Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.
I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating today.
One thing I guess I didn’t believe 17 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did, and we’ll be paying the price for a long time.
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: “An Afghan non-terrorist has non-terroristically injured seven people during a Paris knife attack that is definitely nothing to do with terrorism.” As Tim Blair writes, “It Was Just His Way of Saying Bonjour.”
San Diego: It scored a perfect 10 on Cornet’s scale. They found an SSID called SANfreewifi carrying out an ARP poisoning attack. Cornet estimates you had a 30% chance of connecting to at least a medium-risk WiFi access point at the time they studied the airport.
John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, AKA Orange County: It’s the airport to get to the happiest place on Earth but you will not be happy if you don’t use a VPN there and get hacked.
Houston Hobby Airport: This is the smaller airport to Houston Intercontinental, AK George H W Bush airport. Hobby has often has cheaper fares but that doesn’t mean y9ou should cheap out on your protection. Maybe just tether to your wireless carrier there.
Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers: Oh all those spring breakers flying through and looking to ‘gram. A feast of data for the hackers. You really want to make sure your using https there.
Newark Liberty International Airport: If you can hack it there you’ll hack it anywhere. It’s up to you to secure your ports!
Cellular data isn’t that expensive, provided you aren’t streaming video. And a trustworthy VPN can be had for a nominal monthly fee.
Without much fanfare, Obama has dramatically reversed his Iraq policy — sending thousands of troops back in the country after he declared the war over, engaging in ground combat despite initially promising that his strategy “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Well, they’re on foreign soil, and they’re fighting.
It would have been easier — and would have cost far fewer lives — if we had just stayed. But Obama had to have a campaign issue.
And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.
In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:
[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.
Plus:
Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:
Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.
We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.
Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:
As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.
After the latest hysteria dies down, this chapter in the ongoing psychodrama will be revealed for what it is: a fantasy of a wannabe coup that is not going to happen. The commentariat’s silly claim that the op-ed was “extraordinary” and “newsworthy” is laughable. There are hundreds of “senior officials” all throughout every presidency, no doubt more so in the outsider Trump’s, who are disgruntled. On any given day, any newspaper could root out a “senior official” to write anonymously anything it wished to fit a preconceived narrative. What is extraordinary is not an op-ed from some sort of a mad David Stockman taken to the woodshed or defrocked Don Regan losing a war with Nancy Reagan, but that the New York Times hunted down someone of #theResistance to create a hysteria that an unhinged Trump must be removed.
By the scale of past White House melodramas, this is no big deal. It is not as if an off-the radar, rogue band in the White House was caught selling arms to Iran and using the profits to fund resistance to Daniel Ortega’s Marxist regime in Nicaragua. The gossip about Trump’s mental processes are no more dramatic than the rumors were about a doddering Reagan in his second term, which later were trafficked by his own son, Ron Jr. (“Father had Alzheimer’s in office”). Trump is not, in Woodrow Wilson fashion, near comatose and locked up in a White House bedroom, while Melania takes over the country. His aides are not covering up the fact that Trump’s blood pressure is peaking at 250 over 150, or that some mornings he cannot get out of bed—as was true of FDR as he campaigned for a fourth term in 1944.
There’s no refuting VDH’s facts or reasoning, although you might take issue with his assertion that the hysteria will die down. Certain stories or tactics will come and go, but the hysteria isn’t going anywhere but up.
As Patrick Poole tweeted yesterday, with a screenshot of a few of LGBTQ+ Society of London’s Goldsmiths University’s tweets before they decided to make their account private after a massive amount of what the kids on Twitter call “being ratioed,” “When they tell you who they are, BELIEVE THEM:”
Believe it not, it gets worse from there, as Twitchy notes in the headline link.
TOM CLANCY WAS RIGHT: (Reposted from earlier today) And we’re living one of his scenarios right now. Not much is known for sure, but it’s obvious that the United States is the target of a major terrorist assault. There’s a lot of bloviation on the cable news channels, most of which will turn out to be wrong or misleading later. Here, for your consideration, are a few points to be taken from past experience:
The Fog of War: Nobody knows much right now. Many things that we think we know are likely to be wrong.
Overreaction is the Terrorist’s Friend: Even in major cases like this, the terrorist’s real weapon is fear and hysteria. Overreacting will play into their hands.
It’s Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new “Antiterrorism” legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats’ wish lists. They will be things that wouldn’t have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That’s what happened in 1996. Let’s not let it happen again.
Only One Antiterrorism Method Works: That’s punishing those behind it. The actual terrorists are hard to reach. But terrorism of this scale is always backed by governments. If they’re punished severely — and that means severely, not a bombed aspirin-factory but something that puts those behind it in the crosshairs — this kind of thing won’t happen again. That was the lesson of the Libyan bombing.
“Increased Security” Won’t Work. When you try to defend everything, you defend nothing. Airport security is a joke because it’s spread so thin that it can’t possibly stop people who are really serious. You can’t prevent terrorism by defensive measures; at most you can stop a few amateurs who can barely function. Note that the increased measures after TWA 800 (which wasn’t terrorism anyway, we’re told) didn’t prevent what appear to be coordinated hijackings. (Archie Bunker’s plan, in which each passenger is issued a gun on embarking, would have worked better). Deterrence works here, just as everywhere else. But you have to be serious about it.
For now, the terrorists have won. They’ve shut down the U.S. government, more or less. They’ve shut down air travel. They’re all over TV. But whether they really win depends on how we deal with this; hysterically, or like angry — but measured — adults.
In Venezuela, baby formula has become so expensive for families that some mothers have begun turning to other women for breast milk donations or even to nurse the babies directly.
President Nicolás Maduro’s government eliminated five zeros from the national currency in an attempt to combat wild inflation in Venezuela, but now a medium-size can of imported baby formula costs even more — 3,300 bolivares or about $33 at the black market exchange rate.
And finding formula to buy isn’t easy. It means going to a resale market because it is almost impossible to find in regular supermarkets or pharmacies.
Marianella Herrera Cuenca, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, heard during her visits to poor and middle-class homes about informal networks of women who were helping other mothers by supplying their children with breast milk when they couldn’t afford to purchase enough formula.
A study by Herrera Cuenca and others at the university into the lives of poor mothers in Venezuela — the results have not yet been released publicly — found that as many as three in 20 mothers are being helped to feed their babies by relatives or friends who supply breast milk.
Plus: “39 percent of Venezuelans kids in underprivileged neighborhoods are not breastfed all the way to the six-month mark — and many are then fed with the water used to cook rice or spaghetti, or with corn flour mixed with cow or goat milk, diets that could make them even more undernourished.”
Given his record, the silence about Farrakhan was nothing short of astonishing. The NOI has been appropriately labeled a hate group by both the ADL — which remains the nation’s primary monitor of anti-Semitism — as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing group that has often rebuked conservative groups for drawing attention to Islamist terrorism. But even the SPLC understands that a group that preaches contempt for whites and that singles out Jews for constant abuse should be treated as being beyond the pale.
For decades, Farrakhan has used his NOI pulpit to harp on the “evil” and “satanic” nature of Jews. Using rhetoric straight out of the traditional Nazi playbook, he has relentlessly peddled conspiracy theories about the “synagogue of Satan” oppressing African Americans and controlling the banks, the media, and the “slave trade.”
This ought to have consigned him to the margins of American life, but it hasn’t. His sympathizers may number in the hundreds of thousands. That’s been especially true since the “Million Man March” he organized in 1995, which aided his effort to portray the NOI’s main goal as empowering the black community rather than spreading hate. Representative Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), the deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is a former ardent supporter of Farrakhan, a fact he’s tried to cover up since he sought higher office. Members of the Black Congressional Caucus have also embraced Farrakhan.
They are not the only ones treating Farrakhan as a respected black leader rather than a pariah. Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour — the leaders of the Women’s March in January 2017 and organizers of mass anti-Trump “resistance” rallies — are both ardent supporters of Farrakhan.
As Franklin’s funeral showed, Farrakhan has been just as successful in winning support in the music world. Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan, who sang at the event, also took part in a documentary made by Farrakhan’s son about his father, and they played with him on a companion album set that celebrated the hatemonger’s prowess as an amateur violinist.
The key question is how and why someone with such extreme views can be treated as respected black leader.
BUT THE LEFT WANTS TO PRESENT THEMSELVES IN EXACTLY THAT WAY. BECAUSE THEY ARE DESPICABLE: End the Term ‘Resistance’ for Rosh HaShanah. They are cowardly curs playing at courage.
CORRECTION: EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH TRADITIONALLY-PUBLISHED, JOCKEYING FOR AWARDS SCIENCE FICTION. SCIENCE FICTION IS DOING FINE IN INDIE: Everything wrong with SF/F in one post. The vultures are fighting harder and harder over tinier and tinier scraps. And even they can’t convince themselves that they compare in any way, shape or form to the greats of the genre’s past. Hence the screaming. It’s akin to a child covering his ears and shrieking, so as not to hear the denial of his fantasies.
PSSSSSST, WHO’S GOING TO TELL THE LEFT THE OKAY SIGN THING WAS A 4CHAN TROLL? OR HAVE PEOPLE TRIED AND THEY REFUSE TO BELIEVE IT? AGAIN, IF YOU HEAR DOG WHISTLES, YOU ARE THE DOG: Zina Bash, Demystified.
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