07.26.10
Posted in Afghanistan, Journalism, Pakistan, War at 5:59 pm by Administrator
Pretty scummy in general to be leaking classified material and giving three major newspapers an multi-week look at all of it. That said, there’s a well-duh quality to much of what is there. Collateral casualties? Covert operations? These are new elements in war?
For BN’s money, the most noteworthy point of the whole set of documents is the reiteration of what we’ve all known all along: the Pakistani ISI is a pretty rotten organization.
At the risk of sounding ethnocentric or xenophobic, it’s still clear that our best allies in the current world war are the most western ones.
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05.24.10
Posted in Appeasement of rogues, Brazil, China, Corruption of the scientific world, Diciness of Western civilization's survival prospects, Diplomacy - ineffective and effective, Government spending, Iran, National Security, North Korea, Nuclear proliferation, Pakistan, South Korea, Turkey at 12:02 pm by Administrator
Caroline Glick’s Townhall column today demonstrates the interconnectedness of the various and sundry matters vexing us at present.
No one – not South Korea, the U.S. or any international body – is going to do anything substantive in response to the North Korean sinking of the Cheonon.
North Korea completed a successful fusion test recently, meaning it is preparing to add hydrogen bombs to its nuclear arsenal.
All the Turkey-Brazil deal with Iran did was demonstrate the ascendancy of all three countries. It changes nothing about the timeline for Iran being able to make nuclear bombs. That’s plural, and that timeline is measured in months.
Arms of the most lethal sort continue to make their way to Hizbollah in southern Lebanon.
China will build two more nucler reactors in Pakistan.
Why are those with the most to lose acting like their hands are tied in this scenario? Because China cannot be brought on board, not to knock it off with the nuclear projects with Pakistan, not with getting stern with North Korea, not with meaningful sanctions against Iran.
There is this little matter of its financing of the U.S.’s ever-growing debt. And that leads right back to Pennsylvania Avenue, to spending already in place, like the stimulus and socialist health care, as well as the spending in the pipeline, like the banking-reform bill that just passed the Senate, as well as this “infrastructure” monstrosity Congress wants to pass as soon as possible. Let us also not forget cap-and-trade, which refuses to die, no matter how badly “climate science” has been disgraced.
We’re on our own, folks.
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10.12.09
Posted in Pakistan at 1:46 pm by Administrator
On the heels of the weekend’s assault on Pakistan army headquarters comes this suicide bombing in a marketplace area near the Swat Valley. 41 dead at most recent count.
Wasn’t the Pak army supposed to have eradicated the Taliban from the Swat region?
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10.10.09
Posted in Pakistan, World War III at 6:21 pm by Administrator
. . . as the Taliban attacks Pakistan’s military headquarters. That’s right – headquarters. Still holding hostages as of this writing. Actively working on getting to the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Third major attack in Pakistan in a month.
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10.08.09
Posted in Afghanistan, American military, Pakistan, World War III, iraq at 5:00 pm by Administrator
The Washington Post, no organ of hawk policy, says in an unsigned editorial that after some of its editors met with Pakistani foreign ministry officials last week, they got a clear picture of just how distressed Pakistan is over TCM’s dithering about Afghanistan strategy.
This Joe Biden-led push for the ironically named “Pakistan First” approach fails to take into account the transnational threat the Taliban poses in that region. One must keep after al-Qaeda, but the Taliban would provide the host animal upon which the jihadist fleas would hitch a ride.
Paul at Powerline characterizes this whole chain of theaters that become “not the focus,” going back to Iraq, as a shell game.
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08.24.09
Posted in Ideology, North Korea, Pakistan at 4:52 pm by Administrator
TCM wants to turn 9/11 into a day of Aquarian hoo-ha.
UPDATE: This Lennox Yearwood, who organized the conference call to discuss it (other participants including Code Pink and ACORN), is a real humdinger.
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08.18.09
Posted in Culture, Educational dhimmitude, Pakistan, Religion & Spirituality, Spiritual implications of our life choices at 12:18 pm by Administrator
Dennis Prager on the moral cowardice of Yale University – the University Press and the administration – for not printing the Danish Mohammed cartoons – in a book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons.
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Posted in North Korea, Pakistan at 5:14 pm by Administrator
David Solway has a carefully reasoned and exquisitely written piece today at Pajamas Media. In fact, the only tinkering I might have done with it is extend its title, “The Absurdity of the West,” to include the phrase “in its Final Throes,” so as not to run the risk of giving readers the impression it was going to be about some fundamental absurdity of our civilizational heritage.
What it is actually about is the possibly fatal infection of Western civilization with this heretical view that the human being can be made unremittingly “nice.” As Solway points out in his last few paragraphs, we are now beyond having a margin for error that would cushion us from the consequences of such a basic misconception of our nature. Those who are not operating under such an illusion are in a position to sashay right in reality’s wide-open sliding-glass door. And see their will imposed.
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07.28.09
Posted in Culture war heroes, Ideology, Pakistan at 5:36 pm by Administrator
I guess you’ve noticed that lately I haven’t posted much beyond links to items about new developments on a number of fronts – health care, TCM’s exacerbation of the Skip Gates situation. It’s not for lack of such developments; they come down the pike hourly now. (A terror group based in North Carolina with one member still loose?)
What I’ve been looking at is the utter, grim predictability of our current juncture. I mean this on the level of TCM and the FHer-controlled Congress as currently composed, but also on a scale that involves looking back along a much longer timeline.
Where we find ourselves economically and politically in this country is the result of a gain in momentum much like that in the realm of nuclear proliferation. We can employ hindsight to spot precient portents in the designs of Iran and North Korea going back thirty years – really, more, in North Korea’s case. Likewise, we can see, upon examining what FDR was up to as far back as 1933, where that vector would lead without a sufficient check on its force. The signs became even more egregious in the mid-60s, with LBJ’s War on Poverty and Great Society measures. What keeps that from being more clear than it is as a harbinger of our present perilous state is the fact that LBJ at least still embodied the anti-Communism that tempered the domestically collectivist leanings of Truman and JFK. This, of course, made LBJ a square old warmonger in the minds of the radicals. Beginning in 1968, when LBJ bowed out of the scene and the rock-and-roll ethos thoroughly permeated all aspects of our culture, the radicals moved in to combine welfare-state collectivism with their own Aquarian peacenik notions of a world that could move beyond war. Between then and the 1972 election cycle, they went to law school and went to work for news media and generally came to “work within the system,” ala Saul Alinsky. Beginning that year, with the candidacy of George McGovern, the Democratic Party put forth radical, post-American candidates for President and seats on Capitol Hill pretty consistently. They ususally lost in presidential races, except in the cases of the victories of Carter and Clinton, when the GOP had committed some blunder that couldn’t help but drive the voting public away. The Democractic party became, as we here at BN emphasize every chance we get, the repository of freedom-hatred in the United States.
And, of course, in 2008, the FHers fielded their most radical slate to date, starting at the top with TCM. It was the perfect storm of political circumstances – a handsome, glib, fairly hip, fairly new candidate whose ethnic makeup providedthe ideal means for liberal Americans to assuage the racial guilt they had continued to impose on themselves decades after the civil rights movement had achieved victory. His attributes were so compelling that they easily put the kibbosh on any talk of his radical upbringing or radical associations since becoming an adult.
As many pundits have said – and you’re seeing more of this recently – he never overtly tried to conceal what he was about. He just knew that his confluence of qualities tailor-made for a celebrity-worshipping culture would relegate examination of his radicalism to the back burner.
And now the fruits of what we’ve chosen are upon us. A faux-stimulus bill that was really a porkfest, a budget that saddles the country with a debt level never seen, and government-owned car companies and banks.
Even if the rest of the agenda, which includes the real centerpieces of it all, cap-and-trade and socialist health care, never gets enacted, this nation is seriously damaged.
That’s the kicker, though. Cap-and-trade passed the House. It seems unlikely to pass the Senate, at least in Waxman-Markey form, but then again, the fact that hundreds of ostensibly sane grown-ups, elected by the ostensibly freedom-loving and well-informed public, have taken it as far as they have doesn’t speak well of the maturity level or the spiritual fortitude of our small-r republican form of self-government as we actually put it into practice. Freedom-Hater-style health care seems to be cracking up in the face of public opinion that gets more negative by the day, but let us not forget the determinatin of radicals to achieve their aims. Their means for doing so do not necessarily have to be Constitutional.
So we have a president without a partiotic bone in his body, whose vision has nothing to do with the United States of America as Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, or even Wilson, LBJ or Carter understood the concept. Our president and his ideological soulmates in leadership positions in Congress are deliberately wrecking the economy. They are so convinced of their Aquarian messianic powers that they won’t and can’t behave the way normal human beings who love freedom, dignity, common sense and civilization would when dealing with the likes of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hizbollah.
So I’ve been marinating in my alarm and disgust, and trying to act upon my inspiriations to be a force for the opposite of what’s prevailing in the society in which I live. I write this blog. I hopefully make music that ennobles those who listen to it. In my personal life, I strive to be a good husband, friend, citizen of my community and seeker after God, doing what I can to imbue my household with a sense of fun, safety and an atmosphere where virtues such as loyalty, integrity and commitment to clarity are upheld.
I’d like to see more signs than I do that we’re going to squeak by without major discomfort. I mean major, of the kind that Cubans experience daily. We’ve had way too many brushes with the unthinkable lately for me to sanguinely assume that to be the case.
I think what it boils down to is a race between the American people getting a clue – which is happening, much to my delight and relief – and the ability of our Freedom-Hating overlords to pull any more fast ones over on us.
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07.06.09
Posted in Basic conservative principles, Ideology, Pakistan, Sarah Palin at 1:26 pm by Administrator
. . . as he sits down with Putin and Medvedev. Pundit and Pundette on the continuity between his Columbia thesis and his current messianic quest for a no-nuke world, and Jake Tapper (by way of P and P) on his willingness to override Constitutional limits on his authority. No wonder he’s on the same side as Zelaya.
P and P, pour me another while you’re up, if you would, please.
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07.04.09
Posted in Eye-opening developments, Ideology, Pakistan at 8:32 pm by Administrator
A lengthy and important Neoneocon post about trying to reserve judgement of a set-in-stone degree about TCM, but finding, after a few months of truly alarming initiatives, that that is called for – and seeing liberal friends come to much the same conclusion and dealing with their buyers’ remorse.
She correctly points out that we conservative bloggers don’t, with this medium, reach nearly enough of those who need to be reached. It’s important for us to know we are a community based on a love of freedom, and that there are many of us, but it’s more important right now to find a way to reach those Americans who occasionally look up from the minutiae of their daily lives, work and amusements to exclaim, “Hey, I don’t like this (or that) development at all!” We need them on board if we are to resuscitate what those gathered in Philadelphia signed into being 233 years ago.
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Posted in Culture war heroes, Pakistan at 7:50 pm by Administrator
Another concept I’ve put forth that I’ve subjected to self-questioning, as much like hyperbole as it sounds on first encounter, is the notion that the United States of America may be a thing of the past. Alas, three Pajamas Media writers have Independence Day columns up today in which they wonder the same thing. You can find them here, here and here.
These writers share my concern that we have irretrievably lost sight of that which made this nation free, strong, righteous, inventive, vibrant and unique. Our enemies sense it. Our friends and allies seem to sense it as well, given the rightward direction of recent elections in Europe, South Korea and Israel. They’re starting to question the wisdom of sitting idly by and waiting for a hyperpower to have their backs. In fact, that kind of assumption on the part of the individual citizens of this country has a lot to do with what got us to our current distressing juncture.
Any road back will not be a matter of business as usual, of putting up the same old kinds of hopeful figures to be put through the same old political hoops. If the United States of America can be brought back from its flatline status, it will be by heroes and visionaries with entrails on fire.
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06.30.09
Posted in Barack Obama, Basketball, Law dhimmitude, Pakistan at 9:18 pm by Administrator
The Minnesota Supreme Court decides for Al Franken for the Senate seat. The program director for the failed Air America network and former Saturday Night Live writer puts the Freedom Haters over the top at 60.
The grim reality of totalitarianism is upon us. The internal front in the current world war just became a whole lot harder for the forces of freedom to wage battle on.
That doesn’t mean we give up.
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