I'm travelling through Poland, and will be unable to post for a couple of days.

Big bomb.

Check out Times on Line:

Nestled deep in George Bush’s latest $190 billion request to Congress for emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a tantalising little item that has received scant attention.

The US Department of Defence has asked for an additional $88 million to modify B2 stealth bombers so that they can carry a 30,000lb bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator (or MOP, in the disarming acronymic vernacular of the military).

Iran massive ordnance penetrator MOP

Welcome to America.

Check out the video that Disney made for the US Government, for free, to welcome visitors to the country.

I like it! It captures what the US is all about.

welcome Disney video State Department public diplomacy

The UN: a communist creation?

The UN, its creation, and its communist roots. Check it out here.

Alger Hiss State Department UN

The Anglosphere.

Read Christopher Hitchens' article on "how a shared tradition of ideas and values—not bloodlines—can be a force for liberty". Two great quotes:

Arthur Conan Doyle:

You Americans have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting. She is an Empire, and you will soon be an Empire also, and only then will you understand each other, and you will realize that you have only one real friend in the world.

On the UN: "...the UN—in its failure to confront the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur and in its abject refusal to enforce its own resolutions in the case of Iraq—is a prisoner of the “unilateralism” of France, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, China."

Anglosphere

Thank you!

I just discovered a "special" blog, Bill & Bob's Excellent Afghan Adventure. The author is right:

This is what it's all about. You can see a lot of the emotions of Afghanistan on their faces. Determination, friendliness, happiness, uncertainty, and trepidation are all there on one face or another. The children of Afghanistan are the future of Afghanistan, and when these children are educated and grown and live in an Islamic democratic society that works, there will be no home in Afghanistan for extremism. That is what will make our country and all the countries of the world safer.

It is not something that will be fixed overnight. And in the meantime there is more work for soldiers and police to do. Either we can do it, or our sons can do it for us. I know that I would prefer that my sons not have to do this.

Afghanistan Global war on terror GWOT military blog

Germany: A society without children is a society without a future.

Read the article in the Weekly Standard written by Steven Ozment, professor of history at Harvard, about Germany's plight.

In Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, native birth rates barely leave a single offspring behind to replace its two parents. As a result, large and growing numbers of foreign workers--predominately Bosnian, Turkish, and African Muslims--have immigrated to Western Europe to work the vacant, or unwanted, jobs native Europeans now lack the manpower to fill. The economic and social costs of European reluctance to be "fruitful and multiply," as the Bible puts it, are high and going higher for Europeans. Denmark's immigrant population is only 5 percent Muslim, yet that 5 percent receives 40 percent of the state welfare budget, and those families are just beginning to grow.

The civic and political costs promise to become even more frightening as immigrant populations
grow unchecked and assimilation to European languages and culture remains partial and increasingly tactical. Should there be successful Muslim proselytizing among German youth--many of whom do not share their elders' flight from the traditional family, religion, and work ethic--Germany could become, religiously if not yet politically, a mixed Muslim state within a quarter-century.

In Germany's large Muslim communities, speaking German and mastering the German Basic Law are proving to be effective tools not only for immigrant assimilation to German culture, but also for the ascendancy of immigrant culture over German. With the continuing growth of these communities, and the construction of mammoth mosques within them, will come increasing demands by the inhabitants to govern by sharia law rather than by German Basic Law.

One might have expected that Germans, who have been historically Europe's most theologically literate people, would have rediscovered and reembraced the lessons and resources of their own Catholic and Protestant heritage in coming to terms with European Islam. The misdeeds and shortcomings of those Christian churches in the 20th century do not merit their present oblivion. This is especially true in light of Christianity's vital historical contributions to European law, culture, and polity, without which Germans might still today be wandering across Germania in search of an Arminius.

Despite some countervailing evangelical straws in the wind, Germans today have hardened their agnosticism and atheism against established religion, apparently believing, counterintuitively, that the sermons of Luther and Bonhöffer are a less mighty fortress against Germany's gnawing problems (low native birth rates and bleak existentialism) than the old tin drums of Günter Grass and Jürgen Habermas. It is a good German question to ask today: Which of the two are more likely to assist new mothers with child-care and child-rearing and keep Germans' sunny-side up?

A year and a half ago, in a gripping interview with Die Zeit, Matthias Platzeck, Franz Müntefering's successor as Social Democratic party chairman, complained about the large numbers of Germans who no longer believe in the traditional German family, religion, and work ethic. One need only count late-20th-century Germany's historically low birth rates, scant church attendance, and mini-work-weeks with early retirement and cushy pensions, to see the gravity of Platzeck's complaint.

Germany demographics traditional German family Christianity Islam

80% of Afghans want the "foreign" troops to remain.

Here's the Toronto Sun's story:

If the CBC had known that a public opinion poll it co-sponsored in Afghanistan would turn out the way it did, you can be assured the CBC wouldn't have had anything to do with it.

Conducted by Environics, the poll probes the attitude of Afghans towards Canadian troops -- both in the Kandahar region, where our guys are fighting the Taliban, and throughout the country.

Only 15% of Afghans wanted Canadian troops to leave immediately; the greater proportion of 80% wanted them to remain until the Taliban was crushed.

You can read more about it here as well.

Canada Afghanistan poll foreign troops

Extreme makeover...

thanks to a joint Iraqi-US effort at the Yarmook Girls' School in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood. $200,000.00 in new roof, paint, etc., to help repair the school during the summer months.

Sadr City Yarmook Girls' School Iraq reconstruction

Canada and its smoking laws: Muslims can smoke, infidels cannot.

Read all of Mark Steyn's column. Here's an excerpt:

“The decline of the West,” wrote Samuel P Huntington, is still in the slow first phase, but at some point it might speed up dramatically.” What is the point at which it becomes irreversible? If you’re on a river heading over the falls, it’s not the moment when you plunge over the precipice and are dashed on the rocks below. That’s the great visual dividing line – Joseph Cotton in Niagara: one minute his boat’s horizontal, next it’s heading straight down. But the critical point happens way back upstream. It’s still flat, it’s still the river not the distant falls, but what you thought were the placid shallows has, in fact, a strong silent running current and, before you even know it, you’re being swept along.

Canada hookah-parlour Vancouver smoking

More on Poland's elections:

...from Finland: "Poland is still deeply divided. The voter turnout was the highest since the fall of communism. This time the urban middle classes and the Poles living abroad who want a closer relationship to the EU played a key role. ... This generation was tired of having to be ashamed of its politicians and has now hit back. Nonetheless, the fact remains that 45 percent of the population didn't vote."

And from Poland: "Over 80 percent of Poles support European integration. The government has the legitimation to act in this area. ... Over the past 14 months Poland has acquired a reputation for acting as a brakesman and even blocking joint EU initiatives for the sake of national interests. If we became the first to ratify the new treaty we would act as the engine that puts the treaty on a new track."

Poland elections EU Finland

More reaction from Germany...

regarding Poland's elections: "Europe is delighted by the decision of Polish voters to replace conservative Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski with the EU-friendy Donald Tusk. German commentators welcome the swing to the political center."

Poland elections Germany

Night and Day.

I went to see this show the other day - there were impressive kicks and maneuvres, though it would have been nice to have had some dancing to old melodic tangos:


Last night, I watched Top Hat for the umpteenth time. What grace and beauty. That's why it's ageless. Enjoy Cheek to Cheek:



tango fred astaire ginger rogers top hat

On Poland's elections:

From the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Online (by subscription only, so here are excerpts):

It was billed Poland's most important election in 18 years, and it didn't disappoint. Sunday's poll won't have the impact of the historic June 1989 vote that brought on communism's death throes in Europe. But it should resonate outside Poland.

The election immediately ends, after two years, the strange double act atop Polish politics. A surprise Civic Platform victory pushed Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski out, though his identical twin, President Lech Kaczynski, stays on.

But Civic Platform's triumph heralds more than a change of personalities. Voters handed power to economic liberals in the Thatcher mold. They also dumped two extremist parties from Parliament, giving lie to the oft-heard trope that Eastern Europe suffers from some incurable populist bug. And, in the highest voter turnout since 1989, young people with hazy memories of communism made themselves heard for the first time, bringing a welcome generational shift.

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Poland transitioned to the current post-post-communist era in 2005, when the main ruling left-wing party tainted by corruption was rudely bounced out of power. Donald Tusk, the conciliatory leader of Civic Platform who barely lost the 2005 presidential election, comes from the same rightish political camp as Law and Justice. In Sunday's election, Civil Platform and Law and Justice won three in four votes.

As we wrote two years ago, Mr. Tusk and the Kaczynskis were poised to build the Polish version of the "Reagan coalition" with security hawks, patriots and ardent free marketeers all under the same roof. These parties had promised to form a governing coalition then but true to national character, squabbled and turned into adversaries, probably for good. The Kaczynskis went on to regret their coalition with the extremists.

Mr. Tusk now has another opportunity to realize a new political era. His party doesn't need to shy away from remembering the traumas of Poland's recent past. But his success will depend far more on reviving its role as a pacesetter for economic transformation. In the early 1990s, its "shock therapy" reforms showed the world the surest path from communism to free market. Civic Platform can make Poland a liberal laboratory. The party wants to reduce the deficit and cap spending to prepare Poland for tax cuts and the euro and to skinny down its burgeoning state. If Mr. Tusk manages to implement a flat tax on personal and corporate income by 2009 -- following the example of many of its neighbors -- Poland will be the largest EU country with one.
*****
...mark Sunday as another triumph of representative democracy in this region. Though sometimes rambunctious, Poland is a model of vitality for Western Europe's more stodgy political systems. And if Mr. Tusk plays his cards right, it could yet become an economic model, as well.

Poland elections Tusk Civic Platform

Whoever Did This Knew What They Were Doing...

...according to California Fire Battalion Chief. "Fire officials are now stating that the Orange County Santiago fire was purposely set and there is speculation that other fires may have also been deliberate."

California fires arson

Laura Bush helped launch in 2006 the U.S.-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer Awareness and Research.

The First Lady launched the "Making It Our Business: Breast Cancer Awareness" Program in Dubai, and here are her remarks.

breast cancer awareness Laura Bush

A Polish-American disconnect?

Regarding elections in Poland:

Contrary to the opinions of voters in Europe, were it up to Polish American voters, based on their preferences shown in the Polish elections, Poland's Kaczynski Government would not only have stayed in power, it would have taken majority control of the Sejm and Senat.

Poland elections

Viva La Muerte. "Long live death".

This is the rallying cry of jihadist "suicide" terrorists.

Curiously, the important link between Islamist terror violence and repressed male sexuality remains widely unrecognized. Regarding female suicide bombers, even less is understood.
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What genuinely animates Islamist "suicide" terror is the tangibly ecstatic promise of personal salvation through sacred acts of killing. It is. then, this particular redemptive promise that blocks the way to American and Western success in counter-terrorism at home and abroad. From a military standpoint, it is an incomparable offer that can never be countered with bombs or with "boots on the ground."

Read the whole article here.

jihadist Islam suicide bomber

Women's rights: where are the Western feminists?

WARNING: The video below is SHOCKING and VERY DISTURBING.



Women Islam Human Rights Islamofascism

A German view:

of elections in Poland. Check out Der Spiegel here and here.

Poland elections Germany

The human bomb: The destructive principle inheres in us, whether we know it or not—this is the persistent message of the tragedians.

A MUST READ from André Glucksmann:

For half a century, we fashioned our peace, both external and internal, according to Sartre’s fragile axiom: “The atomic bomb is not available to just anyone; the crazy person [who unleashed Armageddon] would have to be a Hitler.”

Great confusion understandably resulted when this certainty disintegrated before our eyes, exploded by human bombs in Manhattan. An annihilating power is available today, or will soon be available, to just about anyone; the destructive will of an enemy without borders, equivalent to Nazi dreams, targets civilians: this combination amounts to a do-it-yourself Hitler kit. How can one make sense of, how can one neutralize, a human bomb?
*******
The worst of the storm has barely passed, and one is busy “moving on”—renovating dead-end roads, regilding the clocks of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. We turn away from reality and its truths, which are neither easy to live with nor pleasant to talk about. Before long, repression is complete.

Will repression overtake us again as we get further from the revelation of 9/11? “
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We have entered another world. The threat of a new Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. The human bomb claims the power to strike anywhere, by any means, at any time, spreading his nocturnal threat over the globe, invisible and thus unpredictable, clandestine and thus untraceable. The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. Without an accidental delay on the tracks—just a few minutes—the pulverization of two trains in Madrid, at the Atocha station, would have claimed 10,000 victims, three times more than in Manhattan. Then there was London. Whose turn is next? Each of us waits for the next explosion.
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In Iraq, then, what rages is a war of terror against civilians, not a war of independence against an occupying foreign army and its indigenous military supporters. Vietnam is far away; those who miss Woodstock forget that the world has changed in 40 years.
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The fight to avoid the Somalization of the planet is just beginning, and it will probably dominate the twenty-first century. If they resist the sirens of isolationism, Americans will learn from their mistakes. Europe will either resolve to help them or abandon itself to the care of the petro-czar Vladimir Putin, who stands ready to police the old continent, while preaching antiterrorist terrorism, with his devastation of Chechnya as a case in point. The borderless challenge of emancipated warriors allows us little leisure for procrastination.

Read the whole article.

André Glucksmann terrorism From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb war on terror

Islamofascism.

Christopher Hitchens' Defending Islamofascism - It's a valid term. Here's why.

Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

Islamofascism Christopher Hitchens

A President's heavy heart...

bestowing the Medal of Honor (posthumously) to Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy.

















Medal of Honor Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy hero

A clash of Polish civilizations?

? "The Polish elections broke down to a contest between two distinct regions of Poland occupied by people of distinct age groups, lifestyles and cultures."

Poland elections

Sin palabras...

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States were "not that terrible" when compared to attacks by the IRA in Britain.
"September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible," the Nobel Literature Prize winner told the leading Spanish daily El Pais.

"Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said in an interview published Sunday.

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing