44 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. “That is the nature of the enemy.”
    Islam is the enemy.
    …-
    ““Just then, the baby’s body, rigged with explosives, detonated.”
    By Mona Charen
    The next to last assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto came on Dec. 13, when a man in the crowd got the former prime minister’s attention. He was holding a one-year-old baby — Bhutto said later she thought it was a girl — and tried to hand the child across the sea of bodies. Bhutto said, “He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother. I love babies. But the [streetlights] had already gone out and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.” So she turned away and ducked into her armored vehicle. Just then, the baby’s body, rigged with explosives, detonated.
    That is the nature of the enemy.”
    http://tinyurl.com/2q9cqz (national review)

  2. BIG BROTHER COMES TO WISCONSIN:
    YOU WILL BE FINGERPRINTED FOR PARKING VIOLATIONS
    http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?s=2776926
    “”f you’re ticketed by Green Bay police, you’ll get more than a fine. You’ll get fingerprinted, too. It’s a new way police are cracking down on crime.
    If you’re caught speeding or playing your music too loud, or other crimes for which you might receive a citation, Green Bay police officers will ask for your drivers license and your finger. You’ll be fingerprinted right there on the spot…. Police say it’s meant to protect you “”
    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
    Ahhhh yes, “identity theft” , big brother’s latest con to micro manage the population. Big brother has been salivating to get a biometric data base of western populations for the past decade. In this case there were only 5 cases of identity theft in all of Wisconsin and all related to credit card theft…I sincerely doubt if an “identity theif” would pay your fines and bills…what will a gullible public swallow next from these Orwellian propagandists?

  3. I am not sure if anyone has provided this link to an excellent article by Stanley Kurtz on the not well know history of Waziristan – essential for understanding what is happening in Pakistan.
    http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/article_print.asp?articleid=1507
    Also this article by John Burns gives a good overview of the corruption of the Bhutto’s…
    HOUSE OF GRAFT: Tracing the Bhutto Millions — A special report.; Bhutto Clan Leaves Trail of Corruption
    http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE5D91F30F93AA35752C0A96E958260

  4. SPEAKING OF BIG BROTHER AND HIS POLICE STATE:
    What’s Christmas shopping without a customer getting tasered by the cops for becoming emotional during a bad news phone call about her kids?
    Gotta whip those emotional rabbits back into line. I don’t care who you are, you get an ORDER from a 75 IQ affirmative action cop, you jump and jump now… or 40KV will straighten your insubordinate civilian ass right out!
    http://tinyurl.com/2842lo

  5. MSM takkiya; taking lessons from Muslim takkiya.
    Getting bail for aiding/abetting criminals is an outrage enough.
    MSM/CKNW disguises/cloaks the Iranian gangster/rapist as a “Persian”.
    …-
    Prison Guard Out on Bail
    VANCOUVER/CKNW(AM980) – A prison guard accused of helping a Persian gangster escape has been released from custody.
    Edwin Ticne has been granted bail. …-
    http://tinyurl.com/ywrnqg

  7. The French understand The Goreacle
    Gore Milks Cash Cow, Sego May Run Again: What France Is Reading
    Review by Jorg von Uthmann
    Enlarge Image/Details
    Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) — Climate-change skeptics are taking a beating these days even in France, where people long resisted the green creed.
    Paris bookstores brim with guidebooks — including one shaped like a toilet seat — that tell readers how to help save our planet. Yet the dissidents refuse to shut up, even now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize and the U.S. government has agreed to negotiate a new global-warming treaty by 2009.
    The most conspicuous doubter in France is Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, “Ma Verite Sur la Planete” (“My Truth About the Planet”), doesn’t mince words.
    He calls Gore a “crook” presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore’s French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.
    Allegre doesn’t deny that the climate has changed or that extreme weather has become more common. He instead emphasizes the local character of these phenomena.
    While the icecap of the North Pole is shrinking, the one covering Antarctica — or 92 percent of the Earth’s ice — is not, he says. Nor have Scandinavian glaciers receded, he says. To play down these differences by basing forecasts on a global average makes no sense to Allegre.
    He dismisses talk of renewable energies, such as wind or solar power, saying it would take a century for them to become a serious factor in meeting the world’s energy demands.
    3w.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aVvwX1RTVGr8&refer=muse

  8. One of Rick Richman’s customary contemplative pre-Shabbat postings:
    Religion and Irreligion
    IN THE MAIL: John Allen Paulos, “Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
    Paulos is the author of the best-selling “Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences,” and his new book seeks to add to the already burgeoning neo-atheist best-seller list.
    …Paulos…inadvertently demonstrates the inherent limitation of a purely materialistic or mathematical view of life. It lacks a soul.
    Leon Kass…may have best captured the immense knowledge of science and its inherent limitations in this passage about eating, from his book “The Hungry Soul”….And anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, psychology, and anthropology — even taken together — cannot produce the transformative understanding contained in a simple prayer before a meal. They describe only the visible world, where everything may appear to be just stuff.

  9. I worry most about montana,being my neighbour
    An assortment of seemingly crazy state driving laws exists and can be found easily across the Internet. Most of these examples are sourced from newspapers and come from the site http://www.dumblaws.com, whose editors did not respond to a call for comment. Here goes:
    In California, no vehicle without a driver may exceed 60 miles per hour.
    In Florida, if an elephant, goat or alligator is left tied to a parking meter, the parking fee has to be paid just as it would for a vehicle.
    In Montana, it is illegal to have a sheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperone.
    In Oregon, a door on a car may not be left open longer than necessary.
    In Tennessee, it is illegal shoot any game other than whales from a moving automobile.
    Good luck finding a whale in Tennessee

  10. “Her ties to the United States and her moderate Islamic faith are probably what killed her.
    During Bhutto’s terms as Prime Minister, she was accused of corruption by wealthy Pakistanis and the military, who viewed her as too pro-western. Yes, their was corruption during her administration but many of the stories are likely exaggerated.
    Ms. Bhutto shut down radical institutions and extradited Ramzi Yousef to the United States because of his ties to the first World Trade Center bombings and other crimes. Yousef had spent much time in the US and entered the country with a fake Iraqi passport. Yes, Virginia — Yousef had close ties to Iraq.”
    Great leaders are charming and charismatic, and people often buy the illusion they portray.
    Benazir Bhutto, in all her moderate Islamism, did not just help create the Taleban – she was the executive power that ensured it happened. We know how thats turned out.
    The corruption is not exxagerated. It is well known. She has a house in London with a helipad. These things dont come free. God knows how many billions shes pilfered. Her husband is especially famous for his corruption.
    Benazir’s ties to the US are laughable. She did study here, but she was also very much in Pakistan when the US did nothing to save her father’s life six years later despite the fact that they could have. If that wasnt enough,they openly, and publicly, embraced the man who killed her father – a military dictator who died with a US ambassador on his aircraft.
    She is no more a voice of reason than most other leaders in Pakistan. She just has a brand name. Someone else will step up. She did hand over Ramzi Youssef, but that had a lot to do with various trade deals that would have disappeared if she hadnt.
    Benazir Bhutto’s father began the process of Islamisizing Pakistan. He banned the alchohol, amongst the enforcement of other Islamic laws, and promoted the super religious General Zia, who would later execute him, in order to win an election. In fact he was initially arrested for trying to fix election results.
    This author needs to get his facts straight.
    In any event, Pakistan have lost an important, but not superb, leader.

  14. My view of Pakistan is that, as a social system, it is in an advanced state of dysfunctional collapse, a mode that is beyond redemption.
    I don’t think that there should be any assistance from the West. The state itself, as a social organization, has moved into a terminal collapse. It must be allowed to collapse. No propping it up.
    No elections, because the deep infrastructure isn’t democratic and having a superficial election will only delay what must happen. What must happen? A total collapse.
    I think that the old tribal system is corrupted beyond redemption; this old system is also entangled with modern industrial corruption. The result of such a contradictory mixture is a morass, a swamp of decay. There is no possibility of attaching, from the outside, a singular governing infrastructure to such a fetid entangled system.
    I think that Pakistan has to be left alone, to collapse this entangled mixture on its own. Then, its own people have to reject the decay, reject the lack of governance, and start to set up a modern system. It can’t be handed to them from the West. It can’t be done now, because the deep infrastructure is beyond redemption.
    This collapse will indeed cost many lives, but, it will be a short phase. Then, Pakistan can start to build itself from within.
    I recommend that the West – and indeed the world – stay out of Pakistan. Leave it collapse. Focus attention on Afghanistan, to prevent the collapsing Pakistanian tribal lords from moving into Afghanistan. Focus on Iraq’s gradual emergence into democracy and the development of a middle class. Stand back and allow Pakistan’s entangled systems to collapse, and only then, move in to assist them to develop a singular modern system.

  15. More on BB by Salim Mansur:
    “To be human is to be riddled with flaws, and the flaws of public figures are doubly magnified in the glare of never-ending publicity. Bhutto was no exception. She was indeed flawed.
    But the circumstances of her death amply illustrate the one characteristic of her tempestuous life — her indomitable courage in confronting her foes — for which she will be greatly missed by her people and her nation.
    Bhutto knew the lengths to which her enemies would go to deny her the public office she intuitively knew she could win in an open and fair election.
    As a young woman, she had witnessed her father removed by the military from his position as a popularly-elected prime minister, and then hanged in 1979.
    Bhutto knew well those who killed her father would one day come after her. But she was willing to stare them down and let the people of her country decide on the direction they wanted to go.
    She could have remained in exile, keeping alive her father’s memory, and the promise of constitutionally- based democratic rule for Pakistan that her stints as prime minister symbolized for a country torn by regional-sectarian divisions and heavy-handed military rule.
    But she chose to return even as her enemies were readying, and they almost eliminated her last October in a well-planned suicide bombing of her political rally in Karachi on the day of her arrival.
    It needed profound courage to speak so publicly and so eloquently, as Bhutto did, against the evil darkness of Islamist terror consuming her country.
    She was precise, cogent and determined in identifying her enemies and, moreover, in indicating her enemies were the same people driven by the same mad lust of a perverted and murderous ideology of radical Islamism, at war with the modern world of democracy and the most basic human rights.
    This is why Benazir Bhutto was killed by her enemies who are also the enemies of freedom and democracy everywhere.”
    Hard to believe some are trying to blame US and West in general for his attack. One caller talked about “global elites” executing 9/11, without ever identifying these elites, and some other idiot saying GWB stayed at school for minutes after being told of attack that day. Yeah, he should have run around the room screaming; yes, proof positive, as member of “world elite.” GWB and his buddies did 9/11. It was so clever of them to let AQ take the blame, by apparently using identical tactics.
    The killer who died killing BB did reduce the world by one dangerous idiot. Apparently, there are plenty of global village idiots remaining.

  18. Those who know nothing about Pakistan might find ETs view entirely laudable, but they are in fact ill-advised, bordering on ridiculous.
    “I don’t think that there should be any assistance from the West. The state itself, as a social organization, has moved into a terminal collapse. It must be allowed to collapse. No propping it up.
    No elections, because the deep infrastructure isn’t democratic and having a superficial election will only delay what must happen. What must happen? A total collapse.”
    There was once a nation called Afghanistan. It was propped up by communists. The communist pulled out. It collapsed. The rest is history. Factor in nuclear weapons into the equation, and it gets much worse. Pakistan as a failed state, with the state in total collapse will be nothing short of devastating, locally and globally. Right now the Pakistani economy is growing well, even though the country is plagued with violence. If it cant feed its own people they will leave. And India wont be looking on to taking the millions of refugees, focused as it is on economic growth. Neither will Iran or Afghanistan. And they have enough religious hotheads who would love nothing more than to bring about armageddon.
    The tribal system in Pakistan is not unlike that which was seen in India sixty years ago. If there is a lesson to be learnt from Democratic India, it is that political reforms can change overhaul fetid systems, albeit slower than one would like.
    The west doesnt have to hand anything to them. If they do some soul-searching and revert to the words of their much reverred “father of the nation” MA Jinnah, they will be able to find all the blue prints for a successful governing system. They know just as well as anyone else that till 60 years ago they were a part of India, and if India can build up the institutions it has, flawed tho they maybe, then so can Pakistan.
    Staying out of Pakistan is not an option. It has a lot of infrastructure that could be devastating in the wrong hands.

  20. Actually most Pakistanis identify themselves as Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans, Mohajirs (Urdu-speaking immigrants from India as a result of partition) and Baluchs. A key problem of the country is a very weak sense of national indentity, a gap that fundamentalist Islam–very weak when Pakistan was created in 1947, including what is now Bangladesh (Bengalis)–has been able to exploit.
    Fundamentalist Islam seized an opening when Gen. Zia pulled a coup against Benazir’s father, Zulfikar, in 1975. Zia started to emphasize the Islamic nature of the state in an effort to gain popular support by contrast with the elder Bhutto’s essentially secular socialism.
    Mark
    Ottawa

  21. Gary C. Gambill, Islamist Groups in Lebanon
    Although Lebanon’s ethno-sectarian demography is manifestly unsuitable for the establishment of an Islamic state, the salience of militant Islamist movements in this tiny Mediterranean country has few parallels. Above and beyond the regional conditions fueling Islamic revivalism, Lebanon’s weak state, acute socioeconomic and political inequities, and experience of pervasive external intervention converged to create an unusually permissive environment for Islamists. Under these circumstances, radical Islamism has become a powerful instrument of communitarian social mobilization and an effective vehicle for drawing resources from the outside world.

  22. Bhutto’s Uncle Yasser, yessir!
    …-
    Egyptian magazine confirms Arafat was behind Munich Olympic and other murders [Tom Gross]
    The latest edition of the Egyptian magazine Al-Ahram Al-Arabi has confirmed what many in the West have suspected for a long time: that Yasser Arafat personally directed the Black September terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for the 1971 murder of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi at-Tal, the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and other atrocities.
    The Cairo newspaper quotes a new book by PLO leader Marwan Kanafani, “Years of Hope,” to be published soon.
    There have also long been claims that Arafat’s longtime deputy Mahmoud Abbas, who is still widely known in the Middle East by his military name Abu Mazen, was very closely involved in the Munich Olympics massacre. For more, see here.) …-
    http://tinyurl.com/2hdr4u (national review)

  23. Trouble is, both careful and ET are right. The situation in Pakistan is malignant now, but there is still nuclear deterrent present. As Pakistan fails, surely the risk of AQ nuke acquisition increases beyond deterrable measures. Then what?
    If we stay out, we leave the ground open for AQ instrusion. If West intervenes (or anti-intervenes, by withdrawing aid), then we are the big bad imperialists. That area of the world is a cauldron of guns, drugs, espionage, religious hysteria, shocking poverty and brutality. We can’t make a real difference, frankly, without inflicting more misery on the people, before we can help them.
    Unless and until we get interested parties out that area (China, US, Russia, Iran, India to name a few), Islamofascism will flourish in the resultant vacuum of authority.
    I agree Pakistan’s institutions must be modernized, but something has to be done about the lawless border region right now. I hate say this, but, we’ll have to go big or go home and tighten our chinstraps.
    “It’s simple but it’s hard.” (Les Brown talking about decision-making)

  24. I’m already salivating over this one. Caroline Glick has a book coming out in a few months:
    The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad – With Introduction by R. James Woolsey.
    Due to be published in March 2008 by Gefen Publishers.

  25. Just a heads up that Warren Kinsella has SDA in his crosshairs again in the National Post’s Full Comment and on his blog.

  26. Has any one fading Liberal coffee-fetcher spent so much time on a nobody from Saskatchewan in the history of mankind?
    Heh.
    Not that it counts for much. This month, a link from warrenkinsella.com sent me 0.2 % of my traffic.

  28. I agree with Shamrock about the border region with Afghanistan; that’s a role for Afghanistan.
    I think that India and Pakistan, as social structures, are/were very different and can’t be compared. I’m also suggesting that Afghanistan and Pakistan are very different and can’t be compared.
    Afghanistan was pure tribalism, operating as a system of isolate villages/tribes, subsisting in a peasant agriculture. No modernization at all. Therefore, you can more easily move the population out of tribalism into modernization. I say ‘more easily’ only in comparison to Pakistan.
    Pakistan is a morass of two contradictory systems that, naturally, cannot interact: tribalism and industrialism. Pakistan has artificially entangled the two systems. The result is, a gangreneous morass. Neither system can operate robustly; both systems have moved into a degenerate state. How do you both disentangle them and start one, and only one, on a healthy path?
    I don’t see any tactic of doing it, other than to let the entangled system, as it is now, implode. What will be the result of implosion? Several steps. The first is the breakdown of the society as a service system. Since neither tribalism nor modernization is working, the system collapses.
    Some will leave, but I think that more people will start to insist on reform. The reason why more people will insist on reform rather than leaving as refugees is because of the already existent infrastructure of industrialism.
    When they start to demand and work on reform of the political and social infrastructure, that’s when the West can move in to help. Not before.
    Why note before? Because Pakistan, unlike Afghanistan, is an entangled mess of two political systems: tribalism and industrialism. If the West helps Pakistan now, both systems will continue – and the mess will continue.
    You have to allow the country to sink further, to destroy this entangled structure, enable only one system to survive…and then, move in to help.

  29. What killed Bhutto?
    […]
    “First Bhutto was reported killed from bullets, then from shrapnel. Now from concussion. Captain Ed notices that Bhutto was the only person in the car to sustain injuries. Some of Bhutto’s supporters are refusing to believe this version of events.
    NDTV says some Bhutto supporters have denounced the finding as a “pack of lies”.:
    Benazir peeped out of the sunroof of the SUV…”
    http://tinyurl.com/22tz37 (belmont club)
    Muslim takkiya:
    Here is Bhutto not “peeped out of the sunroof of the SUV”:
    http://tinyurl.com/2avhu3

  31. Has any one fading Liberal coffee-fetcher spent so much time on a nobody from Saskatchewan in the history of mankind?
    Heh.
    Not that it counts for much. This month, a link from warrenkinsella.com sent me 0.2 % of my traffic.
    A certain kind of person goes through life achieving a modicum of material success by seeking the “smarmiest and most obsequious” prize from his employer, whether a prime minister or a newspaper, e.g. “They turn to newspapers (for analysis, and detail)” in the face of historically declining newspaper readership, and simultaneously engaging in viciously adolescent name-calling on his own website while bowdlerizing it in his cross-posting on the newspaper’s site.
    When you’ve lost the battle of wits, start with the “brain-dead” smears. How very, er, liberal apparently.

  35. Just went over and had a look at Warren Kinsella’s site. What a self centered ego “testical” POS. I think if he had to do a face to face meet with anyone he regularly craps on he would turn into a quivering pile of goo. A totally gutless little weasel .

  36. “Bhutto said Musharraf should be held complicit in her death due to his refusal to meet safety requests she had made.”
    Maybe it’s just me but I think if you have survived a recent assassination attempt and you have powerful enemies who want to do you in, it’s a tad foolhardy to ride through the massive crowds with your head protruding through the sunroof of a car.

  40. ET, I agree with a lot of your analysis of Pakistan and it’s tribalism.
    You probably have just forgotten that Pakistan has NUCLEAR WEAPONS and cannot be left to its own devices to rebuild itself.
    That is exactly what the western nations are so concerned about. If Pakistan was a only bunch of warring tribes within their own state, then let them fight it out.
    But they have the weapons and if the country and its armed forces falls into the hands of the blood-thirsty religious radicals, India as well as many other countries, could be in great danger.
    North American is safe as long as they only have donkeys as their main delivery system.

  41. If someone goes to kinsella’s site, please comment an outline here. One sentence would probably do it. Saves the rest of us the nausea.

  43. cal2: In Montana, it is illegal to have a sheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperone.
    Reminds me of the old joke: What are the three biggest lies in Arkansas?
    1 – Honestly, officer, that’s just water in the jug.
    2 – Of course my sister’s a virgin.
    3 – I was just helpin’ that pig over the fence.

  44. I agree with ET. The west cannot spend the next fifty years being a global policeman in islamic countries. As long as pakistans nuclear weapons cannot reach the west, then let the Islamic nations worry about it. We are in Afganistan and Iraq, that is enough, although I support both these wars(?) at some point we have to just say no more.

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