Happy New Year! ! !
I’ll try to begin bloggin’ again shortly.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Mexico Threatens Suits Over Guard Patrols
I've been so delinquent in blogging due to apathy, sorry...but this just gets me. The Mexico govt has the audacity to threaten us with lawsuits for enforcing our laws and borders.
Look, we need to truly be compassionate about the whole immigration process. I mean, if you have children raised as Americans, we really shouldn't force them back to their 'home' country. But then again, before we do any reformation, we REALLY need to be able to seal up the border as much as possible.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Mexico said Tuesday that it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops on the border become directly involved in detaining migrants. Mexican border officials also said they worried that sending troops to heavily trafficked regions would push illegal migrants into more perilous areas of the U.S.-Mexican border to avoid detection.So because we make it more difficult for them to cross, they're threatening to sue us...
Look, we need to truly be compassionate about the whole immigration process. I mean, if you have children raised as Americans, we really shouldn't force them back to their 'home' country. But then again, before we do any reformation, we REALLY need to be able to seal up the border as much as possible.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Wafa Sultan
I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed reading in my local rag, The News Tribune, about Wafa Sultan and her lashing out at radical Islam. It was a joy. I’ve been waiting and waiting for moderate Muslims to unite and repudiate the Islamofacists. The rebuke has been few and far between for whatever reason.
The Religious Policeman has an excellent article on the moderate Muslim’s perspective. In addition, he links to MEMRI’s video of two of her interviews. Pls watch them. I have profound respect for her….and wish her health and happiness in face of what no doubt will be unrelenting harassment. She has true bravery.
The Religious Policeman has an excellent article on the moderate Muslim’s perspective. In addition, he links to MEMRI’s video of two of her interviews. Pls watch them. I have profound respect for her….and wish her health and happiness in face of what no doubt will be unrelenting harassment. She has true bravery.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
What are your thoughts today?
What are your thoughts these days? I’m not too moved by the Portgate issue, sorry to say. Both sides are on the roof tops bemoaning the thought of ‘foreign’ countries operating ports. When Sen. Boxer goes off, it’s rather laughable given the fact Chinese are operating two major ports on the West coast. I may not be 100% comfortable with foreign ownership, but let’s see what the impact truly is before we go off.
Victor D. Hanson’s Friday article once again is spot on:
Fear in the U.S. of Russian nukes made strange bedfellows during the Cold War, like our relationship with the shah of Iran, Franco, Somoza, and Pinochet. The logic was that such strongmen, unlike Communist thugs, would evolve eventually into constitutional governments, or, unlike elected socialists, they could at least be trusted not to turn their countries into satellites of the Soviet Union.
We paid a price for such realpolitik when the Berlin Wall fell. Few gave us the deserved thanks for bankrupting the Soviet empire, but we did get plenty of the blame for the mess left behind by third-world dictatorships.
Now Middle East autocracies use the same "it's either us or them" blackmail. They hope to survive the tide of democratization by showing off their antiterrorist plumage. The problem is that the defeat of terrorism — like that of global Communism — ultimately rests with promoting freedom, not authoritarianism.
Decades of supporting right-wing authoritarians did nothing to ameliorate a dysfunctional Middle East. Perhaps support for democratic reform will usher in Hamas in Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, something worse than Gen. Musharraf in Pakistan, and a shaky post-Saddam Hussein government in violence-torn Iraq, but what else is the United States to do?
About what we are doing now: We should keep supporting the process, but not necessarily the result; much less should we subsidize elected anti-Americans. The key is to keep a low profile and promote consensual government, but without bullying or grand moral pronouncements when the odious are elected.
We should praise the relatively free voting that ushered in Hamas, insist that they institutionalize the process that brought them to power, but under no circumstances give such terrorists any American money as long as they pledge to destroy Israel.
Allowing the autocratic Mr. Mubarak to go his own way without any more American largess may well empower the Muslim Brotherhood. Fine. Let the zealots talk all they want about bringing corruption-free government to Egypt at last, and hatred of the United States too. In response, America need only quietly explain that we no longer subsidize dictators — or terrorists who are elected to power through principled American support for democratic elections. I'm sure that after all the invective subsides, the Egyptians can sort out both our logic and idealism.
I’ve long questioned the support of Egypt as being foolish. I also am not fearful of the election results of Iraq and Palestine. Democracy has a way of balancing out differences. After all, we’ve always had a ‘cordual’ relationship with India while not always agreeing with their relationship with some of our adversaries.
Victor D. Hanson’s Friday article once again is spot on:
Fear in the U.S. of Russian nukes made strange bedfellows during the Cold War, like our relationship with the shah of Iran, Franco, Somoza, and Pinochet. The logic was that such strongmen, unlike Communist thugs, would evolve eventually into constitutional governments, or, unlike elected socialists, they could at least be trusted not to turn their countries into satellites of the Soviet Union.
We paid a price for such realpolitik when the Berlin Wall fell. Few gave us the deserved thanks for bankrupting the Soviet empire, but we did get plenty of the blame for the mess left behind by third-world dictatorships.
Now Middle East autocracies use the same "it's either us or them" blackmail. They hope to survive the tide of democratization by showing off their antiterrorist plumage. The problem is that the defeat of terrorism — like that of global Communism — ultimately rests with promoting freedom, not authoritarianism.
Decades of supporting right-wing authoritarians did nothing to ameliorate a dysfunctional Middle East. Perhaps support for democratic reform will usher in Hamas in Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, something worse than Gen. Musharraf in Pakistan, and a shaky post-Saddam Hussein government in violence-torn Iraq, but what else is the United States to do?
About what we are doing now: We should keep supporting the process, but not necessarily the result; much less should we subsidize elected anti-Americans. The key is to keep a low profile and promote consensual government, but without bullying or grand moral pronouncements when the odious are elected.
We should praise the relatively free voting that ushered in Hamas, insist that they institutionalize the process that brought them to power, but under no circumstances give such terrorists any American money as long as they pledge to destroy Israel.
Allowing the autocratic Mr. Mubarak to go his own way without any more American largess may well empower the Muslim Brotherhood. Fine. Let the zealots talk all they want about bringing corruption-free government to Egypt at last, and hatred of the United States too. In response, America need only quietly explain that we no longer subsidize dictators — or terrorists who are elected to power through principled American support for democratic elections. I'm sure that after all the invective subsides, the Egyptians can sort out both our logic and idealism.
I’ve long questioned the support of Egypt as being foolish. I also am not fearful of the election results of Iraq and Palestine. Democracy has a way of balancing out differences. After all, we’ve always had a ‘cordual’ relationship with India while not always agreeing with their relationship with some of our adversaries.
Monday, February 13, 2006
 | You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don�t enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com |
Saturday, February 04, 2006
VDH Post
Sorry for the absence, I’ve just had no inclination to blog. I’m finding most of life inane, especially politics. From Alito to ‘Domestic Spying’, all is just gak and I just don’t care…
Yet, I do feel the Indignation felt by printing of cartoons in Europe is hypocritical. It’s the old ‘do as I say, not as I do’ mentality. They can dish it out, but not take it . . .
Victor Hanson has yet again posted an insightful piece on the lunacy of the Middle East. I do feel the next focus of American ingenuity should be on Alternate Energy. It is vital for the survival of the Western beliefs. Otherwise, we will be consumed…
From VDH:
Public relations between the so-called West and the Islamic Middle East have reached a level of abject absurdity. Hamas, whose charter pledges the very destruction of Israel, comes to power only through American-inspired pressures to hold Western-style free elections on the West Bank. No one expected the elders of a New England township, but they were nevertheless somewhat amused that the result was right out of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Almost immediately, Hamas's newly elected, self-proclaimed officials issued a series of demands: Israel should change its flag; the Europeans and the Americans must continue to give its terrorists hundreds of millions of dollars in aid; there will be no retraction of its promises to destroy Israel.
Apparently, the West and Israel are not only to give to Hamas some breathing space ("a truce"), but also to subsidize it while it gets its second wind to renew the struggle to annihilate the Jewish state.
All this lunacy is understood only in a larger surreal landscape. Tibet is swallowed by China. Much of Greek Cyprus is gobbled up by Turkish forces. Germany is 10% smaller today than in 1945. Yet only in the Middle East is there even a term "occupied land," one that derived from the military defeat of an aggressive power.
Over a half-million Jews were forcibly cleansed from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and other Arab cities after the 1967 war; but only on the West Bank are there still refugees who lost their homes. Over a million people were butchered in Rwanda; thousands die each month in Darfur. The world snoozes. Yet less than 60 are killed in a running battle in Jenin, and suddenly the 1.5 million lost in Stalingrad and Leningrad are evoked as the moral objects of comparison, as the globe is lectured about "Jeningrad."
[…]
The architects of September 11, by general consent, hide somewhere on the Pakistani border. A recent American missile strike that killed a few of them was roundly condemned by the Pakistani government. Although a recipient of billions of dollars in American aid and debt relief, and admittedly harboring those responsible for 9/11, it castigates the U.S. for violating borders in pursuit of our deadly enemies who, while on Pakistani soil, boast of planning yet another mass murder of Americans.
Pakistan demands that America will cease such incursions — or else. The "else" apparently entails the threat either to give even greater latitude to terrorists, or to allow them to return to Afghanistan to destroy the nascent democracy in Kabul. American diplomats understandably would shudder at the thought of threatening nuclear Pakistan should there be another 9/11, this time organized by the very al Qaedists they now harbor.
The list of hypocrisies could be expanded. The locus classicus, of course, is bin Laden's fanciful fatwas. Oil pumped for $5 a barrel and sold for $70 is called stealing resources. Tens of millions of Muslims emigrating to the United States and Europe, while very few Westerners reside in the Middle East, is deemed "occupying our lands." Israel, the biblical home of the Jews, and subsequently claimed for centuries by Persians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Ottomans, and English is "occupied by crusader infidels" — as if the entire world is to accept that world history began only in the seventh century A.D.
[..]
So take the dependency on oil away from Europe and the United States, and the billions of petrodollars the world sends yearly to medieval regimes like Iran or Saudi Arabia, and the other five billion of us could, to be frank, fret little whether such self-pitying tribal and patriarchal societies wished to remain, well, tribal. There would be no money for Hezbollah, Wahhabi madrassas, Syrian assassination teams, or bought Western apologists.
The problem is not just a matter of the particular suppliers who happen to sell to the United States — after all, we get lots of our imported oil from Mexico, Canada, and Nigeria. Rather, we should worry about the insatiable American demand that results in tight global supply for everyone, leading to high prices and petrobillions in the hands of otherwise-failed societies who use this largess for nefarious activities from buying nukes to buying off deserved censure from the West, India, and China. If the Middle East gets a pass on its terrorist behavior from the rest of the world, ultimately that exemption can be traced back to the voracious American appetite for imported oil, and its effects on everything from global petroleum prices to the appeasement of Islamic fascism.
Without nuclear acquisition, a Pakistan or Iran would warrant little worry. It is no accident that top al Qaeda figures are either in Pakistan or Iran, assured that their immunity is won by reason that both of their hosts have vast oil reserves or nukes or both.
[…]
In the meantime, until we arrive at liberal and consensual governments that prove stable, there will be no real peace. And if an Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria obtains nuclear weapons, there will be eventually war on an unimaginable scale, predicated on the principle that the West will tolerate almost any imaginable horror to ensure that one of its cities is not nuked or made uninhabitable.
Yet if billions of petrodollars continue to pour into such traditional societies, as a result they will never do the hard political and economic work of building real societies. Instead their elites will obtain real nuclear weapons to threaten neighbors for even more concessions, as they buy support at home with the national prestige of an "Islamic bomb." Saddam almost grasped that: had he delayed his invasion of Kuwait five years until he resurrected his damaged nuclear program, Kuwait would now be an Iraqi province, and perhaps Saudi Arabia as well.
In the long-term, democratization in the framework of constitutional government has the best chance of bringing relief. But for the foreseeable future the United States and its allies must also ensure that Iran, and states like it, are not nuclear, and that we wean ourselves off a petroleum dependency — to save both ourselves, the addicts, and even our enemies, the dealers of the Middle East.
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