference.
Re the Stan Kurtz post at the Corner, I do think that whole sections of Western populace unable to think about the WoT properly. It doesn't seem like a left/right issue here in the UK though - I'm sure the situation is different elsewhere, but most of the pro intervention writers I can think of are on the left or used to be on the left (Aaranovitch, Cohen, Kamm, Geras, Hitchens, Hari, etc). Only Melanie Philips and Chris Hitchens' brother spring to mind on the right.
http://www.andrewcollins.com/
pag...upping_2006.htm on long washed out river thames rituals ..
"HTTP:EN.WIKIPED.." -- ????
I am browsing entertaining stuff crustalustered around the old Jose at the mo . . .
less frustrating to have far away kin to gripe over than bemoaning a bunch of just as unresponsive dutch morons ..
nick. Fonte, fascinating. hmm. guess there are things worse than islamofascism? gee, if every NGO was committed to getting just one, just one, black man out of jail & helping him transit back into society ... that would be a real achievement.
HTTP://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/
LIS...A_CRAYON_COLORS
oops---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Lis...a_crayon_colors
http://www.mysterious-
america.ne...ofrecordsa.html
via (^^) http://www.redicecreations.com/
red ice is swedish .. . hahaah .. Collins pronounces cygnus quite like 'sickness'.
i've had my coincidences with swans as it went .. . .
You would think that the left would have more in common with the neo-con, democratic, internationalist (surely highly congruent) agenda than al Qaeda's but I guess that's wishful thinking and the eschatalogical, religious elements of both tie together perfectly. (I fail to understand how anyone can not see Islamism as inheritor to the 20th century totalitarian tradition - but maybe complicity or habit prevents it).
And of course Berman has nailed the whole liberal "pathological mass movements are not really pathalogical at all" mindset which sees suicide bombing and some kind of proof of Western oppression or proof of Jewish Nazism, and anything but irrational bloodlust.
Plus the whole "you could/should do/have done more to fight the terror threat" combined with the "stop over-exagerating the terror threat and asking for more resources to fight it you blood thirsty lunatics" thing where governments are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
'Plus the whole "you could/should do/have done more to fight the terror threat" combined with the "stop over-exagerating the terror threat and asking for more resources to fight it you blood thirsty lunatics" thing where governments are damned if they do and damned if they don't.'
Quite true--if they don't (which they didn't, as I very clearly pointed out and Suskkind's book defines precisely) it is hardly surprising that people would be suspect of asking for more resources for fighting something a government doesn't show any seriousness about to begin with. Clinton wanted to kill Bin Laden in 1999 (you'll also find in Wright's book) but was overruled because a few hundred civilians would have been killed as well. Now look how many civilians have been killed.
Whatever you may hate about Clinton and Gore, they were definitely on to Bin Laden, and it is impossible for me to imagine either of them--infinitely more intellectually developed and (in Clinton's case) quite as politically savvy as Bush--ignoring such intelligence. There is no point arguing about how they should or should not have treated this intelligence: It was there and they did not deal with it. For this, they should NEVER be forgiven.
And Nick, as for 'American cities not being attacked again and introverted into its own [Islamic] cities', that also does not pass muster because Al Qaeda went ahead and had its way with London, Madrid, Jordan, Morocco, Bali, etc. That they have not chosen or not carried out another attack on an American city therefore really means nothing, because they have attacked other Western cities and will be glad to again when they think it's expedient. Suicide martyr-idiots simply do not operate within any of the usual narratives informed by logic as we understand it.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipe...127/
023990.html
China's Muslims look to Middle East as ties grow
http://today.reuters.com/news/ar...epth+NewsNews-
2
Mon Nov 27, 2006
By Lindsay Beck
BEIJING (Reuters) - Hai dreams of learning Arabic and hopes one day to study
in the Middle East.
For now, the 25-year-old is stuck in Beijing.
It's thousands of miles from Mecca, but more and more Chinese Muslims are
fulfilling their dreams of learning about their faith as the government
relaxes controls over Islam to win hearts in the Middle East, where it seeks
to strengthen trade and oil ties.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipe...127/
024020.html Loren goldner on imperialism
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/
0...artner=homepage
Gates did fine job yesterday.
It's also important to remind people that most Democrats voted to authorize the Iraq War, so they cannot be termed 'leftists' in the sense that Tim is talking about 'identification with Al Qaeda' in this religious way that the hard left definitely does do (the most extreme are the idiot conspiracy theorists, whom I find even more insulting--due to the horror of a pure and demented stupidity, replete with faked cellphone calls, drone planes into the buildings and taking the passengers of the real planes off and killing them at some unspecified and never imagined elsewhere, PLUS getting every single member of all bureaucracies to never breathe a word about the conspiracy to anyone, including each other, and to just write 'novels about Al Qaeda', the whole incredible elaborate delusion--than I do those who sympathize with Al Qaeda's actual acts: At least they base their wrong thinking on facts, not sci-fi B.S.). Perhaps some need to be reminded that Hillary Clinton and John Kerry both have been dealing with their votes in support of the Iraq War ever since they cast them. Bush is still not officially listening to Gates and the Bush 41 people like Baker, but there have been sources that say he actually is going to have no choice. The Iraq policy is changing--for whatever reason, it has not worked.
Artist - Of course, the centre left in this country similarly voted with Blair (though there was significant parliamentary resistance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/
S...,903843,00.html ). But remove the whip and what would the result have been...? Think that significant sections of the British public wholly opposed to any sort of foreign military intervention, especially one involving an American president they despise (or at the very least, look down on as an unsophisticated moron) and an environment of total media cynicism - plus, it would just be a lot fucking easier wouldn't it, if we could just leave them alone and they'd never bother us again?
I agree with you about 9/11 conspiracies - hilarious idiocy ("it was Mossad", "it was Neo-con publishers looking to sell some more books about the middle east", etc), that even if I could believe a possible act for hundreds of public servants, still remains unbelievable in execution. (How would they have kept it quiet for all these years? How come they're incompetent at almost everything else)?
[Shakes head] Bob Gates...
blinclusivity* according to Rodney Collin was quite good,
* he projected what enormous distance as well as the most gigantically long timelapse photography possible would make our solar system look like. A snail (which Dan Winter (in his typically cracked kundalini cauldron callousness borrowed, spun (which he does literal and quite elegant versions of really) promptly likened to a (((logo))sperm((atikos))) in space.
Andrew Collins is really the antithesis of the ever striving after exclusivity Tenen, let me post a quote to illustrate, AC: "It is an influence that came to be personified in the heavens as a cosmic bird of creation, variously seen as a swan, vulture, hawk, dove, heron, magpie, eagle or bird of paradise. It was the basis behind concepts of the Supreme Being, such as God, Yahweh, Allah, the One, etc, as well as Cosmic Mothers, such as Nut (or Nu-it), Hathor, Saraswati, Allat, al-Uzza, Venus, and Bride-Bridget.")
Goldner cautions leftists about midwifing a reactionary movement by way of sympathy and support for the likes of the Taliban. .. .. Anybody read that prophetic nineties Tom Robbins book with 'cripple' in the title???
Is this the serving of exemplary hysteric lefty muslim defense you ordered Pelznickill?
http://negativepotential.blogsport.de/
http://negativepotential.blogspo...uslims-as-well/
concentration-camps-for-those
-bad-muslims-and-perhaps-for-the-yes
-but-muslims-as-well/
Piet - I was thinking more of things like this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Column...1964092,00.html
and this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
commen...1963921,00.html
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipe...127/
024048.html Here you see the words of a young man I've had altercations with (near misses really) throughout my years of attending commentacious indymedia stuff (he started the www.infoshop.org and now www.breadandrosesweb.com, moved back to Kansas from his DC days, has lovely sisters and loves porn, condones and encourages property destruction of the kind that has proved so popular on the hotterblooded side of the americas (but bycause Zerzan does radio and books the latter took all the credit/blame raps/raves for it). He is adressing the man i suspect operates that german bloglink
them comment columns are annoyingly narrow .. . and the guardian commentariat guardians are biased towards disallowing the expression of generalized and if at all differentiated no further than opposed feeling toward ethnicities (as if saying similar things bout govts or orgs isn't the same thing).
Love this part but stay away from that, even see the root of all evil in those parts (and vica versa). It's all a matter of hormone selection; do read http://www.neoteny.org and don't tell me that is not one of the very best sites i manages to digidig up.
it's interesting and appropriate that you have the political perspective you do, nick, since the right wing has been so effective in america largely due to the ambivalent treatment of 'truth' and 'belief' that hyperstition follows to its logical conclusion. you can't possibly really 'believe' any of this you're spouting- not because it's 'wrong', although i wouldn't say it's 'right' either
wow, even just searching for piccies under 'rodney collin' turnachurns up the meru instigated restraint order (against dan winter): http://www.chillingeffects.org/n...ce.cgi?
sID=1837 -- that's twice today
' it would just be a lot fucking easier wouldn't it, if we could just leave them alone and they'd never bother us again?'
It's not that: It's there are simply not unlimited resources in defense and there never can be. That, incidentally, is one of the practical problems of Cheney's 'one percent doctrine' as well-described by Ron Suskind, even if you buy all the rest of it: If you go attacking all the small potatoes, there's no reason to think that big potatoes won't be rearing their heads at some points and frequent, and if you've wasted your seed, then...It's just not even practical to go thinking you can put out every one-percent threat, because for one thing, efforts to do so have already met with total failure or their would be no continual talk of the WoT.
The Theory of Celestial Influence: Man, the Universe, and Cosmic Mystery. London: Vincent Stuart, 1954, 392p., index; New York: Weiser, 1971, 393p.; Boston: Shambhala, 1984, 392p.; London & New York: Arkana, 1993, 392p.
http://www.bardic-press.com/
rcol...collinindex.htm
a piece of his art work and a bunch of links
RC is http://emilyrichardsmusic.com/home.html favorite teacher:
Emily Richards is best known as the most popular artist on MP3.com with 10 self-released albums and over 3 million unique downloads. Emily is currently recording her 11th album.
His sister in law was well spiral obs.. eh .. preoccup...eh .. .taken with spirals as well
http://joycecollinsmith.co.uk/sp....uk/
spiral.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram nice page
http://www.avaxhome.ru/ebooks/
en...dneycollin.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/23901...1095/
COLLIN.rar
.rar files (which Universities don't seem to like)
http://www.godlikeproductions.co...=191269&
mpage=1
all 6 books of the 3.3Mb seperately (also at rapidshare.de) but erased due to lack of traffic
it's a 12 page thread and someone quite recently c(onp)laims the all went.
for northy:
Healing
Aries Kali phosphate
Taurus Natrium sulfate
Gemini Kali muriaticum
Cancer Calcium fluoide
Leo Magnesium phosphate
Virgo Kali sulphate
Libra Natrium phosphate
Scorpio Calcium sulphate
Sagittarius Silicae
Capricorn Calcium phosphate
Aquarius Natrium muriaticum
Pisces Ferrum phosphate
Disease does not occur if cell metabolism is normal
Cell metabolism is normal if cell nutrition is adequate.
Nutritional substances are either organic or inorganic as far as the body is concerned.
The ability of the body's cells to assimilate, utilize and excrete nutrients is impaired if there is a deficiency of tissue salts.
Adequate cell nutrition and cellular metabolism restored if the proper cell salt is supplied in a form the can be used by the body.
Suggested readings: The Zodiac and the Salts of Salvation by George Washington Carey and Inez Eudora Perry
Dr. Schuessler's Biochemistry by JB Chapman
Julius Hensel's big book was up on ebay for 5$ and remaindered unsold!!!! what's even more absurd is that the link was removed from the (dead as a doornail in any case) remineralize forum.
Some aeons you just can't win.
Emily is good therapy for you Nick, wisdomweed glory sung and mr gorey cameos in her songs too.
northy, a very suethingable sinterklaas cadeau:
meru tenen winter google 166 hits
http://www.waywardmuse.com/tenen.htm 198k
LEGAL MEMORANDUM
by Judy Kennedy
© 2005
It is unfortunate that Winter felt (as a result of coercion or not) that he had to give up his First Amendment freedoms and flee the country in exile. Little does he know that he did not need to do that, that there were remedies, that an admission of copyright infringement does not require giving up all one’s First Amendment rights to self-expression, study, and research and the right to publish the results of exercising those rights. Yet that’s what Tenen and company sold him. What a lemon, indeed. And now they’re trying to sell this truly rotten “poisoned fruit” to me. But I’m not buying it.
lots about the substance too, and this:
BACKGROUND
While researching for my book, Beyond the Rainbow: Renewing the Cosmic Connection Regarding Spirituality, Extraterrestrials, and Occult Conspiracy, I came across an interesting and highly relevant article by Stan Tenen in The Noetic Journal entitled “How to Talk To An Extra-terrestrial” published on the Internet. I printed out a copy and decided to quote the abstract in Chapter 8 of my book entitled “Awakening the Dragon: The Physiology of Awareness” under the subheading about DNA. Tenen’s article discussed his research regarding the possible biological and geometric components of the impact of Hebrew letters as one of the original mystical alphabets. While doing research online, I came across many other researchers in this same field, among them, Dan Winter. I decided to use Tenen as a reference instead of Winter, however, because of the legal controversy between the two over an issue of copyright infringement that resulted in an injunction against Winter.
......
My publisher sent Tenen a courtesy copy of the final proof of my book. Even though we had completely complied with his request, he was not satisfied. He informed us that the text that I had substituted created “a more serious problem” than what was there previously. Therefore he demanded that I delete it including a reference to another author’s work (Paul White) that was similar to his own. He had not previously mentioned his objection to my referencing White’s work to my publisher, therefore that paragraph remained untouched in the revised edition. Tenen is now threatening litigation in the event that we do not comply with these new demands based on an allegation that I am subject to the same injunction he obtained against Winter.
http://www.cassiopaeacult.com/
se...ouijaboards.php
To cap what was an already intense melange of weirdness, I learned that Vincent Bridges was also a collaborator with Dan Winter, a person concerning whom I had heard quite a bit. Mr. Winter, now apparently an international fugitive from a copyright infringement suit, was the role model for the central figure in Darren Aronofsky’s PI. In fact, the inside buzz was that the entire movie was modelled on Dan Winter’s dispute with Stanley Tenen of the Meru Foundation. And Vincent Bridges had apparently been Dan Winter’s publisher at the time. From the remaining articles of Mr. Winter’s on the web, it appears that he had appropriated as much from Vincent Bridges’ work as he had from Stanley Tenen’s.
CAB - kind of looks like there's something interesting in your comment, but it's too truncated and drive-by to impact.
If you don't accept the hyperstitional hypothesis - that reality is under construction (rather than existing as a completed object of contemplation and epistemic reference) then you are necessarily committed to a theo-cosmic slave perspective that abolishes productive history (evolution) and subjects all processes to the absolute sovereignty of a primordial condition. Islam does a fair job of systematizing such a position, which is why it translates as 'submission' and demands universal ass-raised prostration.
'demands universal ass-raised prostration.'
so that what we must do is to use the prostration only for the enhancement of the ass-raising (bubble-butts when possible) so it can be kissed by the appropriate Prophet-saturated personnel.
nick- no, i agree with the hyperstitional hypothesis. i think that i can accept "productive history" if it doesn't mean "progress", and you don't exactly seem to subscribe the view that mankind is marching together towards some great utopian future.
i suppose i object to the nihilistic, destructive conclusions you draw from the action/auction situation, but they're not invalid. it's also possible to draw "good" conclusions since the situation has no inherent qualities, but i prefer to draw no conclusions whatsoever. my position is in line with badiou's imperative to "decide from the point of view of what is undecidable"- i'm more interested in the superimposed, contradictory state of reality before the wavefunction collapse, so to speak.
as for my previous comment, i meant that the right-wing movement in america has been effective through a hyperreal approach- with the replacement of beliefs with talking points, they've severed any relationship between the political moment and meaning. the best right-wingers can completely contradict anything they've previously said, if the situation requires it, without a moment of hesitation- there is no reality contained within any of their statements to really contradict. thanks to the conservative political machine, the american political discourse has become a pure simulacrum.
i disagree with your political opinions, but that's a much less interesting topic.
CAB - I appreciate the tone of your comment, but if you're suggesting that political discourse on the left is somehow more substantive I think you're deluding yourself out of partisan feeling. Whenever anyone tries to discuss economics with left-wingers they just start shrieking and flounce off into pomobabble and conspiracy-mongering. 'Talking-points' are just mature democratic semio-technics - not especially interesting content-wise (except as material for diagnosis at a superior level of analysis), but in no way a right wing monopoly.
Anyway, the differences are quite substantive and obvious to everyone who's interested: Leftists privilege equality (of outcome), rightists privilege (non-sophitical i.e. negative) freedom. Rightwingers are much more inclined to see inequalities as consequences of legitimate processes (differences of talent, effort, adaptive cultures and good fortune). Leftists are happier with obese government. Rightists think incentives are crucial, leftists tend to ignore them. Of course, there are others, but these seem the most important to me.
anti-politics
please excuse a little narcisstic self-reference in the interests of coincidence engineering.
"a proxy Iran-Saudi punch-up sounds good to me" - and Spengler, it seems:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Mid...t/
HL05Ak04.html
northanger - the trouble with anti-politics is implementation.
Given anarchocapitalist settlements in the asteroid belt, it would definitely be a winner. In the interim, however, we're left with dirty practicalities, among which the machinery of bi-polar democratic politics is probably the most effective long-term guarantor of at least basic liberties.
Schumpeter (in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) persuaded me to look at democratic politics more realistically, and thus with less tendency to bitter disillusionment. Once it is recognized that politicians seek the public good exactly as much as corporations - i.e. not at all except as the side-effect of more pressing interests (of party and career in this case) - one begins to place confidence in the competitive mechanism itself, rather than in the altruism or public-spirit of participants. Politicians are parasitic scoundrels, so at least make sure they're nervous parasitic scoundrels (in the US case eliminating gerrymandered districts to maximize the number of competitive elections would help).
"Words often mean the opposite of what they appear to mean in the Middle East"
so true. lol.
'Leftists are happier with obese government.'
Curious observation if however totally predictable, nevermind that we've just finished the spectacle of the most nearly obese government in American history, with a little 60-year-old boy acting out fantasies of Caligula for all the world to retch at-- and 'most nearly obese' only insofar as they were not allowed to go the Whole 900 Club (club featuring members of 900 lbs. or more) Yards they wanted. Imperial Dictator is what Bush has wanted and would have had be been able to push through even one more purely Executive Power-oriented Supreme Court Justice through.
Dick Cheney can't even use his tie-breaker vote in the Senate. He'll probably turn red in the face innumerable times, and I can live with it, and whatever other misfortunes may befall him.
By 'obese' for leftists, you mean that leftists do not decry all forms of governmental support for the unfortunate or even just ill or elderly--and that rightists however do (and they do often seem to want to do just that if they wanted to fuck Social Security, which they most certainly did try and fully fail to do. Americans often do remember that the government is 'for the people, by the people and of the people', whereas every single Bushie told them this was the case while proving they didn't believe a word of it). Both leftists and rightists want obese government, gluttons all for the power they want to call their own. You're right about politicians being squalid parasites, but all I've got to say is: GO HILLARY!!!
Extremists are so much more stimulating than those who actually work at the jobs in government. That's why I love to read Nick on the far right and warszawa on the far left. Keeps me from going bipolar personally, and as a capitalist, of course I am concerned only with my own ass.
Bitch is gonna win in 2008 too. They say she'll use Obama as her Veep, which is all right. He's too much of a boy to be president yet, and wouldn't know how to do it any better than Bush.
This will get me into hot water with my Skull-and-Bones buddies, but I can see an upside to Hillary - the US could probably use a savage harridan right now. She'll sure scare the bejeezus out of the bum-raisers. Not so great for the economy though, so an extremely tight-fisted Republican house would be essential.
"nevermind that we've just finished the spectacle of the most nearly obese government in American history" - run by a centrist president and porky cohorts.
Do you really think the right is OK with this? Biggest expansion of the welfare state since Johnson, and hasn't even found the spare change for a few extra infantry divisions. But then, even Reagan found it hard to wield the axe. I've no idea at all what the battered American taxpayer can do about this chronic scandal - what would you suggest?
oh gosh! rolling stone has an article this month on Boss Hog. i won't eat pork again. poor pigs.
"Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Forth Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson. Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmorgrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do."
it gets worse. ugh.
follow up on that Goldner on imperialism
link i posted yesterday:
On Dec 3, 2006, at 3:19 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> I can remember arguing, with others, that the return of the
> recession in the 1980s would lead to a re-conquest of the world on
> the Lenin model, but I was wrong. Maybe something of that sentiment
> was abroad in the talk of civilising missions and such-like, but
> our contemporary elites lack the inner certainty of those British
> District Officers from the Colonial Office who lorded it over the
> natives without cutting and running like Donald Rumsfeld.
Is it that, or is it that our semi-democracy acts as a check on
foreign adventures (if they cause too many US casulties, that is)?
Doug
........
So Northanger, which nhearthgonian GON or AQ do i use to prove this:
Stan Tenen = Judaism = GWBush
Dan Winter = folklore = SHussein
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipe...127/
024059.html
on Christian splits (Wallis on Lerner via Pugliese)
one raises ass in order to be, upon rising, clad with the powerrrrrighteousness and divine guidance such regular acts of ostensible humility -- submission as they like to call it, but really an eastern way of rigorous gratification postponing, ritualized homosexuality -- is perceived to grant.
AQ 467 = Stan Tenen-Judaism-GWBush = SIXTY-ONE THE JEWS CALL IT (Liber AL I:46).
AQ 541 = Dan Winter-folklore-SHussein = EUROPEAN NUCLEAR CONSORTIUM = SURGE IN THE GLOBAL HOBBES-FACTOR = ULTIMATE NUMOGRAMMATIC ENIGMA.
AQ 61 = NIK.
AQ 131 = ASK NICK = OLD NICK.
that Collin was quite a numonoid too, 18 point circles, 15 point triangles and 24 point enneagram (drawn squigled in 'the christian mystery') all sharing intermittent calculus (periodic 'raakpunten')
... and on a Blakean or Mansonite note, OLD NICK = CHRIST
Can you believe a search with "ecologists in china" gets you all of 16 results?
WWND.
nick - don't you mean Masonic? Mansonite sounds creepy.
Man is a not so distant relative of the termite:
The Last Frontier: Illegal Logging in Papua and China's Massive Timber Theft
17/02/2005
(EIA and Telapak Indonesia)
'The Last Frontier', exposes the international criminal syndicates behind the massive looting of merbau trees from Indonesia’s Papua Province. Merbau, a valuable hardwood used mainly for flooring, is being smuggled out of Papua at a rate of around 300 000 cubic metres of logs every month to feed China’s timber processing industry.
(Link to document, 1215k)
http://www.illegal-logging.info/
...st_Frontier.pdf
line break
China's Wood Market, Trade and the Environment
01/12/2004
(WWF International (Zhu Chunquan, Rodney Taylor and Feng Guoqiang))
This report analyses China's domestic use and export of timber and explores the environmental impact of logging in the countries that supply wood to China. The report suggests measures that could be taken by the governments of China and its trading partners to discourage imports to China of wood sourced from illegal or destructive logging operations.
(Link to document, 1233k)
http://www.illegal-logging.info/
...Trade_Study.pdf
that's 2 out of 20 on a page (330 in total) at: http://www.illegal-logging.info/...ents.php?
id=351
Abrupt Climate Changes Recorded Over The European Land Mass (ACCROTELM) http://www2.glos.ac.uk/accrotelm/ - http://noorderlicht.vpro.nl/arti...kelen/31866284/
(online footage) .
Jorn Barger abandoned his robotwisdom blogging in favor of his '2'
http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com...-
historian.html
pretty hyperstitious if you ask me. ..
looks like the US is .. .ermmm .. .occupied, yeah that's it, occupied.
http://www.arsepoetica.com/blog/
..._globally_.html
'nick - don't you mean Masonic? Mansonite sounds creepy.'
Oh,now wake up, Ms. Northanger, you've spent a lot more time with Nick than I have. Of COURSE he meant Mansonite, although I don't know if he knows that Marilyn Manson, the amusing ugly pop star ('Sweet Dreams Are Made of This' is one of the best songs of the last 15 years) lived in the old Tate/Polanski house on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills (I went by there in 2001; oh Gawd, it's just half a mile away from where Ann-Margret has lived for 45 years and those people had a big hit list back then of celebs they wished to 'help and love' by killing them) in its last years before being razed--the same house, obviously, where those vile freaks murdered the pregnant Tate and several others. Charles MANSON is still alive behind bars in California, and so are a bunch of the other originals.
Masons are more for people like Mozart, Tamino, Clinton and Gore.
1 Comments:
S. Kalyanaraman said...
Brilliant, scintillating note.
On the scribes in distant Mohenjo-daro, here is an ebook which has cracked the code of the hieroglyphs (so-called Indus script). http://sarasvati95.googlepages.com/
Download the ebook which has the complete corpus of epigraphs
http://rapidshare.com/files/
1247...guages.pdf.html
Kalyanaraman
5:56 PM
this is the only comment on a noblesavage blsp which puts a classic by Fredy Perlman online:
Against His-story, Against Leviathan! chapter 3
http://
noblesavagery.blogspot.co...viathan_14.html
The bum-raisers don't talk much about how the Mecca shrine was, in fact, defiled in that uprising that had to be aborted. This is one of the most interesting things in the Wright book, and so I guess they don't realize that their religion will never be the same again, because once defiling the Qabaa thing (I think that's what it's called), is quite enough. Now it won't really matter if Madonna goes and does Jewish mysticism in there. Also interesting in the book is all the incredible work Bin Ladin's brilliant father did in all the sacred Saudi shrines--his career was phenomenal and I knew little of it.
Peters on the ISG, pretty amusing:
"Really, what Baker - and this is Baker's issue - argues for is the traditional Saudi and Arabist view that the Middle East's problems are Israel's fault. The fact that Baker would have made the same argument 15 years ago confirms that you really can't teach some old dogs new tricks."
- http://www.nypost.com/seven/1207...ters.htm?
page=0
Glenn Reynolds thinks Hillary could be "the most uncompromising wartime President in United States history"
http://instapundit.com/archives2...12/
post_843.php
(sounds like a good thing, although she'll find winning in '08 an uphill struggle - too much baggage)
She would be incredibly strong, because she truly loves to work all the time, no fear of it at all (I confess to not understanding this sensibility). If she and Giuliani ran against each other, I'd probably still vote for her, but that would be the one race that wouldn't freak me out, because he's pretty fantastic too. However, I think she's more level-headed and smarter, even though he's got a lot of class himself. McCain has ceased to impress me, as he'll use moral high ground for awhile, but then cancels it out by letting it show for the opportunism it had been (which in no way means his POW experience was not important.) He seems clumsy to me, not really slick enough--and it's necessary.
She does have a lot of baggage, but those 2 Clintons are masters of political Houdini-ism or whatever it might best be called: They've nearly been down innumerable black holes and thus far have always worked their way back. They're just plain political wizards--and slick as they come. Hillary has the strength of Thatcher and probably is somewhat slyer: Without the political luck of the Falklands, Thatcher obviously wouldn't have gotten those extra 6-8 years. Hillary is shameless and I think is genuinely unconcerned with public opinion in the same sense that Giuliani isn't.
What's interesting is that they were about to compete for NYSenator in 1999, when Giuliani had to drop out of the race to be treated for prostate cancer. Hillary did all sorts of bullshit, including this 'listening tour' of New York, as shameless as it gets; and Giuliani did a hilarious mockery by going to Arkansas (her home state at least after she married Bill) and doing a 'listening tour' of Arkansas (where nobody was running for anything, at least they were not. It was truly one of the wittiest things I ever saw in American politics.) People who were not in New York at the time of 9/11 are still often mystified at the importance of his presence, and all I can say is that they just don't know: He kept us all from going nuts, and everybody in town knew it.
i'm trying to understand singularities & event horizons. not that Hillary isn't interesting, mind you. but talking about the presidential race this early is like hearing christmas songs in november.
"To illustrate just how disruptive such an object might be, the simple act of going into orbit around a naked singularity would enable one to travel to any point in the past"
- Cool
Sanity in the UK (from Perry de Havilland):
"Good grief! I was not calling for a tax increase but rather more money to fund the military, which is not the same thing at all. Things would be vastly improved (and not just for the military) by abolishing the DTI, ending state funded education and scrapping the NHS and giving half the savings to the MOD..."
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/
ar...k_military.html
GON 9 = DTI (abolish)
GON 1 = NHS (end)
GON 10 = MOD (give ½ the savings)
GON 15 = TIME TRAVEL
or,
GON 15 = SATAN.
More sanity in the UK - Nick Cohen has written sensibly about Armed Forces "underfunding":
http://www.nickcohen.net/?p=125
This is good as well, anti-masonic Muslim paranoia:
http://www.nickcohen.net/?p=71
Tim's last link completes a weird circle:
"The Masons, you learn, hide subliminal messages in The Simpsons as well as the music of the Eagles, Michael Jackson and Madonna, the better to brainwash the world. (Should you be inclined to play 'Hotel California' backwards, you will hear 'yeah Satan', apparently.)"
(Manson was probably a secret Mason)
[comment thread on that link kind of repetitive ....]
no wonder the lefties hate Nick Cohen - the shameless 'monger thinks fascism is a bad thing!
(obviously needs to read more badiou)
The first Cohen piece linked to is provocative but,IMHO, a tad over-stated. A military that abandons the technological frontier of warfaring is condemning itself to miss out on all the serendipitous evolutionary breaks that lie on the war-machine escalator. A robotic warfare revolution is inevitable, it is just a matter of when ...
Manson was probably a secret Mason
- Yeah I was just trying to keep Northanger happy by posting something vaguely hyperstitional, if pretty obliquely. :)
Nick - I do agree that there is a necessarily technological aspect to modern warefare which shouldn't be ignored. A lot of writers at the moment seem to be pushing a similar line to Cohen's (Ralph Peters, for example, has talked about the need for a more infantry focused doctrine), but perhaps go too far in that direction. There's nothing to be gained in retarding military development and a lot to be lost - a balanced approach that neither fetishises unrealistic (in some theatres at least - Lebanon for e.g.) shock and awe type tactics which pander to the pacifist war-where-nobody-gets-hurt crowd, nor relies only on the grunts getting bloody paradigm which abandons most of our technological advantages now, and as you say, the technological advantages which are surely around the corner, is what I'm after.
fascize organically: http://www.naturbauten.com/bilder.htm
[I've been wanting to know how to do this for ages!]
no wonder the lefties hate Nick Cohen
- What a bizzare and weirdly banal waste of time, though.
unwanted look into lefty mind-sewer - ugh!
got interrupted on the tech/war issue.
1) (... got started) benefits of intimacy with cutting-edge R&D are profound and sometimes quite invisible. Because economies of scale aren't often in evidence (in peacetime), the cost-per-unit of whatever one's talking about can look simply absurd. (1st serious autonomous predator robot will probably cost a US$ billion, even if they can then be cranked out for under US$1 million each, or even breed on their own for free eating trashed enemy scrap)
2) Who knows what's around the corner. No serious military can afford not to prepare for the most challenging and expensive confrontation it could imaginably face.
3) Asymmetric tactics are a response to asymmetry - give up on overwhelming dominance and the whole landscape could tilt back unpredictably. (why didn't Saddam try flying planes? He certainly had them, and not cheap one's - against a Cohen military it might have been worth it)
Despite all that, there's clearly a lot right in what Cohen is saying ...
piet - Chinese do a lot of that kinky vegeto-engineering, woven trees etc. We've even got one in the apartment (common type of slowly knitted house-plant). So it's not just teutonic phytological parade-grounding, although I can see why it looks like that ...
[lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion
I happen to think that what we're hearing in America is the sound of
the Capitalist Revolution starting to hit the rocks, so I'm not that
distressed. But I also think we have to get about creating a program.
boddi
Piet: ouch.
nother blooper:
"In the modern era, the cult of state worship has frequently taken on the
character of earlier forms of religious faith."
Now I do think that this is true but I would also refer to class structure,
social property, and gender and race divisions through out history.
Jerry Monaco
Spinoza was a great and early exponent of the stupidest sort of unfounded faith in the state. That innocent trust may have been more justified in his day and things may have been looking up but he expressed himself in such infantile, faithfilled and -fueled terms over 'the state' that i am suprised this escaped our widely read fellow JM
Doug's answer reflects some of this:
> > we can only use the word "ideology" in a more or less common sense
Of course, "common sense" is itself a deeply ideological category - all the knee-jerk responses we're programmed with from birth.
Doug
http://www.epwijnants-lectures.c.../
27nov2006.html isopsephy and all that numboidism and more 'mancys' than you can shake your rumsfelddicknick at.
Nick - right on points, I agree absolutely (& I think one of the comments at the Samizdata post said similar things). Were there any justice in this world, you'd have Lord Drayson's job and a very large wedge of cash.
I see Cohen's piece and others like it as the necessary counter-weights to the RME types where neither are wholly right, neither are totally wrong.
Still on my Marxian political economy tip to be honest (I've stopped dreaming about it, thank god), but this is great.
"modern warefare"
Tim, are you still dreaming of Marx?
oops. saw that last bit finally. lol.
tim - last link ++ excellent, thanks
Descartes vs Hayek format is great for casting light on the hideous Badiou phenomenon and why it's simultaneously and by essence regressive, communist, and French
best contemporary Hayekian is the stupendously brilliant Virginia Postrel IMHO
you mean like this?
zenpundit says go vote for The Glittering Eye
nick - sorry, out of the loop; think these issues are totally worth spending time on, but perhaps not in minor skirmishes in the blogosphere along the same old lines as before. the points you outline are worth developing in more detail behind the scenes imho. hope to catch up soon ...
let's hear more about badiou from you nick
CAB - my reading of badiou is pretty limited, although I was utterly revolted by the Platonic Master-Philosopher piece (an interview) in the recent Collapse (the contrast with Chaitin's wonderfully unpretentious and empirically substantiated piece in the same volume was astounding). I will go out on a limb to say that Badiou is obviously:
1) Smart enough to play the French intellectual fashion game extremely well.
2) Repudiating the 'anglo' elements in D&G (dismissed as 'vitalism' as if the vitalism/mechanism dichotomy were not consistently diagonalized by machinic thinking), that is to say, the empirical, State-phobic, pro-liberty aspects, returning to the typical Gallic (Colbertian) proto-Stalinism his acolytes are all so dreamy about.
3) Having a disastrous regressive effect among his followers, who have all re-discovered the transgressive pleasures of SM psychoanalytical totalitarianism (exactly the nexus D&G sought and evidently failed to dispell). Fortunately there aren't enough of these sad freaks to matter, and as in all things a la francaise, another bus will be along in a minute.
4) Despite his 'mathematicism' he refuses to get his hands dirty, and is fact a very tired figure in new clothes: the Platonic-Cartesian Geometric Totalitarian. The D&G Nomad war Machine essay contained more genuine numeracy than we'll ever see from Badiou.
To redirect our gaze to what appears to be the only pressing issue that lacks adequate coverage: WWIV.
Check where all the action is going on at http://www.jihadwatch.org/
archiv...014357.php#more
For a flava:
Consider the inter-connectedness of the following incidents, all of which took place in the past few months:
* In Indonesia, three Christian schoolgirls were beheaded.
* In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.
* In Somalia, a nun was shot to death as she left the hospital where she worked, tending the sick and dying.
* In Lebanon, just days ago, a cabinet minister was assassinated.
* In Britain, authorities uncovered a conspiracy in which native-born Brits plotted to blow up several trans-Atlantic flights, killing as many as 3,000.
* In Afghanistan, suicide bombers are at work again.
* In Iraq, they never stopped. Additionally, the week before last, a group of worshippers were abducted from a mosque, doused with gasoline and burned to death in what’s described as “sectarian violence.”
* In France, a high school philosophy teacher is in hiding after very credible death threats following publication of a September 19th commentary in Le Figaro.
* Some 139 people died in riots in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – following the publication of Danish cartoons.
* Europe is experiencing the worst wave of anti-Semitic violence since Kristallnacht. The former director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum reports there an average of 12 assaults a day on Jews in Paris.
* In Kosovo, 90 percent of Serbs gave been ethnically cleansed from the province since 1999. The rest live in a state of siege.
* In Mumbai, India, a series of blasts killed almost 200.
* In Gaza, terrorists recently celebrated the latest “ceasefire” by raining more rockets on southern Israel.
* And the leader of more than a billion Catholics received death threats and demands that he convert after giving a speech in which he called for a balance of faith and reason, and quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor.
What do the foregoing have in common?
INDEED.
dlp - please allow me to adopt a stance of morbid detachment for a moment and ask:
When, if ever, will people join the dots? Or is it that they already have, and actually accept the legitimacy and / or sheer inevitability of global jihadi onslaught?
My guess is that our (mongerish) patience will be sorely tested. Perhaps the West is so lost in its Christianized swamp of dishonesty, self-loathing and neurotic passivity that it deserves to die.
In any case, the (political) tide is not promising right now. You'll probably agree with this (I certainly did):
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Arti...le.asp?
ID=25909
The Islamarxist left has already happily waved goodbye to scientific reason, secularism, women's rights and free expression. Beheaded Indonesian schoolgirls? "They probably ate at McDonald's. Screw them!"
Glenn Greenwald :: Nobody glorifies the power of the Islamic Terrorists more than Bush followers do. As The Heretik says in comments: "What's so impressive about the terrorists and the insurgents and the Shiites and the Sunnis who yearn so for the inevitable caliphate that will stretch from Spain to Pluto and beyond is that even as they fight amongst themselves, they have time to sit down and figure out how to influence our politics here."
northanger - do you seriously doubt they "sit down and figure out how to influence our politics here"? It's hardly a major commitment of resources (people and time they have plenty of, and unfortunately they're not stupid.
Greenwald is a tool, and as far as I can see, deliberately lying.
nicholas. well, dah. everyone's deliberately lying. thing is, who's the king of liars. that's the thing. thought it was YOU, but i'm not so sure any more.
maybe i'm hanging out at the wrong blog. hmm.
Nick- Being and Event caught my attention because of Badiou's application of set theory to ontology but so far I have not found it very rewarding. I haven't read collapse but I know the Chaitin article which is very illuminating. when you refer to "vitalism/mechanism dichotomy... consistently diagonalized by machinic thinking" I assume you mean as in by Cantor's method- would you agree diagonalization is the basis of the original contradiction hyperstition exploits?
CAB - I'd be more inclined to see Cantorian diagonalization as an exemplary diagonal method (due to its technical rigour), but one among others - formal and informal. For e.g. Undercurrent at one stage produced an impressively rigorous musicological diagonal method for processing rhythm/tone relations in Drum&Bass, without depending beyond broad analogy with the Cantorian approach.
As to the relationship between diagonalism and hyperstition, given the somewhat cryptic genealogy of the latter, it would be rash to jump in too quickly with a straightforward identification (although I'm sure the connection is a strong one, and the intelligence of your question is highly appreciated).
On Badiou, isn't the ontological project precisely the problem? Whatever his purported immanentization of philosophy to the mathematical, the question of being is not a mathematical one, and is in fact a shrouded political assertion exloiting the technical expertise of mathematics to impose a Platonic-Cartesian State-power agenda (exiling dispersed learning or tacit, empirical evolution from 'truth' - in the way of all absolutisms).
northanger - OK, I take the point, but whilst transcendental lies can be hyper-productive, scuzzy empirical lies are generally merely tedious, and Greenwald belongs firmly in the latter category
Nick, I read your use of 'diagonalization' in the original context to mean a process that exploits a method of comparison to reach a contradiction or discontinuity that opens the hitherto plenary construction or concepts onto a void, and perhaps exposes the two opposing constituents of whichever dualism to not be so clearly separated or even interchangable. if your broader inflection of 'diagonalization' entails processes not much like cantor's, are these processes still at least somewhat like the above outline i expounded from my understanding of cantor's method?
CAB - the topic you're raising here is so important and complex it deserves a discussion-thread of its own. I'll try to put up a few opening remarks, no doubt citing your comments, in the next few days so we can thrash it out at an appropriate tempo.
nicky. Greenwald's scuzziness is unintentional, whereas you are deliberately vile & slimely. smelly too. because you really do need to jump the hyperstitional diagonal rashly into straightforward identification.
GON 54 = HYPERSTITIONAL DIAGONAL
northanger - i can tell when you're genuinely miffed because this GON nonsense starts slithering back in
nick, are you going to post something new soon? [pleaz] with a picture!
first pic scheduled for early 2009, but a post maybe even tonight ...
2009?
GON 54 = PHOENIX-FEATHER HOLLY WAND (Harry Potter's wand; feather from Fawkes).
If you think politics is an empty shell left and right cease to mattter, similarly .. . .
http://girlsgofishing.com/pc/
Ice...IceAgeNews.html
Like one kid bragging to a crowd of his peers about how he's got 'one-upsies' on them, Bush said [about the terrorists] ..."They're the kind of people that look at Katrina and wish they had caused it."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS...ralresponse.ap/
. .. .says the man who denies being the cause of 'it' and who thinks global leadership is a case of deflecting the punishment for vindictive jealousy one so richly deserves expertly, that is, like only a heap of sibling semite rivalry topper can.
Not even Churchill has 'helped' the Judaic death cult shackle schwindlers as good as jeworgy boy has done.
It is pretty safe to say in the light of Sander Gilman's scholarship for one, and two, having been face to face (again, after half a year's time, though he says he was expecting me) with 'meine Schwunde' (millenia crossing kind of kin if not kith) again recently, a peculiar hermit/heir of assimileeship (the nose is very similar, eyes lighter, hair thinner, beard thicker), 5 books in his possesion (one on wool dying, Spinoza's Ethics .. .and a few others) and advice for me to dump mine, dwelling in a very expensive house (and getting more so as he restores it) on a top location and considered like a madman by his neighbours (who run a snackbar and feature offspring of saddening rotundation size so don't ask me which household i think is the crazier of the two) but he actually gets into some of them prestigious castles around there to excercise his meticulous and slow repainting perfectionism.
check your email for some unpublished gematria, nick.
Cheers for the link Nick. Front Page is a staple read. Perazzo’s piece in Front Page is a lucid reminder of the struggle we are engaged in within the West that will to a large extent determine the outcome of WWIV. In fact, this conflict is a key part of WWIV, which is as complex as WWIII was simple. It is not that WWIV has not been declared – WWIII was not declared, strictly speaking. The enemy is twofold, external and internal, but doubly so in each case: Jihadis killing and attacking infidels and creeping sharia across the whole Muslim world; Jihadis living amongst us, hate mongering funded largely by the Sauds or Iranians; idiot leftist Eurabian apologists running governments, the EU and UN; and a new phenomenon in increasing numbers of converts, like Adam Gadahn, spokesperson for al Qaeda, fighting in the media or mountains. National borders belong to the Clauswitzian past. Governments are ill adapted to cope. Islam, as a political and authoritarian ideology is a virus, a disease, that we will all have to stare in the face sooner or later. By then it may be too late. The battle lines need to be drawn out, surveyed, patrolled, and pushed back. Who is aware of this and who is doing this?
'Grounding parade' (see last link if you don't have much time)
i'm gonna borrow that for a title post;
http://www.too-late.ch/gallery2/
...g2_itemId=10288
http://www.turn.ch/danceoutwef/?...twef/?
page_id=7
Here's a large series of parade pictures from Bern Switserland; about a hundred lefties with slogans such as 'rich hearts instead of fat profit' and the like leftoid 'catextoskism', .. .as if money shouldn't or can't or won't again be what enriches the heart as the means that makes matter and spirit meet and bond in the middle as heart and soul.
I wrote words to that effect in response to folks ganging up to oust www.weidenhof.de (from the rainbow list in german) for asking a fee upfront in case one would like to make use of the meticulously clean and dustfree accomodation. A hysterical reaction since there is a vast amount of room to do the rainbow family thing next to and all around it.
Same, however, applies to my objections regarding their plans to have firewalks across or next to the 'sacred' fire planned there this month.
Turns out John Ray's vocal opposition still has people that say the same things JR used to except now there are many and pretty popular descendants from his barbaric point holding techniques (I include Reiki, Quantum Touch and lots of those feminine typ therapies).
Now if you were to go down life's walks and styles depicted on the right hand side in the scheme depicted in the post previous to this one (at indexterity) you'd see what i doubt the chinese drone swarmclone will ever be capable of (without some/your? help; so why don't you smuggle these pictures and everything they stand for into the Chinese daily nick):
http://www.treehousebydesign.com/
http://www3.telus.net/public/dwm.../
slideshow.html zoaria's favorites (4 full slideshow series)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"National borders belong to the Clauswitzian past."
- Thought this was interesting. Any chance you could expand on it a little, dlp (why is past Clauswitzian but not future, etc)?
Re Greenwald, haven't the jihadis already made their feelings on the outcome of the US mid-terms known?
Tim, Clauswitz's theory of warfare is based upon the notion of the state as warfaring entity, and the division of government, army and people. Martin van Creveld, in the Transformation of War, provides the best modern critique of this classical theory with prescient forebodings: “From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious …fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict…” – this van Creveld quote is provided by Robert Kaplan in the Coming Anarchy, who elaborates in the nature of modern warfare in conjunction with environmental scarcity and cultural and racial conflict as a recipe for disaster.
... who elaborates *on* the nature of modern warfare ...
however, Kaplan underestimated the extent to which Islam is a death cult with a proactive engine: true, as he says, "Islam's very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden", but being down trodden is not the cause of its militancy. This ought to be made rigorously clear. Likewise his astute appreciation of cultural and environmental cartographies - for example in his thinking the Kurdish/Turkish conflict over water would be of more significance than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict - is nevertheless not in line with the track we are now on. Water may yet become a weapon in warfare, but for now it is oil. But it’s not even about the oil. There is a complex relation between dar el Islam (‘land of submission’) and dar el harb (non Muslim lands, the ‘land of war’) stretching back to the origins of Islam itself. If Kaplan was aware of this, and the coming anarchy of the Jihadi onslaught, he might not have underplayed the significance of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and appreciated its strategic significance in this WWIV. Far from being a parochial struggle, it has always been the epicentre of global Jihad, which has now captured Iraq. So, back to Nancy Pelosi, one can see the complete lunacy of the argument that if the Anglos leave Iraq, the “insurgency” will die down and peace will be “restored”.
Of course, I find Pelosi's reasoning to be completely faulty and the line that US presence has "caused" the insurgency to be morally repugnent. Ditto the Israeli-Palestinian origins of the WoT as propagagted by the ISG. Palestine, like US presence in Iraq, is a recruiting tool, yes, but it is not the "cause" any more than computer games or heavy metal "cause" teenagers to murder each other. As always, you remain responsible for your own actions.
dlp - I'm hugely with your analysis ...
Clauswitz is extremely important reference, however, and not only as a foil. His notion of war as "violence taken to an utter extremity" has disturbingly realistic pertinence to the current world situation. The religious sanction of jihad means that nothing whatsoever is forbidden in the (armed) service of God. I doubt whether Westerners are well-placed to think through what that means, but Clauswitz has already been there in theory ...
"It is necessary to make a friend of horror ..." (Kurtz was, of course, an exemplary Clauswitzean)
I have only at best a limited knowledge of Clauswitz but would have thought that he ties in exactly with are current situation. Obviously war is now much more globalised than he could have imagined but it still seems that all of Clauswitz's axioms about centre of gravity, the goals of war etc are highly prescient given our current inability to fight in a "Clauswitzian" manner.
NIck, agree with you on this overlooked aspect of Clauswitz. But in addition to 'nothing is forbidden' in the service of Allah, is the insidious, creeping take over we are witnessing in Europe in particular of Islamic Correctness, a variant of PC, with a view to sharia. Violence has its 'civilian' counterpart par excellence with this resurgent/new enemy.
dlp, tim - this stuff obviously needs a thread of its own. Using Clauswitz as the emblematic theorist of the "Western way of war" (VD Hanson, John Keegan) and its predicament in the WWIV environment seems a good way to frame the discussion.
Is there an effective diagonal between war-as-welfare attempts to modernize Islamic societies against their will and genocidal thermonuclear confrontation (as Omega Clauswitaeanism)? Many on the right are certainly getting worried that the perpetual undermining (and intrinsic weakness) of the former implies a hideous slide toward the latter.
What does Peters (another Clauswitzean) always say?
Here we go:
"War's immutable law... is that those unwilling to pay the butcher's bill up front will pay it with compound interest in the end."
That quote was from this article, "Politically Correct War".
Nick - I guess there is also a parallel view to the one you've just outlined which thinks that actual confrontation has more chance of encouraging nuclear war, and that theo-fascist appeasement is the safer option.
tim - your Peters quote makes the perfect response to that, surely. But then it all comes back to basics: do incentives matter. Anyone who thinks they do is going to doubt that rewarding aggressive tyranny (or even failing to punish it) is likely to prove successful.
My problem here, I confess, is that (as in so many other places) I simply cannot work out what leftists are thinking (if, indeed, they are thinking at all).
[I've used the opportunity provided by your Peters ref. to try and get this discussion moved upstairs.]
hmm.
Of course we will never find those WMD now that Saddam has been executed... oh I forgot we don't worry about them any more do we. We pretend its always all been about fighting against miltant jihadists. Or is that too leftist for you Nick (alias Dr Strangelove?)
There was no spoon.
Engels - oh for fuxake, it's not that complicated -
Saddam was whacked for not coming clean about the status of Iraq's WMD programs.
You know perfectly well that he deliberately obfuscated the situation though an infuriating shell-game (facilitated by the UN). Now he's gone. All that remains is increasingly tortuous lawerly spin. I just hope you don't seriously expect anyone other than ant-american bizarros to be impressed.
ant-americans? durn, swat down one threat & another pops up.
btw, has anybody seen The Hyperstitional Manual for the Multi-Tasking Grunt lying around here?
wait, i'm confusing that with The Seven Habits of the Highly Effective Grunt.
Nick, I can still remember a time when you would have taken an opposite view (...and previous to that much the same view as you appear to hold now.) So suppose you are at least consistent in your inconsistency. Never was about WMD... just revenge for Bush senior (the original sore loser to return to te thread)
The Functioning Core & the Non-Integrating Gap
(2003) it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein in favor of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. "Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically" [...] The paper, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" [...] featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading "land for peace" by transforming the "balance of power" in the Middle East in favor of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan. To do so, it called for ousting Saddam and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad.
US plans to merge Iraq, Jordan after war (2002)
Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan & Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan (14-Feb-1958 to 02-Aug-1958) + Faisal II of Iraq, Iraq's last king.
The Hashemites trace their ancestry from ... the great-grandfather of Muhammad. The early history of the Hashemites saw them in a continuous struggle against the Umayyads for control over who would be the caliph or successor to Muhammad. The Umayyads were of the same tribe as the Hashemites, but a different clan. This rivalry eventually would lead to the split between the Sunni and Shia.
Red Lines & Deadlines (Interactive Map)
Reversal of Alliance? (1958)
Giant U.S. embassy rising in Baghdad :: Three years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, only one major U.S. building project in Iraq is on schedule and within budget: the massive new American embassy compound [...] The 104-acre complex — the size of about 80 football fields — will include two office buildings, one of them designed for future use as a school, six apartment buildings, a gym, a pool, a food court and its own power generation and water-treatment plants. The average Baghdad home has electricity only four hours a day, according to Bowen's office. The current U.S. Embassy in Iraq has nearly 1,000 Americans working there, more than at any other U.S. embassy.
http://www.notinourname.net/
http://www.nion.us/
http://www.worldcantwait.net/
http://www.artistsnetwork.org/
http://www.vervemusicgroup.com/e...d=11297&
ecid=81
http://thumbsnap.com/v/aP9efEVI.jpg
"an opposite view" - opposite merely observing (I'd assumed uncontroversially) that Saddam was playing a WMD shell-game?
Sounds to me like an opposite view to "CHina is a large Asian country"
[apologies for typos - sprog issues]
I meant perjorative "ant(i)-American"
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