==========================

QUOTABLE QUOTE:

 

“Life is not about surviving the storm. It's learning to dance in the rain”
 

—   Comedian Robert Schimmel

 

========================

 

'Right wing'? 'Left wing'? How about: 'just crazy'
 

New Republic  -   Michelle Cottle

Lord have mercy. These days, a man can't even strap on a bunch of explosives, take a network building hostage and get himself shot dead by police without touching off a partisan slap fest.
 

Like all good ideological warriors, I'm happy to throw around the terms right-wing nutter and left-wing nutter early and often. But one case where I think they should be more conservatively applied (no pun intended) is when we're talking about people who are literally -- as opposed to figuratively, functionally or strategically -- nuts.  [ More ]

 

========================

 

Animal Planet Comes Home to Roost

 

Human Events  -  Daniel J. Flynn

“Don’t bring any more humans into being,” begins Paul Watson’s Ten Commandments.

“Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture,” concludes James Lee’s 11-point tirade against a cable television empire.

 

The Discovery Channel profits from broadcasting crazies endangering the lives of people in their workplace. Ramming vessels on the high seas, throwing butyric acid and methyl cellulose powder onto ship decks, and attempting to disable boat propellers are among the dangerous stunts celebrated on Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars.” [ More ]

 

========================

 

Another new world order

 

Globe and Mail  -  Kevin Lynch

As the ballad goes, “the times, they are a-changin’,” and so too is the context that shapes our national interests and our global relationships. In just 20 years we have gone from a bipolar world of two military, if not economic, superpowers, to a single-polar world of an economic, political and military hyper-power to today’s multipolar world with competing centers of economic and political power, and evolving military balances. It has also been an intellectual roller-coaster ride from Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History in the mid-1990s to Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World a short decade later.  [ More ]

 

========================

 

Is the old America gone forever?

 

Human Events  -  Patrick J. Buchanan

"There are only two men in America who can fill Yankee Stadium on three weeks' notice," a friend instructed me years ago.

"Billy Graham and Louis Farrakhan."

Indeed, a decade ago, Black Muslim Minister Farrakhan's "Million Man March" brought a throng of hundreds of thousands to the Capitol.

But, last Saturday, Glenn Beck packed the Mall with a crowd that could have filled Yankee Stadium to overflowing five times over. As it stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, the estimates of its size ran to half a million.  [ More ]

 

========================

 

Check your dignity at the gate

 

National Post  -  Father Raymond J. de Souza

Is there anyone who does not know how to use a seat belt? As summertime travelling draws to end, how many airplane passengers will be briefed today on the use of the seat belt? If there are any who cannot intuit how to "operate" this device without benefit of audiovisual demonstration, surely those passengers should not be given free rein to use more complex equipment, like the lavatories.

Everyone complains now about the indignities of air travel, the lengthy lineups and the stripped down service. I can take all that, but what continuously offends upon arrival at the airport is that the whole safety and security arrangement seems to be grounded on the premise that the passenger is a complete idiot. I feel sorry for the security personnel and flight attendants, all of whom are required by the constantly invoked "federal regulations" to treat me as if I were so stupid that, well, I could not master the seat belt. [ More ]

 

========================

 

Flying the Flag, Faking the News

 

AntiWar.com  -  John Pilger

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the first world war, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe.

 

In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the "intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society" and that the manipulators "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country." Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism "public relations."  [ More ]

 

========================

 

New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign

 

New York Times  -  Martin Fackler

The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.

 

Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.  [ More ]

 

========================

 

The "nobody-could-have-known" excuse and Iraq

 

Salon.com  -   Glenn Greenwald

The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures. The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the "nobody-could-have-known" excuse. Each time something awful occurs -- the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration -- one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they "could have known" what was to happen.

 

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," Condoleezza Rice infamously said on May 16, 2002, despite multiple FBI and intelligence documents warning of exactly that.  [ More ]

 

========================

 

It’s Not Just About Israel

 

Slate.com  -   Christopher Hitchens

With Russia's ever-helpful policy of assisting Iran to accelerate its reactor program, allied to the millimetrical progress of sanctions on the Ahmadinejad regime and the increasingly hopeless state of negotiations with the Palestinians, there is likely to be no let-up in the speculation about an Israeli "first strike" on Iran's covert but ever-more-flagrant nuclear weapons installations.

 

I have lost count of the number of essays and columns on the subject that were published this month alone. The most significant and detailed such contribution, though, came from my friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg in a cover story in the Atlantic. From any close reading of this piece, it was possible to be sure of at least one thing: The government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants it to be understood that, in the absence of an American decision to do so, Israel can and will mount such an attack in the not-too-distant future.

 

The keyword of the current anguished argument — the word existential — is thought by a strategic majority of Israel's political and military leadership to apply in its fullest meaning. To them, an Iranian bomb is incompatible with the long-term survival of the Israeli state and even of the Jewish people. [ More ]

 

========================

 

Hank tackles the Protocols and Blowjobs

Why are Feminists Surprised Their Daughters are Sluts?

 

Save the Whales  -   Henry Makow

While the feminist mothers saw power as financial independence and rejected female "objectification," their daughters accept the pornographic message of pop music and advertising. In the words of one mom, they "believe their purpose in life is to be sexual beings who please men."

"A blow job is like shaking hands," said another mom. "Their attitude is: 'We're emancipated, we're liberated, we're in control. They see [it] as power; I see it as giving their power away." [ More ]

 

========================

 

Mossad in America

 

American Conservative  -    Philip Giraldi

Israeli government claims that it does not spy on the United States are intended for the media and popular consumption. The reality is that Israel’s intelligence agencies target the United States intensively, particularly in pursuit of military and dual-use civilian technology. Among nations considered to be friendly to Washington, Israel leads all others in its active espionage directed against American companies and the Defense Department. It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.  [ More ]

 

========================

 

Iraq Sanctions and the NYC Imam

 

FFF  -   Jacob G. Hornberger

The controversy over the mosque/cultural center in New York City is performing at least one valuable function, one that no one could have ever predicted: causing Americans to confront the wrongdoing of their own government and reflect on how such wrongdoing has contributed to the terrorist woes that now besiege our nation.

The issue involves the brutal sanctions that the U.S. government and the United Nations (where the U.S. government was the driving force) enforced against Iraq for more than 10 years.   [ More ]

 

========================

 

Troops Wonder: WTF Are We Doing In Afghanistan, Again?
 

Wired  -  Spencer Ackerman

Two years ago, when I was last in Afghanistan, soldiers complained to me off the record that there weren’t enough of them to properly fight the war. This time around, in similarly candid moments, I heard a more fundamental complaint: The war doesn’t make sense.

To get the caveats out of the way: This post is based on an unrepresentative sample, drawn from what fewer than a dozen soldiers, airmen and contractors told me at this sprawling military base (and only here). There’s some anecdotal evidence that troops stationed on megabases are prone to greater despair than those serving in more spartan conditions. Most of my interlocutors sought me out to vent; none wanted speak on the record, fearing command reprisals. [ More ]

 

========================

 

The morning after the attack on Iran
 

Haaretz  -  Ze'ev Maoz

One of the less discussed aspects of a possible Israeli attack on Iran is the international community's response. A plausible scenario that should be taken into account is the possibility of massive international pressure on Israel. This would consist of American pressure (assuming the attack is carried out without the United States' agreement ) for disarming from the nuclear weapons Israel supposedly has, or to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and subject its nuclear facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency's supervision.   [ More ]

 

========================

 

Economy Is Ripping The Dignity Of Millions Of Unemployed Americans To Shreds
 

Eco Collapse  -   Unknown, anonymous writer
 

========================

 

Toilets and cell phones

 

New York Times  -   Roger Cohen
 

I was intrigued to learn the other day that there are now more cell phones in India than toilets. Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.

 

This can be seen as skewed development favoring private networks over the public good. It can be seen as an example of markets outstripping governments: Nimble cellphone companies profit while lumbering Indian authorities are unable even to stop the propagation of water-borne disease through defecation in the open. Or it can be seen merely as the choice Indians have made about their priorities. [ More ]

 

========================

 

Testing the Limits of Freedom of Speech

Ernst Zündel Speaks Out

 

Foreign Policy Journal  -   Kourosh Ziabarit

An exclusive interview with one of Europe's most well-known political prisoners

 

Ernst Zündel is a German author and historian who has spent seven years of his life behind bars as a result of expressing his controversial viewpoints and opinions. He is a revisionist who has denied the Holocaust as described by most historians. He has been one of the most prominent political prisoners in Europe and has been jailed in three countries on two continents.

After his arrest in the U.S. in 2003, he was deported to Canada, where he was kept in prison as “a threat to the national security” for two years. After deportation to Germany in March 2005, he was convicted and sentenced in 2007 to five additional years of imprisonment on charges of holocaust denial. He was finally released on March 1, 2010.

This is the first interview Ernst Zündel has given since his release.

 [ More ]

 

=========================

 

The pretty boys of Afghanistan

 

VICE Magazine  -   Robert Maginnis

Kandahar just may be the world capital of buggery. There’s a popular joke here that goes, “Why do birds fly in circles over Kandahar? Because they’re covering their ass with one wing.”

 

The rest of Afghanistan is always riffing about Kandahar. “Down there, girls are for procreation, boys are for recreation.” Stuff like that. Taliban, "mujahideen" strongmen in Kandahar — including the police chief — were not averse to taking boys as brides. In fact, according to a New York Times article, a homosexually driven feud led to the rise of Bin Laden’s future hosts. Two "mujahideen" battled for possession of a prized boy. They rolled out the tanks and shot up the bazaar, killing scores of innocents. By 1994, many of the “holy warriors” who had beat back the Soviets were terrorizing their own people. [ More ]

 

=========================

 

Islam: Don't Tread on Me 

 

Human Events  -   Robert Maginnis

The U.S. Army and the Comedy Channel – which broadcasts the cartoon “South Park” -- share a common fear: alienating Muslims. And, giving in to that fear, both exorcised views that threatened to alienate Muslims. Those actions empowered Islamic radicals, trampled freedom of speech and ignored legitimate criticism of Islam that endangers American security.

The Army rescinded an invitation for Christian evangelist Franklin Graham to speak at a Pentagon National Day of Prayer event. That decision was a reaction to criticism from groups like the Council of American-Islamic Relations that complained Graham “calls Islam evil and claims Muslims are enslaved by their faith.” [ More ]

 

=========================

 

The New Commandments

 

Vanity Fair  -   Christopher Hitchens

The Ten Commandments were set in stone, but it may be time for a re-chisel. With all due humility, the author takes on the job, pruning the ethically dubious, challenging the impossible, and rectifying some serious omissions.

 

What do we say when we want to revisit a long-standing policy or scheme that no longer seems to be serving us or has ceased to produce useful results? We begin by saying tentatively, “Well, it’s not exactly written in stone.” (Sometimes this comes out as “not set in stone.”)

By that, people mean that it’s not one of the immutable Tablets of the Law. Thus, more recent fetishes such as the gold standard, or the supposedly holy laws of the free market, can be discarded as not being incised on granite or marble. But what if it is the original stone version that badly needs a re-write? Who will take up the revisionist chisel?  [ More ]

 

=========================

 

Why are we still bowing to Muslims?

 

Townhall.com  -  David Harsanyi
 

Not long after President Barack Obama gave his conciliatory speeches to the Islamic world, he chose not to meddle in the sham election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In fact, he offered not a word of support for the men and women who took to the streets against that totalitarian regime.

Then, as "manmade disasters" continued to erupt spontaneously around the world -- including at a United States military base -- the administration held steadfast in using non-offensive euphemisms, lest anyone be slighted by our jingoist need to use words that mean something.  [ More ]

 

==========================

 

Boys of the Taliban
 

Front Page Magazine  -  Jamie Glazov

The fact that Taliban militants’ spare time involves sodomizing young boys should by no means be any kind of surprise or eyebrow raiser. That a mass pathology such as this occurs in a culture which demonizes the female and her sexuality — and puts her out of mind and sight — is only to be expected. To be sure, it is a simple given that the religious male fanatic who flies into a violent rage even at the thought of an exposed woman’s ankle will also be, in some other dysfunctional and dark secret compartment of his fractured life, the person who leads some poor helpless young boy into his private chambers.  [ More ]

 

==========================

 

Toronto Dailies (local interest) Opinions

 

Toronto Newspapers  -  Various Scribes

 

 [ More ]

 

==========================