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Friday, July 23, 2010

A Few Words on a Few Things

Shirley Sherrod: Far-left. Race-obsessed, but with a reason (her dad was murdered by a white man in Jim Crow South). Blames Bretibart for her firing when all the blame lies squarely on the spineless, knee-jerk, moronic White House... you know, the people WHO FIRED HER! She deserves her job back no matter her ideology.

Journolist: Knew it. Knew it, knew it, knew it.

Ground Zero Mosque/Community Center: Backed by Islamists. Not a good thing. Not to mention that NO ONE has asked the Orthodox parish that was destroyed about any of this. There are future plans for a new church, but having a Islamist center next to them may be a bit iffy. Turkey's Islamist government hasn't exactly been nice to the Orthodox community.

Music: Matisyahu is awesome.



I'll be traveling for the next week, so updates will be sparser than usual. Hopefully I'll get out a longer post in that week. Probably covering some petty thing the MSM is covering. Oh, and I'll still be all over Twitter. So don't fret.

Or frat.

Or frak.

Nevermind, fraking is fine.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Leftist Mythology and Real Faith

A story:
'Before beginning my talk I want to tell you a story about Moses. When
he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought, 'What a good
opportunity to have a bath!'

He removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the
water. When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished.
An Israeli had stolen them.'

The Israeli representative jumped up furiously and shouted, 'What are
you talking about? There were no Israelis there then!'

The Palestinian representative smiled and said:
'And now that we have made that quite clear, I will begin my speech.'
Sounds great, huh? The Israeli just got owned by history. A liberal responded to it with:
“How about we don't care what an old book of myths says about who owns or should own the land?

That being said, I wish [the] story was true.”
Ah, the great answer to the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Why not ignore the religious claims and just blindly support the Palestinian's great historical ownage. This has pretty much been the left's view on the conflict since Israeli's creation 60 years ago. Ignore legitimate Jewish claims to their ancient homeland. Ignore the ethnic history. Ignore the political claims. The Palestinians are the underdogs, so they're the ones to support.

Aside from over 5000 years of Jewish history in the region (that's 3700 years before Islam), the ethnic similarities between the two warring parties and the decades of Jewish political organization under secular Zionism before the birth of Israel, yeah, that answer pretty much has the entire thing down.

To dismiss faith has been part of the left's agenda since the mid-1900s. Before that, the Progressives were quite religious. Woodrow Wilson based his proto-fascism on, among many things, Christian supremacy. It was the infection of hardcore Marxism that turned formerly pious eugenicists into atheistic fire-starters. Since that time, faith is decadent and evil (see: Dawkins vs. the Catholic Church), and science has become not just a method of investigation, but an ideology (see: Dawkins and Darwin, any atheist). If you think a pompous priest is annoying, wait until you meet a atheist leftist from community college. Gah!

Anyway, liberals, socialist, communists, and pretty much any other left-wing ideology, have this century and a half-long mythology running their political religion. Marx was a genius, not a anti-Semitic Jew who failed in pretty much all his predictions. Wilson was a visionary, not a theocratic tyrant who re-segregated the government and had a true imperialistic vision for America. FDR was a God, not a racist who imprisoned Asian citizens based solely on their race, or a horrible economist who prolonged the Depression and created a culture of dependency and currency inflation. Kennedy was a leftist, not the anti-Communist, pro-free market, “pro-war” president he actually way. LBJ's Great Society sunk minorities into poverty and dependency. Carter's peace overtures killed more people than saved. Clinton's deficit was actually the Republican Congress'. If I had the time and the attention span, a whole book could be written on the myths of the left.

The left believes in these things because, sadly, they have no real faith. They don't cross that line between reason and beyond reason, they straddle it. People of faith believe in things beyond human beings. They believe in the redeeming power of Jesus, or the mercy of G-d, or the righteousness of Allah, or the enlightenment of Buddha. They believe beyond people into the realm of revelation and the soul. They believe, and this is key, in something that TRANSCENDES human nature and act upon that belief. Altruism, as close as one can get to it, is never based on reason, even for those claiming strict atheism. Transcendence beyond our nature is a religious idea. Those atheistic leftists who support indulgence of base instincts like promiscuity, early sexual experimentation, primitivism and the like are much closer to true atheism than those who claim to not believe, but also call on our higher faculties (ie. Against our selfish nature) to give up wealth and economic freedom for others.

Unlike the left's myth of religion, faith and reason are NOT opposites. Of course, you'll encounter those who deny reason because of faith: creationists, Islamists, global warming fanatics; but those people aren't exactly the mainstream of human thought. Science grew within countless religious cultures. A Muslim created algebra. A Catholic created astronomy. An Orthodox Christian founded an alphabet now used by hundreds of millions. A Christian founded modern physics. Science, much to the chagrin of the left, has flourished due to, not in spite of, religious faith. That's not to say that religious INSTITUTIONS haven't interfered with scientific endeavors, but simply believing in God does not discount someone from being a scientist.

Leftist atheists love to shove it in your face that everyone else is stupid. Studies about creationists are their favorite. It's creationists this and God that. If you have faith, you're on the wrong side of history. And amusingly, if you ask a leftist about global warming, they tell you the “science is settled”, which spits in the face of the very idea of science. Or ask about John Kennedy, as I described above. Ask any number of historical or philosophical ideas, and you'll get a pre-engineered response about it from most. Say Hitler, you get right-winger. Say USSR, you'll hear not real communism. Like the religious fanatics in Islam and Protestantism, they're knee jerks will knock you out of your reason chair. But don't tell them they aren't reasonable... because they are... because they say so. And to dispute it is being closed minded.

Sheesh.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

When the Apology is Longer Than The Crime...

...they ain't sorry.

The crime: 120 characters.


According to Patterico:
Fadlallah was a Holocaust denier who has justified suicide bombings and who “is believed to be responsible for the killing of 241 U.S. Marines during the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings,” according to the New York Times.
The apology: 747 words, emhapsises mine. With gems like:
It was an error of judgment for me to write such a simplistic comment and I'm sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah's life's work. That's not the case at all.
Life's work. Like terrorism and Jew hating?
I used the words "respect" and "sad" because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman's rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of "honor killing." He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam.
He still supported things like, um, TERRORISM!

It goes on and on retelling mostly her encounters with him. She does say "Sayyed Fadlallah. Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It's something I deeply regret." You didn't need to explain a terrorist to say sorry, Nasr. Just say "Sorry I lamented the death of an oppressor of Lebanon."

Or, if you actually care about Lebanon missy, you do what I did and say "YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

To Boldly Go Where Every Liberal Has Gone Before...

White House defending NASA's new Build-A-Bear program:
“The President has always said that he wants NASA to engage with the world’s best scientists and engineers as we work together to push the boundaries of exploration. Meeting that mandate requires NASA to partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries. The space race began as a global competition, but, today, it is a global collaboration.”

Friday, July 2, 2010

Steele's Loose Lips Sinks Us All

"Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.... if [Obama] is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?"
-Micheal Steele

Micheal Steele must go. Now.

I'm not exactly a GOP activist. I joined the party last year because I felt I could do more in the system than out by supporting libertarian-leaning and/or national defense hawk GOPers in Utah primaries (I supported Mike Lee, for those who care). I'm not usually a party guy, but today I am because Micheal Steele is a giant idiot.

Afghanistan wasn't a war of Obama's choosing. It was a war brought to us by Al-Qeada and the Taliban. It was brought to us way before 9/11 (WTC Bombing, Embassy Bombings, USS Cole), but it was 9/11 that brought us to Afghanistan. We defeat the Taliban and drove it back to its Pakistani base. We've harassed Al-Qeada for almost a decade now, keeping it on its toes and killing major players. While we've yet to capture or kill Osama bin Laden or his deputy, we've done so much damage that AQ's branch in Yemen is working harder than is core in Pakistan.

Afghanistan was never going to be an easy war, no matter what anybody said. It was always going to be a long-haul, decade(s)-long counter-insurgency against a fanatical grouping of terrorists. They're dug in there forever. They want to rule and expand their ideology, no matter what. Its a battle of wills, as a great general said a few days ago.

Everyone who says no one has ever conquered Afghanistan forgets that we're not there to take it over. We're there to deny it as a base to our very active enemies. We're not the British or the Tsarist Russians or the Soviets. We're there to deny access, not to rule. If we were there to rule and reap, would we allow Karzai to dictate our air war policy? To insult us publicly? To mismanage his government? No.

Honestly, Steele is talking like the fringe libertarian/far left. Ever since Iraq, the anti-war crowd has crowed that Iraq took away from winning Afghanistan. The President ran on that issue, even though he said we were slaughtering civilians as well. Now that Iraq is inching every closer to complete victory, we hear from them that Afghanistan is lost. It's not. Its just that the anti-war folks have no knowledge of this kind of war and have no backbone. Or worse, they've always wanted us to lose.

The long and short of it is that:

1) Afghanistan is important enough to GWOT that we must stay in for decades. Maybe not at the levels we have now (98 000), but we cannot abandon it as we did right after the Soviets left. This is one nation building project that's actually vital to our national security.

2) With Russia throwing its weight around and Iran following suit, having Afghanistan in our geo-political pocket is vital to our ability to hold off Russia and its Iranian client in Central Asia. Unlike the rainbow-dreaming folk in the White House, Russian dominance in the region will not bode well for us in the next decade or so. If this means pulling out of Western Europe (Oh God, pretty please), then so be it. If NATO has to be dissolved, so be it. The key to the next two decades of geopolitics is Central Asia, not Europe. This means turning places like Afghanistan to us. Also, countries like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia (especially Georgia), Armenia, Azerbaijan, and so on are all perfect for us in both anti-terrorism and counter-Russian planning. We need allies more in tune with our goals, not in tune with their navels.

3) Micheal Steele is a giant moron and needs to resign from his position as head of the party for his comments. Really now, when you can't tell the difference between the head of the GOP and Code Pink, you're pretty much screwed.

If the GOP doesn't do anything about Steele, his flubs will sink the party even further than it's already fallen.