Marching Toward Hell

Michael Scheuer's new book Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq came in the mail today, I've read the first 20 pages or so, it looks to be a very good read. The man is the Merle Haggard of foreign policy.

Meaningless op-eds masquerading as human interest stories

From the CNN.com article: Muslim women: My headscarf is not a threat after telling a story about rudeness at Walmart while wearing a hijab (which they put in quotation marks for some reason).

Such stories are not altogether uncommon for Muslim Americans.

Wow, not altogether uncommon! I guess it's not unlike a problem of variable merit. There's also the annoying use of the term Muslim American (implying ethnicity or nationality) instead of American Muslim.

The rest of the story is of dubious logic and follows the same pattern as all other CNN.com stories about group identity, which is

1. An offensive incident
2. A quote of data after some seemingly arbitrary date
3. Quote from expert
4. Further interview with subject, telling everyone that he/she wants to be different while remaining the same.
   

Nuking Mecca would be counterproductive and silly

I listened to the Republican Debate from Sunday and heard Tom Tancredo repeat his strategy of nuking Mecca if terrorists launch another attack on the United States. It's just silly. Everyone is sold on the notion that religions are "of" something, like peace or justice.

Nuking Mecca is a way of fighting on technicalities and hoping that the other side believes in them as much as we would like them to. It's like trying to fight LSD use by threatening to build a Starbucks on Jim Morrison's gravesite.

Saturday link roundup

• A nice how-to on HDR photography
• Survivorman is blogging again!
• The greatest living American you've never heard of.
• The world's stupidest Fatwas, my favorite -

  Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.

  The injuction against the Polio vaccine is scary though.
• It seems that tires will outlive us all
• More on the Kathryn Johnson case
• A Slate article on the ethanol haters, of which I am one. He leaves out the fact that creating ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
  

Recommended reading for Tuesday

• Londonistan Calling - Hitchens goes back to London. Choice quote:

  He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked..

• The Crime Against Kansas - Why isn't this sort of thing in more history classes? You might hear about John Brown's raid, but never about any clashes
  

The most illuminating presentation I've seen in years

Via Zen Pundit, it's Col Patrick Lang's Lecture on Islam. Purely informative, insightful, historical, well presented, and doesn't run afoul of the Electric Shaver of Peace fallacy. I recommend it to everyone. It's about 90 minutes worth of video, I just let it play while I worked on other stuff.

Friday night round up

• Hansellman on graphing - the data "wants" to be presented in a certain way
• Hansellman on a family backup strategy - for all of those of us who give out free tech support to family and friends
• Perceptions of America and Iran in der Spiegel
• Der Spiegel again - Muslim integration into Europe
  

Sunday round up

• A good read on economics and statistics
• Islam and Christianity - IBM and Microsoft - Embrace and Extend
• Resiliancy, and how to measure it
  

Quick tab clearing roundup

• The Sunni-Shia Quiz - I got a 100!
• Private solutions to Global Warming
• Ron Paul is running for president! Finally a good republican.
• Engineering Quotes
• Woman Fired For Writing About Avoiding Work
  

Thursday rapid fire

• Hitchens reviews Stein - personally I don't think the demographic argument carries much weight - look at the performance of Japan vs China and Germany vs Russia in WWII. A productive culture beats a backward one in a life or death struggle. It's an interesting read though. To clarify - the reason that Japan and Germany lost was American material and military support. While they could die bravely, that doesn't lead to many wins.
• Toddler's Temper Ousts Family From Plane -

  She was removed because "she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn't get in her seat" during boarding, Graham-Weaver said.

• Police in Tijuana Issued Sling Shots -

  The police department has issued about 60 slingshots to officers in the violent border city of Tijuana, where soldiers confiscated police weapons two weeks ago on allegations of collusion with drug traffickers.

  Yet the war on drugs continues. This time for sure!
  
• Battery Breakthrough - Well worth reading. If true, this changes American society for the better in ten years or less. Sadly, most scientific breakthroughs tend to be either false or meaningless
• Diane Feinstein and conflicts of interest
• Winning the battle for freedom - RTWT - from the founder of Whole Foods no less.
  

Everyone should read this

Dan Habbot over at TDAXP has the single most informative article on the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam I've ever read.

Thoughts on today

Another terror plot is centered in London and Pakistan, as were the 7/7 plot.

I wonder if the prime focus of radical Islam is not the Arab word but Central Asia. Perhaps Arab culture, for good or ill, is too strongly ingrained to be replaced by a pure (messianic cult) version of Islam. The Central Asian states, might be more pliable due to 70 years of Soviet purges weakening the societies.

Just a thought.

Freedom lives in syndication

South Park's "Super Best Friends" is still airing in syndication, and still shows Mohammed.

Things that annoy me about our modern world

At the moment, it's the politically correct West, and their treatment of Islam. I recently came across an ad for the movie Islam: What the West Needs to Know.

I read the site and found it irritating. The phrase "religion of peace" has been repeated often enough to be ridiculous, and it is a patently ludicrous assumption. But the opposite of a falsehood is not necessarily the truth, it's usually another falsehood, as it is in this case.

Plainly put, saying a religion is a religion of peace is about as meaningful as saying the Norelco Bodygroom is an electric shaver of peace; it's a term that doesn't apply. Religions aren't inherently anything, it's all in the practice, and that varies with people location and time. If the practice at a given point in time and place is warlike or placid, then so be it. It's a meaningless statement. It's like imputing anti-semitism to vegetarians due to Hitler's aversion to meat.

Quick Sunday night round up

• Drones over Los Angeles
• Unusual, but proven business ideas
• Smart Traffic Systems, in Georgia no less.
• Photographing Urban Landscapes
• A poll of the Muslim countries, one thing that jumped out was

  One of the more surprising findings in the poll was that solid majorities in Indonesia (65 percent), Turkey (59 percent), Egypt (59 percent) and Jordan (53 percent) said they do not believe the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States were carried out by groups of Arabs.

  which is scary, scary stuff.
  
• MSNBC has a nice catch-all page on Islam in Europe.
• Wikipedia entry of the day: Charles Martel
• Wildcats in Buckhead
  

Nomenclature

Over the past week the term "Prophet Mohammed" has come into existence. Weird. It used to just be Mohammed, with no title.

In related news, here is a fine editorial by Andrew Sullivan on the topic, and here is a post about the media as "a proper Victorian gentleman" which is well worth reading Also marginally related, Fareed Zakaria on the decline of Europe.

I forgot about that one

Andrew Sullivan remembers that South Park portrayed Mohammed in an episode a few years ago. And no on cared. What a scam this all is.

And Kudos to the Weekly Standard for publishing the photos. The gutlessness of the American press on this one has been quite sad. The article is well worth reading as well. Quick quote:

None of these anguished reactions actually occurred, of course--no pogroms, no renunciation of U.S. and E.U. aid, no hiccup in the Iranian nuclear program. Because there was no real "anguish." In truth, by December nothing much had happened because of the cartoons.

So a group of Danish imams took off for the Middle East to try to cause trouble. To do this, they added three cartoons to their roadshow that they seem to have ginned up--crude propaganda pieces that would be guaranteed to stir a mob, just in case the original illustrations didn't produce the effect they were after.

The militants' trip was a success. Various extremist groups and terror-connected Islamists decided to use the cartoons as yet another weapon in the radical Islamist attempt to intimidate the West, and various Arab dictatorships saw a political opportunity in starting some anti-European riots.

And you can understand their calculation. Since 9/11, the West has gone on offense against radical Islamists and Middle Eastern dictatorships. That assault has apparently been more threatening to them than many of us realized. From Iraq to Palestine to Iran, from Islamist enemies of liberty to dictatorial opponents of democracy, those who are threatened by our effort to help liberalize and civilize the Middle East are fighting back with whatever weapons are at hand, and with whatever invented excuses and propaganda ploys they can discover.

There's not much more to say.....

Everything that needs to written about the current green line conflict (to use hip internationalist jargon) in Denmark has been written. I suppose the underlying theme is the need for people to participate in a society to a strong degree.

It is a good display of spine by the Danes; I imagine we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future as multiculturalism wears thin for the Europeans, and diminishing marginal returns (as it becomes easier to move about that part of the world) on immigration.

Interesting

Holland might ban the burqua. Here is a link to Georgia's largely unenforced mask law, which would ban it here as well.

Quick round up

• An article from Newsweek which has some interesting stats on American feelings on abortion.
  
• Saudi teacher sentenced to 750(!) lashes for blasphemy. Among other things he was charged with "defending Jews". No one seems to have adopted him as the new Scopes.
• "Ban Asian marriages of cousins, says MP"
  

  The report, commissioned by Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide.

  ...

  "I think this should be applied to the Asian community. They must look outside the family for husbands and wives for their young people."

  It is estimated that more than 55 per cent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, resulting in an increasing rate of genetic defects and high rates of infant mortality. The likelihood of unrelated couples having the same variant genes that cause recessive disorders are estimated to be 100-1. Between first cousins, the odds increase to as much as one in eight.

  55%!?

• This is way cool.