Counterstrike
Reflections on 'Blowback' - Lee Harris
It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.
Iran: The wrong options on the table
- Spengler
The neo-conservatives "idealists" in the US had an easy, neat and plausible solution to the Middle East in the form of exporting democracy to the region. They were wrong. Similarly, the "realists", who, judging by the recent intelligence estimate on Iran, are in the ascendancy in the Bush administration, have a neat and easy solution - balance of power and deterrence. They are also wrong. There will not be a happy ending.
The abandonment of the Jews - Caroline Glick
The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.
In Praise of Carbon - John BrignellSuch delicious irony. How is that today's twisted eco-fascists have turned the source of all life into the destroyer of worlds?
Road to Bali - Peter FosterThe issue is not whether humanity will succumb to a "climate crisis," ... it's whether the authoritarian enemies of freedom (who rarely if ever recognize themselves as such) will succeed in using environmental hysteria to undermine capitalism and increase their Majesterium.
Television Networks Fade To Black As The U.S. Surge Succeeds In Iraq - Rich NoyesWinning the war? Who cares about that?
Football?s thin-skinned culture of complaint
The willingness of fans to take offence risks destroying the freedom to engage in no-holds-barred terrace banter.
Adapting Birdsong and finding gay footballers
This week, the long-awaited TV version of Faulks? war epic was trumped by a surprisingly sweet invective against footie fans.
Don?t replace the drug laws with therapy laws
Campaigners who claim they want to liberalise the drug laws are in fact demanding more state control over drug-users.
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Exposing a sham - February 1, 2012
So, is "multiculturalism" dead now?
This is a question that might have come to anyone's mind, while reading through news reports and commentary on the Shafia "honour killings." And I don't just mean after the verdict was announced on Sunday, but ...
Making cars visible - January 29, 2012
Thought for the day: The railways were built by robber barons, i.e. capitalists. The highway systems were built by politicians. Henry Ford was depending, from the beginning, on the government to supply roads and parking spaces for his vehicles.
T...
Harper at Davos - January 28, 2012
Apparently, we must go to Davos, Switzerland, to find
Aout what's on Stephen Harper's mind. This, anyway, is the impression given in Canadian media reports, which splashed his remarks to the World Economic Forum about yesterday as if they amounte...
Clint Eastwood Gives America a Pep Talk
Did the first Obama re-election ad run during the Super Bowl? You might have missed it since the president wasn't even mentioned. It was a Chrysler ad, although even that wasn?t obvious. Instead, more than 111 million viewers were greeted by that tough-talking American icon Clint Eastwood as he delivered what amounted to a locker room speech to the country. ?It's halftime in America,? he intoned, as the New York Giants and New England Patriots went in for their midgame break. He heralded the auto industry?s revival and said it is a model for a nation poised for a comeback. By the end of the stirring message, pollsters could probably have found a majority of the country ready to elect the city of Detroit president.
Time for QE3
Three and a half years into the Great Depression, just-inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged Americans to believe that ?the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.? Three and a half years into the worst recession since then, America is more threatened by complacency than fear.
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Stop the Masochistic InsanityThe violent response to the report of "Quranic abuse" isn't about faith, it's about intolerance.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 23, 2005, at 9:16 AM PT
Toward the end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, when music had already been banned and women excluded from Islamic rituals by being immured in their homes, and when new non-Quranic punishments—such as being buried alive—had been promulgated for homosexuals, an arcane point arose among the fierce Islamists who ran the place: Should paper bags also be haram, or forbidden? The point was an exquisitely delicate one. It was known that such bags were made from recycled paper. It had been alleged that old and torn copies of the Quran had been thrown, or must have been thrown, somewhere and sometime, into the vats of pulp. Was there, therefore, not a real risk that each paper bag might contain a profaned fragment of the divine word? The thought of toilet paper being made in this manner may have been too obscene even to consider, but in the event, paper bags were banned, just as most reading material had already been.
It's essential that we understand the deep irrationality that underlies all faith and that can take these fetishistic forms. That great religion expert Kenneth Woodward, who used to write with extreme lenience on such subjects as miracles (for Newsweek, as it happens), has now written a solemn article for the Wall Street Journal saying that Muslims revere the Quran, or "recitation," much, much more than Christians revere the Bible. The Bible is only a first draft of God's will, set down by mere mortals, whereas the Quran is the unmediated word of God himself. No wonder, then, that pious Muslims will hear of a Newsweek capsule story, assume it to be infallible, and immediately begin to kill and burn. What could be more understandable?
Well, first, most Muslims did not do any such thing, and those who did should not be indulged in the Wall Street Journal. Second, why are we to assume that God speaks only Arabic? Third, are these not the same crowds who believed that all the Jews were ordered to leave the World Trade Center just in time? The truth or otherwise of the story has precious little to do with it. If it had not been this "provocation," it would have been another (such as the claim that the United States sets off the car bombs in Baghdad to give itself an excuse to stick around).
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