Bittersweet

Lets talk about talent

What is talent in the blogging world to you? For me it’s a post or a blog that goes that one step beyond special and speaks to me, challenges me and makes me feel a part of something bigger than myself.

Sometimes it’s something like this piece by mamamontezz that exudes a sexy coolness and reminds me to stop, close my eyes and take a breath. There’s more to life than politics, war and terror.

Sometimes its a thrill ride by the always ronin ” d “of mangled thoughts ( you better know your Shakespeare) and it can often be as simple as an elegant title from ” ilibcc ” also of mangled thoughts that makes you pause to remember the reasons why you believe in someone or something.

there’s the guy that makes me laugh .. alot.. over at Beautiful Atrocities

and the always elegant thought provoking writings on Wandering Mind and
The Little Red Blog and one of my favorite all time posts ever
by Bunker Mulligan

there’s La Shawn and Jared who speak to my spiritual side and show me that I’ve still much to learn.

……and then there’s Jericho

What to say about Mike Jericho, I’ll commence with the fussing and fawning and anyone who doesn’t like it can buggar off this is my blog.

First of all to me Mike is the big daddy of bloggers. When I first started blogging a friend of mine told me that he thought I was brave to be putting myself and my opinions out there for public scrutiny, he asked how I could do it. It’s pretty easy when someone like Mike takes you under their wing and makes you feel welcome even while picking on you! (feel free to go challenge his assessment that I’m evil)

Mike is talent straight up and he does exactly what any good writer is expected to do. He challenges your emotions and brings them to the forefront with his “in your face and that’s how it is style” There is without a doubt NOT a politically correct bone in his body. Prepare to be challenged back if you leave a nasty comment attacking his work.

In one reading he’s pushing your buttons and allowing you the right to be angry (rare in a world where only murders seem to be given that right) when he posts about the injustice of Islamic extremism or the stupidity of leftist moral relativism and propaganda.

Scroll down and you may find yourself in tears at his thoughtful outrage over the death of the children of Beslan, the kidnappings and murder of innocents and the sad injustice in the Sudan.

As I said he can make you angry, make you cry, make you think and at times his wicked sense of humor makes an appearance and you find yourself laughing out loud like an imbecile.

Once in awhile you might even get confronted with pictures of women whose breasts are so large, that there was once even a mini debate over who’s knees one of them would have to prop hers on when she started to grow older. ( no I’m not linking that you perverts go find it yourself)

Mike’s blog has gone through several changes since I first met him but it’s always remained the quality place to be on the net.
The addition of Aliyeh Tanner for a female perspective has proved to be a stroke of genius. She’s as gutsy as he is and so it works.

Mike’s strong character and sense of honor truly shine in his work. You get a good sense of who he is beyond the macho man ( never change) bravado, his affection for guns and his incessant addiction to layout change. (* oh snap)

He is a man in the classic strong sense of the word, that wants to make the world a better, safer and more just place and he is a man that truly loves, respects and honors his wife. I’m not certain he knew that last part was so very obvious but it is.

Ok Mike- it’s 4 am I have a flu and a fever and yet I still found time to suck up to you, so how’s about passing over that warrior poet template, the one with the girl .. pretty please or else I’ll be forced to put that picture you made of me on display. .. oops wait that would only embarrass me wouldn’t it? .. nevermind

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It seems that the cowardly Soldier attacker has been busted

A man has been arrested and charged in the alleged attack on a Central Ohio soldier at a local concert venue, NBC 4’s Monique Ming Laven reported.

Brent Cornwell, 28, of Blacklick, was arrested Tuesday night by Columbus police. He was charged with felonious assault Wednesday morning at a Delaware County Municipal Court video arraignment.

A judge set bond at $15,000. Cornwell was ordered to be on house arrest.

via Backcountry Conservative

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John Quincy Adams speaking about Russia and Jihad in 1830

As the essential principle of his faith is the subjugation of others by the sword; it is only by force, that his false doctrines can be dispelled, and his power annihilated.

They [The Russians] have been from time immemorial, in a state of almost perpetual war with the Tatars, and with their successors, the Ottoman conquerors of Constantinople.

It were an idle waste of time to trace the causes of each renewal of hostilities, during a succession of several centuries.

The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.

The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective.

The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force. Of Mahometan good faith, we have had memorable examples ourselves.

read it all

It’s interesting how these same words are as relevant today as when they were first written 174 years ago

“we have had memorable examples ourselves”

we certainly have

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Mullahs showing of Moore Film prompts disgust and outrage by Iranian citizens

Iranian Citizens Trash Fahrenheit 9/11

A few weeks ago, Mamoun Fandy, a media analyst, syndicated columnist and former professor of Arab Studies at Georgetown University, was interviewed on the subject of Michael Moore. Fandy stated that Iraqis who were familiar with the film found Moore’s portrayal of them to be exceedingly racist; he went on to say that Moore’s callousness to the plight of the Iraqi people and to the unbelievable human rights devastation in Iraq was outrageous.And that was only the verdict of the Iraqis.

I have also been asked to express the judgment of a number of Iranians who saw the film in Iran. They sent e-mails, faxes and even phoned me to ask me to report their reviews.

and here are some examples -

After 25 years of living in a virtual concentration camp, Iranians have become exceedingly socio-politically savvy. Moore’s anti-American propaganda did not attract anywhere near as many viewers as the Mullahs had hoped for. Tehran’s despots had hoped the film would challenge the Iranian people’s favourable notion of President Bush and promote John Kerry.But Iranians are too smart.

A group of 12 university students, for example, composed of both men and women who had seen the film, collectively wrote me and signed an e-mail which said: “Wow, this guy complains that Bush lied once. What would this windbag do if he lived here where our president lies to us once an hour?”

Another comment was: “This guy gets to publicly accuse Bush of lying and becomes famous and adored worldwide. We, here, complain about some decrepit and inconsequential government lackey and we not only go to prison but some of us get death sentences. He ought to thank his lucky stars he lives in a country where he’s allowed and even encouraged to be this obnoxious…”

Someone else quipped: “If he thinks that the U.S. is so bad, he’s welcome to trade places with us…since he’s so forgiving of brutal Middle Eastern dictators!”

Another young man said: “They are showing this film to erase from our minds the idea of America being the great liberator; maybe Americans themselves don’t appreciate what they have but we sure do!”

Another comment was: “Outside such pathetic ideological schemes, Moore’s fixation to reprimand and castigate his own society is so great that he is BLIND to the fact that our ancient land and society cannot be regarded and dealt with in the same fashion; therefore he has fallen pray to the Mullahs for whom he is nothing more than a tool to discard when his mission for them is completed.”

read the rest

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“Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death; don’t stand back and let them die. Don’t try to disclaim responsibily by saying you didn’t know about it. For God, who knows all hearts, knows yours, and He knows you knew! And He will reward everyone according to his deeds.”
Proverbs 24:11-12

Janjaweed target children at school

Sudan - The walls of the school at Kailek village were made of straw and sticks, so the bullets went right through them. As the children studied one morning about six months ago, armed Arabs on camels and horses attacked the village in Sudan’s Darfur region and surrounded the school. They raised their weapons and fired again and again, gunning down the trapped children and teachers. The most haunting memory of that terrible day is the sound of children screaming and weeping.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

- John Adams

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For quite awhile now President Bush has been warning that the rhetoric coming from the Kerry campaign and the MSM could and most likely would hurt the morale of the troops in Iraq.

Since Senator Kerry and our elite media can not bring themselves to heed the Presidents advice, perhaps they should try listening to the words of an Iraqi War Marine

Marine Lance Cpl. Lawrence Romack :

U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq are “terrified” at the prospect that Americans back home might elect John Kerry president, a Marine and Iraq veteran who is on his way back to the front lines said Monday.Asked how Kerry’s election would affect troop morale in the combat zone, Lance Cpl. Lawrence Romack told KWEL Midland, Texas, radio host Craig Anderson, “It would destroy it.”

“We’re pretty terrified of a John Kerry presidency,” added Romack, who served with the 1st Marine Tank Battalion in Iraq.

The Iraq war vet said he fears that most of the news coverage is being skewed to make the mission look like a failure in order to give the Kerry campaign a boost.
“What they’re trying to do is get Kerry into the White House, because they know he doesn’t want us to stay [in Iraq],” he told Anderson.

Asked if Americans back home were getting an accurate picture of what’s happening in the war, the Marine corporal said: “No, they’re not. It’s not even close. All the press wants to report is casualty counts. They don’t want to report the progress we’re making over there.”

Romack noted that in the southern part of the country, Iraqis welcomed U.S. troops when they set up an immunization programs for children, opened schools and began distributing food.
“Almost immediately people were lining up to get their kids shots,” he told Anderson.
Contrary to reports that the general population was too afraid to help ferret out insurgents, Romack said, “We had Iraqis pointing out former Baath Party members for us to arrest.”
When the KWEL host opened up the phone lines, a member of the 82nd Airborne who had returned from Iraq in March was first on the line.

He agreed with Cpl. Romack that media reports coming out of Iraq were often inaccurate - and sometimes even dangerous. “The news media - sometimes I felt like I had as much to fear from them as I did the Iraqis,” he complained.

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I have no desire to belittle the struggle for womens rights in my Country, however I do not believe there was ever a time when American Women were herded into soccer stadiums and shot in the head, or buried in the ground with only their heads sticking out so that they could be stoned to death.

There has never been a time in American history where any man on the street could legally beat another man’s wife because she made to much noise when she walked.

So I’m always a bit skeptical and annoyed when an American Radical Feminist gets on a rant about how to best view the struggle of women in the Middle East and Africa

I believe that these suffering women would consider it a good time to be only as oppressed as an American woman during the worst time for women in our history.

There should have been no doubt that the women of Afghanistan deserved freedom, but it seems not everyone would agree and I find this to be ignorance and arrogance in it’s most sickening form.

Duke Feminist Gives Thumbs Up To Taliban

Afghanistan’s Taliban was one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, and doubly so when it came to women’s rights. For years, various activists expressed concern about the situation of Afghan women and supported the efforts of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, to try and affect reform. So when the opportunity arose to overthrow that brutal regime, it was expected that RAWA activists would naturally back the insurrection.

However, it turned out these activists were more opposed to U.S. military intervention than they were in favor of getting rid of the Taliban, even if it meant that Afghanistan’s women remained in a state of perpetual slavery. And among those who subscribe to such views is Duke University Professor Miriam Cooke. Cooke is a Professor of Asian and African Languages and Literature and President of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, an international organization staunchly opposed to what they call on their website the “new imperialism,”and a disciple of the theory of post-colonialism. Cooke is also a strong proponent of “Islamic feminism.”

Islamic feminism holds that Muslim women should enact social change from within the confines of their own culture and religion. Western powers are viewed as having purely imperialistic designs and, as a result, their intervention is unwelcome. Such is the “logic” that caused Cooke, a longtime proponent of Muslim women writers, activists, and intellectuals, to oppose the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban, as well as the democratization of the Middle East.

I imagine that would be an easier task without the prospect of a noose being placed around your neck

During a talk at a forum on the future of Iraq at the John Hope Franklin Center on March 26th, 2003, Cooke rejected the liberation of Afghan women as a reason to go to war. Rather than being grateful for calling attention to the suffering of fellow women, she castigated First Lady Laura Bush for her radio address on behalf of the women of Afghanistan. Cooke accused Laura Bush of furthering “the imperial project in her highly gendered appeal to a world conscience.”

Of course, this never was the principal reason for overthrowing the Taliban, but rather a welcome side effect. As for the al-Qaeda terrorist training camps dotting the Afghanistan countryside, Cooke said nothing. She is equally silent today on the ten million Afghans who are now registered to vote - forty percent of them women - in the upcoming election.

In the same talk, Cooke mocked “the campaign to democratize the Middle East,” that she claimed, “deployed women as victims to save or to empower.” Empowering Muslim women would seem to be a good thing, but according to Cooke, if Western interests are involved, women’s liberation is no longer valid. Cooke opposed the war in Iraq for this very reason, fatalistically predicting that Iraqi women would end up “like the Shiite women who were driven out of their homes in southern Iraq in March, 1991, to enter refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and then went on to exilic futures outside the Middle East.”

So what exactly does Cooke have to offer to Muslim women as a concrete course of action to better their lives? It turns out, not much. Not only are her ideas vague and overly academic, all too often she falls back on concepts steeped in the terminology of Islamism. For instance, throughout her career, Cooke has written extensively about the idea of a “women’s jihad.”

During a lecture at Wellesley College in November, 2003, Cooke elaborated on this concept. This jihad, she maintained, is not for an “Islamist state,” but rather for “an Islamic community.” Subscribing to a pacifist model, she insisted that women’s role within the Islamic world should be “drawing attention to the consequences of war, not advocating violence.” Yet somewhat contradictorily, she also sanctioned, “the defense of the community when attacked by outsiders.” Which outsiders exactly she was referring to is unknown; but it’s a safe guess that American soldiers and their allies were involved.

Indeed, Israeli civilians appear to be fair game for this “women’s jihad.” When Wafa Idris, a 27-year old Palestinian woman, perpetrated a suicide bombing, killing an 80 year-old man in January, 2000, Cooke’s thesis about women and war were put to the test. But Cooke managed to justify this atrocity by falling back on her old “blame the imperialists” mindset. In typically garbled language, Cooke said, “for those of us who really are concerned with women’s role in the Arab public square, in the way in which women have been trying to empower themselves vis-a-vis the U.S., vis-a-vis old colonial powers, vis-a-vis their own men, the situation has become so desperate that now women’s participation in war is a mark of absolute hopelessness.”

Women like Miram Cooke are dangerous, she should not be allowed to teach and spread this ideology of stupidity to unsuspecting college students.

It’s just an idea but perhaps things wouldn’t be so hopeless if the women in places such as Afghanistan and Darfur knew that here on the other side of the world women supported their liberation without restrictions and by whatever means necessary along with as quickly as possible.

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