It’s not that hard to do. But still, it’s pretty cute. My husband shaved his mustache off when our son was about three, to similar effect:
I bet she would have been a whole lot more frightened if he’d been able to grow a beard in 30 seconds.
And now for something that is unlikely to scare anybody:
[Hat tip: CDR M at Ace’s.]
…it’s even worse than you might think:
Using further eyewitness reports, the article describes how Hamas has integrated the tunnel network into the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, constructing entrances in homes and even mosques. “I have not entered one civilian home that did not have weapons, suicide belts, or booby traps in it,” the source told the Post, stressing the lengths to which the IDF goes to protect innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, regardless.
Much more from Powerline:
Hamas was apparently a few months away from conducting a mass attack on Israeli civilians during the upcoming Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, on September 24. The raid would have been like something out of a movie: hundreds of heavily-armed Hamas fighters would have emerged from over a dozen underground tunnels in the dead of night, jogged 10 minutes to their targets, and then infiltrated a set of lightly-populated and lightly-guarded Israeli communities. Casualties could have reached the thousands, and some of the victims would have been taken back alive as hostages.
The offensive attack tunnels seem to quite literally have been built for this kind of purpose. The IDF recently published a map of how they were dug to spill out on both sides of nearby communities (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtYjL4mCAAAI6c6.png). Israeli soldiers have been reporting that just inside some of the tunnels were storage units filled with tranquilizers, handcuffs, ropes, and so on…
If the reports are confirmed, there are some immediate adjustments that analysts, journalists, and diplomats will all but certainly make:
(1) A ceasefire without at least the destruction of Hamas’s tunnel network would likely becomes a non-starter. It would be militarily untenable ”“ and probably politically impossible ”“ for Israeli leaders to accept anything less.
(2) The inevitable Israeli investigation into pre-conflict failures ”“ and the Israelis always hold these, no matter how well things go ”“ will have to take into account both how so many tunnels got built and why Israeli intelligence failed to crack the tunnel plot earlier. There’s a lot of focus right now on the former, but a lot of the digging and earth moving happened underground. It’s the latter debate, about sigint and humint, that has the potential to cost people careers.
(3) Confirmation of the plot would raise the stakes in the growing controversy over how human rights groups and diplomatic bodies pressured the Israelis into liberalizing restrictions on cement imports. Kilometers and kilometers of reinforced tunnels were being built deep into Israeli territory while Gaza-based offiicals railed against cement shortages
Given all of this, the objections to the Israeli offensive become more and more absurd. Some people will not rest until Israel is no more, and they would like to intimidate Israel into committing suicide.
[Note: A commenter recently alerted me to this 2009 article by David Horowitz about Obama’s Alinsky roots which described the aims of his presidency. I’d like to give that commenter a hat tip, but I can’t seem to locate who it was.]
Although I had certainly read about Obama’s Alinsky roots prior to Obama’s election, and understood in a broad and basic sense what that past of his meant—looking back now on David Horowitz’s 2009 essay on the subject I’m impressed by how deeply Horowitz understood what was going to happen. His essay is still well worth reading, although I wish all of America had read, and understood, it before voting in 2008.
But it’s no accident it—and the facts and predictions in it—was kept hush-hush. The vast majority of the press and Obama’s fellow Democrats were too excited at the prospect of electing America’s first black president, and were either fooled by Obama’s generalities and platitudes, or they were fully on board with the leftist fundamental transformation of America that he contemplated and wanted to keep it a secret from the public as long as possible.
Looking back, these quotes from Hororwitz leapt out at me with particular poignance and clarity. Now that we’ve experienced five and a half years of Obama’s destructive presidency, it’s possible to appreciate even better than before (and most people on this blog were well aware of Obama’s nature even in 2008) how excellent and important the fit is between Obama and Alinsky:
The Alinsky radical has a single principle – to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots. What this amounts to in practice is a political nihilism – a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people” …the goal is power for the political vanguard who get to feel good about themselves in the process.
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.
Guided by Alinsky principles, post-Communist radicals are not idealists but Machiavellians. Their focus is on means rather than ends, and therefore they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies in the way their admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agenda, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is resources and power.
Unlike the Communists who identified their goal as a Soviet state – and thereby generated opposition to their schemes – Alinsky and his followers organize their power bases without naming the end game, without declaring a specific future they want to achieve – socialism, communism, a dictatorship of the proletariat, or anarchy. Without committing themselves to concrete principles or a specific future, they organize exclusively to build a power base which they can use to destroy the existing society and its economic system. By refusing to commit to principles or to identify their goal, they have been able to organize a coalition of all the elements of the left who were previously divided by disagreements over means and ends.
After Obama became a U.S. Senator, his wife, Michelle, told a reporter, “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.”
Thus Alinsky begins his text by telling readers exactly what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. In his own mind the radical is building his own kingdom, which to him is a kingdom of heaven on earth. Since a kingdom of heaven built by human beings is a fantasy – an impossible dream – the radical’s only real world efforts are those which are aimed at subverting the society he lives in. He is a nihilist…I am constantly asked how radicals could hate America and why they would want to destroy a society that compared to others is tolerant, inclusive and open, and treats all people with a dignity and respect that is the envy of the world. The answer to this question is that radicals are not comparing America to other real world societies. They are comparing America to the heaven on earth – the kingdom of social justice and freedom – they think they are building.
Conservatives think of war as a metaphor when applied to politics. For radicals, the war is real. That is why when partisans of the left go into battle, they set out to destroy their opponents by stigmatizing them as “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes” and “Islamophobes.” It is also why they so often pretend to be what they are not (“liberals” for example) and rarely say what they mean. Deception for them is a military tactic in a war that is designed to eliminate the enemy.
The most basic principle of Alinsky’s advice to radicals is to lie to their opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals.
Alinsky’s advice can be summed up in the following way. Even though you are at war with the system, don’t confront it as an opposing army; join it and undermine it as a fifth column from within. To achieve this infiltration you must work inside the system for the time being. Alinsky spells out exactly what this means: “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.” In other words, it is first necessary to sell the people on change itself, the “audacity of hope,” and “yes we can.” You do this by proposing moderate changes which open the door to your radical agendas
No matter what Alinsky radicals say publicly or how moderate they appear, they are at war. This provides them with a great tactical advantage since other actors in the political arena are not at war.
There is no real parallelism in the war which radicals have declared. One side is fighting with a no-holds- barred, take-no-prisoners battle plan against the system, while the other is trying to enforce its rules of fairness and pluralism. This is the Achilles’ heel of democracies and all radical spears are aimed in its direction.
What makes radical politics a war is the existence of an enemy who must be eliminated. For Alinsky radicals, that enemy is the “Haves,” who “oppress” and rule the “Have-Nots.”
Lenin once said that the purpose of a political argument is not to refute your opponent “but to wipe him from the face of the earth.” The mission of Alinsky radicals is a mission of destruction.
In contrast to liberals, who in Alinsky’s eyes are constantly tripping over their principles, the rule for radicals is that the ends justify the means. This was true for the Jacobins, for the Communists, for the fascists and now for the post-Communist left. This is not because radicals begin by being unethical people. On the contrary, their passion for a future that is ethically perfect is what drives their political agendas and causes many to mistake them for idealists. But the very nature of this future – a world without poverty, without war, without racism, and without “sexism” – is so desirable, so noble, so perfect in contrast to everything that exists as to justify any and every means to achieve it.
Writes Alinsky: “The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem.” In other words, Alinsky’s radical is not going to worry about the legality or morality of his actions, only their practical effects. If they advance the cause they are justified. “He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.”
The end of Hororwitz’s article is, “What radicals like Saul Alinsky create is not salvation but chaos. And presidential disciples of Alinsky, what will they create?” Even back then it was a rhetorical question; Hororwitz knew the answer, although he did not yet know how successful Obama and his minions would be.
The feeling many Americans now have of having been duped by Obama is completely understandable. They were purposely and consciously duped. We who never bought into Obama in the first place, who regarded him even in 2008 as a leftist con man fooling Americans, don’t feel duped. But we feel horrified at the way it’s played out so far. Obama has run into speed bumps along the way, but how many Americans are still unaware of what they are dealing with except for a vague feeling of unease? And how many think what Obama’s been doing is just peachy keen because they agree about wanting to destroy this country and move it to the far left? There are way too many of both types: the fools and the knaves.
The decision in any appeal of Halbig—and therefore the ultimate fate of Obamacare—may rest on that question.
The left would like to say it was all a huge oversight and more or less an unfortunate and careless typo or drafting error, and that clearly Congress’s intention was to allow the feds to give out subsidies. The right says no way:
The deliberate creation of a separate section to authorize a separate federal entity is not a drafting error. The repeated and deliberate reference to one section but not another is not a drafting error. The refusal to grant equal authority to two programs authorized by two separate sections is not a drafting error. The decision to specifically reference section X but not section Y in a portion of a law that grants spending or tax authority is not a drafting error.
The clear text of the law repeatedly demonstrates that plans purchased via federal exchanges were never meant to be treated the same as plans purchased by state-based exchanges. Despite its assertions, the IRS was never granted the statutory authority to hand out tax credits related to plans purchased via a federal health exchange.
Now a video from 2012 has been unearthed featuring “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber (about whom I’ve written about in depth before). In it Gruber, who should know a thing or two about Obamacare, makes it very very clear that subsidies can come only through the state exchanges. What’s more, he said it on record at least two times, one of them not in response to a question, and explained both times at significant length.
Now, of course, he’s saying dummy me, I can’t even imagine what I was thinking back then. He calls it a “speako”—like a typo, get it? But these were “speakos” that went on for a full minute, in some detail. The most that he could say that would make any sense is that he was mistaken.
It really doesn’t matter, though, whether Gruber was right or wrong. His statements can’t speak for Congress’s intent, although they would constitute a small bit of evidence about it. Intent is deduced from much more than that, but you know what? Statutes are usually considered (at least by non-liberals) to say what they mean unless the mistakes really do involve typos, which the ACA certainly does not (as Sean Davis makes clear).
It might seem a bit odd, but as a general matter, while conservative jurists are likely to look to the intent of the framers for constitutional questions, for statutes the basic process is to look at the plain language of the statute first, either ignoring Congress’ intent entirely, or turning to it only in the case of an ambiguity in the statute.
The language is not the least bit ambiguous here, and it is consistent too. There is really very little wriggle room for interpreting it otherwise. In a more normal world, the courts would simply say to the legislature, “If you didn’t mean what you wrote, go back and fix it so it says what you meant.” Now, of course, that’s not possible, because Obamacare could never be passed again, and everyone knows that. It’s that unpopular.
I’ve noticed it among the young.
I’m a woman, but I’m not an upspeaker. That’s because I’m old.
And very opinionated. Polite, but opinionated.
And I don’t like upspeak, in men or women.
Most of us think we know a lot about what makes people fat. They eat too much and they’re inactive.
Newer evidence about the influence of gut flora indicates the iffiness of the first proposition, at least as a hard and fast rule. Certainly, eating less will cause weight loss. But the fat do not necessarily eat more than the thin, something I’ve noticed (and written about) before among my friends and acquaintances. There is no justice.
In recent years some studies have indicated that inactivity among children, something that was long thought to be responsible for increasing levels of childhood obesity, may not be that much of a factor either. Although the news came out four years ago, I don’t think it’s gotten widespread notice, perhaps because it goes so strongly against what seems to be common sense as well as PC thought. I think it highly likely that exercise is good for kids whether it leads to weight loss or not, but apparently it’s not the basic causative problem in obesity:
EarlyBird is based at the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, UK, and has been observing in detail a cohort of city school children for the past 11 years.
A review published in 2009 of all trials using physical activity to reduce childhood obesity showed weight loss amounting to just 90g (3oz) over three years, and the EarlyBird study wanted to know why the trials were so ineffective. So they challenged some popular paradigms.
It is well known that less active children are fatter, but that does not mean — as most people assume it does — that inactivity leads to fatness. It could equally well be the other way round: that obesity leads to inactivity.
And this is the question EarlyBird was uniquely placed to answer. With data collected annually over several years from a large cohort of children, it could ask the question — which comes first? Does the physical activity of the child precede changes in fatness over time, or does the fatness of the child precede changes in physical activity over time?
And the answer, published recently in Archives of Disease in Childhood, was clear. Physical activity had no impact on weight change, but weight clearly led to less activity.
What does cause childhood obesity, which has been increasing dramatically for decades in the entire western world? From reading up on it, I can only conclude that it works something like this: some people have the genes that foster it and always have, but previously it was held in check by the fact that food was neither very plentiful nor varied for the vast majority of the population (there also was more physical activity, but that doesn’t seem to have made as much difference). Now that tasty, abundant, and non-monotonous food has become readily available in the west to even most poor peoplet, everyone is eating pretty much to capacity. Therefore those with the genes for it are going to become fat.
Being fat used to be a sign that a person was prosperous and healthy. No more. In the west, it tends to mean a person is more likely to be poor than rich (Michael Moore excepted). Certain ethnic groups, blacks and Hispanics, are also more susceptible, and their increasing numbers in the population will also lead almost inexorably to higher percentages of obesity.
Want 10 more reasons for increasing rates of obesity that have nothing to do with overeating or inactivity? You’ve got em.
Despite our growing hedonism we’re still a moralistic and somewhat puritanical species. It’s just that the target of our concerns have shifted, and what used to be focused on sexual prohibitions seems to have shifted to health rules, particularly on overeating and exercise. But maybe we’re not such bad folk after all, it’s just our prosperity and our genes.
[NOTE: In an attempt to head off the “just go on a lowcarb/Paleo/Taubes diet” people who seem to come in proselytizing on every thread about weight loss or diet, I refer those interested to this thread (including comments) and this one.]
Regular readers here may know that I frequently cross-post at Legal Insurrection, a popular blog with a fine and varied group of writers including several leading legal minds. They’re announcing a new feature called Morning Insurrection to which you may want to subscribe, at no charge. Take a look at what’s being offered.
It’s so rare to see a piece describing a political change from right to left that this one in Politico entitled “Why Am I Moving Left?” caught my eye.
It’s written by Thomas E. Ricks, a 50-something journalist who has spent the last twenty-five years specializing in writing about military matters, and he seems remarkably unreflective for a writer. He’s “puzzled” by not just his drift but by his “late-middle-age politicization,” since prior to this he had been a “detached centrist” who “didn’t participate in elections, because I didn’t want to vote for, or against, the people I covered.”
I can’t see how a person can follow politics and not have an opinion on them, so my guess is that until recently Ricks closely followed events in his field of expertise (the military) but not events in general, because he describes not a conscious effort to refrain from voting despite strong feelings, but a lack of strong opinions about politics at all.
So perhaps he’s just begun to pay attention recently, because he’s decided he doesn’t need to remain aloof anymore. One of the things he doesn’t like is what happened in the Iraq War, and he also thought that our conduct of the war in Afghanistan was “inept.” How that would translate into support for the left (or particularly Obama, who destroyed whatever good we did) I haven’t a clue, since a person would have no reason to believe the left would be better at conducting a war Ricks actually supported, such as Afghanistan. Nor does he explain what was so inept about Afghanistan, under the extremely difficult circumstances that country presented, circumstances that were known and predicted to be exceedingly challenging.
I’m not going to bother to fisk Ricks’ entire article. But if you go down the list of things Ricks says were what turned him to the left, you’ll find that most of them are emotional reactions where calling on the left to remedy things doesn’t seem to demonstrate much logic at all. Ricks doesn’t like the NSA spying, income inequality, bailouts, gun massacres. So: Democrats? Did they oppose the NSA data collection or the bailouts to a greater degree than Republicans did, and do they have solutions for gun massacres or income inequality that aren’t worse than the diseases? Ricks doesn’t even try to argue why he thinks they do.
I have no idea how typical Ricks is of any recent phenomenon. I’ve not seen any surveys on how political change has been going during the Obama administration, but I find it very hard to believe he’s not in a tiny minority, and that any change that has occurred has been in the other direction, particularly among millennials.
[ADDENDUM: Just now I looked up Ricks’ Wiki entry, and after reading it I am of the opinion he’s very much a liberal, and has been for a long time.]
Why is Ed Rogers so mild and tentative here?:
Nothing suggests the president wants to own, control or take charge of securing our border. He only met with Texas Gov. Rick Perry when he was shamed into doing so and he is not relaying any tough messages or talking about potential penalties for the countries that are exporting their citizens to the United States. Even the $3.7 billion he wants Congress to appropriate for the crisis is mostly geared toward accommodating the inflow of illegal immigrants, not stopping it. And that request has not been accompanied by any serious effort to lobby for its passage.
With all this, it is fair to ask: Whose side is the president really on? Does he support the beleaguered U.S. law enforcement officials who are trying to guard our border? Does he empathize with the American communities who are forced to deal with the influx of those who are willfully breaking the law?
It is revealing that after meeting in early July with immigration activists who oppose any efforts to return the illegal immigrants to their home country, the president went so far as to reassure the group that, “in another life, I’d be on the other side of the table.” It is not hard to believe the president has a bias on the side of the foreigners. It isn’t a leap or unfair to believe that emotionally and ideologically, the president’s sympathies are with the goals of the immigration activists ”” but since, as president, he has this bothersome responsibility of enforcing U.S. laws and protecting the U.S. border, he must, for the time being, avoid formally joining their ranks.
Rogers has long been an Obama critic. But still, contrast the polite caution of his accusations in this piece with the sort of thing you used to read every day about President Bush from the liberal press. And yet there really is no question that Obama not only is uninterested in securing the border but is actively undermining and even sabotaging border security for what he sees as political gain.
Granted, it’s a serious charge. There aren’t too many things presidents are required to do, and one of them is to maintain and defend our territorial integrity. Obama not only refuses to do that, he is neither subtle nor hidden about it; on the contrary, he is open in his contempt for the entire situation.
Obama has reached a new stage in his presidential life. It was nearly four years ago (November of 2010) that I made the prediction that Obama could be re-elected in 2012:
And then, and then””voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?
In Obama’s case, not answering to the electorate doesn’t just mean advocating unpopular things, or spending his time on golf and fund-raising, or refusing to even make an appearance at the border despite being begged, although those activities or omissions are all included. It means endangering the country and putting its populace at risk. It means winking at the arrival of criminals from south of the border. It means dismantling the armed forces. It means releasing five Taliban leaders in exchange for one traitor. It means refusing to stop the rise of ISIS when it was possible to do so, allowing Islamist terrorists around the world to regroup and get much stronger.
And somehow it means that even many of those pundits who oppose and criticize Obama are afraid to tell it straight. I assume that’s because they fear they’ll sound as though they’ve gone off the deep end, or will be accused of that old perennial, racism. But it’s Obama who’s gone off the deep end—and this country is poised to follow him right over the brink.
[NOTE: In the comments section to the Rogers article, I found this interesting remark by someone who calls himself “brianc2221.” I can’t find a way to link it, so I’ll just quote it:
Some on the far right have long claimed Obama’s goal was to destroy the country. I never believed them UNTIL NOW.
I’m not sure how widespread that sentiment is, but I hope “very.”]
The phenomenon was mocked in “My Fair Lady” but its origins predated that, in “Pygmalion,” Shaw’s play from which “My Fair Lady” and this speech of Alfred Doolittle’s was taken. Isn’t it interesting that, despite writing this, Shaw was a Fabian Socialist?
Here’s how the undeserving Doolittle ends up:
Be careful what you wish for, “That’s the tragedy of it, Eliza.”
How do you fight a group that is perfectly willing—nay, eager—to try to get you to kill its children even if you don’t want to?
That’s the situation Israel faces in Hamas. It’s the situation we face against Islamist terrorists, because they use such techniques as one of their primary tools, and the bleeding heart liberal west and the MSM all too often play right into their hands by demonizing Israel and the US rather than the perpetrators.
This is not new. It began when the west decided that war was something it could no longer in good conscience wage. Civilian casualties in World War II reached such a high point that we turned in revulsion against them, and the increasing accuracy of weaponry enabled us to entertain the idea—for a short while, anyway—that wars could be fought with “surgical precision.”
That would be true, if the enemy cooperated. But it doesn’t.
The Islamist terrorists didn’t invent the technique. But in order for it to come to full fruition, you need a west with a guilty conscience about itself and a desire to excuse the enemy’s barbarism, and an MSM fully on board with the program. This was already beginning to be developed during the War in Vietnam:
The Viet Cong were amplifying and extending tactics practiced in the First Indochina War, most importantly the militarization of civilians and an “opportunistic readiness to exploit any social ”˜contradiction’ in order to bring about the violent defeat of the enemy” (Johnson 1968, p. 447). The Viet Cong would attack quickly and then withdraw without trying to win the battle. They would ambush American soldiers; they would blend in with civilians; they would target civilians. Schools were bombed, health centers were bombed. “A teenager was used to throw a grenade into a holiday crowd in downtown Saigon” (Pike 1970 p. 96). Any method that could pull the enemy off balance would be used. The disappearance of front lines and a clearly identifiable enemy was disorienting. It induced fear and paranoia: “Frustrated and frightened, U.S. soldiers tended to view all Vietnamese with distrust” (Lawrence 2008, p. 107)…
The Viet Cong used children as spies (Peer 1970), suicide bombers, and sappers. Recruiters preferred the young for sapper cells “because they are more easily influenced in their thinking, are willing to run risks, physically are better able to carry out their assignments, are less likely to question the arrangements for an operation, and are less apt to become double agents” (Pike 1970, pp. 74-75). ). Some youths were volunteers while many others were forcibly recruited (Goure 1965). The lowest age for recruitment into formal Viet Cong forces was 17, and boys 15-16 years old were eligible for “youth duties” in local hamlet militia (Donnell 1967, p.8-11). However, even younger children were utilized for special operations. Fourteen year olds were known to have worked for demolition units laying land mines (Elliot and Elliot 1969), and to have thrown bombs into police headquarters. A twelve year old was coerced into throwing a grenade into a village. A Viet Cong fighter was known to have given a small school girl an unpinned hand grenade and then told her to take it to her teacher: “At the classroom door the child drops the grenade, killing herself and injuring nine children” (Pike 1970, p. 107). The tactic appeared to work on the notion that the younger the child, the greater the psychological force. The Viet Cong had produced a tactical innovation with their use of children in war.
It is altogether fitting that John Kerry, who made his reputation accusing his fellow soldiers of widespread barbarism in Vietnam, should be orchestrating our diplomacy today in Israel and Gaza for the Obama administration. In addition to his unwarranted sarcasm about the care Israel has taken to minimize casualties, we have his (and Obama’s) working against the interests of Israel and for the interests of Hamas:
As Israel has uncovered the scope of Hamas’s infrastructure of murder and terror, the US has acted with the UN, Turkey and Qatar to pressure Israel (and Egypt) to agree to a cease-fire and so end IDF operations against Hamas before the mission is completed.
To advance this goal, US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Cairo on Monday night with an aggressive plan to force on Israel a cease-fire Hamas and its state sponsors will accept.
As former ambassador to the US Michael Oren told the media, it is clear that neither Israel nor Egypt invited Kerry to come over. Their avoidance of Kerry signals clearly that the US’s two most important allies in the Middle East do not trust US President Barack Obama’s intentions.
And their distrust is entirely reasonable.
The State Department has openly applauded Turkey and Qatar for their involvement in attempts to achieve a cease-fire. Last week Israeli officials alleged that the US was responsible for Hamas’s rejection of the Egyptian cease-fire proposal. By attempting to coerce Egypt to accept Qatar and Turkey as its partners in mediation, Obama signaled to Hamas’s leaders that they should hold out for a better deal.
Due to Turkey’s membership in NATO and the glamour of the Qatari royal family, many Westerners find it hard to believe that they are major sponsors of terrorism. But it is true. Turkey and Qatar are playing a double game.
While sending his ambassador to Brussels for NATO meetings, Erdogan has been transforming Turkey from an open, pro-Western society allied with Israel into a closed, anti-Semitic and anti-American society that sponsors Hamas, ISIL, al Nusra and other terrorists groups.
As for Qatar, the tiny natural gas superpower presents itself to Americans as their greatest ally in the Muslim world. The emirate gives hundreds of millions of dollars to US universities to open campuses in Doha and pretends it is a progressive, open society, replete with debating societies.
…At the same time, according to the Calacalist report, Qatar is the major bankroller of ISIS and al Nusra in Syria and Iraq. It gives $50 million a month to jihadists in Libya. It gives Hamas $100m. in annual aid. And in the past two years Doha has provided Hamas with an additional $620m. dollars, including $250m. it transferred to Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal’s personal bank account, and $350m. in military aid to Hamas, transferred after the Egyptian military forced the Muslim Brotherhood government from power last July.
Add to that the $100m. per year that Qatar pours into Al Jazeera’s satellite network ”“ which has dedicated itself to undermining pro-Western Arab regimes while popularizing the likes of al-Qaida and Hamas, and Qatar is the largest financier of international jihad in the world.
Manipulating the situation so that Israel or the US has virtually no choice but to kill civilians, including women and children, is popular in the Arab world because it works. It’s been working for many decades. In a 2007 piece of mine about the phenomenon I wrote:
When I was about nine years old, I read the Philip K. Dick story “Second Variety” (odd reading for a young girl, I know, but that’s the way it was). The work, in case you’re not familiar with it, was later the basis for such disparate cinema entertainments as “Screamers” and “Terminator.”
The story featured an end-of-the-world war with a series of killer robots made to look exactly like people, and designed to prey on the humanity of the good guys. The first robot type (“first variety”) looked like a wounded soldier needing help. The second variety was unknown, and only revealed towards the end of the story (I won’t be a spoiler here). But the third—the one that gave me a special chill—was a small vulnerable child needing help, a boy clutching a teddy bear.
At least in the Dick story, these small children were not real, they were only killer robots cleverly designed to look real. But the principle of using an enemy’s humanity against itself was the same. The challenge we face is now how to fight such an enemy effectively without losing our own humanity, and so far—arguments about waterboarding and the like notwithstanding—I have no doubt we have erred, if anything, on the side of caution.
Since I wrote those words, the Obama administration has been trying to retreat from the arena. But the issue will come back to face us again; there is really no retreat possible. Israel does not have the luxury of even temporary retreat, because it lives in that arena.
Makes no more sense than the previous tales:
In either case, a scratched HD platter wouldn’t result in a complete loss of data. This would be nearly impossible, given the simple physics of the device. You don’t change the orientation of all the ones & zeroes on a thin sheet of ferromagnetic material by scratching one part of it, any more than you could change the orientation of a magnet by nicking it with your snuff spoon.
A good lie is not that easy to come up with. Truth may sometimes be stranger than fiction. But still, if often makes more sense than fiction.