by

News/Politics 9-28-12

What’s news today?

Two things are bothering me this morning.

The first one.

It’s time to go. Like now. You can’t put soldiers in harms way and tie their hands like this. Have we learned nothing?

From Michael Yon Combat Journalist/Former Green Beret

“Yesterday a concerned father forwarded to me a letter from his son in Afghanistan. I confirmed authenticity, and republish with permission:

“I am fed up. I cannot believe the lack of attention the recent changes in this war is receiving by the media or the country. I think I saw one thing on CNN about the following subject, but I had to dig extensively to find it. The purpose of this letter is to let you know of the garbage that our soldiers are going through right now. With this knowledge, I hope that you take action by writing your congressmen.”

“Do not buy into what the some media outlets have already said about this. Casually saying that this is a frequent occurrence is false, and is an attempt to downplay the major ramifications for these decisions. We have never been so restricted in defending ourselves as we have now. This is not just a stand down.”

Read more here

And this one.

Really, who do they think they’re kidding? OK, I get that technically it’s a violation, but really?  If not for the film I doubt they’d bother.

From CNN

“Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man allegedly behind the inflammatory film “Innocence of Muslims,” was ordered held without bail Thursday after being arrested in California and accused of violating his probation.

Handcuffed and chained at the waist, Nakoula appeared in a federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday for a preliminary bail hearing.”

“Prosecutors asked that Nakoula be sentenced to 24 months in prison for the probation violations. His attorney, meanwhile, countered that the judge should set bail at $10,000.”

Read more here

I guess there’s more than one way to silence him, and of course to placate the rioting hordes as well.

Yeah, that’ll work……

41 thoughts on “News/Politics 9-28-12”

  1. I’m not sure how many people who condemn this film so vigorously remember how badly Christians are treat in Muslim countries. I’m not saying this guy is a model Christian but you can kind of understand why he dislikes Muhammad.

    Like

  3. Guys

    You do realize that “Sam Bacile” was on probation for fraud emanating from his use of the internet for scams and that part of his probation was staying off the internet? You are not defending a Christian role model standing up to the barbarian horde. You are not defending free speech in defending him.

    Ricky, your wife can watch the trailer on you tube. Separate q for you Ricky, why Poland, Chile and Hong Kong? You do realize that Poland as part of the EU has more liberal laws than where you currently live, right? Chile has recently approved gay marriage. And Hong Kong is owned by China. So, what is your thinking process?

    Like

  4. Interesting question, CB, and one that I ponder each day. I am looking for:

    1 A country where Christianity is strong and/or growing;

    2 A country where economic freedom is strong and/or growing; and

    3 A country not strongly influenced by the poisonous popular culture of the US (English-speaking countries get marked down).

    Poland, Chile and Hong Kong all graded higher than the US in the recent economic freedom report by a Canadian Foundation. The US rating in this area is plummeting like a rock. Catholicism has a tremendous influence in Poland and Chile and Christianity is alive and well (although a minority religion) in Hong Kong. I see the influence of US popular culture being relatively weak in these three countries.

    Like

  7. The really appalling item among AJ’as concerns is the letter from our soldier in Afghanistan to his father. If what the soldier says is true, namely that we have stopped fighting in Afghanistan due to political pressure on the military, then why are the troops staying there until the end of 2014?

    On the maker of the anti-Islam film trailer, his probation issues and right to make the film are two distinct matters. If he has seriously violated probation, then prosecute him. If his prosecution is related to the film, then that is wrong.

    Like

  8. Chas,

    Seriously? Sigh.

    Sails – I’m thinking we need to get our troops out of there. On the arrest od the video producer, exactly. This should be a nonissue for Americans. Arabs, however, are likely to interpret it incorrectly. Wish this guy had simply been just another person attempting to create art rather than a known fraudster.

    Like

  9. CB, I do new research each day. The tricky thing when you are considering emigration is that you must project out 50-100 years, to try to project the best place for your grandchildren and their grandchildren. There is no perfect place. West Texas probably comes the closest, as it is populated almost entirely by Hispanics and those folks you call Crackers. However, there is that sovreignty issue due to the unfortunate events of 1865.

    Like

  10. I agree with CB on Afghanistan. I have contacts with troops in that country. We have stopped joint operations because of the extreme danger of joint operations. The Taliban is not fighting us in the field. They are infiltrating Afghan forces and then murdering our people. We went to Afghanistan to prevent re-establishment of an Al Qaeda base. AQ now can use Libya, Syria, Egypt, etc as bases. Time to pull our people out.

    Like

  12. On Afghanistan, what’s needed most now is an honest statement by the president as to what our present war policy is and reasons for essentially stopping the fighting. This probably won’t come until after the election.

    I’m not as sanguine as either CB or Ricky that it is in our interests to abandon Afghanistan that would likely over time hand it over to the pleasures of the Taliban. If this happened, the whole region will destabilize even more than at present and strengthen the Taliban in Pakistan. Can we imagine a Taliban ruled Pakistan with nukes?

    Like

  13. I’m with KBells. My family has been here since the 1630s and, even though living in the belly of the secular whale in Massachusetts, I ain’t leaving.

    Ricky’s basic problem is that he is still fighting the Civil War. Should he move to Chile or Poland, or whatever, he would become wickedly depressed having lost Texas along with trying to explain the demon Civil War outcome to uncomprehending foreigners.

    Like

  14. Sails, You understand me well. However, it is quite fun to explain the War of Northern Aggression to foreigners who are happy to take the side of the South. Recently, Polish villagers participated in ceremonies in Poland placing a Confederate gravemarker on the grave of Major Heros Von Borcke, aide to General Jeb Stuart. My ancestors have been in America since the early 1600s and in Texas since the 1830s. However, there was a time when some of them left their homes in Europe seeking a better life for themselves and their descendants. Those were the true pioneers.

    Like

  15. The Letter: It seems we have gone from unarmed guards to unarmed soldiers. As said before, only the bad guys get guns. People who have gone to war in the past have expected the possibility of getting killed. We don’t want them killed. The answer is probably not to leave them in a war zone without a purpose or the ability to defend themselves.

    Like

  16. Sails,

    You’re descendants have been in New England that long? I wonder if we’re related. I’m descended on my mother’s side from the Noyes family who helped settle Newbury and Newburyport. I’m not directly descended from Salem judge Nicholas Noyes, which I suppose is good, but from his uncle. I think the judge’s father and brother came in the 1640s if I remember correctly, though, so perhaps you’re from a different family?

    Like

  18. Coyote,

    This guy apparently was a fraudster who violated his probation, but generally they don’t send multiple squad units to pick up non-violent criminals on parole violations. Did you see the pictures of them taking this guy away? This certainly looks like a PR stunt to appease Islamic thugs. Pretty incredible.

    Like

  20. Well, Ricky, I’ll amend that to most uncomprehending foreigners. A few years ago I made a trip to Poland and found it a delightful country. My favorite place was Kracow including a very moving experience of visiting Auschwitz for a day.

    Though I’m glad that the Union was preserved and slavery abolished, I regard Lee and Jackson, along with the mostly undaunted foot soldiers, as great heroes. I once took a course at Harvard College on the history of the South taught by a woman historian who grew up in the Northwest but came to practically revere the South. She and a lot of the course reading were most convincing that despite the curse of slavery the South is a great region of the country.

    Another thing that I know is that the North was far from guiltless on slavery and that a bunch of self righteous Unitarians from Massachusetts had a lot to do with starting the Civil War. Even Lincoln was wary of these moralistic souls. It would have been better for the South to have dealt with this issue in its own way, though that professor above viewed the Civil War as providential, citing Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address as the prime evidence.

    Like

  23. Ree, I’m unaware of a Noyes ancestor, though I had a direct ancestor from Newbury who somehow antagonized the Indians and was shot dead by an Indian in 1643 who managed to sneak up and use the ancestor’s rifle that was by a nearby rock.

    Like

  24. Ree,

    Or possibly to protect him – hence the inability to see any of his face. I’d be surprised if there were not multiple fatwas calling for his death.

    Like

  28. Sails, My Dad really enjoyed his one visit to Poland. He reported that their favorite dish was very similar to our Chicken Fried Steak. Southern Nationalism is somewhat like Zionism without the Biblical promise. For the last 70 years Southerners would joke about “the South rising again”, but most were content to be part of the US. In fact, Southerners became super-patriots, always being over-represented in our military during wartime. Jim Webb’s Born Fighting paints an accurate picture. My neighbors are currently extremely unhappy with conditions in the US. On November 7th, they will likely be much more unhappy.

    Like

  29. Coyote,

    The man was safely in hiding before they came and got him, and the probation violation was for posting the film’s trailer onto YouTube without checking first with his probation officer because he was prohibited from using the internet. This isn’t the kind of violation people generally get picked up for. A citation to appear before the judge on a given date, perhaps. Not multiple squad units sent out.

    Probation violations like this are routine and not considered serious enough crimes to deal with so heavy-handedly as this.

    Like

  30. I have not followed my ancestry to closely but as I recall, the arrival was in the early 1600’s and a lot were from the Cambridge area. There is a scholarship at Harvard which nobody was inclined to give to me. We have lots of Roberts and Thomas’s and Guilfords and Johns.

    Like

  32. Mumsee,

    Anne Bradstreet came aboard the Arabella in the 1630s with her family. Her father was Thomas Dudley and he, as well as Anne’s husband, each governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony for a time. It seems likely that this is your family. Perhaps you weren’t descended directly from Anne, but probably from her father’s family. Thomas Dudley founded Cambridge, MA and he signed the charter to start Harvard University. I’d look into it if I were you.

    Like

  33. Chas – Time had an interesting article about the film & the attacks.

    Soon after that, the thread was picked up in Egypt by a TV host every bit as inflammatory and opportunistic as Jones: Sheik Khaled Abdallah of the Islamist satellite-TV station al-Nas. Supported by unknown backers, the channel traffics in demagoguery and hatemongering. Abdallah is its star. In previous broadcasts, he has called the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring “worthless kids” and condemned newspapers that don’t support his views. But he reserves his harshest criticism for the country’s Coptic Christians, who make up about a tenth of the population.

    For Abdallah, the fact that a Copt was promoting an anti-Muhammad film endorsed by the Koran-burning pastor was too much. On his Sept. 8 show, he broadcast some of the clips, now dubbed in Arabic. In one scene that was aired, “Muhammad” declares a donkey the “first Muslim animal” and asks the creature if it likes the ladies. Abdallah’s show, complete with the offensive video, was also posted on YouTube, and it has attracted over 300,000 views.

    Abdallah’s show was a dog whistle to the Salafists, a fundamentalist Islamic movement that makes up the second largest faction in the Egyptian parliament. For months, organized Salafist groups had been protesting in small numbers in front of the U.S. embassy in Cairo, calling for the release of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik currently in a North Carolina prison, convicted for plotting a series of bombings and assassinations in the 1990s. They were joined on Sept. 11 by prominent leaders like Nader Bakar of the Salafist Nour Party and Mohammed al-Zawahiri, brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s longtime deputy and now head of al-Qaeda.

    Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/09/13/the-agents-of-outrage/#ixzz27moRsU9W

    Like

  34. Someone from my mother’s side of the family came over to Massachusetts in 1632. Maybe Backhouse (now Backus?)from Barnstable, MA. Also the Putnams of either Salem Village and/or Salem Town.

    Like

  36. This is supposed to be totally hush-hush, but I am aware of someone in the U.S. Army who is being deployed to Afghanastan in November. He has been instructed to tell no one where he is being sent (his FIL let it slip). So we not only aren’t bringing them home, we’re sending more over. And I’m not sure of the exact date he’s scheduled to go but I’d bet money that it’s after the election.

    Like

  37. I agree that our leaving Afghanistan will create chaos like the Vietnamese boat people that few in the media cared about.
    But we can’t work with Afgans because there is no way to identify the enemy. He is your friend until he is ready to kill you.
    I expect this entire area will come under control of Iran, including Iraq.
    Ahmanidjad is expecting the Mahdi. He is serious about that.
    I recommend again, the book JoeB recommended to me. God’s War on Terror by Walid Showbat.
    I am still a bit skeptical, but I keep reading to figure where he’s wrong. I still can’t.

    Like

  38. Chas,

    That’d be Pakistan that would warm up to Taliban. And you’d probably see civil war for a while. Not like vietnam. Different country, different circumstances.

    Like

  41. Hey y’all, remember Ed? Y’know evangelical militant atheist Ed? The guy that said science was rapidly closing the gaps on all the stuff we don’t know? I laughed right out loud at the time… That had to be one of the most arrogant statements of ignorance I’ve ever seen.

    Over on World Magazines website, they quote someone a bit more enlightened:

    “For all that, we still know little. The lead coordinator for ENCODE, Ewan Birney of the UK-based European Bioinformatics Institute, estimates we’ve uncovered about one-tenth of the human genome’s secrets. “I get this strong feeling that previously I was ignorant of my own ignorance, and now I understand my ignorance,” he joked to Scientific American. “It’s slightly depressing as you realize how ignorant you are. But this is progress.”

    This is an excerpt from an article they posted about the human genome, and scientists are finding that the “junk DNA” is more than just junk. And it challenges, of all things, Darwinism. Fascinating:

    http://www.worldmag.com/2012/09/debunking_junk

    Sorry Ed. You’ll have to rethink that position a bit more. The more we find out, the more we realize we don’t know.

    Like

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.