Islam Versus the West as expressed on the soccer field

Three Soccer games. Two different worlds. One problem.

From The Blaze:

"Istanbul fans boo minute of silence for Paris attacks, chant "Allahu akbar" before Turkey vs Greece soccer friendly"

(video at the link)

And from the Guardian:

 But as La Marseillaise rang around Wembley on Tuesday night in defiance of the terrorists who caused carnage in Paris, the fans who sang it did so in the knowledge that a friendly between Germany and Holland in Hanover had been cancelled just before kick-off due to security concerns.

 (video at the link)

And what about those "security concerns" in Hanover?

From the New York Daily News:

But police then ushered everyone outside, and later called off the game.
Officials later said they received a slew of tips indicating an attack, but have not found any explosives on the scene.

Was it a hoax, a failed attack that was aborted before it began, or a successful exploitation of European fears of a repeat of the attack on the French Soccer stadium by Islamic excrements, as part of an orchestrated campaign by Daesh to keep Europeans in a state of fear?

What's next?

Islam's medievalists versus Islam's modernisers

From the Telegraph, an excerpt from the article titled: Paris attacks and the civil war between Islam's medievalists and modernisers

The latest terrorist attacks in Paris serve as a grim reminder that the threat of global terrorism is unlikely to end until the resolution of the civil war of ideas between Muslim modernisers and those adhering to an outmoded theology of Islamic dominance.

Which way will Islam go?

Will the west wait?

Daesh: “a bigot who imposes his view on others.”

 From the Boston Globe:

The term “Daesh” is strategically a better choice because it is still accurate in that it spells out the acronym of the group’s full Arabic name, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Yet, at the same time, “Daesh” can also be understood as a play on words — and an insult. Depending on how it is conjugated in Arabic, it can mean anything from “to trample down and crush” to “a bigot who imposes his view on others.” Already, the group has reportedly threatened to cut out the tongues of anyone who uses the term.

Why do they care so much? The same reason the United States should. Language matters.

The war to define Islam

From the Telegraph, an excerpt from the article titled: "Paris terror attacks: We Muslims must hunt down these monsters who make a mockery of our religion"

“My dear Muslim brothers and sisters, it is time to make our voices heard: we must rise up massively and tell the barbarians who ordered, executed or condoned the acts of mass murder just committed in Paris that from now on we will take the lead in fighting and hunting them down, not just beside, but ahead of, our Christian, Jewish, or agnostic brothers and sisters.

"We must do so because Muslims are the extremists’ first victims and because we have mustered the courage to take our responsibilities and launch a massive, global movement for Islamic reform.
"If we do not, we must accept that these monsters represent Islam (and us) in the face of the entire world. With obvious consequences in many an forthcoming European election. The choice is ours.” 

The article is worth a read.

When google sneezes, the web catches a cold

A bit of the google colossus went off-line for about five minutes or so on August 16th. It was a few minutes before midnight.

See: Google outage reportedly caused big drop in global traffic

See also: Google Outage: Internet Traffic Plunges 40%

How can that happen?

What is google up to that a small hiccup in their server farms would result in a 40% drop in internet traffic?

There are several amusing possibilities that come to mind. Here are two to think about.

1) google has so many spiders and web crawlers grabbing data and making links that it alone is the single biggest user of web data on all of the interwebs. 

2) the tools used to measure web-traffic are so dependent on google that a google outage wiped out a great bulk of the the web traffic tracking software that is used on the internet. The drop in traffic was more of an illusion than a reality.

I am betting on the second guess. Though, it should be noted that the two guesses are not mutually exclusive. 

Gun Free Zones Are Legislated Killing Fields

The following is from a speech given by Bob Guida at the 2nd Amendment Rally, 1/31/2013, State House, Concord, NH

There are those within this legislature, and in congress, who believe that by restricting the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms, they will make us safer. To them I say, “Molon Labe!” They establish “Gun Free Zones” that are in fact legislated killing fields which actually attract those who seek to do evil. They disallow our citizens’ role as a competent constitutional militia, to act in our own defense, whether it be against criminals or against government tyranny. They are the very reason our 2nd Amendment was written. They call it Public Safety. I call it National Disarmament. And again I say to them, “Molon Labe!”

A gun free zone is a place where someone intent on doing harm to people can rest reasonable sure that he is the only one possessing firearms. Like at Sandyhook, there will be no one in the "Gun Free Zone" capable of doing anything more threatening to him then throwing a chair. That is until the cops arrive twenty to thirty minutes later after everyone is dead.

Gun Free Zones, Gun Control Cities and Gun Control States are in fact Killing Fields where bad people can kill with impunity.  

Bob Guida's speech is well worth reading in its entirety.

HatTip: C2 

 *Molan Labe

Seattle Homeless Man Murders A Cellophane Wrapper

Walking home from work last night, crossing the foot bridge from 1st Street to the ferry terminal, I heard a loud crashing clang on the street below.

I looked over the side.

There was a homeless man in his mid twenties on the far side of the street below. He was jumping up and down and holding his fist as if it hurt. There was a traffic sign attached to a light-standard next to him. It was vibrating wildly. He must have struck it with his fist. That would account for the noise that I heard and the evident pain that he suffered.

A small piece of cellophane wrapping floated down from the winds above and landed a few feet from him. He turned and stomped on it with his foot and then he commenced to jumping up and down murderously on the piece of plastic wrapping.

He was consumed with rage - Jumping up and down on a piece of plastic, having moments before struck a light-standard mounted metal street sign with his fist.

There was no calm moment. He said nothing. He made no noise save for the striking of the sign and the stomping on the sidewalk.

I walked on thankful that I was not on the street below where he would notice me.

---

At night, the homeless gather underneath that footbridge to sleep. The footbridge offers them some protection from the Seattle rains. There is often about twenty to thirty people there bedding down for the night with their sleeping bags and blankets.

This is a commonplace in Seattle. This is every night here.

In the morning, the encampment will be cleared. A few rags and bits of garbage may remain but an inattentive passer-by would not notice anything amiss during the daylight hours.

It is a different place at night.

---

I see these people nearly everyday. They are for the most part, the same people that I have seen here for years. This is not a moment of hard-luck. It is not a problem of poverty. There is something else at work here.

I am sure that most of these people present little danger to anyone but themselves. Most are only a danger to themselves in that their hygiene suffers and they risk exposure from the cold and the wet.

But I wonder about the one that was trying to murder that piece of cellophane.

Santa Clause and Barak Obama

There was an election in November.

It went badly.

Santa Clause, running on a Robin Hood platform, beat the Republican challenger.

The Republican, Mit Romney, promised prosperity through hard work.  This did not sit too well with an electorate that wanted to rob the rich to support the welfare state.

The nation has sold it's soul for ObamaPhones and ObamaCare.

A cheap price for a once rich nation.

Heaven help us.

Is it all over for the Obama Campaign?

This was from a +4 Democrat poll.

According to a CNN/ORC International survey conducted right after the debate, 67% of debate watchers questioned said that the Republican nominee won the faceoff, with one in four saying that President Barack Obama was victorious.

"No presidential candidate has topped 60% in that question since it was first asked in 1984," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

Boof!!!

This is not good for the President.

There were more Democrats than Republicans in the sample.

If the poll is to be believed, it is as if Romney won all of the Republicans, all of the Independents, and some of the Democrats.

This may well be the beginning of end of the Obama Campaign.

Debate Transcript: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/2012-presidential-debate-president-obama-and-mitt-romneys-remarks-in-denver-on-oct-3-running-transcript/2012/10/03/24d6eb6e-0d91-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_print.html

Do you think that the polls are biased in favor of Obama? If so, you are not alone.

From: Poll: Plurality say polls biased for Obama - The Hill (October 2nd, 2012)

A plurality of Americans and more than seven in 10 Republicans say pollsters are intentionally skewing results to benefit President Obama, according to a new poll released Tuesday.Some 42 percent of voters surveyed by Daily Kos and SEIU believe pollsters are manipulating their sample sizes to benefit the incumbent president, while 40 percent do not. An additional 18 percent said they were not sure. That's evidence that Republican claims that Democrats and minority voters are being oversampled in national polls could be resonating — and potentially undermining the momentum of the president's early lead. (More)

Read the whole article. It is worth it.

Of course, there is a little bit of irony here in that the article is based on polling data.

What Is Your Country? - The State Department Vs The United States Of America

See: Reagan Readied U.S. Warship for '82 Falklands War

The article details how President Reagan was ready to lend England one of our warships in the event that they lost a carrier in their fight with Argentina over the Falklands.

The article has a curious tidbit:

Lehman and then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger agreed to support U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the loan of the amphibious warship USS Iwo Jima , he said.

“We agreed that [Weinberger] would tell the President that we planned to handle all these requests routinely without going outside existing Navy channels,” Lehman said in a speech provided to the U.S. Naval Institute he made in Portsmouth, U.K. “We would ‘leave the State Department, except for [Secretary of State Al] Haig, out of it.’” 

It was as if they were deliberately treating the State Department as if it had trouble understanding where it's loyalties should be.

I was reminded of something that I had heard about Secretary Of State, George P. Shultz.

LAMB: Is there anything that didn't make it into these 1,188 pages that disappointed you -- you ran out of time, space?

SHULTZ: Oh, no, I think that the important things are all there. There's one incident that somehow or other is not in there, and I don't know why it got left out. But it's an interesting thing that happened. When I was -- in the first period when I was secretary of state, there was in my office a big globe. And when ambassadors, who were newly going to their posts or in their posts and coming back to visit me, would get ready to leave, I would say to them, "Ambassador, you have one more test before you can go to your post. You have to go over to the globe and prove to me that you can identify your country." So unerringly, they would go over and they'd spin the globe around and they'd put their finger on the country they were going to, pass the test. 

So Mike Mansfield, great elder statesman in America, former Senate majority leader and who had been ambassador to Japan for a while before I was there, and he was a close friend of mine from back when I was in the Nixon administration -- so he was visiting and he got ready to leave. I said, "Mike, I got to give you the same test I give everybody else. Before you can go back to Japan, you got to show me that you can go over to the globe and put your finger on your country." So he went over and he spun this globe around and he put his hand on the United States, said, "That's my country." 

So I've told that, subsequently, to all the ambassadors going out, "Never forget, you're over there in that country, but your country is the United States. You're there to represent us. Take care of our interests and never forget it, and you're representing the best country in the world."

It is an important caution.

It would be far to easy to work in the section for a particular country or region and forget that you are working to promote what is best for the United States of America, not necessarily what is best for that particular country or region that you are assigned to.

Another issue that comes into play is how a person's world-view fits or conflicts with role of State Department. Those that look at themselves as more of a "citizen of the world" than a "citizen of the United States of America" would be in conflict with the State Department role of protecting and promoting the interests of the USA over and above the interests of other countries or of "the world."

For the Constrained, the question of "What is your country?" is not confusing or difficult to answer. For the Unconstrained, the "citizen of the world" concept confuses and makes difficult a question that if answered wrongly, puts their country at risk.

From the "Why haven't we kicked the UN out of the US yet? files:

See: U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites, leaked docs show

The United Nations is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest Web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations.

The UN and the rest of the world needs to be reminded that the Internet is ours and they are free to play on it.  This kind of scheme can be dealt with fairly easily. Any country that adopts this tax should be kicked of the net entire and invited to create their own Internet that they may tax and regulate to their hearts content.

If they come to their senses, they can be allowed back on to the US created Internet. Until that time, they can go pound sand.

Bath-salts and the Zombie-Apocalypse

You may have heard about the recent incident where one nekkid guy was eating the face of another nekkid guy. The cops shot the one that was out to lunch.

See: Miami Police Shoot, Kill Man Eating Another Man’s Face

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Miami police are still tight-lipped about the man they shot and killed on the MacArthur Causeway Saturday afternoon, but new details back claims they had no choice: the naked man they shot was trying to chew the face off another naked man, and refused to obey police orders to stop his grisly meal, which one source now claims included his victim’s nose and eyeballs.

See also: Causeway Cannibal Identified; Fears Grow Over Drug Possibly Involved

Emergency room doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital said they too have seen a major increase in cases linked to the street drug called “bath salts” or what is sometimes referred to on the street as “the new LSD”.

When I first saw the headline at drudge, I thought it meant bath-salts as in, you know, bath-salts. Not some exotic drug.

I figured, "well, that might explain the nekkid."

All the same. Yuck!

Drugs are bad. m'kay?

Pot: I understand that stuff. I don't want to do it. I don't think it is a good idea to smoke a substance that dulls your wit. But, if you want to do it, at least be mindfull that it will make you stink like a skunk with a bad attitude.

Meth and Crystal: This stuff will destroy you. Everyone that I know that has used this crap, and I do mean every one of them, has had their lives destroyed. Who can watch people destroy their lives on that stuff and think that they will be the exception if they use it? Meth and crystal will destroy you. No Exceptions.

Crack and PCP are bad too. Don't do them. Just don't.

And now bath-salts. That stuff makes meth, crystal, crack and PCP all look like girl-scout cookies.

Bath-salts ---> Zombie Apocalypse!

It is like something out of a movie.

Some things out of the movies should stay in the movies.

Zombieland was fun as a movie. As real life, not so much.

Now in the apparently possible event that you find yourself facing a real life bath-salts-Zombie bent on eating your face, remember, there are 32 rules of Zombieland. Memorize them. You may actually need them.

Is government using "obesity" to justify growing fatter?

In a word, Yes.

See: Hinkle: Drop and give Uncle Sam 20

At a "Harvard Thinks Big" confab earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman offered his own bright idea for tackling the nation's obesity epidemic. Merely medicating it won't do, he said, and education is well-meaning but ineffective. His answer? "Coercion. … We should start telling corporations what to do." But not just corporations. He also advocated — "to hearty applause," the Harvard Gazette noted — "requiring people to exercise."
Lieberman's idea sounds radical. For now. But in fact, he is (pardon the term) only slightly ahead of the curve. Yale's Kelly Brownell has long advocated taxes on Twinkies, soda and other high-sugar snacks. That idea has gained support from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the mayors of Philadelphia and Baltimore, and state lawmakers in numerous states. The New York Times' Mark Bittman likens foods with added sugar to tobacco, and asks, "How do we regulate the consumption of dangerous foods? … We need the government on our side. It must acknowledge the dangers caused by the most unhealthy aspects of our diet and figure out how to help us cope with them." Bittman's colleague, Frank Bruni, agrees. In a column lamenting America's spreading waistline, he concludes that "we need to rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly."

It is in the nature of government and government agencies to want to regulate and to control. There is no limit to what a government agency will think it has the right and the duty to control. That is why governments are dangerous and why our founding fathers set up a constitution that specifically limited the powers and scope of our government.

But the constitution itself is not enough. What is even more important than having a constitution that limits the powers and scope of government, is having a people that want to be free.

If the people that make up our nation want a government that controls what they can eat and how much they exercise, then constitutional limitations on the powers and scope of government are reduced to nothing but a string of nice sounding words.

We are sliding into an age where eating a chocolate bar will become a revolutionary act.

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington

Who wrecked the UK?

A Reuters Headline that caught my eye this morning.

UK has changed for worse under Queen Elizabeth: poll

Sorry folks. You can't blame the demise of the UK on the Royals. You did it yourselves. You voted to have the state give you things for free. Now you are learning that "free stuff" is more often than not, worth exactly what you pay for it.

Socialism sucks. It destroys wealth. It destroys people. It destroys everything but want.

The execrable "give back to the community" guilt-trip.

I really hate the guilt-trip phrase “give-back” the way that it is used here and in the post that it links to.

See: https://twitter.com/#!/SeattlePD/status/189419396429643776

And: http://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2012/04/09/spd-officers-give-back-to-the-community/

The term is loaded with the implication that something was wrongly taken and that the taker has “given back” to make amends for their aggression against those that they have victimized.

People need to call bullshit on this crap.

These police officers did not take something wrongly. They did not victimize "the community" by taking something from it by force or by fraud. Neither they nor any of us should allow ourselves to manipulated by the cult of victim-hood that promotes that damnable “give-back” crap. It demeans all of us when it is used.

Big Labor Hates Amazon

The Unionistas have a new target in their sites.

Check out the timeline of this twitter feed for March of 2012. https://twitter.com/#!/workingwa There is every reason to expect Amazon to feature prominently in the months to come.

Now take a look at a what appeared in the Sunday April 1st Edition of the Seattle Times.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017883663_amazonmain25.html

Hint to The Seattle Times and labor toadies: Amazon is a retailer, not a charity. They sell stuff to people that are willing to buy. They employee people to make this enterprise work. Everyone wins, except the parasites. People are not forced to work for them. People are not forced to patronize them.

These kinds of attacks on Amazon will likely ramp up this summer.

Hopefully Amazon will have the courage and the will to fight these bastards.