Willie Nelson

Brings a tear to your eye; doesn't it?

'Lone Wolf' Theory

I listened with only half an ear. The story repeats itself almost daily. It’s no longer interesting. Some kind of criminal - involved in serial crime - was on the loose in some urban neighborhood (possibly one of the outer boroughs of New York City).

He was said to have robbed banks, raped women, abducted school children, or stabbed random people on subway platforms - I can’t remember which. People from the neighborhood were reported to be afraid. They did not want their names broadcast as they gave interviews. From their voices it was apparent that they were not native speakers (unless broken English was native to their neighborhood). The cameras blurred their faces.

Neighbors were cautioned to remain indoors while the cops were working out the details of the cases. They gave out descriptions of the perp: Male; roughly 5’9; about 45; last seen wearing a blue jacket.

As far as the shooting at the Frankfurt airport is concerned, my ears perked up when I heard that U.S. soldiers had been shot. In Afghanistan? Maybe. Surely not in Frankfurt. The link to ‘Kosovo’ appeared early in the reporting of the incident. (Could still have been someone upset with Obamacare.) The detail of the shooter shouting ‘Allah-U-Akbar’ came much later. It was immediately followed by the ‘lone wolf’ theory. No names yet.

This has me wondering just how many of these ‘lone wolves’ are still out there. Strange that there appears to be absolutely nothing to tie them together.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

'Check Engine' Light

For the first time I see U.S. oil dependence as a real existential threat. The perfect storm is raging while we are agonizing over Charlie Sheen. Oil prices alone will crush our economy. We can now appreciate the efforts of previous administrations designed to keep it all together. ‘Containment’ had become an intricate game that demanded increasingly complex solutions. Clearly, our present administration does not know how to play.

We went to war in Iraq in response to 9/11. It was not something we could avoid. Admittedly, we ran the risk of destabilizing the region. It did not destabilize. We actually were on the right track. The countries of the Middle East were reminded to mind their manners. They did - for a time. When it became clear that America was crumbling from within and that we would not be able to sustain the drive, they began to bolt. The election of Barack Hussein Obama confirmed to the world that we were finished.

Now, voters' remorse. We don’t even have it in us to criticize our president’s handling of the job. We’re just desperately hanging on till the next election cycle, watching as we circle the drain. Our fear that we won’t last that long is already palpable.

Russia and China will survive. It’s not that our past presidents were so much smarter or capable than Putin or Hu Jintao. But at the very least it was a more or less even match. Now, ‘the U.S. is out of the game’. We’ve left the stadium and taken our ball.

There is one attribute that elevates the leaders of China and Russia (and those of most other nations) to the status of players on the global gridiron: patriotism. Most leaders take pride in their countries. They may have different ways of expressing it; different approaches; different ideologies, etc. But, in almost every case, they do what they do to give their nations a chance to survive. Even Kim Yong-Il rattles his bones of a nation to fair advantage. There are only two notable exceptions: Iran and the U.S.

Iran is so locked into an eschatological vision, it pays no heed to possible consequences. This, while current U.S. leadership wildly pursues some utopian ideological throw-back to some unworkable drug-induced version of a coma. Both are so arrogant as to ignore any and all warning signals.

I’ve been driving for years with my ‘check engine’ light on. So far so good. I haven’t had problems. It’d be a bit different if I still had to ferry kids to and from soccer practice. Or, if I were running a country with over 300 million people in it.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Spoon

WINDS OF HATRED CONTINUE TO SWEEP ACROSS PAKISTAN

At a time when winds of change have been sweeping across many Islamic countries with calls for greater freedom and democracy, winds of hatred continue to sweep across Pakistan.

2. Pakistan, which has become over the years a breeding ground of Islamic beliefs of the most irrational and extreme kind, is helpless in the face of these winds of hatred. These winds have distorted Islam beyond recognition and provided a breeding ground for Islamic extremism and jihadi terrorism of various hues.More murders and more crimes of various kinds are committed in Pakistan in the name of and for the sake of Islam than in any other Islamic country of the world.

3. Unless and until the breeding grounds of hatred from where these winds rise are eliminated, extremism and terrorism will continue to find nourishment in the soil of Pakistan. No amount of change in the other Islamic countries through which the winds of change have been sweeping would provide relief to the rest of the world from the scourge of Islamic extremism and jihadi terrorism. It is a plague over which the state of Pakistan has no control.

4. This plague claimed one more fatal victim on March 2,2011, when Shabaz Bhatti, a Christian belonging to President Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), who was holding the Minorities Affairs portfolio, was shot dead by a group of unidentified assassins as he was being driven to work in Islamabad. Reports from Islamabad indicate that he was travelling in his official car without being escorted by a security team despite the fact that he was one of the most threatened members of the Council of Ministers because of his criticism of the blasphemy law which provides for a mandatory death penalty to anyone insulting the Holy Prophet. The law has come in for strong criticism from liberal elements in the rest of the world because the rules of evidence governing trials under it are so flimsy that anyone can accuse anyone of insulting the Holy Prophet and get that person convicted without satisfactory corroborative evidence.

5. Previously, only insulting the Holy Prophet was considered an act of blasphemy, now, even criticising the law is treated an act of blasphemy by extremist elements which do not hesitate to kill anyone criticising the law. This was the second high-profile assassination this year of persons criticising the law. In January, Salman Taseer, a liberal Muslim, who was the Governor of Punjab, was assassinated by one of his own security guards because he dared to criticise the law and visited in jail a Christian who had been convicted under the law. Death threats have reportedly been held out against Mrs.Sherry Rehman, a Member of Parliament belonging to the PPP, for allegedly suggesting a re-look at the law.

6. How can one save Pakistan from the clutches of Islam of the most extreme kind when the assassin of Taseer was not condemned as a murderer, but was hailed as a saviour of Islam by some sections of the population, including lawyers? Organisations such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has claimed responsibility for the assassination of the Christian Minister, and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), the extremist Sunni organisation, look upon it as a God-ordained duty to eliminate anyone who is seen by them as insulting Islam even for criticising the obnoxious features of it in Pakistan.

7. One cannot hope for any salvation for Pakistan from these winds of hatred unless there is a mass uprising to break the stranglehold of these elements over the society and the State. Pakistan is a State governed by fear---not the fear of despots, but the fear of the irrational clergy and even more irrational extremist organisations. Unless the people are able to rid themselves of this fear and come out in the streets against these organisations, the winds of hatred will continue to blow across the country.

8. Unfortunately, Pakistan is a country where liberalism is merely a talking point in the drawing rooms of the elite and not a rallying cry for protests in the streets against the irrational and extremist elements. It is a gloomy situation from which no exit is in sight. ( 2-3-11)

( The writer, BAHUKUTUMBI RAMAN is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

Cucible

If any should doubt that we are deeply entrenched in a clash of cultures - a war, if you wish - I direct you to Caroline Glick’s opinion piece entitled “The West’s proxy war against the Jews” in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post. She lays it out clearly as few can and have. The crucible, in her view, is Israel. That is to say, the fate of Israel is the metric that will define the ultimate winner of the struggle.

To live side by side in relative peace (like sticks of furniture in an otherwise empty room) with the current Islamic/communist coalition assault now in full swing is out of the question. It is now fully in attack mode. One of its goals is to push Israel into the sea. (Envision anything I might mean by that.) It’ll mark the defeat of the West. The victorious coalition will at first gather ‘round to congratulate themselves; then, they will begin fighting each other, for they are only united on one issue: their hatred of Israel and western capitalism.

Whereas America will remain relatively unscathed by the fall of Jerusalem into Arab hands, Europe will likely not be so lucky. To be sure, America will have its own problems. For one thing, it will be difficult to convince the entire country to salute the red flag. This will have to play out over time.

In today’s WSJ, Mark Helprin tells of America’s retreat from the high seas in an article entitled “The Decline of U.S. Naval Power” We see it ourselves in the continuing saga of pirates successfully negotiating ransoms and killing civilians. It seems incredible that we cannot do much about it. Similarly, as pertains to Libya (or any other trouble spot on the globe), our hands appear to be tied by outside interests and internal concerns (and distractions).

The media has been gearing up to tell us just how bad Kaddafi is (and has been). This is the likely view of the Obama administration as well. It makes me suspicious, however. It’s been a long time since either the media or the government has told us the truth about anything. It may simply reflect Obama’s calculation as to what he believes Kaddafi’s staying power to be, and this administration’s scrambling to get out in front of the curve for once (of course hindered somewhat by - as JB points out - Tripoli’s long and well-established connections to radical elements in Chicago (Farrakhan).

Realistically, you’ve got to go all the way back to 1988 when Pan Am flight 103 crashed at Lockerbie following an in-flight explosion, killing all on board and scattering wreckage all over the area to pin anything of substance on Kaddafi. Since then, I’ve been under the impression that Kaddafi has undergone semi-successful rehabilitation and earned his way back into the fold of the human community. In light of what else is going on in the world today, the springing of bombing suspect Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from a Scottish hospital/jail seems more of a prank, designed to redden the faces of the pompous, than a full-blown crime against humanity.

There is no doubt in my mind that the relatively recent upheavals we are witnessing in the Middle East and elsewhere is due to America’s deliberate distancing itself from its traditional international obligations. This has, at the very least, left a vacuum for sinister forces to exploit. The end result continues to be the chaos of birth. We definitely appear to be on the cusp of some momentous change. This (chaos) is only the first step. What will eventually emerge is anybody’s guess.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters

The only thing that the Left and the Right actually agree on is that growth alone will fix the economy. From there on, however, their approaches differ. Whereas the Left favors opening wide the back doors of the armored truck and heaving fistfuls of dollars out into the street, the Right says it’s time to keep the trucks locked up at the depot. This fundamental difference also colors our approach to foreign policy. As liberals are presently in charge of nearly everything, consider the following likely conversation between our State Department and the PA regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

U.S. State Department: “We want you to reach a peace agreement with Israel during this term of the Obama administration. What would it take for you to accomplish this?”

PA: “Impossible. We do not recognize the existence of the Jewish State.”

U.S.: “We will give you money - as much as you want. And we will give you more afterwards to help make you into the most prosperous nation on earth.”

PA: “We will take your money, but we will only buy guns and knives so we can slit the throats of the Israeli Jews.”

U.S.: “So you see, we’re making progress. You now recognize that there actually are Israeli Jews. We will give you an initial down payment and much more after you agree to come back to the table for further negotiations.”
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Or, imagine our conversation with the King of Saudi Arabia:

U.S.: “We will give you money so that you will keep the oil flowing to Europe and America.”

SA: “We have more than enough money. Money means nothing to us. Another Rolls Royce or two will not make a difference. We already have plenty. These only serve to remind us that we are nothing. We do not produce Rolls Royces. It does not improve our self-esteem to drive them. It is you who should feel proud for having produced what is arguably the finest land vehicle the world has ever known. We, on the other hand, simply use them as we would toilet paper.

“We produce nothing. We have no skills, no imagination - only resources. It is these resources - our resources - with which you spin your magic: building great industries and communication networks, creating timeless art and philosophies, etc. We simply allow you to pump oil out of our wells. Although you pay us handsomely, it’s only money, which is essentially worthless to us because we do nothing to earn it.”

U.S.: “But we’re prepared to pay you even more.”

SA: “Save it. It will help neither us nor you. You have done more than enough to inflict us with a fatal case of ‘Dutch disease’ (as defined by your own economists). The only way we will be helped is for us to destroy you. Because every day you continue to exist on this, our shared, planet reminds us of our humiliation before God.

“We have therefore decided to pronounce everything you do as evil. And thus we have discovered our power over you. We are now in the position to drain the very blood from your veins. And only this (by the grace of Allah) will restore our self-esteem and bring us back to some semblance of life. In other words, we must kill you.”

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/