IN FLANDERS FIELDS
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved,
and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
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Lately I’ve been chasing my father all over Hell – figuratively speaking. I don’t expect to catch him; he died seven years ago, taking with him some secrets I wish I could have asked him about, and others that I know I couldn’t have. He left behind some intriguing clues about himself, but remained something of a mystery to the end. [Read more →]
Where there is suspicion there is hope. Anything less than defiantly blind credulity must be taken as something of a triumph, especially amongst the young. If you want to see suspicion in all its varied glory make this a habit: whenever you meet a young jew (and it comes up) ask, are you a Zionist Jew or an Anti-Zionist Jew? If immediate suspicion is in the jewish character it seems to have been mostly boiled out of the semite undergrad. Mostly, as with all questions these days, you will receive the quizzical expression of a kitten nursing a cigarette. They are not used to new questions, these pupae, without getting the answers in advance, and presume you have begun speaking a foreign language. Possibly fictional. For some reason the usual method of fence straddling is likewise not employed. It is that expression, Zionist. They know they have heard it and it is not good. “But it does seem to have something to do with jews, which I am,” so they are at least hesitant to join in the hoots, the damnation of the bankers, the presumption of their jewishness, the denunciation of Israel and the perpetual explanations of how the jews are at the root of it all.
Given the givens of our day, as I said, this is triumphal and all opportunities must be explored. [Read more →]
Gilad Schalit is a free man today and he became a man in the custody and care of Hamas. Schalit was a nineteen-year old jew from a nation of jews, stolen like a comely goat from his post, as he was a soldier; a jewish soldier from a nation of jewish sodiers. As far as can be divined, the raid that claimed him was conceived and launched, involving months of tunneling by many hands, for the very purpose of capturing a jewish soldier and ransoming prisoners from the jewish jail. Schalit was of no consequence personally. He was just a jew.
For five years Schalit has paid the price for that crime. As yet we have no word from him as to what conditions he was kept. Almost certainly those were far better than exist in Palestinian jails in Gaza and the West Bank, which are filled mostly with “collaborators”, either with jews (and just the allegation of this can get one killed in the street) or the other entity. In Gaza, Hamas jails those with sympathy to Fatah. In the West Bank, Fatah jails those favorable to Hamas but in either case a five year sentence would be grueling and would show a mark or two. Schalit seems to have been kept in marketable condition as befits his status, not as prisoner of war or justice, but as a commodity. [Read more →]
From the producers of that whole “health care reform” thing that was going to save everyone money, and “green energy subsidies,” and the endless wars in the Middle East, and the policy of frisking children and cancer patients at the airport, and the program that sold guns to Mexican drug cartels, and attacks on medical marijuana patients, and the same people who haven’t passed a budget in two years, and, well, fill in whatever nonsense you want, comes an exciting new program!
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
Do you feel safer?
Not to be confused with this.
A few months back I read about a truly mind-blowing scandal involving the Bureau of Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco. Apparently the organization had been supplying guns to Mexican drug cartels which – unsurprisingly- had since been used to kill people.
Now in many parts of the world you would assume that corrupt members of the ATF were boosting their income by moonlighting as arms dealers. In Mexico the police, government and gangs are closely interlinked, and nobody is shocked. In the 1990s some Russian soldiers sold weapons to the Chechen militants they were fighting. Why? Everybody knew: to supplement their miserable earnings.
But America is more complex than that. [Read more →]
Sir John Keegan’s modest, mighty book contains five chapters, each describing a separate age of human warfare. The first is a primitive state where monkeys who threw their shite at one another have descended and stood straight(er) to hurl spears and stones. This has its roots in predation and animalistic defense of territory. The Age of Stone begins when a few of these hominids, sick of being attacked or doing the attacking, begin to lay one stone on another and another and another and another proto-man comes and another and also lay stones until there is a wall. Fortification was the great weapon in the Age of Stone. This continued until the Age of Flesh; that would mean horseflesh mostly but also the Age of Flesh involves the invention of something you could call an army. Warriors at the command of a chief would include far more than his cousins. With hordes of this size and mobility the siege became possible, starving out the fortress masters or breaching their walls in massed attacks. Fourthly comes the Age of Iron, not meaning iron weapons although the era is about right. Rather this is the coming of iron discipline; think Greece, the Macedonians and Rome. The modernization of fighting comes naturally with the modernization of life. The art of fortification is mated to iron-willed and stone-hearted defense, counter-attack and long-ranging strategic forces executing sophisticated political solutions to domestic problems, often involving wealth and power being in the wrong hands. The Fifth Age, the one we inhabit now, is the closest they come to being well yclept. The Fifth Age is The Age of Fire. [Read more →]
The President addressed the UN yesterday to weak applause. None would publicly declare their love. If only I had been successful in getting my bathroom recognized as an Observer State years ago; I could have been present and, in Venezuelan-style, banged a pot with a wooden spoon drowning out the sarcastic-polite golf-clap that is the international kleptocrats’ gravest insult. The gunslingers and AM burpers who make daily claims to Zionism are unified in their disdain for the United Nations and the President. The endemic assumption is that international bodies, the President and the Democrats generally are pillars of a monolithic, Israel-bashing Left, and generally this is so. Yet we must recognize that in this instance Obama, with his pledge to veto Palestinian statehood, is squarely on the Zionist side of the field as his cool reception indicates. He may not like it, we cannot say, but he is there. Oh yes. [Read more →]
The History Channel is running a handful of documentaries today, all about 9/11. Fox News and CNN are showing various specials, all with eyewitness accounts of what happened that day. And internet site after internet site is undoubtedly analyzing and reflecting on all things September 11th. But only here, at the Coliseum, can you ultimately measure who were the real winners and losers of 9/11, exactly 10 years later. [Read more →]
The day began for me in the oddest of ways. As is my habit, I worked late into the night of Monday Sept. 10th 2001, writing in my study, and slept in the morning of the 11th. At exactly 10 a.m. I was awoken by the doorbell, and suddenly remembered the appointment I had with some sound engineers. So I hurriedly dressed and rushed to the front door. I opened the door to a bright, perfect-looking day, but it struck me as odd that one of the two men had some blood on his face and shirt. [Read more →]
No matter where you turn in the media, there are a LOT of people offering up a 9/11-related post this week. Here’s mine …
“Beauty,” Margaret Hungerford once suggested, “is in the eyes of the beholder.” I suspect the same could be said for icons … which is how I feel about my disagreement with Britain’s Jonathan Jones over a photo taken that day by photographer Thomas Hoepker, an image that, according to Jones, “is becoming one of the iconic photos of 9/11.”
I disagree.
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Recently you may have seen reports in the news about a Borat-style incident featuring a Brazil-based Al Jazeera employee named Gabriel Elizondo who was recently denied permission to film a high school football game in Booker, Texas. Apparently Mr. Elizondo has been traveling around the states trying to gauge the American mood on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, etc. No sooner had he shown his Al Jazeera business card than the high school superintendent, a Mr. Michael Lee, told him to leave the school premises, denying Mr. Elizondo permission to film or conduct interviews. [Read more →]
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we haven’t had any global health scares like Swine Flu, Avian Flu or SARS recently. Why? Well, with all the economic misery in the United States and Europe, revolutionary unrest in the Middle East, rioting mobs in the UK plus the usual war and famine elsewhere, things are so awful right now that apparently we do not need hallucinatory fears to stimulate the collective nervous system. We have enough actual worries of our own. [Read more →]
What was the central lesson that the Great Powers learned from the carnage of World War II? I firmly believe it was “never again”- that is, “never again will we fight a country that has even remotely comparable military strength to our own.” Even so, beating the crap out of weak nations is not always as straightforward as one would imagine.
It’s 4th of July weekend and I have already seen and heard a fair share of patriotic television production. In the intellectual osmosis that is channel changing, I somehow subconsciously absorbed the Marine Hymn. I found myself humming it throughout most of the day. I don’t know the words really, but I do know the first two verses.
“From the Halls of Montezuma,”
“To the shores of Tripoli.”
I never though much about the words – or the song really – but the reference to Tripoli got me thinking that, just like 200 years ago in the Barbary Wars, we are in a fight in North Africa. This time the only pirate is Muammar Gaddafi, and as of this past week he is figuratively on the lam. [Read more →]
Recent and blatant toying with the time stream has spun off other reality-bending side effects. These are revealed in phenomena that are reaching out far beyond the control of the Department of Corrections threatening to crush our world under the weight of replicating paradoxes. Paradox Poisoning, like most infectious diseases, strikes the very young, very old and those with pre-existing enfeeblements the hardest so, as always, it is wise to pay close attention to Chris Matthews as you would a canary in a coal mine. It is well for our own safety that we do not have to get too close. Modern crowd-sourcing techniques, like those arrayed against the tundra monster Palin allow us to keep a safe distance, crucial, as when the collapse comes the vortex will first whirl out of Matthews well-snugged cravat, engorged on his voluminous but empty melon. The latest evidence is a nationally transmitted spasm of erupting nonsequiturs and self-contradictions that seemed to indicate the Big Crunch was underway but Matthews survived this crisis, clearly due to a diet rich in riboflavin and gin. I provide the link for documentary reasons but no need to endanger your own existence as we will examine this specimen through the safe filter of text. [Read more →]
A half-baked clone of Snagglepuss by the name of Huntsman has announced his enthusiastic intent to join the scrum of the Republican Primaries. He commandeers the best view of the Statue of Liberty to do so. One would think that schmaltz like this would be in heavy demand, but no. Only twice before has a Presidential candidate made their debut here. One was Pete Wilson, modestly competent Governor of California. The other was Ronald Wilson Reagan. Old Pete hoped to trade on his commonality of office and, hilariously, of name, to ladle some sweet Reaganny goodness over his own head which would be punctuated by the familiar location. This seems to have failed but Huntsman is up to give it another go. [Read more →]
The Zionist Entity is the Little Satan. The Great Satan? USA! USA! USA! No big surprises there. It’s pretty easy to laugh at this literal demonization. Okay, so we’re the debbil! That’s pretty cool, actually. We’re all red and smoky! What are you going to do about it? Send the Egyptian Navy? Kill us one by one when you get the chance? Practicality demands the latter and so does the koran. If, at this late date, you do not know that jihad is a required sacrament of all muslims and that it demands your conversion, submission or death, truly you don’t know much. I will dispense with pro-forma exclusions of “good muslims” who might box or rap, or “moderate muslims” who are simply not that devout and those even rarer creatures, the “reformist muslims” who do forthrightly declare adherence to something we modern Westerners would recognize as openness and tolerance. Because they are satans, too.
You have to admire the pure binary nature of the catechismic divide. This is the central enterprise of islam, functioning like a junior-high school clique the muslim scholars toil merely to decide who is in. And who is out. [Read more →]
