Fire and Ice

At the end of April I'll be touring Iceland with another photographer, so I'm happy to read that a volcano's erupted. It's right beside this glacier where I was in 2007:



Our trip will head first for Snæfellsjökull, the highest mountain and the entrance for Jules Verne's 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'.

The Nobel Prize for Taking the Piss

Re that earthquake in Hawaii:

• It's true, Hawaii and Haiti both have 2 i's.
• Obama may have been born in Hawaii, so it seems peculiar that he'd confuse it with a different one of the 57 states, but, look, he hasn't been back there for nearly 3 months.
• He claims that the great Hawaii Earthquake of 2010 will be covered for federal aid because of the Louisiana Purchase in his Healthcare Bill, but it won't because that provision is explicitly limited to Louisiana, which makes sense because it was an La. senator's vote being purchased, not the vote of Senator Papa Doc Duvalier from Hawaii.
• So this isn't just a lie, it's a multi-layered, nuanced, Harvard Law School, Potemkin Village, alternate reality, supercallifragilsticexpialidocious, Krakatoa of a lie….an Obaman lie.
• All together now, to the tune of The Star Spangle Banner: "WHAT IF BUSH HAD SAID THIS?"

Blame Bush

Really. Bush should have bombed the Iranian nukes, as Cheney seems to have advocated, and worked to undermine a barbaric regime that's committed many acts of war against the US. Instead Bush's good nature told him to leave that decision to the next President, realizing the problem of inheriting a direct conflict with Iran. But a more cold-blooded thinker would have taken Obama at his and his associates' word and presumed that Obama would betray Israel. And so it came to pass. Blame Bush and blame the Jews who voted for Obama.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The soft bigotry of high expectations

Obama is useless, as in soup-to-nuts useless and then some. The "and then some" means wrecking America's alliances and emboldening America's enemies. Has he no friendships with foreign leaders? Britain? Fuhgeddaboudit, that romance is swimming with the fishes. France? Sarkozy looks down his distinguished nose at Obama's "virtual" foreign policy to Iran and says so at the UN. "Zut alors! 'oo eez ze surrender monkey?" (while refusing troops for Afghanistan). Where are the African leaders fêting Obama? Indonesia? Nope. India? China? Nope, nope. Venezuela? Iran? N. Korea? Brazil? Russia? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

People are starting to notice and this piece attracted this comment:

Obama’s problem is that most other world leaders are not empty suits but people of some accomplishments. As these leaders have met and assessed him as of no consequence, in effect agreeing with Bill Clinton that Obama is little more than a coffee boy elected via celebrity syndrome, they have little interest in him and he realizes that he is not of their caliber either. Consequently, once past the pleasantries and the weather, neither has much to say to the other.

And for masochists a comedy classic:

In civilisation

Tony Blair in Israel:

Of note is a story he related about Netanyahu when the two of them were at a dinner party hosted by Netanyahu. It seems the waiter accidentally ladled the soup, matzo ball I presume, onto Netanyahu’s lap. The waiter, rather than gushing over with apologies to his head of state, proceeded to berate him for being in the way while he was trying to do his job. Netanyahu apologized profusely... Blair asked rhetorically, in which other Middle Eastern nation might one witness such an episode with a similar outcome.

Is it me or everybody else that's insane?

The BBC:

Ok, chaps, you didn't get us last time around, here's what you need to work on.

Morning rant #10, perfidious America

Actually I don't need to rant on America selling out my country by billing and cooing with Argentina about the Falkland Islands. Powerline has done it elegantly here:

So, once again, the Obama administration has sold Great Britain, formerly our #1 ally, down the river, along with the inhabitants of the Falklands, whose opinions would seem to count for something. We are past the point where anyone could doubt that the Obama administration's hostility toward the U.K. is intentional. Obama seems to have substituted personal pathology for national policy.

Investors Business Daily here:

The U.S., which backed Britain to the hilt when Argentina invaded its Falklands in 1982, has suddenly gone neutral on who has sovereignty over the islands. This is much more than a bad slap to our best ally.

Remember April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq who infamously told Saddam Hussein in 1990: "But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." To Saddam, that was a green light from the U.S. to invade his tiny neighbor.

Today, we hear similar language from the U.S. on another territorial dispute that may take us down the same road.

My gut reaction is to re-deploy the Royal Navy from Afghanistan to the Falklands and then annexe the US Virgin Islands (I've long coveted St John's, USVI, where they already drive on the left) and then burn down Washington, tho I expect you'd cheer us on this time. I'm telling you, Yanks, you're pissing off Americaphiles like me, not because your scummiest President and dopey Hillary are doing doo-doo on our alliance, but because your decent leaders are silent. Palin and Romney should be screaming blue murder. Don't take Gordon Brown's quietism as a guide. He's more supine than Obama.

Meanwhile I suggest Hillary asks Argentina for some troops for Afghanistan while she's so popular in B.A. They make good sandbags.

Exit question: What was the best thing that ever happened to Argentina?

Answer: Getting whacked by Britain in 1982 which led directly to the fall of the murderous military junta and then democracy. There should be statues of Thatcher on every street corner. She liberated Argentina.

Why didn't I think of this?

Barack Obama wants the 9/11 ringleader, KSM, tried in a civil court in New York. Now he's been forced to re-consider the venue, but treating foreign terrorists like constitutionally protected US citizens remains dogma for our Harvard Law School philosopher kings.

So where's an appropriate venue?

Eureka!

Flashing amber, crossroads ahead

Present-day America is neutral at best towards its allies:

The Obama administration’s decision to remain neutral in the dispute between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands is a shameful decision that will go down very badly across the Atlantic. As The Times has just reported, Washington has point blank refused to support British sovereignty over the Falklands, and is adopting a strictly neutral approach.

Writing as a British husband and father of Americans, here's the deal: I don't care if Obama betrays my country. I don't want his approval, nor Hillary Clinton's, nor the approval of the rest of the clowns who represent America today. But it does behove other Americans to support Britain against the likes of Argentina and Venezuela. So Palin, Romney, Limbaugh, Beck and other decent Americans who are naturally focusing inwards right now, speak up when it matters. If not, then you lose people like me.

In 1956 America betrayed Britain, France and Israel over Suez while we waged war against the Arab nationalist, Nasser. That betrayal became a deep psychological motive for many British conservatives to pull away from America and creep towards the essentially anti-American EU. That tension was the deepest motif of Thatcher's struggle in the Conservative Party and led directly to her political downfall as she was stabbed in the back by the likes of Heseltine and Howe.

My opinion doesn't matter, but if you lose me, you lose many British conservatives and will find yourselves weakened even after you recover from your current sickness. I do not speak of the British governing class, they are mostly as bad as yours. This is more important.

A more emotional view from the author of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People".

British politics

A General Election looms, so naturally the press is full of demeaning stories about politicians (all true). There's a labyrinthine meme about Gordon Brown as bully. 'Bullying' is the new black in un-pc vices, often in the eye of the beholder, and so a deliciously malleable accusation for modern witchfinders. Since the witchfinders are usually Nu-Labour apparatchiks, it's apt that Brown is on the receiving end of strongly sourced charges that he hits his flunkies and pushes secretaries around. His answer is to go all weepy in a cringeworthy, humanising interview with Piers Morgan. It is sad, but what kind of scumbag uses such personal grief to win votes ? But this reconstruction from Taiwan almost makes me want to vote for him. If he socks Obama between now and May, then I will.

Disgrace

I don't know why I am ashamed by Obama's insults to the Dalai Lama; I'm not even American and he's equally contemptuous to my country. But I am.


Maybe the Dalai Lama is the wrong religion. Maybe Obama wants to appease China. Probably both.



Altho the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, can be a bit of a twit on political theory, his holiness and symbolism exceed those of any other living leader despite having the Nobel Peace Prize. Americans who see their President treating him with disdain may weep to recall that the Dalai Lama holds the Congressional Gold Medal....like George Washington. It makes me angry to write it, but the Dalai Lama would be the last to take offence. He'd see it as no problem or Obama's problem.



The mystique of the Dalai Lama in the psyche of adventurous boys of my generation is hard to overstate. 'Seven Years in Tibet' by Heinrich Harrer is a sensational story guaranteed to make a boy head for the mountains; I stress the book not the movie. In part it deals with the moment when remote Buddhism met modernity and modernity's monster in the attic, communism. That tragedy is personified by this man whom Obama puts out with the trash.



When one day Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize for Phoniness and the Prize for Narcissism and the Prize for Appeasement, let there be added a Nobel Prize for Gracelessness. Then let the medal's mould be smashed.

Sherpas are Tibetan Buddhists who emigrated across the Himalayas to Nepal 300 years ago. Their strength, bravery and sense of fun were qualities I read about as a boy and found to be real when I first climbed in the Himalayas. As a palate cleanser here's a picture of my friend, DaGombu Sherpa, in front of the Everest massif: