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s I understand it, here’s the Obama/Clinton State Dept’s take on how they will win what we used to call the war on terror:  The problem between the U.S. and the jihadists is that we just haven’t been likable enough. We’ will win over Islam if we spend less on the military and more on fish sticks for orphans.

That was the gist of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith A. McHale’s talk to the Center for a New American Security today.  (I thought the old Bush security was just fine, by the way, since no Americans were killed by jihadists on American soil during his watch, post 9/11.)  Here’s some excerpts:

Whether we are strengthening old alliances, forging new partnerships to meet complex global challenges, engaging with citizens and civil society, or charting new strategies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, our national interests depend on effective engagement and innovative public diplomacy. The stakes could not be higher. We must get this right…This is not a propaganda contest — it is a relationship race. And we have got to get back in the game.

Enhanced public diplomacy is a key component of the President’s new strategy in the region…To achieve the President’s aims, we are launching a multi-faceted strategy to provide platforms for local moderate voices, support democratic institutions and civil society, and position the United States as a long-term partner working to create opportunities and enable the people of the region to chart the futures of their own countries.

We are responding to requests from the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to help meet the needs of their people. Secretary Clinton recently announced more than $100 million in humanitarian support for the people of Pakistan. And Ambassador Holbrooke just announced another $200 million. Since 2002, the United States has provided a total of more than $3.4 billion to alleviate suffering and promote economic growth, education, health, security and good governance in Pakistan. [Oh, wait! You mean Bush tried this to the tun of $3.4 billion and they're still trying to kill us? No matter; just apply the Universal Obama Solution - throw lots of money at it.]

Yet we have a credibility gap with many in the region — some have called it a ‘trust deficit.’ So part of our task is reassuring the people that our aim in the region is to support their own aspirations. We need to do a better job of getting the word out about what we are doing to help Pakistan and Afghanistan become more stable and prosperous, both through the local media and by communicating directly with people.”

It is not about getting the word out, or the trust deficit, but it is most definitely about the aspirations of the people of the region.  A significant percentage of them have a deeply imbedded aspiration to bring pain, suffering and death to the Great Satan, and no amount of communication or prosperity is going to change that.  Only rewriting the Q’ran will change that.

Islam has nurtured radicals since the dawn of the religion, through times of great wealth and times of great poverty alike.  Radical Muslims abound in Lebanon, where Democracy still hangs on. And education? Cairo University, where Obama spoke to the Muslim world last week (except for Iran, of course, where the state didn’t broadcast it), has spawned its share of very well educated Islamo-savages.

McHale concluded her comments with a bizarre historical reference:

A few days after I started at the State Department, I moved into George Marshall’s old office. General Marshall saw a world beyond our shores devastated by war and reeling from economic crisis. He knew that our fates and our fortunes were intertwined and that America had to engage with the world to ensure our future. So he launched one of the most far-reaching engagement efforts in history. And today we are still reaping the rewards of that investment in mutual prosperity and security. From Cairo to Kabul, from quiet villages to crowded cities, America is once again reaching out a hand of friendship and seeking new relationships. We know it is the right thing to do and we know, like General Marshall did, that our future depends on it.

Yeah, but back then Europe was a Christian continent. And the enemy was broken, broke and starving – a point we’ll never get to if the administration can’t even admit that we’re fighting terrorists.  There is a role for public diplomacy – what we used to call foreign aid – but alone, it will have no measurable effect on the level of jihadist violence against us.

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eople who believe in karma and reincarnation better be very careful to live good lives … or they could be reborn in Pakistan. Here’s the latest from that lovely home of 176 million Muslims:

CHAKWAL: At least 24 persons died and 35 were injured at the Imambargah suicide bombing here.

One killer blew himself up with explosives during annual Majlis Aza being held at the Imambargah located in the centre of the town at Mohala Sarpak of City police station area. The blast ripped apart the bodies of the faithful at the Imambargah, leaving a horrific scene of scattered body parts and blood all around the incident site.

Eyewitnesses said that following a Majlis, the faithful had crowded the main gate of the Imambargah, while those entering into the Imambargah were being frisked, when a youth 16/17 year old during checking blew himself up, which resulted in on the spot death of 20 persons, while the other four succumbed to their injuries in hospital. Four children were also included among the dead, they said. (Int’l News, Pakistan)

Imagine, if you can, weekly killings of dozens of people as Baptists and Methodists take turns exploding their youth in each other’s churches. Of, for that matter, French existentialists and modernists taking turns with the exploding vests.

But that just doesn’t happen. This was just another Shi’a-Sunni tit-for-tat.  This was Islam, the only religion that fosters uncontrolled hatred both within and without. Yet they call themselves the religion of peace, and they make themselves the one religion that cannot be criticized.  This is the one religion that needs criticism and lots of it, and its efforts to squelch the human expression of concern about what’s going on in Islam will only nurture and feed its evil side.

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H

ere’s a headline you don’t see every day:

 Gunmen shoot Sri Lanka cricketers

But it’s not really surprising, given that the cricketers were on their way to Gaddafi Stadium.  In Pakistan.  Two plus two equals Islamist terrorists bent on jihad, and indeed the attack this morning on the Sri Lankan team, which was touring Pakistan after India’s team pulled out for security reasons, had the look and feel of the Mumbai attacks.  BBC:

Pakistani officials said about 12 gunmen were involved and grenades and rocket launchers have been recovered.

Officials said the incident bore similarities to deadly attacks in Mumbai in India last November.

Reports suggest 10 to 12 gunmen ambushed the team coach and its accompanying police detail on the Liberty Square roundabout in the heart of Lahore, as the convoy was on the way to the Gaddafi stadium for a Test match.

No terrorists were apprehended.  Five Pakistani police officers and the bus driver – who the cricketers described as heroic, saving their lives by continuing to drive under the hail of lethal bullets - were killed.  Ten Sri Lankan team members and coaches were injured, two seriously enough to be hospitalized.

One Pakistani official sought to shift blame away from Islamist jihadists, claiming without evidence that India was behind the attacks, in retaliation for the Mumbai attacks.  No word on why the Indians would have been so stupid as to kill Sri Lankan cricketers instead of Pakistani jihadists.

Inone of the greater understatements of the jihadist war against civilization, International Cricket Council president David Morgan said it would be “very difficult for international cricket to be hosted in Pakistan for quite some time to come.”  Indeed, it will be very difficult for the international community to consider Pakistan to be a country in control of itself for some time to come.

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hat’s interesting about the dossier India presented to Pakistan today outlining evidence of Pakistani involvement in the Mumbai terror attack isn’t so much what the dossier contains, but its distribution list.

The dossier’s contents have not yet been released, but news reports say it contains the confession of lone terror force survivor Ajmal Amir Kasab, records of GPS and satellite phones used by the attackers and transcripts of conversations between the attackers and their handlers in Pakistan.

Its distribution includes Islamabad, of course, but much, much more:

Stepping up the diplomatic offensive, foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee said he has written to his counterparts around the world and that countries are being briefed separately giving details of the Mumbai attacks and its links in Pakistan.  …

“It is my hope that the world will unite to achieve the goal of eliminating the threat of such terrorism,” Mukherjee said.

The External Affairs Ministry will be briefing all heads of missions based in Delhi, with the briefings to be concluded by Tuesday, and Indian ambassadors and high commissioners will be doing the same in their host countries around the world.

Seeing the reprehensible world response to Israel’s measured response to terrorist aggression against it, India’s diplomatic initiatives look quite savvy.  Pakistan is no Israel in the world’s perception – which as a powerful proof of how wrong the world’s perception of Israel is – but India’s diplomatic push assures that when Islamabad responds, world leaders will be able to measure that response against the dossier’s contents and judge accordingly.

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Mysteries Of Evolution

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ere’s a story that might give Darwin pause:

Amoebas glide toward their prey with the help of a protein switch that controls a molecular compass, biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered.

Their finding, recently detailed in the journal Current Biology, is important because the same molecular switch is shared by humans and other vertebrates to help immune cells locate the sites of infections.

The amoeba Dictyostelium finds bacteria by scent and moves toward its meal by assembling a molecular motor on its leading edge. The active form of a protein called Ras sets off a cascade of signals to start up that motor, but what controlled Ras was unknown.

Amoeba have a sense of smell? They know how to build a molecular motor? Darwin certainly never suspected a single-cell critter could have all that!

It requires more faith to believe such a complex system can evolve out of the primordial mud than it takes to believe the amoeba is part of God’s design. Continue Reading »

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G

ood old Yankee know-how has been on display in Waziristan lately, as drone-fired missiles are slamming into rat-filled hovels. The latest report claims 20 “militants” – al-Qaeda and taliban terrorists – were killed.

A fine thing indeed, but what’s with this paragraph?

One attack in Mohammadkhel village about 28 miles west of Miran Shah, the region’s main town, killed about 19 people, most of them alleged militants but also including about a half-dozen foreigners, the officials said, citing agents in the field.

You mean the foreigners weren’t also terrorists? Were they perhaps European tourists on an eco-tour? Hollywood stars and Parisian fashion models on a round-the-world Smug Quest?

More likely they were jihadis from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or Euro-Muslims on the only real kind of tour that reaches those parts, jihad madrassa tours. A half-dozen foreigners? A half dozen more dead terrorists, most likely.

Since this is evidence of stepped-up efforts to win the war in Afghanistan by taking  out the terrorist dregs that dragged that sorry butts back to the mountains after we took out most of their compadres in Iraq, one would think that Barack “The Kabul Kid” Obama will be singing the praises of the attack.  Bets anyone?  Anyone think he’ll actually praise a successful military action?

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L

et’s revisit those terrible, terrible roots of terrorism, shall we? You know, the aching poverty and heavy burden of being a pathetic post-colonial backwater suffering because of globalization. To help us understand this horrible situation, here’s a bit of bio on a recently arrested terrorist:

She is one of three children of a British- trained Pakistani doctor. She moved to the US from Pakistan in 1990 to live with her brother, an architect, and study. After completing her neuroscience doctoral thesis she married a Pakistani anaesthesiologist and lived in a flat in Boston.

Poor baby, so mistreated by the West. No wonder she, one Aafia Siddiqui:

• Was questioned by the FBI after here husband allegedly purchased night-vision goggles and body armour on the internet. Within months the couple moved back to Pakistan but soon separated.
• Married Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar alBaluchi, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a cousin of Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York.
• Was arrested in Afghanistan when she was seen acting suspiciously outside a provincial governor’s compound, identifying herself as a boy – but besides being wrong on that, they found in her possession numerous documents about “the creation of explosives, chemical weapons and other weapons, descriptions of U.S. landmarks in the US, documents about US military assets and excerpts from The Anarchist Arsenal.
• Grabbed an M16 while being held for interrogation and fired two shots at an Army captain. (She missed when a translator pushed the rifle away.)

All this info from Times of London; read the whole article, complete with the lame defense being set up to make her a heroic martyr of US mistreatment.

Included on the list of targets carried by our long-suffering Ms. Siddiqui was the USDA’s Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which the feds want to use as a biological terrorism research center. Put that together with a neuroscience doctorate and you realize that the terrorists who will hurt is us are not theflea-bitten, uneducated, suffering terrorists, but those that were once a part of us.

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Super Nan Readies For Denver Showdown

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est you think this week’s Democratic convention in Denver will be just a showcase for the pontificating and grandstanding leaders of the party that knows what’s good for us even if we don’t, Nancy Pelosi stands ready to set you straight. This is no small deal.

“We’ve got a planet to save. Nothing less is at stake other than civilization as we know it today.” (source)

Thank God we’ve got a proven, capable Dem savior like Barack Obama to get us through the fight with the super-nemesis, Maverick Man.

And Joe Biden? The perfect sidekick for The Mighty O and Super Nan, sez Madam Speaker:

“Joe Biden is the all-American boy.”

I’m sure he looks great in tights, too.

hat-tip: Urgent Agenda Continue Reading »

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ast night I headlined a report of a missile attack in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area, saying it sounded like the sort of operation designed to take out Taliban leadership.

We have a confirmation of sorts … from the Taliban:

A missile apparently fired at a religious seminary in Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal region early Monday killed seven people, a local Taliban leader said.

The pre-dawn attack was carried out at a ‘madrassa’ at the border region of Azam Warsak at 3 a.m., Maulavi Nazeer said.

The missile attack also injured three others, he said.

Locals said that the missiles struck seminary belong to a local cleric Maulana Jalail, who is considered to be linked with Taliban.

Locals believe that the missiles were fired from Afghanistan to hit a house in the Pakistani area near the border with Afghanistan.

The army spokesman confirmed the incident but did not say if it was missile strike or a bomb blast.

He said the coalition forces exchange intelligence with Pakistani forces before their actions. (Global Security/IRNA)

Al Jazeera adds:

Residents said the house where the missiles struck belonged to local tribesman Malik Salat and that suspected pro-Taliban fighters used to stay there.

Several villagers said they heard jets approaching from Afghanistan before the strike.

Still waiting for something official … and that’s interesting. In some earlier attacks, there were immediate outraged charges of civilian deaths and mutterings from the DoD about investigations. Reaction to this attack is muted … as if we hit what we wanted to hit.

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A Personal Hero Revisited

I earned my degree at Ernie Pyle Hall, Indiana University’s journalism school, so this story moved me:

NEW YORK — The figure in the photograph is clad in Army fatigues, boots and helmet, lying on his back in peaceful repose, folded hands holding a military cap. Except for a thin trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, he could be asleep.

But he is not asleep; he is dead. And this is not just another fallen GI; it is Ernie Pyle, the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II.

As far as can be determined, the photograph has never been published. Sixty-three years after Pyle was killed by the Japanese, it has surfaced — surprising historians, reminding a forgetful world of a humble correspondent who artfully and ardently told the story of a war from the foxholes.

“It’s a striking and painful image, but Ernie Pyle wanted people to see and understand the sacrifices that soldiers had to make, so it’s fitting, in a way, that this photo of his own death … drives home the reality and the finality of that sacrifice,” said James E. Tobin, a professor at Miami University of Ohio.

Read the rest at USA Today.

I think Pyle would have taken umbrage at the line, “… not just another fallen GI.” There were no “just anothers” among the soldiers Pyle wrote about in his columns from the front lines of the war, which you can read in Brave Men or Here is Your War: The Story of GI Joe.

Pyle might just have been the last great journalist, were it not for men like Michael Totten and Michael Yon, who ignore the directives from the military’s PR men and put themselves at risk, as Pyle did, to report the noble, inspiring and heartbreaking stories of our great soldiers doing their great work.

Now, 63 years later, we see Ernie Pyle at rest, and it is a moving, powerful photo. How tragic that often this is bravery’s reward; how reaffirming that six decades on, we still care.

Unwelcoming Worlds

Be thankful that you’re from Earth, not a planet in the RS Ophiuchi binary system, the red giant/white dwarf system rendered here by a NASA artist.

Here’s why:

“We were getting ready for a routine engineering run when all of a sudden the nova went off. It was very bright and easy to observe, so we took this opportunity and turned it into gold,” says team member Marc Kuchner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. …

The Keck Nuller [astronomical instrument] was undergoing tests on February 12, 2006, when a nova flared up in the constellation Ophiuchus. The system, known as RS Ophiuchi, consists of a white dwarf and a red giant. The red giant is gradually shedding its massive gaseous outer layers, and the white dwarf is sweeping up much of this wind, growing in mass over time. As the matter builds up on the white dwarf’s surface it eventually reaches a critical temperature that ignites a thermonuclear explosion that causes the system to brighten 600-fold. (Science Daily)

Talk about your global warming!

But what’s a mere super-nova among friends? What makes the RS Ophiuchi system just so darned inhospitable is that similar events were observed (counting backwards) in 1985, 1967, 1958, 1933, 1989 and who knows how many more times back through the history of the universe.

Those time spans of nine to 34 years were astronomical quick blinks; nearly constant and instantaneous by the way galaxies time things.

RS Ophiuchi is a mighty hymn to the incredible splendor of the universe, and testimony to the infinite creativity … and maybe even humor … of the Creator.

I mean, really, doesn’t this whacked-out solar system remind you just a little bit of the Three Stooges, forever knuckle-heading, slapping and poking each other? You … I oughtta … nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!

Gore Gorged … Again

The next time you bump into Al Gore, you might want to tattoo this across his forehead:

A warming global ocean — influencing the winds that shear off the tops of developing storms — could mean fewer Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States according to new findings by NOAA climate scientists. Furthermore, the relative warming role of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans is important for determining Atlantic hurricane activity.

The article, to be published on January 23 in Geophysical Research Letters, uses observations to show that warming of global sea surface temperatures is associated with a secular, or sustained long-term increase, of vertical wind shear in the main development region for Atlantic hurricanes. The increased vertical wind shear coincides with a downward trend in U.S. landfalling hurricanes. (source)

Researchers did an amazing thing in this study. Instead of stoking up the computer models and filling the models’ cyber-heads with silliness, they actually went back through historical records and tracked real landfalls from the late 1800s on. Imagine that!

Of course, the study finds the oceans have warmed, which supports global warming. But it also shows that we know far too little about what its effects may be to start taxing ourselves in order to fund government programs willy-nilly. If this study is true, people along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts might not be too keen on paying a carbon tax to curtail the forces that are making their lives safer.

Taxes To Beat The Axis

Ymarsakar has posted this Donald Duck cartoon from the 1940s to show how Hollywood’s approach to wars has changed.

clipped from ymarsakar.wordpress.com

As Y says,

This is an interesting example of how Hollywood was for the war in WWII, due to the fact that there was no reason to be against Hitler, given Hitler’s betrayal and attack on Soviet Stalin.

Hollywood seems to have forgotten that the Islamic world that they’re defending through their current round of movies overwhelmingly was on Hitler’s side in WWII.

Like Father, Sort-Of Like Son

Hamza bin Laden is following in the terrorist footsteps of his father, although it appears he may be more willing than pops to actually put his personal safety at risk in the name of jihad.

AP has obtained a draft of Benizir Bhutto’s autobiography, due out later this month, which contains this passage:

“I was told by both the Musharraf regime and the foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me,” Bhutto reportedly says in the book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West.

“These included, the reports said, the squads sent by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud; Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden; Red Mosque militants; and a Karachi-based militant group,” she is quoted as saying.

Mehsud has been blamed by Pakistan intelligence for the attack, but his mouthpieces deny his involvement. Bin Laden & Son are similarly silent — knowing, perhaps, that this is one act of terror they’re better off not taking credit for.

The Consequence Of Being Unread

I wouldn’t put Vladamir Nobokov’s Lolita on my recommended reading list, but let’s face it, it’s a good thing to have some awareness of the literary world around us. Otherwise, our world is vulnerable to this sort of silliness:

LONDON (Reuters) – A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In “Lolita,” a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter — but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting website.

It reminds me of a little girl I saw on TV once named Temptress. The shocked show host asked the girl’s mom if she knew the meaning of the name, and she didn’t. She just thought it sounded nice and had something to do with “pretty.”

Just like whoring has something to do with sleeping, I suppose.

Dem Voter Guide

In closing, I’d like to offer an olive branch to my Dem readers (all two of you!) by providing you with this handy-dandy Dem Voter Guide for the upcoming primaries.

Edwards supporters are free to give their votes either to Jimmy Carter #1 or Jimmy Carter #3. (hat-tip Doug Ross via What Bubba Knows)

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