Serendipitous

Minami Neon

Baluchistan

Ever heard of Baluchistan?  It's the site of one of the seventeen wars involving Muslims currently being fought somewhere on the globe.  That doesn't include countries where there is no war (armed conflict resulting in 1000+ annual deaths), but terrorists are carrying out attacks motivated by Islam's Jihad principles.

In the last twelve months alone, one thousand and seventy-two terrorist attacks have been carried out by Muslims, resulting in the death of six thousand, four hundred and seventy-eight, and the wounding of eleven thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two, mostly civilians.

Cox and Forkum

This is the monster to whom a visa for travel to the US to address the UN was recently granted.

La Defense Steps

Globalisation, Terrorism, & Bird Flu

Often right, sometimes a little off, but always interesting, Mark Stein has a good piece in The Telegraph, with this to say about globalization:

In a globalised economy, the anti-glob mob and the eco-warriors want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. But globalisation cuts both ways, and the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World - just because someone got on a plane.

Indeed, when you look at it that way, the biggest globalisation success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Disney, but Islamism: the Saudis took what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practised by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Buffalo. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalised insurgency.

What's the bigger threat? A globalisation that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalisation that exports the fiercest and unhealthiest aspects of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map - that, in the 21st century, America can be a 19th-century republic untroubled by the world's pathogens because of its sheer distance from them.

The rest of the article is mostly about bird flu, and well worth reading.

Islam For The Perplexed

Hugh Fitgerald, over at Challenging Islam, has a must-read essay:  Islam For The Perplexed.  Read it all, and pass it on.

Namba Lane

Intelligent Design

One question:  who designed the designer?  And that folks, puts an end to that stupid idea.  Why this question doesn't  occur to sane adults is beyond me.  It's the first thing any six year old asks... "Daddy, if god made the world, who made god?"

There is no such concept as "God".  No "Jaweh", no "Allah",  and no god-damned(!) "Gaia".  It's an amazing act of evasion that people can consider, say, the Balinese belief that the world rides on the back of a giant turtle, and realize that it's just a myth, a childish explanation for things a primitive culture could not understand, yet when confronted with, for example, the Christian belief that there is this omnipotent, omniscient "being", who is father and son at the same time, and spirit as well,  and who knows "everything", they can't see that it's simply a more sophisticated version of the same phenomenon.

The scary thing is that those who preach, whether mullah, pope, or shamen; they know.  Heinlein (I think) said it best: "the first priest was the first rogue who met the first fool".

GWB's Evasion

Via littlegreenfootballs:

Whatever criticisms one may have of FDR, and there are many, he would never have proudly added Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to the White House library as a show of "tolerance" towards Nazism.  Nor would such an act have been tolerated by congress, or ordinary americans, for that matter.

But GWB could and has, only with the Koran, Islam's battle manifesto and call to arms.  Make no mistake about the latter;  despite GWB's monumental evasion, Islam is no religion of peace .  [Actually, no religion is, or can be, ultimately peaceful, but that is a subject for another post.]  The Koran is explicit in its calls for the violent spread of Islam and the subjcation of "non-believers".

While GWB  is busy emulating Gomer Pile, the cultural leaders of islam's jihad, the iranian mullahs, arm themselves for war; jihad financiers, Saudia Arabia, underwrite the teaching of jihadist principles in madrasseses the world over; and islam's henchmen in Iraq, Syria, Northern Africa, and in sundry other koran motivated conflicts the world over, murder, rape and pillage in the service of mohamad.

Lamp & Railing