What an absolute disgrace

How in the world does the top picture lead to the bottom? Obama responds to an attack on American embassies with a midnight knock on the door of somebody who posted a YouTube video? What an absolute disgrace.

The flimsy excuse for the region-wide and supposedly spontaneous Islamic protests was some obscure film that 'offended' the so-called prophet Mohamed. Only an idiot would have given any credence to that story. In fact, these were coordinated attacks, one of which led to the the murder of one of our ambassadors, and they were obviously timed to occur on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. We've now learned that warnings were given of such a possibility.

In the face of all that, since day one, Obama's administration has been treating seriously the claim that this is all about some YouTube video. In a time where it may just pay to have Middle Eastern governments, who are the ones that can dispel those rioters in a heartbeat after all, to be worrying about what sort of angry response the U.S. might adopt, we have Obama and company ignoring the reality of the First Amendment and enabling the protests by harassing a YouTube filmmaker.
  
It is the price of having a fool in office who knows how to campaign, but not how to govern. In a post called Obabbler's speech I said this:

Obama gave his big Middle East speech today. My reaction to it is colored by my suspicion, which I cannot shake, that Obama has largely dialed out of the foreign policy component of the Presidency. 

The initiatives he tried to implement in the beginning of his Presidency have all been reduced to a shambles; and rather than rethink his policies, the biggest Brainiac in the Universe has simply shoved the mess aside. Out of sight, out of mind.

My belief is that when he clocked out of directing foreign affairs other elements in his administration began to, in the resulting power vacuum, struggle with each other over the direction of America's policy.  I think you see this in the confused response to the Egyptian crisis, then in the dithering and eventual incomprehensible intervention as Europe's lapdog in Libya, and in the US's obvious uncertainty as to what to do in Syria. Even the multiple and conflicting stories that came out of the raid that killed Bin Laden point to multiple sources pushing multiple narratives.

As a result I thought he speech was a bit of a hodgepodge: his Howard Zinn-like understanding of history as a pastiche of exploited fuzzy-wuzzies, mixed with the Clintonista's pro-Arab slant, mixed with the State Department's usual inertia.

I still think that is true. Obama has been skipping his intelligence briefings for some time, he is so little interested in the rioting that he's not stopped campaigning and fundraising, the State Department appears to be frozen with indecision as it flounders in contrary directions. And the media in all of this? About as useful as tits on a bull.
 

Never Forget

"Suddenly, right on television, at 9:59am the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. When the cloud of dust settled, the building was gone. It was hard to fathom. We were shaken. It was scary to be on this island, bridges and tunnels shut down. Not knowing what might happen next. At 10:28am the North Tower collapsed. Two skyscrapers. 110 floors each. Gone.

Throughout that day, we hung out at my mom and Steve’s apartment. Dazed. Trying not to let panic set in. We were constantly reminded of the day’s seriousness by F-16 Fighter Jets roaring overhead. We watched comedy. Any funny tv show or film we could find. We even put on my childhood home videos to lighten the mood. The city was covered in a thick cloud of smoke, dust, particles… It was very strange to think that human life was somewhere in those particles.

Finally, by afternoon we realized we hadn’t eaten all day and decided to get some food at the corner diner. Walking outside, we saw the strangest sight. Hoards of people, dressed in office attire, walking north. With all the subways stopped, taxis non-existent, and tunnels and bridges closed to cars – people were walking home to upper Manhattan, New Jersey, the Bronx… Some had briefcases; many were covered in white soot. They all looked tired and dazed. I wish I’d taken a photo but I was still in too much shock to think to do it. When we got in Metro Diner, we were shocked to discover that it was packed. New Yorkers were sharing a meal together, some sitting quietly, some talking about what they saw and how they felt. There was a sense of goodwill among the citizens. We would pull together to get through no matter what.

After that day, the city was still in a tailspin. The air down on 14th Street had a unique smell that I suppose can only come from more than 2,000 people and 2 skyscrapers cremated in the blink of an eye. It was strange to breathe it. Our neighbor let us know that her sister who worked in the South Tower, had been late for work that morning and her life was miraculously spared. She had worked on a team with 30 people and only 3 had survived. She was late for work, one person was at a funeral that morning, and one was home sick. She spent the next month going to funeral after funeral for all her lost friends and the PTSD and guilt she experienced was severe. I wonder if she ever recovered…

The most heartbreaking sights in days that followed Sept. 11th were the flyers. Faces of mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers, cousins, boyfriends… All ages and races. MISSING."

(source)

 

Never Forget

Below is the account of Denise M. of her experiences in Manhattan on the day of the 9/11 terror attacks. I broke it into paragraphs, but her words are otherwise unedited. It is taken from September 11 Digital Archive. 

I worked directly across the street of the Trade Center in the World Financial Center for 5 years. I had been on the express bus, coming out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when the first plane hit. We heard the dispatcher tell the bus driver that a plane hit into the WTC and it seemed to be an accident. After hearing that, we all started to make our way off the bus and on to our jobs.

I was walking towards my building, standing directly across the street (on Liberty St) when I was stopped by a police officer. He told me not to go any further because there had been airplane parts all over the street and it was dangerous. So I stayed there just watching the 1st tower burn. I could see all the fireman & police officers getting people out of the building. The people were running, some were injured & burnt. It was so horrific to see this.

After 10 mins of watching, I heard a loud sound as if something were falling from the sky. When I looked up, all I could see was this huge plane right over head flying 100's of miles an hour directly into the 2nd tower. That's when I realized it was not an accident, we were being attached. I could hear the sound of that plane going into the building making a huge suction sound then exploding into peices all over the area.

From that point I ducked so I wouldn't be hit. I know at that point I was not thinking about saving myself or heading somewhere for safty, I was knumb and couldn't move. My whole body was in a state of shock. Here were these two huge buildings that I've associated all my life with home and they were on fire.

From where I was standing I could hear these banging sounds that sounded that little bombs exploding, days later I realized it was the sound of bodies falling from the windows hitting the ground.

Still standing in ora after mins that seemed to be as long as hours, a panic came over everyone around me and that's when I could hear the police officers screaming run the building is collapsing. Well I never ran so fast in my life. I ran towards the water thinking that if one building was falling the others where going to be right behind it sort of like a domino effect. If there was anywhere left to go it was going to be in the Hudson River.

At the time I was running, I turned around to see what was going on behind me and it looked like a scene right out of the movies. This huge gray cloud that looked solid like a marshmello was right behind me and it was coming quick. I got as far as I could go, covering my face with a ripped towel that I fellow next to me handed me. When I was finally able to squint my eyes open, I couldn't even see 10 feet in front. Everyone around me was covered in dust, as was I. It wasn't just dust, it was a pinchy fiberglass feeling that was over your skin. Immediately I got it in my eyes and had to remove my contacts because they were burning me.

The air was starting to clear when I was able to find my cell phone and call home. Not knowing that no ones phones were working, I tried to call out and nothing was happening. I remember thinking two things, this was the end of the world and I was going to die on this day, and my mom & fiance was probably watching this on CNN not knowing where I was because they hadn't heard from me.

Looking for anyway out of the city, I went towards the Staten Island Ferry and just as the ferry was docking in the pier, tower 2 was collapsing and the dust was getting thick again. As I boarded the ferry, the deckhands were handing out life jackets so I grab one and made my way on too the ferry. It took us about 5/10 mins. to get out into the water because the harbor was not clear enough to depart.

When we were finally out by the Statue of Liberty, there was a sign a relief in me but I still didn't feel safe until I was home. When I finally reached my house, I remember running in and my mom was standing at the top of the steps in tears. We both huged each other as tight as possible and cried. At that moment I thought to myself, how glad I was to be alive & able to come home to my family.

There was a lot of tears from that day forward, watching TV, going to funnerals, even the day I had to head back into the city for the first time after 9/11. Things will never be the same here in NYC but we've all gained the strenght to go on with our lives and I know that no one will ever forget that day or those people who lost their innocent lives just trying to make a days pay. And for the heros who were trying to save the people, they've gained more than just respect from me...

9-11 Television News archive

The news clips are arranged on a matrix by channel and hour

A Television News Archive of 911 has been created. Its has 3000 hours of archival footage of news broadcasts, covers 7 days starting with 9/11 and has news from 20 channels, both domestic and foreign.

It is not a trip down memory lane I care to take, although I did watch bits and pieces of it. Prepare for your blood to boil as you watch the confusion morph into horror and then anger.
 

Wretchard's Fourth Conjecture

It appears that the bombing and attack on the teenagers on the island in Norway was done by a native Norwegian who belonged to the right side of the political spectrum. Extremists come in all stripes, and there is no point in doing anything other than condemning his heinous acts. My heart goes out to the Norwegians on this dark day.

As it become more obvious he is not an Islamic radical, and I'll confess to assuming it was an act of Islamic terror, I remembered an old post by Wretchard, a.k.a. Richard Fernandez, at his old fallback Belmont Club site. 

The post was The Fourth Conjecture. The beginning of it is excerpted below.

Item: a letter has been delivered to the Indonesian embassy in Canberra containing anthrax-related spores. The attack is believed motivated by outrage over the sentencing to 20 years imprisonment of Australian Schapelle Corby, widely believed innocent, in Indonesia on drug charges after Bali mastermind Abu Bakar Bashir was given 30 months for murdering nearly 100 Australians. The terrorist weapon was supposed to bring America to its knees, but as terrorist methods proliferate it is increasingly being used in internecine fighting throughout the Muslim world and by non-Muslims in retaliation.

Item: a blast ripped through a Shi'te mosque in Pakistan killing 4 persons. Al Qaeda is suspected of masterminding the Pakistani attack. Item: at least 20 people were killed by a suicide bomber in an Afghan mosque, killing a cleric who was a support of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The attack is suspected to be the work of Al Qaeda. Item: twenty two people were killed as a bomb ripped through an Indonesian market. Item: "The Jerusalem district court on Monday sentenced an Israeli man to eight years in prison for membership in an underground Jewish terrorist organization believed to be behind the killing of eight Palestinian civilians over the last four years."

Steve Coll, writing in the Washington Post asked his readers to imagine a scene in the near future.

Imagine the faculty lounge in the theoretical physics, metallurgy and advanced chemistry departments of an underfunded university in Islamabad or Rabat or Riyadh or Jakarta. The year is 2015. Into the room walk a group of colleagues -- seven or eight talented scientists, some religiously devout, all increasingly angry about events abroad. At night, between sporadic electricity outages, they watch satellite television and chat in cyberspace, absorbing an increasingly radical, even murderous outlook toward the United States. By day, as they sip coffee and smoke furtively in each other's company, these scientists spontaneously form a bond, and from that bond emerges a resolve to act -- by launching a nuclear or biological attack on American soil.

'Beware Islamic wrath', he seemed to say. A true but trite observation. The Belmont Club post All for One and One For All suggested that Coll was missing an equally obvious point.

the situation will be even more dangerous than Coll suggests. Long before a faculty lounge in Islamabad or Riyadh realizes it can build a bomb alone and secretly, the same thought will have occurred to individuals in Tel Aviv, New Delhi or Palo Alto. Any Islamic group that believes it can attack New York deniably should convince itself that no similar group can nuke Mecca at the height of the pilgrim season. In fact, the whole problem that Coll describes should be generalized. The only thing worse than discovering that New York has been destroyed by persons unknown is to find that Islamabad has been vaporized by a group we've never heard of.

Any environment capable of producing terrorism on a scale which could destroy America would be sufficiently powerful to destroy Islam -- and destroy it first many times over. Any weapon that AQ Khan can make can be bought by believers and infidels alike. The theorists of asymmetrical terrorist warfare forgot that its military effectiveness depends on the very restraints that it, itself, dissolves.

That terrorist violence would beget terrorist violence, and car bomb would be answered by car bomb, has always been a frightening possibility. I fear today is the first step in the further coarsening an already unbearably coarse conflict.
 

Death from above

The Diplomad has a post, The SEALs and Abbottabad: What it Means for Islam, in which he discusses the War on Terror. He states the following in it:

Islamic civilization is a rotten house. Constant outside pressure either will collapse it, or force its miserable occupants to begin a serious effort at reforming and rebuilding it.  Islam holds sway among some of the world's potentially richest and most advanced countries, but that, in fact, are among the poorest and most retrograde on the planet.  Islam as practiced is a failed ideology: it leads to slavery, stupidity, and poverty on a mass scale.  The greatest victims of Islam are the Muslims forced to live under its tyrannical, mind-numbing, and brutal rule.

I agree. Islam is fundamentally a triumphalist religion, and by that I mean it assumes its domination over others. The image that leads this post is of the roof tops of Cairo. Note the vast number of satellite dishes on those rooftops. Those TV signals, along with radio, movies and the internet and the message they carry of the differences between the lives of them and us are a poison seeping into that triumphalism.

We often times overlook that the Muslim world, the Ulema, historically has been contracting. We know about their lost Andalusia on the Spanish peninsula, but how many of us forget they earlier lost Sicily, were pushed south out of Russia, and back eastward by the Chinese? Also, within the last 200 years they've been ejected from large swaths of the Balkans and their expansion out of the islands of Indonesia may be in retrograde.

That must eat at a people who imagine they are fated to be at the pinnacle of civilization. Yet, what seeps through those satellite dishes is even worse. The subversiveness of images of affluence and dynamism elsewhere, while so much of what they see in their neighborhoods is squalor and torpor cannot be underestimated.

The Muslim Brotherhood started as a reaction against British rule. Sayyid Qutb, their most influential thinker, was shocked by his travels in the U.S. It should be noted that his shock was not a revelation, rather it was a vindication of beliefs he already held. He had wondered, on the boat trip to the States, “should I travel to America, and become flimsy, and ordinary, like those who are satisfied with idle talk and sleep. Or should I distinguish myself with values and spirit. Is there other than Islam that I should be steadfast to in its character and hold on to its instructions, in this life amidst deviant chaos, and the endless means of satisfying animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins? I wanted to be the latter man.”

That thought is revivalism pure and simple. Just like he imagines he has to cling onto his steadfast character in this life, so to the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists, Wahabists and the rest think they have to cling to something pure -- in all their cases that purity is the example of the first three generations of Muslims -- so that they can stave of this world's chaos and return things to their rightful place. In their minds it is bad behavior that has caused the poverty, powerlessness and contraction of the Ulema, and they can only erase the decline by returning to the pure path of Mohamed's days.

We tend to think that because Islamic radicals take the long view, after all they still mourn the loss of Spain, that they have all the time in the world to wear us down. However, the problem that all revivalists face is there has to be a revival. Sooner or later there has to be a revival. 

In reality, if what is pouring through their TV sets doesn't soon match reality, then they don't have decades much less centuries. The revivalists have to produce or soon they'll join the pan-Arabics and earlier followers of Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah in the obscurity of lost causes.

That sad thing is, arriving at that lost cause is going to be a bloody mess. 

Our European betters and Muslim rage

Sombre & civilized Europeans
at the news of a dead dictator

Sultan Knish, who's in our blogroll and is always a good read, has an new article called Friday Afternoon Roundup - Muslims Ragefully Mourn Bin Laden. 

In it he discusses the European's simpering and finger-wagging over the barbarism of Americans' pleasure over the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

As he points out, "On 29 April 1945, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other executed Fascists were loaded into a moving van and trucked south to Milan. There, at 3:00 am, they were dumped on the ground in the old Piazza Loreto. After being shot, kicked, and spat upon, the bodies were hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of an Esso gas station. The bodies were then stoned by civilians from below. The corpse of the deposed leader became subject to ridicule and abuse."

That's El Duce and a couple of his buddies dangling off meat hooks in the picture above. Presumably the crowd has all doffed their hats for a moment of silence because, after all, every life is precious.

He continues the article will a long series of quotes from Muslims outraged that we would kill Osama, with his fisking of each ridiculous quotation. Be sure to check it out, it is a good read. 
 

Video released of Osama's last moments

Not exactly SFW, but I quite liked the nature of the 72 virgins.

(HT: from a comment by Fredrick Bloggs in a Biased BBC thread) 

Bin Laden finally gets his raisins

Adios Osama, and good riddance to you. As they say in the Navy, "a hearty handshake and a job well done" to the folks who conducted this mission.

Early reports state that the Navy SEALs were in Obama's compound for about 40 minutes. Along with killing Bin Laden, they captured several people: his youngest wife, as well as some of his children at a minimum. There has been no word as to whether any of his aides were also captured.  Presumably any laptops and papers that were in the compound were also secured.

The compound was apparently then set on fire. Perhaps this was done to complicate Pakistani efforts at untangling what happened in the fight and what was taken.  

In the past such raids yielded intelligence that led to other people. It's hard to know how much Bin Laden was still in the loop, but I imagine there are a lot of nervous people today. Al-Zawahri and other Al Qaeda leadership will have to move, and I imagine there are some Pakistani muckity-mucks who are sweating bullets this morning.

At any rate, good to see Osama's been sent to the Great Beyond to collect his raisins. With luck we'll be able to send a few more down the same path because of this raid. 

The staff of life

Ancient Egyptian wall carving of stalks of wheat

In an earlier post, The way to a man's heart, I discussed how large areas of North Africa and the Middle East have low food self-sufficiency. That is, they have to import food to feed their populations. Further, they have to spend a far greater percentage of their per-capita income on food, which means any strain to the world's food supply will greatly worsen their situation. 

Wheat rust is one of the most common diseases that infects wheat and other grains. Normally, up to 20% of a crop can be lost to the disease. However, in Uganda in 1977 an even more virulent strain emerged. Called Ug99, it caused crop losses of 80% in Kenya. Ug99 has since spread to North Africa, the Middle East and as far east as Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

As the VOA article Wheat Rust Threatening Crops in Africa, Asia and Mideast explains, recently another strain of wheat rust, this one a variation of stripe rust, has emerged. Like Ug99, the new pathogen has spread quickly through North Africa and the Middle East.

In April an International Wheat Stripe Rust Symposium was held in Syria to discuss the problem. At that meeting Michael Baum, the director of ICARDA and one of the meeting's organizers, pointed out the following:

There is a stark difference between its consequences in poor and rich countries, said Baum. Last year Syria lost up to half of its wheat to the infection whereas neighbouring Turkey, a richer country, lost none.

In Syria, monitoring is weak; three-quarters of the crop consists of a single variety; and there is not enough fungicide available, he said. Turkey, in contrast, has good monitoring; a wide variety of plants, some of which are resistant to the current rust; and substantial supplies of fungicide. (source)

So, it would seem that agricultural methods, combined with a variety of wheat strains, have a lot to do with successfully mitigating the outbreak. It was felt that alleviating this problem, through diversifying wheat strains and improving monitoring, would take three to five years to fully address.

That may be too long of a time frame because, although nobody wants to say it, a combination of a significant loss of grain crops in the region coupled with spiking global food prices is a disaster in the making. At best we'll see a food crisis, at worse famine. How that would blend with the spiraling violence in the region is a frightening thought.

Carter rants at a North Korean press conference

Which brings us to Jimmy Carter in a 'round about sort of a way. While touring North Korea he had the following to say about that country's growing famine:

"One of the most important human rights is to have food to eat, and for South Korea and the US and others to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people is really a human rights violation."

That comment raised a lot of eyebrows, but it shouldn't have been that surprising. The UN, through its Human Rights Council and various Progressive NGOs, has long been banging the drum for Food Justice, sometimes framed as Food as a Human Right.

This is a movement that encompasses the usual bugaboos: climate change (so arability rather than farming practices becomes the culprit for food shortages), sustainable farming, organic farming, cultural diversity, GM food, corporations, exploitation, oppression and lately the much touted obesity epidemic. 

They make no bones about the fact that they want to change, from seed to table, which foods are grown and how and to who they are distributed.

Make no mistake, if the Middle East does slide towards famine there will be loud voices, accompanied by pictures of big eyed children with empty food bowls, blaming it all on Western capitalism and demanding free food from the same Capitalists as payment of a fine for their guilt. How that will play with grocery prices going up is easy to imagine, but the agitation will be there none-the-less.

I'll end this long post with a couple of images from Kittiwat Unarromhas, Flares' favorite Thai baker.

Helloooo visitors from Instapundit.

Obama's Libyan speech made perfect sense

When I first read Obama's Libyan speech I thought it was contradictory and faintly incoherent. However, as I thought about it and then read it again, I realized that Obama's speech made perfect sense if you viewed it from the perspective of a transnational Europhile, which is precisely the world view Obama holds.

Obama mentions the U.S. Congress in passing in the speech, but in reality it is the international community, and what he calls an "international mandate" that he invokes as justification for the intervention. It is his transnational impulses that lead him to stress that the UN, NATO and the African Union give legitimacy to the action while never really conferring with Congress and largely ignoring the American public for over a week.

Consider his pride in the coalition being put together in only 31 days. We know that the U.S. has acted with greater alacrity in other interventions, but that's the rub -- to him a Nation calling on its allies for action is the old and failed style of diplomacy and war. To him multinational organizations like the UN, the EU, NATO, the Arab League and the African Union trump mere governments. From that view point the agreement was quickly reached, while any previous military actions were merely national in scope and thus suspect and could be safely dismissed as being out-dated and irrelevant.

That is also why, aside from a nod to "democratic impulses" in the region he never discusses democracy. To the transnationalist the citizens are secondary -- after all, they are often little more than bumpkins when all is said and done. Further, it is not congresses or parliaments of individual governments that matter, rather it is the conferences and meetings of governments that confer authority. And, in the end, it doesn't matter not in the least how these leaders came to power, it only matters that they sit at the negotiating tables and support the new civilized order of the world.

Such attitudes explain his contradictions in taking action against Gaddafy while keeping the door propped open for Gaddafy's survival. In the transnational world there are only two avenues for Gaddy to pursue: he either steps down and ends up on the docket of the ICC at some future date, or he moderates his behavior while he keeps pumping the oil. The people's aspirations don't really matter, just ask a Syrian if you doubt that, it is only the stability of the world order that weighs on the scale.   

Yes, there is a lot of spin and BS in his speech, but at its core I think that, considering his embrace of the transnational world view, it is clear he is acting consistently. Too bad it is the Senate, and not the House, that can exert its authority in matters of war and peace. We're on a bad path I fear.

Arab Insult Shoes go global

While reading Don Suber's post Rio to O: Yankee go home I was struck by something in the accompanying picture (cropped version above). The protesters are burning an American flag, and as they burn it two of them are stomping on it with their shoes. Further, one of them holds a shoe, presumably so he can thump on the flag with the shoe. 

It would appear the Brazilian protesters have added the dreaded Arab Insult Shoe to their arsenal. I wonder if pictures of Walker are being pummeled with shoes in Wisconsin?

I, like most of us I imagine, first encountered Arab Insult Shoes when Saddam Hussein's statue was being pulled down in Baghdad. As we watched, Iraquis kept rushing up to it and beating it with their shoes. Then there was the incident where Muntadar al-Zeidi  threw his shoe at President Bush. Prior to that my notion of shoes as weapons was limited to the Jerry Springer show, where bimbos battling over a seedy Lothario would invariably end up throwing their shoes at each other; but apparently now such antics have been elevated to political statements.

Hmmm I wonder what other Middle Eastern protest tactics might catch on with their brothers and sisters in the West? Perhaps Egyptian Riot Headgear?

(pictures from Egyptian RIOT HEAD GEAR!!!)

Edited to add: Oh no! Maybe Egyptian Riot Headgear has already started to spread to protests around the world!

The way to a man's heart

Above is a chart dealing with food self-sufficiency. It is measuring, in calories, (exports-imports)/consumption. Green marks countries with high food self-sufficiency and the scale moves to red, which marks countries poorly able to feed themselves, much less export food (original Net Trade in Food chart).

Anybody following the current unrest in North Africa and the Middle East will immediately note that the area is bathed in red. Add in the percentage of a person's income spent on food and the picture looks even worse. For example, both Spain and Algeria are dark red, yet the Spanish spend only 14.6% of their incomes on food, while Algerians spend a whopping 44% on food.

That means that if World food prices go up they'll cut into the discretionary spending of the Spanish, while they'll cut to the bone in places like Algeria. 

The Chinese are having a crop failure, but they have money to buy food imports. That, and the increasing transport costs due to rising oil prices, means that the price of food will go up. This does not bode well for stability of any post demonstration/revolution Middle Eastern and North African governments. I think it will almost certainly extend the instability of an already unstable region. 

I suspect that whatever governments arise from the latest unrest -- be they better, worse, or more or less more of the same -- that it is likely those governments themselves will be swept away if people grow hungrier. This is going to be a multi-year bumpy ride - Europe, which is already turning to the right is going to face an onslaught of refugees, while the food exporting countries are going to be relentlessly hectored by the UN Food Justice folks.

To end this post, Peter Menzel has put together a series of photographs showing family's weekly expenditures in food around the world. Below, and after the jump, are a few of those photos (from Fresh Pics' What the World Eats Around the World which has more pictures as well as descriptions):

(Hellooooooo visitors from Instapundit)
(Hellooooooo visitors from Small dead animals)

Egypt

USA

If the minute hands ticks towards midnight.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I have little use for Obama. However, the notion that Obama fumbled away Egypt is misguided in my opinion. Yes, he was caught flat-footed, and I have little confidence he'll do anything other than make a bad situation worse, but in the end it will be the Egyptians, and nobody else, that have fumbled away Egypt if it sinks into a theocracy. 

Above are two pictures from Phyllis Chesler's post The Steady Erosion of Women’s Rights in Egypt: A Photographic Story. They are both of Cairo University graduating classes, the top one is from 1978 while the bottom is from 2004. In the first they are dressed in secular fashions, in the second the women all wear hajibs.  Their dress is not something the West forced on them. Their dress is a cultural reaction to the failure of the Islam against the West. 

Whether forced or not, and let's remember that Saudi Arabia, the epicenter of Wahhabism, has to enforce Moslem piety with canes and police beatings, their dress is their embrace of political Islam. Further, that embrace is spreading as Arab push-back against it falters.

When 9/11 happened I feared a widespread war. I still harbor that fear. There was a long thread at Slashdot after the 9/11 attacks. Every one was wondering what the future held and to do moving forward. There was on post in the midst of it all that worried that we already knew the answer to our dilemma: we had reduced both Japan and Germany to rubble and misery, and we could do it again. What a horrible thought, to bath the 21st Century in even more blood than the 20th. Still, it is a potential end game if all goes pear-shaped.

It is a knife's edge the world has been balancing upon, as each side increasingly sees existential threat in the other. I hope we can maintain the balance, because the alternatives are ghastly.  

Then again, maybe I'm just being jittery. I do tend to brood and fear the worse. Perhaps we'll all come out of this crisis in better shape than we entered it. Perhaps the Egyptian populace will embrace the Iraqi rather than the Gazan model of Moslem democracy; and, who knows, but there may be people in Tehran tonight -- and I don't mean the Mullahs -- who are looking at Cairo and seeing an opportunity to reignite their struggles against their repression. After all, history never moves in a straight line.

I apologize for this somber post. If it is any consolation, I am not an Arab or Islamic expert -- I'm just a dilettante. Ah, I should have never gone back and revisited Wretchard's Three Conjectures this afternoon. 

Never forget

The picture above was taken by Bill Baggert. Shortly after it was taken the North Tower collapsed. Four days later his body was found in the wreckage, his cameras destroyed, but with one undisturbed compact flash card containing his final photographs. Rest in Peace Mr. Baggert.

You can read a little about him, see more of his pictures and other projects at the website Bill Braggert Photographer.

Cry me a river...

A preacher with a minuscule congregation in north Florida threatens to burn a Koran and idiocy ensues. 

Would I burn a Koran? No. 
Do I care if a Koran gets burned? No. 
Do I want the Arab street to dictate the shape of tolerance and the limits of free speech? Hell no.

I'll end this brief post with a word to our political leaders who feel they have to preemptively apologize about this -- STFU already. Americans aren't ashamed of the First Amendment,  Terry Jones is an inconsequential lout, and walking on eggs won't keep the Cartoonophobes from blowing a gasket over some perceived slight or another.

Besides, it's not like they have a good track record when it comes to this sort of thing...

Hellooooo visitors from Don Surber. 

Mohammed Descending a Staicase

Whoops, I forgot Draw Mohamed Day. I never drew a picture of Mohammed which naturally makes posting one a bit of a problem. 

Facing that quandary I consider myself lucky to have remembered Marcel Duchamp and his readymades. A readymade is an "ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist."

So, to solve my lack of a Mohammed drawing on this most solemn of Draw Mohamed Days, I found a copy of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and have readymaded it into a new piece of art which I call Mohammed Descending a Staircase. That's it to the left.


If you happen to be a jihadist, rest assured -- even though the details are a bit obscured -- it is a very, very offensive picture of Mohammed and you should be deeply outraged by it.

For the rest of us that are sane, well yes... I suppose I am torturing the definition of readymade a bit. It is a stretch to call me an artist, and I'm not sure that elevating a piece of art into another piece of art is quite within the rules of readymades. Still, Draw Mohamed Day is upon us, and so an artist has to do what an artist has to do.

 

I'm outraged a Moslem won the Miss USA Contest!

Well, ok... actually I'm not. In fact, I don't even know if she's Moslem.

I'll admit, since I've goofed off for a couple of weeks and not posted anything, that this post's headline and the picture to the right are just a cheesy attempt to lure some traffic back.

Beauty pageants are pretty vapid affairs. After all, they are just an excuse to parade a bunch of good looking young women around and pick which is the prettiest. Not that I object to that mind you.

The effort to make them seem more serious than they are leads straight to talent competitions, goofy simple-minded questions and political correctness run amok.

I hate to sound cynical, but because of that political correct imperative to be taken seriously, I have a passing suspicion that her name was far from an obstacle to winning.

Anyways, congratulations to Rima Fakih for her victory.

Occasional Links

Atrazine emasculates frogs.

It's raining men fish.

How to solve health care.

All your news are belong to us.

Grandma in Hubei.

Behind every great fortune....

"The only way you build an economy is through savings and investments."

Jihad Jane.

Seeing through the opaque—they do it with matrices.

The spread of goodness.

Nine eggs sold

"Some wind in the morning, then nice sunny weather. Ground has dried up somewhat. In the evening violent wind & a few drops of rain. The wind actually blew the roof off the small henhouse. Enormous flocks of starlings, some tens of thousands at a time, going over with a noise that sounds like heavy rain. The leaves are mostly down now. Elder leaves just coming down. As I remember it the elms are being stripped much earlier this year than most.

Transplanted the gooseberry bushes. Trust I haven’t damaged them. One or two still had green or greenish leaves, & others were so deep in the ground I had to damage their roots considerably getting them up. The soil there (this end of the garden) is in places pure clay at only 1 foot below the surface. Dug some of this out & lightened the ground as well as possible with sand & turf-mould. Then limed the ground between the bushes & dug in, also pruned the bushes a little. Hope this wind will not blow them all loose again. Added another sack of leaves. [Total on facing page: 3¹/₂.]

9 eggs (probably some of these laid yesterday). Sold 30 @ 4/- a score."

The above quote is George Orwell's diary entry on November 5th, 1939. The Orwell Prize has been posting Orwell's diary entries a day at a time. Each day he writes of nothing but the weather, his gardening and the eggs his hens produce. Soil, fertilizer, rain and eggs -- mundane things that would seem to be of little interest to today's reader.

November 5th, 1939 was in the midst of the Phony War. Germany had invaded and overran Poland and was preparing its attack on France, Belgium and Holland. In fact, while Orwell tended to his garden in England,  General von Brauchitsch was reporting to Hitler on the state of the Germany Army as the Fuhrer considered the starting date for his planned Western Offensive.

During those days Orwell must have felt dread over what he saw on the horizon. With hindsight we know his dread was not misplaced. However, the diary gives no sense of what he thought as he read the day's paper or listened to the news on the radio. He gives no sample of the discussions, fears and hopes that people would have expressed as war loomed ever nearer. Instead, in that diary, he narrowed his world to his garden. It must have been a therapy to him, a quiet corner of his world, a bit of peace to hold onto during the steady drip of disheartening news. 

Eleven soldiers dead today in Fort Hood. The killer was likely just a lunatic. It is just as likely that he wrapped his lunacy in jihadist politics. Is the violence in Fort Hood today a fragment of war brought to our soil, or is it just another side of the pathology that drives serial killers? I don't know, but I have a deepening pessimism, a deepening unease that these times may also be a time of Phony War.

Many years ago I read a translation of a fragment of a Sumerian inscription. It has stuck in my head ever since. Today it seems appropriate: "Look thou about thee and see that all men are fools."