"The attack on a group of Western tourists in Jordan on Monday should be condemned by all standards as an act of terrorism, but..."
Done that. Heard it before. Writes itself. Don't buy it.
But.Me.No.Buts.
September 05, 2006
August 23, 2006
Airport madness
On Sunday we may travel to the northern tip of Denmark, one of the most tranquil spots I know because:
1. The beaches are superb and fairly empty.
2. The land is surrounded by sea on nearly all sides, so the light bounces up and down to create a special palette which was exploited by the "Skagen school" of painters.
The uncluttered landscape is mirrored by Danish design. We're partial to the glassware.
3. I like the Danes. They earned honour in WW2, saving almost all their Jews, and they have been pro-US against the EU pattern. I have done a lot of shipping business with Danes and they are great at performing their side of the letter and spirit of contracts.
4. They were traduced by most of the MSM over the Mohammed cartoons, so this is a good year to visit.
The bad part is Stansted Airport. This weekend a strike of check-in staff and baggage-handlers is scheduled - evil in a normal year. It's a Bank Holiday weekend and the kind of person who'd piss on a family vacation like that deserves nightmares to the crack of doom. Oh the humanity! Think of the children! Let these cockroaches get another job if they can't do this one without back-stabbing the rest of us. Backstabbing cockroaches, pah! This year the strike comes on top of the security farce, so 'treasonous' is too mild. No wonder one becomes a sulphurous old fart with age - it's the rational response to the calibrated sadism all around. Hell is other people, heaven is:
So, folks, for a great family vacation, rent a house in Jutland and fly by private jet.
As an air travel oriented coda, here's a transplanted comment to Mick Stockinger's post on Uncorrelated.com "Mutiny in the War on Terror" provoked by the Movable Type damnspamfilter (more calibrated sadism; what's the bad word ? 'race' ? 'flipflop' ?) -
"I applaud the passenger mutiny. Nobody cares what race they are - it's risk assessment. Nearly a quarter of young British male Muslims tell pollsters that 7/7 was justified.
Mick, it may be hard to get just how 'sensitive' the UK establishment has been to Muslims in ways which are beyond satire. It's been tried and failed. Repeat slowly after me "tried..and..failed."
The dhimmi mood music all around just increases their sense of victimhood. But they are not the victims. We are, and it's time that that culture paid a price and take ownership of the problem. If they can not or will not, then the West must do what it needs to do for self-preservation.
Assume the following:
1. You and your family are on a plane waiting to take off.
2. It's hot. You're wearing shorts and flip-flops.
3. There is no passenger profiling.
4. 24 Muslims, mostly young males, have just been arrested for plotting to blow up passenger planes.
5. There are 2 young male Muslims on the plane. They appear too heavily dressed. They glance frequently at their watches. They speak to each other in Arabic or Urdu rather than English.
Ok, Mick, I want to know, honestly, would you leave your children on that plane for the sake of the wider principles you wrote about ? Not me, mush, and I don't feel bad about it. I didn't create the problem. Muslims did; that's Muslims as a group and Islam as a culture. It's way past time for them to fix the problem or have it fixed around them. "
1. The beaches are superb and fairly empty.
2. The land is surrounded by sea on nearly all sides, so the light bounces up and down to create a special palette which was exploited by the "Skagen school" of painters.
The uncluttered landscape is mirrored by Danish design. We're partial to the glassware.
3. I like the Danes. They earned honour in WW2, saving almost all their Jews, and they have been pro-US against the EU pattern. I have done a lot of shipping business with Danes and they are great at performing their side of the letter and spirit of contracts.
4. They were traduced by most of the MSM over the Mohammed cartoons, so this is a good year to visit.
The bad part is Stansted Airport. This weekend a strike of check-in staff and baggage-handlers is scheduled - evil in a normal year. It's a Bank Holiday weekend and the kind of person who'd piss on a family vacation like that deserves nightmares to the crack of doom. Oh the humanity! Think of the children! Let these cockroaches get another job if they can't do this one without back-stabbing the rest of us. Backstabbing cockroaches, pah! This year the strike comes on top of the security farce, so 'treasonous' is too mild. No wonder one becomes a sulphurous old fart with age - it's the rational response to the calibrated sadism all around. Hell is other people, heaven is:
So, folks, for a great family vacation, rent a house in Jutland and fly by private jet.
As an air travel oriented coda, here's a transplanted comment to Mick Stockinger's post on Uncorrelated.com "Mutiny in the War on Terror" provoked by the Movable Type damnspamfilter (more calibrated sadism; what's the bad word ? 'race' ? 'flipflop' ?) -
"I applaud the passenger mutiny. Nobody cares what race they are - it's risk assessment. Nearly a quarter of young British male Muslims tell pollsters that 7/7 was justified.
Mick, it may be hard to get just how 'sensitive' the UK establishment has been to Muslims in ways which are beyond satire. It's been tried and failed. Repeat slowly after me "tried..and..failed."
The dhimmi mood music all around just increases their sense of victimhood. But they are not the victims. We are, and it's time that that culture paid a price and take ownership of the problem. If they can not or will not, then the West must do what it needs to do for self-preservation.
Assume the following:
1. You and your family are on a plane waiting to take off.
2. It's hot. You're wearing shorts and flip-flops.
3. There is no passenger profiling.
4. 24 Muslims, mostly young males, have just been arrested for plotting to blow up passenger planes.
5. There are 2 young male Muslims on the plane. They appear too heavily dressed. They glance frequently at their watches. They speak to each other in Arabic or Urdu rather than English.
Ok, Mick, I want to know, honestly, would you leave your children on that plane for the sake of the wider principles you wrote about ? Not me, mush, and I don't feel bad about it. I didn't create the problem. Muslims did; that's Muslims as a group and Islam as a culture. It's way past time for them to fix the problem or have it fixed around them. "
August 16, 2006
Leaving Auschwitz
I took these shots a few weeks ago. "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" ("work makes free") is the sign above the entrance to Auschwitz.
As a message from Islam then to Islam now I was interested to learn that : Adolf Eichmann`s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified during his war crimes trial in 1946 that ... "The [Palestinian Grand] Mufti [of Jerusalem] was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan... He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz."
As a message from Islam then to Islam now I was interested to learn that : Adolf Eichmann`s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified during his war crimes trial in 1946 that ... "The [Palestinian Grand] Mufti [of Jerusalem] was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan... He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz."
August 12, 2006
Don't feed the crocodiles
The morning after the woolly Franco-US UN resolution for a ceasefire in Lebanon there are reasons not to be cheerful for those who want:
1. A muscular Anglosphere
2. A timely war to eliminate Islamo-fascism. I mean war, not putzing about; war on Iran; war on disloyal immigrant groups; prompt, ferocious and simultaneous war to install acceptable regimes in Syria, Lebanon and Iran. That will simplify Iraq and Afghanistan. That is the humane and risk-averse policy, the best chance to avert a bloodier war later, which we might lose if our resilience and ferocity is the lesser.
It's not cheerful that Bush is signalling weakness in foreign policy, that the BBC's dhimmitude fades into treachery as the tension grows, that 'Dave' Cameron is leader of the party of Thatcher... that sort of thing.
But...over 0-3 years the scenery could shift to this :
US - Giuliani or Romney
UK - Brown or Reid
Israel - Netanyahu
Australia - Howard
Canada - Harper
Germany - Merkel
France - Sarkozy
Of these, only Howard has proven himself as a fighter for the West, but it's a potentially formidable wartime alliance. I might add Japan and India.
That's a best case and when the US is credibly threatened by an Islamic WMD, appeasement will seem more attractive than now. They know it, we know it. That threat is their stick, the carrot is their permission for us to enjoy life while demography does its work for the Caliphate.
Let me try to articulate the opposite view:
"Like it or not Muslims are provoked by pro-Israeli policy and Iraq. Sharia law can operate alongside western law within Europe and everyone will be happy. Iran is entitled to the same nuclear technology as the West. Ahmadinejad may be even shorter than Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, but he's charming and rational, ok, a little crazy about the Zionists and he hangs homosexuals and he hangs teenage girls for adultery, but that's a cultural thing. We have our equivalent fundamentalists like Bush ."
I hope that's a fair summary of let's call it 'the BBC view'. It has the virtue that it is self-refuting, it just needs to be stated absent the weasel words. The Bugs Bunny Democrats have no coherent view outside self-gratification and appeasement; they are the 'Feed The Crocodile 'Party.
I don't want to feed the crocodile, especially a sadistic crocodile, but I can't live with it prowling around my house. I can't live with little crocodiles inside my house chirruping away to the big one outside.
Appeasement central: hat-tip to Powerline.
1. A muscular Anglosphere
2. A timely war to eliminate Islamo-fascism. I mean war, not putzing about; war on Iran; war on disloyal immigrant groups; prompt, ferocious and simultaneous war to install acceptable regimes in Syria, Lebanon and Iran. That will simplify Iraq and Afghanistan. That is the humane and risk-averse policy, the best chance to avert a bloodier war later, which we might lose if our resilience and ferocity is the lesser.
It's not cheerful that Bush is signalling weakness in foreign policy, that the BBC's dhimmitude fades into treachery as the tension grows, that 'Dave' Cameron is leader of the party of Thatcher... that sort of thing.
But...over 0-3 years the scenery could shift to this :
US - Giuliani or Romney
UK - Brown or Reid
Israel - Netanyahu
Australia - Howard
Canada - Harper
Germany - Merkel
France - Sarkozy
Of these, only Howard has proven himself as a fighter for the West, but it's a potentially formidable wartime alliance. I might add Japan and India.
That's a best case and when the US is credibly threatened by an Islamic WMD, appeasement will seem more attractive than now. They know it, we know it. That threat is their stick, the carrot is their permission for us to enjoy life while demography does its work for the Caliphate.
Let me try to articulate the opposite view:
"Like it or not Muslims are provoked by pro-Israeli policy and Iraq. Sharia law can operate alongside western law within Europe and everyone will be happy. Iran is entitled to the same nuclear technology as the West. Ahmadinejad may be even shorter than Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, but he's charming and rational, ok, a little crazy about the Zionists and he hangs homosexuals and he hangs teenage girls for adultery, but that's a cultural thing. We have our equivalent fundamentalists like Bush ."
I hope that's a fair summary of let's call it 'the BBC view'. It has the virtue that it is self-refuting, it just needs to be stated absent the weasel words. The Bugs Bunny Democrats have no coherent view outside self-gratification and appeasement; they are the 'Feed The Crocodile 'Party.
I don't want to feed the crocodile, especially a sadistic crocodile, but I can't live with it prowling around my house. I can't live with little crocodiles inside my house chirruping away to the big one outside.
Appeasement central: hat-tip to Powerline.
August 11, 2006
Correlate that
1. Time - "a knowledgeable American official says U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group's communications."
2. FT - "The detectives allowed the alleged plot to continue for as long as they dared. They followed the young Muslim men’s movements in London and other parts of the UK, listened into their meetings and monitored their spending."
3. WSJ - "The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs."
4.
2. FT - "The detectives allowed the alleged plot to continue for as long as they dared. They followed the young Muslim men’s movements in London and other parts of the UK, listened into their meetings and monitored their spending."
3. WSJ - "The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs."
4.
August 10, 2006
Correlate this
I'm in London.
My family is in the US, due to fly to the UK at the weekend.
This morning there is the highest level threat alert on UK/US flights - 'critical'.
The UK police say they've thwarted a specific attempt at 'mass murder' .
21 British Asian Muslims have been arrested overnight.
Neither the police nor the BBC say the word ' Muslim'.
Nearly a quarter of young British Asian Muslims polled say 7/7 was justified.
There's a long-term, consistent profile of terrorists against planes.
Everyone knows what that profile is.
Almost all security assets at UK and US airports will be applied to the bags of passengers like my family, not to logical human targets.
Security assets are finite.
Security intelligence is finite.
Please correlate.
Afterthought: Thank God the New York Times didn't know these arrested men were under surveillance.
My family is in the US, due to fly to the UK at the weekend.
This morning there is the highest level threat alert on UK/US flights - 'critical'.
The UK police say they've thwarted a specific attempt at 'mass murder' .
21 British Asian Muslims have been arrested overnight.
Neither the police nor the BBC say the word ' Muslim'.
Nearly a quarter of young British Asian Muslims polled say 7/7 was justified.
There's a long-term, consistent profile of terrorists against planes.
Everyone knows what that profile is.
Almost all security assets at UK and US airports will be applied to the bags of passengers like my family, not to logical human targets.
Security assets are finite.
Security intelligence is finite.
Please correlate.
Afterthought: Thank God the New York Times didn't know these arrested men were under surveillance.
August 09, 2006
UNCoRRELATED.com
Today's posts are in fact posts made over the past few weeks on Mick Stockinger's UNCoRRELATED.com
All together now..love,love,love
Paul and Heather McCartney are impressive people, but their divorce is doing to them what divorces do: 
"Sir Paul ordered all the locks on his properties to be changed after the phone at his Peasmarsh estate in Sussex was bugged earlier this year — and the tape strangely ended up in Heather’s hands. She challenged him over a conversation he had had with his daughter Stella, in which Stella had attacked her stepmother."
May they act with grace. That would be a blessing to them and their daughter. Divorcees know the risks of a downward spiral once lawyers and advisers are involved.
Heather Mills was once a prostitute, which she seems to have lied about to Paul. That's an honest and useful profession and it's tough on her that she's being humiliated. The cruellest commentary comes from women maybe because fucking for money makes plain to men and themselves that swapping sex for stuff is much of the underlying deal, whereas love, which is real too, is optional rather than primal, but it binds a man to a particular woman and to their children against his own merely reproductive interests.
[A propos -
A woman can have about 1 child per year for 30 years.
A man can have about 1,000 per year for 60 years.
and
There is no reciprocity.
Men love women.
Women love children.
Children love hamsters.]
I wouldn't choose the expensive wedding they chose - in contrast to Paul and Linda 38 years ago when he was still more famous; flashy wedding, trashy divorce. Maybe the flashy wedding compensates for an emptiness in the spiritual wedding. The flash says 'Look at me, look at us, we look married so we are married, here's stuff to prove it' when all that's needed at a wedding is true minds. The stuff is impediment.
"Sir Paul ordered all the locks on his properties to be changed after the phone at his Peasmarsh estate in Sussex was bugged earlier this year — and the tape strangely ended up in Heather’s hands. She challenged him over a conversation he had had with his daughter Stella, in which Stella had attacked her stepmother."
May they act with grace. That would be a blessing to them and their daughter. Divorcees know the risks of a downward spiral once lawyers and advisers are involved.
Heather Mills was once a prostitute, which she seems to have lied about to Paul. That's an honest and useful profession and it's tough on her that she's being humiliated. The cruellest commentary comes from women maybe because fucking for money makes plain to men and themselves that swapping sex for stuff is much of the underlying deal, whereas love, which is real too, is optional rather than primal, but it binds a man to a particular woman and to their children against his own merely reproductive interests.
[A propos -
A woman can have about 1 child per year for 30 years.
A man can have about 1,000 per year for 60 years.
and
There is no reciprocity.
Men love women.
Women love children.
Children love hamsters.]
I wouldn't choose the expensive wedding they chose - in contrast to Paul and Linda 38 years ago when he was still more famous; flashy wedding, trashy divorce. Maybe the flashy wedding compensates for an emptiness in the spiritual wedding. The flash says 'Look at me, look at us, we look married so we are married, here's stuff to prove it' when all that's needed at a wedding is true minds. The stuff is impediment.
Special relationship
My New Yorker wife pretends to write a book, "101 uses for an English twat" [pronounced "twot" rather than "twat"] and I scold her to talk proper - eg "bottle of water" for "boddle of wader." It's nothing to do with accent or idiom - I love hers - but blur pronunciation and you blur speech then thought and I don't want our children lumbered with inexpressive speech.
Anyhoot, I'm glad that "wanker" is getting tossed into American usage. "Merchant banker" is a nice variant from rhyming slang. The great linguistic prize would be a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate "restroom" and "bathroom" as euphemisms. "Bog" is the mot juste.
Anyhoot, I'm glad that "wanker" is getting tossed into American usage. "Merchant banker" is a nice variant from rhyming slang. The great linguistic prize would be a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate "restroom" and "bathroom" as euphemisms. "Bog" is the mot juste.
Universal wolf, universal prey
Animal testing is an issue in the UK. Most of the New Labour apparatus is clear that the medical benefits to man trump the emotionalism of the anti-vivisectionists and that the illegal, sometimes terroristic attacks on scientists must be beaten. When I've seen the issue raised on conservative sites (diabolical britspeak profanity warning), the likes of PETA are scorned to the hilt...tree-hugging liberals....skinny twerps. The BBC just staged a debate. The protestors were inarticulate dolts. The scientists were cool and logical within their definitions.
But still it stinks. To refute a common debating point: would I accept animal testing to save myself? Yes. So I'm a hypocrite and the anti-vivisection argument fails? Yes, I'm a hypocrite, no the argument doesn't fail. I would accept testing on any animal, but especially on the human animal, to save myself. That makes me selfish (and sane), but the anti-vivisection argument stands since Law should protect the rest of you against me as I wish Law to protect other animals against us.
The fallacy in all this is the ego-syntonic superstition that human animals are more important than other animals. Maybe, maybe not, but a scientist should be sceptical of human criteria to decide the question. Mankind vivisects because it can and because it can sanitise the the disgusting, cowardly deed by keeping it out of sight. I don't know about animal rights, but I do sense the virtue in human duties, one of which is the duty to abstain from tormenting other animals. If the cost of that is worse medicine (though I doubt it), then so be it for the sake of decency.
Things change. Orthodoxies change. This perversion of science, which includes abortion and vivisection, is not science, but a guilty use of power..
"Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite (an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power)
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last, eat up himself."
Embryonic stem cell research is nicely pinned by "and last, eat up himself."
But still it stinks. To refute a common debating point: would I accept animal testing to save myself? Yes. So I'm a hypocrite and the anti-vivisection argument fails? Yes, I'm a hypocrite, no the argument doesn't fail. I would accept testing on any animal, but especially on the human animal, to save myself. That makes me selfish (and sane), but the anti-vivisection argument stands since Law should protect the rest of you against me as I wish Law to protect other animals against us.
The fallacy in all this is the ego-syntonic superstition that human animals are more important than other animals. Maybe, maybe not, but a scientist should be sceptical of human criteria to decide the question. Mankind vivisects because it can and because it can sanitise the the disgusting, cowardly deed by keeping it out of sight. I don't know about animal rights, but I do sense the virtue in human duties, one of which is the duty to abstain from tormenting other animals. If the cost of that is worse medicine (though I doubt it), then so be it for the sake of decency.
Things change. Orthodoxies change. This perversion of science, which includes abortion and vivisection, is not science, but a guilty use of power..
"Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite (an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power)
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last, eat up himself."
Embryonic stem cell research is nicely pinned by "and last, eat up himself."
Strong/Weak continued
Here Mick argued that Bill Kristol was disingenuous and puerile in arguing that we aren't travelling the path in the war on terror. On the substance I commented that there is clear and present danger and we should hit Iran now because :
1. What about a suitcase bomb?
2. What about a ship bomb?
Mick replied :
1. Only the US and Russia have suitcase bomb knowhow.
2. The threat from tankers is understood and easily defeated.
3. Iran would be deterred as the weapon would be traced and Iran would cease to exist.
This is too important and too wrong to leave to a thread which has disappeared over the horizon.
1. You and I just don't know who has a suitcase bomb, but suppose it is only the US and Russia, would you gamble New York City - ok, Salt Lake City - on the hope that Russia itself or a Russian AQ Khan won't sell the knowhow or a bomb to Iran? It's plausible that something south of billion dollars buys Iran a nifty nuke from a Russian (or Chinese or Ukrainian or American or Israeli) source. It's not "Who has it?", it's "Who wants it and can pay for it?" and it can be any other WMD as well.
2. You don't explain how a ship bomb is easily defeated if you don't know it's there. Armageddon 101 - place bomb in container, load container on vessel, sail into a Western harbour, make cellphone call to the 12th Imam, pop.
3. Mutually assured destruction may be no deterrent to a messianic regime. Anyway Iran just needs to demonstrate its capability to get the leverage.
Iran must be dealt with. Sooner will be less bloody than later. Diplomacy is a displacement activity to avoid starting down a tough road.
UPDATE - the Iranians may have a "dirty" bomb already
- ingredients from Britain.
1. What about a suitcase bomb?
2. What about a ship bomb?
Mick replied :
1. Only the US and Russia have suitcase bomb knowhow.
2. The threat from tankers is understood and easily defeated.
3. Iran would be deterred as the weapon would be traced and Iran would cease to exist.
This is too important and too wrong to leave to a thread which has disappeared over the horizon.
1. You and I just don't know who has a suitcase bomb, but suppose it is only the US and Russia, would you gamble New York City - ok, Salt Lake City - on the hope that Russia itself or a Russian AQ Khan won't sell the knowhow or a bomb to Iran? It's plausible that something south of billion dollars buys Iran a nifty nuke from a Russian (or Chinese or Ukrainian or American or Israeli) source. It's not "Who has it?", it's "Who wants it and can pay for it?" and it can be any other WMD as well.
2. You don't explain how a ship bomb is easily defeated if you don't know it's there. Armageddon 101 - place bomb in container, load container on vessel, sail into a Western harbour, make cellphone call to the 12th Imam, pop.
3. Mutually assured destruction may be no deterrent to a messianic regime. Anyway Iran just needs to demonstrate its capability to get the leverage.
Iran must be dealt with. Sooner will be less bloody than later. Diplomacy is a displacement activity to avoid starting down a tough road.
UPDATE - the Iranians may have a "dirty" bomb already
- ingredients from Britain.