Terror Threats and Alerts in France

Because I've always been a francophile and because STRATFOR lets me (link is here):

Terror Threats and Alerts in France is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

By Scott Stewart

The Eiffel Tower was evacuated Sept. 28 after an anonymous bomb threat against the symbolic Parisian tourist attraction was phoned in; no explosive device was found. The day before the Eiffel Tower threat, French authorities closed the Gare Saint-Lazare in central Paris after an abandoned package, later determined innocuous, was spotted in the train station.

These two incidents serve as the latest reminders of the current apprehension in France that a terrorist attack is imminent. This concern was expressed in a very public way Sept. 11, when Bernard Squarcini, the head of France’s Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (known by its French acronym, DCRI), told French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that the risk of an attack in France has never been higher. Never is a long time, and France has long faced terrorist threats, making this statement quite remarkable.

Squarcini has noted in recent interviews that the combination of France’s history as a colonial power, its military involvement in Afghanistan and the impending French ban on veils that cover the full face and body (niqabs and burqas) combined to influence this threat environment.

A Month of Threats

After the French Senate approved the burqa ban Sept. 14 — which will go into effect next March — a bomb threat against the Eiffel Tower was called in that evening, causing French authorities to evacuate the site and sweep it for explosive devices.

On Sept. 16, five French citizens were abducted from the Nigerien uranium-mining town of Arlit in an operation later claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a claim French Defense Minister Herve Morin later assessed as valid. In July, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon declared that France was at war with the North African al Qaeda franchise after the group killed a French hostage it had kidnapped in April. Fillon’s announcement came three days after the end of a four-day French-Mauritanian offensive against AQIM militants that resulted in the deaths of several militants. After the offensive, AQIM branded French President Nicolas Sarkozy an enemy of Allah and warned France that it would not rest until it had avenged the deaths of its fighters.

French officials have also received unsubstantiated reports from foreign liaison services of plans for suicide bombings in Paris. National Police Chief Frederic Pechenard told Europe 1 radio Sept. 22 that in addition to the threatening statements from AQIM, the French have received specific information that the group is working to target France.

On Sept. 6, Der Spiegel reported that authorities were investigating reports provided by the United States that a German-born Islamist extremist arrested in Afghanistan has warned of possible terrorist attacks in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — including France — planned by jihadists based in Pakistan. This story hit the English-language media Sept. 28, and included reports that the threat may have involved plans to launch Mumbai-like armed assaults in multiple targets in Europe.

In the words of Squarcini to the press, these combined incidents mean “all the blinkers are on red.” This statement is strikingly similar to one in the 9/11 Commission Report attributed to then-CIA Director George Tenet, who said that in July 2001 “the system was blinking red.”
While an examination of the current threat situation in France is interesting, it is equally interesting to observe the way that the French are handling their threat warnings in the media.
The Threat Environment in France

While its neighbors such as Spain and the United Kingdom have suffered bloody attacks since 9/11, the French so far apparently have been spared — although there are some who suspect the yet-unsolved June 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 may have resulted from foul play, along with the explosion at the AZF fertilizer plant in September 2001.

France has long been squarely in the crosshairs of jihadist groups such as AQIM. This is due not only to its former colonial involvement in North Africa but also to its continued support of governments in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia deemed un-Islamic by jihadists. It is also due to France’s military commitment in Afghanistan. Moreover, on the domestic side, France has a significant Muslim minority largely segregated in slums known in French as “banlieues” outside France’s major cities. A significant proportion of the young Muslim men who live in these areas are unemployed and disaffected. This disaffection has been displayed periodically in the form of large-scale riots such as those in October 2005 and November 2007, both of which resulted in massive property destruction and produced the worst civil unrest in France since the late 1960s. While not all those involved in the riots were Muslims, Muslims did play a significant and visible role in them.

Moves by the French government such as the burqa ban have stoked these tensions and feelings of anger and alienation. The ban, like the 2004 ban against headscarves in French schools, angered not only jihadists but also some mainstream Muslims in France and beyond.

Still, other than a minor bombing outside the the Indonesian Embassy in Paris in October 2004, France has seemingly been spared the type of attacks seen in Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. And this is in spite of the fact that France has had to deal with Islamist militants for far longer than its neighbors. Algerian Islamist militants staged a series of attacks involving gas canisters filled with nails and bolts on the Paris subway system in 1995 and 1996, and during the 1980s France experienced a rash of terrorist attacks. In 1981 and 1982, a group known as the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction attacked a series of diplomatic and military targets in several French cities. Algerian militants also hijacked an Air France flight in December 1994, a situation resolved when personnel from the French Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) stormed the aircraft in Marseilles and killed all four hijackers.

“Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid, who is serving a life sentence in the United States for trying to blow up a Paris-to-Miami flight with an explosives-stuffed shoe in December 2001, staged his attack out of France.

In 2001, French authorities broke up a French-Algerian terrorist cell planning to attack the U.S. Embassy in Paris. The six militants, some of whom French authorities had linked to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Also in 2001, Algerian extremists were convicted in connection with an aborted plot to attack a Christmas market at Strasbourg Cathedral on New Year’s Eve 2000.

In January 2005, French police arrested a cell of alleged Chechen and Algerian militants, charging members with plotting terrorist attacks in Western Europe. According to French authorities, the group planned attacks against government and Jewish targets in the United Kingdom as well as against Russian diplomatic and business targets in Western and Central Europe. Other targets included tourist attractions and crowds in the United Kingdom and France and French train stations.

More recently, in October 2009, French particle physicist Adlene Hicheur and his brother, Halim, who holds a Ph.D. in physiology and biomechanics, were arrested and charged with helping AQIM plan terrorist attacks in France.

In the final analysis, France is clearly overdue for a successful jihadist attack, and has been overdue for several years now. Perhaps the only thing that has spared the country has been a combination of proactive, skillful police and intelligence work — the kind that resulted in the thwarted attempts discussed above — and a little bit of luck.

Alerts

France has a national security alert system called the Vigipirate, which has four levels:

· Yellow, which means there is an uncertain threat.

· Orange, which signifies there is a plausible threat.

· Red, which signals a highly probable threat.

· Scarlet, which indicates a certain or known threat.

The Vigipirate level has been set at red since the aftermath of the July 2005 London bombings. This level is probably justified given that France is overdue for an attack, and French authorities undoubtedly have been busy investigating a large number of potential threats since the decision was made to raise the level to red. Still, as we have long discussed, this type of warning system has a tendency to get some attention when the levels are initially raised, but after five years of living at level red, French citizens are undoubtedly experiencing some degree of alert fatigue — and this is why Squarcini’s recent statements are so interesting. Apparently, he does not have the type of hard intelligence required to raise the threat level to scarlet — or perhaps the French government does not want to run the political risk of the backlash to the restrictive security measures they would have to institute if they raised the level. Such measures could include dramatically increasing security personnel and checkpoints and closing certain metro stops, train stations and airports, all things that could be incredibly disruptive.

Generally speaking, a figure like Squarcini would not provide the type of warnings he has recently shared in the press if his service had a firm grasp on the suspects behind the plot(s) about which he is concerned. For example, the FBI felt it had good coverage of groups plotting attacks in some of the recent thwarted plots in the United States, including the group arrested in May 2009 and charged with plotting to bomb two Jewish targets in the Bronx and shoot down a military aircraft at an Air National Guard base. In such a case, the director of the FBI did not feel the need to alert the public to the threat; he believed his agents had everything under control. Therefore, that Squarcini is providing this warning indicates his service does not have a handle on the threat or threats.

Information about a pending threat is not released to the public lightly, because such information could well compromise the source of the intelligence and endanger the investigation into the people behind the plot. This would only be done in situations where one has little or no control over the potential threat. There are numerous factors that would influence the decision to release such information.

Perhaps one of the first is that in a democracy, where public officials and their parties can be held responsible for failure to prevent an attack — as the Aznar government in Spain was following the Madrid train bombings — information pertaining to pending threats may also be released to protect governments from future liability. Following every major attack in a democratic nation, there is always an investigation that seeks to determine who knew what about the threat and when. Making threat information public can spare politicians from falling victim to a witch hunt.

Alternatively, some suggest that French authorities are being pressured to make such warnings to distract the public from domestic problems and Sarkozy’s low popularity. Many also believe the French government has been using its campaign against the Roma as such a distraction. Sarkozy, widely perceived as law-and-order oriented and tough on crime and terrorism, is indeed struggling politically. While the current warnings may provide such a beneficial distraction for Sarkozy, it is our assessment that the terrorist threat to France is very real, and is not being fabricated for political purposes.

Warnings also can be issued in an effort to pre-empt an attack. In cases in which authorities have intelligence that a plot is in the works, but insufficient information to identify the plotters or make arrests, announcing that a plot has been uncovered and security has been increased is seen as a way to discourage a planned attack. With the devolution of the jihadist threat from one based upon a central al Qaeda group to one based upon regional franchises, small cells and lone wolves, it is more difficult to gather intelligence that indicates the existence of these diverse actors, much less information pertaining to their intent and capabilities. In such a murky environment, threat information is often incomplete at best.

Whatever Squarcini’s motive, his warning should serve to shake the French public out of the alert fatigue associated with spending five years at the red level. This should cause the public (and cops on the beat) to increase their situational awareness and report suspicious behavior. The suspicious package seen at the Gare Saint-Lazare on Monday may well have been reported as a result of this increased awareness.

As the jihadist threat becomes almost as diffuse as the criminal threat, ordinary citizens who practice good situational awareness are an increasingly important national security resource — a complex network of eyeballs and brains that Squarcini may have been attempting to activate with his warning. With the burqa ban scheduled to begin next spring, French troops in Afghanistan and the ongoing conflict with AQIM, the threats are likely to continue for the near term — meaning France will remain on alert.

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

This was a book-club pick.  It's also a Pulitzer Prize winner.  It's a lovely novel told through short stories in which the title character appears.  Olive is at the center of some stories and barely present in others.  

Strout does a particularly stunning job of describing and reflecting on aging.  She's got a degree in gerontology and makes good use of her knowledge here, taking Olive from middle-aged to her seventies.

Olive has not been a particularly easy person to live with.  She abused her son, though she insists fiercely that she loved him.  She's gruff, prone to temper flares, and opinionated.  She's none too fond of people unless they are in dire need of love. 

The stories cover themes of finding companionship and emotional support outside of marriage while staying married, depression (treated and untreated), parenting and results thereof, the walls people build between themselves and others (sometimes by choice, sometimes made of the debris of resentments, sometimes indestructible).  This reminds me a bit of Wendell Berry, but with a darker slant.  

Archive for subtitles

Since I can't get anyone else interesting in tags, I'm confident you won't be interested in archiving subtitles either, but I'm going to give it a shot and you should feel free to help out. When you create a new subtitle, make an entry on the new page for "Subtitle Archive" (at the bottom of the column on the right), with the date you published the new subtitle. Optionally, add a link to the source.

Which candidates' parents are praying to "bring America back to her knees"?

From Joel Demos' parents:

We ask for your prayers that God will use Joel to advance HIS Kingdom and help bring America back to her knees! Joel has passed phase one of this venture with flying colors, gaining the favor and backing of key MN Republicans in a miraculous way in a very short time. Now, it is crucial that he pass through the second phase successfully, raising the large amount of money needed to launch his campaign in a very short time. Pray that the finance needed for this venture will miraculously come in from unexpected and solicited sources. Pray that the Word will be fulfilled, Matthew 10:18-20, throughout the remainder of this campaign to become Congressman Joel Demos from CD5 in Minnesota! ...
For the Kingdom and for America,
Alan and Valerie Demos

I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I'm betting that if Keith Ellison's parents publicly prayed that Allah "bring America back to her knees," Glenn Beck would be having a cow.

Here's the Matthew passage:

Matthew 10:18-20 (King James Version)

18And ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles.

19But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.

20For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.

h/t quichmoraine

Joel Demos!

Canoeing with the Cree, Eric Sevareid

I just learned of the existence of Canoeing with the Cree, a book written by Eric Sevareid that looks interesting.

In 1930 two novice paddlers--Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port--launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor, or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages. Nearly four months later, after shooting hundreds of sets of rapids and surviving exceedingly bad conditions and even worse advice, the ragged, hungry adventurers arrived in York Factory on Hudson Bay--with winter freeze-up on their heels. First published in 1935, Canoeing with the Cree is Sevareid's classic account of this youthful odyssey. The newspaper stories that Sevareid wrote on this trip launched his distinguished journalism career, which included more than a decade as a television correspondent and commentator on the CBS Evening News. Now with a new foreword by Arctic explorer, Ann Bancroft.

I can't believe I didn't know about this book and its role in Sevareid's career.

WhatThe****ShouldIMakeForDinner

Want help thinking of something to make for dinner? Try this.

Click on the food name to get to a recipe for it. Or click on "I Don't F***ing Like That" or "I Don't F***ing Eat Meat" to change the suggestion.

I'm still shopping at Target and I still support same-sex marriage

There's a boycott going on in our area against Target for its contributions to MN Forward, a group that has backed Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate for Minnesota governor. Mr. Emmer is against gay marriage.

Of course, I love the idea that these political contributions have consequences to the businesses that make them, but this boycott against Target doesn't quite make sense to me. Here's the problem: I don't think very many people who've started buying their paper towels at Cub Foods instead have investigated Cub's political donations.

Cub is owned by SuperValu, Inc. Its political action committee has donated to a lot of Democrats, but it also has supported Republican candidates who are against gay marriage. One example, Joe Linus Barton:

Maybe the scale of Supervalu's donations (via a PAC) is small enough, compared to Target's contribution to MN Forward, that it's a different animal, but I daresay that lots of boycotters haven't considered whether their alternative paper-towel source is really better.

And, by the way, has anyone checked on political contributions of the manufacturer of those paper towels (and everything else)?

This is pretty simple

I have a few more thoughts about the D'Souza piece. It's not that I merely disagree with his conclusions, it's that I can clearly see that he's carrying the party's water at the expense of intellectual integrity.

It's completely, utterly, intellectually dishonest for D'Souza to write these opening sentences, without any acknowledgment whatsoever of the epically depressed economic conditions in which Obama's policy choices have been made:

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike.

Those actions might be bizarre if they were done in the midst of an economy perking along. D'Souza surely knows this and yet chooses to omit mention of the economic conditions.

How about this:

The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd...

Oh yes, so very odd. It's almost as odd as our country's 1950's tax policy. Apparently, we've had Kenyan anti-colonial, socialist policy-makers fathered by Obama's dad in our past but just weren't aware of it.  (From dshort.com here.)

D'Souza actually wrote these sentences:

Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill?

Yes indeed.  What ON EARTH could be a reason someone would reflect on fossil-fuel consumption in the midst of an oil spill.  I just can't figure that out either.  It surely must have something to do with one's (completely absent) father's view of colonialism, because there just is no other explanation for such a thing.

If you don't think D'Souza is playing a dangerous game of pushing buttons to cause Rethugs to salivate, then ask yourself this: What is the point of including the dollar figure in this sentence: "He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center."

The point, of course, is to repeatedly connect Obama's name to expenditures. Nevermind that this isn't government money being spent. Doesn't matter. It's a signal to generate the desired Pavlovian response: "Obama spends my hard-earned money. There he goes, spending another $100 million, this time on Muslims."

D'Souza uses the words "odd" and "bizarre" to characterize Obama's behavior. These are word choices calculated to fit the rightwing meme that Obama is a foreigner (and of course we all know foreigners are threatening to our well-being). Seriously, why else would D'Souza call it "odd" to discuss dependence on fossil-fuel at the site of an oil spill? Why else would he use the word "bizarre" to characterize stimulus spending that was voted on by Congress (none of whom shares Obama's father)?

As The Economist put it this way in reaching the conclusion that D'Souza is deranged:

There's no need to search for abstruse reasons why an extreme movement conservative like Dinesh D'Souza might oppose raising taxes on the rich or defend privilege in access to education. And it's not surprising that a centrist liberal like Barack Obama thinks people earning more than $250,000 per year ought to be paying more taxes. In fact, that conviction is shared by a majority of the American electorate. If Mr. D'Souza finds it bizarre, it's not Mr. Obama who's out of touch with America.

Incidentally, who isn't anti-colonialist? Is there a pro-colonial movement afoot in the Conservative party?

Nothing like kindly being chastised by an atheist...

And Michael has chastised me before along the same lines:

"How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?" -- Penn Gillette

Video here.

SHAC Jam

The Boy Scouts are going to attempt a world record rocket launch on October 9 in College Station and invited the Cub Scouts to help.  Here's our pack yesterday testing some rockets. 

Charlie, I can't see a thing...

Charlie, I can't see a thing in here, where are you?  Wait.  OK.  Here, hold out your hand.  Here's your whistle.  Got it?  OK, later.

October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys

Scooter:  It's October Sky on P______ H______!

Michael: It's more Simpson than Hickam...

I guess I've been behind the Pine Curtain too long...

If this is my new fantasy love interest and new favorite sport's league:


Kenda Lenseigne and Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association. Videos here.

Huh.

I would not have guessed that Kanye was a fan of classic lit, but here you have it:

Blogging mystery

Why is my proof-reading proofreading more thorough and accurate after I post than it is before I post?

Update:  You'll think I misspelled proofreading for effect, but I did not.

Was going to put this as a subhead

but still can't take down "man-biz".

Mr. O'Rourke describing Scooter in the last paragraph of All the Trouble in the World:

Maybe this isn't such a hopeful moment in history. Really, it's something of a disappointment to know that when mankind--through noble struggles, grim sacrifices (and a lot of money-making)--does achieve such things as property rights, rule of law, responsible government, and universal education, the fruit borne of these splendid achievements is, um, me.

The Fourth Branch on D'Souza

If anyone is looking for a more detailed take-down of D'Souza's nonsense, try this post at The Fourth Branch. Have a few key points, but do read the whole thing:

1) D'Souza ascribes a policy choice (loans to Brazil's oil industry for off-shore drilling) to Obama, but that choice was actually made by a board that had more Repbulicans Republicans than Democrats, every one of whom had been appointed by Bush.

2) Obama's speech about the BP spill DID spend several paragraphs talking about the clean-up. Besides, since when is it Kenyan-anti-colonial to talk about the dangers of dependence on non-renewable sources of energy?

3) Bailout money is actually getting repaid. TARP was under Bush.

4) Military:

Perhaps D’Souza is unaware that Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan since taking office and left troops in Iraq longer than he said he would as a candidate. He has also increased predator drone attacks into Pakistan and deployed troops to the US border with Mexico. Are these honestly the acts of a man driven by an impassioned hatred of the US military or who views the US military as a neocolonial force?

Adam Serwer on D'Souza

Adam Serwer on Sept. 13:

For whatever reason, elements of the right have chosen not to evaluate Barack Obama based on his actions or his policies but through the kind of postmodern literary interpretation that wouldn't make it through the vetting process of a freshman bong circle at Wesleyan. In these retellings of Obama's personal history, the president's life is an epic, Marxist, sinister version of a Joseph Campbell-style heroic journey, with its hero ultimately falling, like Anakin Skywalker, to the dark side of the force.

Emerging from his sinecure as president of a small religious college in New York, Dinesh D'Souza, who has been laundering the racism of the right through an "intellectual" filter since his days at Dartmouth, gets back to where his career began. In an essay for Forbes, he concludes that the animating philosophy of the president is "Kenyan anti-colonialism." The purpose of the essay is to synthesize the most idiotic conservative criticisms of Obama into one handy term...

[Jump]

This is birtherism with big words. This is the witchdoctor sign without Photoshop, WorldNetDaily without the exclamation points. D'Souza doesn't need to stare at Obama's birth certificate for hours to come to the same conclusion as the birthers, which is that the president is a foreigner. But neither is "Kenyan anti-colonialism" a superficial term. At once, it engages all the racialized elements of the conservative critique of Obama -- not just that having an African father means he isn't really an American but that his inner life consists of a deep anger toward white people, and the office of the presidency is merely the means to secure a collective payback. It also manages to nod in the direction of another conservative racist meme, that having a black president makes the United States somehow analogous to African Third World countries run by bloodthirsty despots.

Shariah is the fault line

We've been arguing about the wrong thing: who is moderate, who is not, who is more moderate than whom.

"Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam's internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates - figures like Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and leader of the world's largest liberal Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama - who embrace the Enlightenment's veneration of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms. On that side of the divide, Shariah is defined as but a reference point for a Muslim's personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.

The other side of the divide is dominated by "Islamists," who are Muslim supremacists. Like erstwhile proponents of communism and Nazism, these supremacists - some terrorists, others employing stealthier means - seek to impose a global theocratic and authoritarian regime, called a caliphate. On this side of the divide, Shariah is a compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to wage jihad to install and to which the rest of the world is required to submit.

For these ideologues, Shariah is not a private matter. They see the West as an infidel enemy to be conquered, not a culture and civilization to be embraced or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of government like ours to coexist peacefully with the end-state they seek."

Does Rauf support or reject Shariah?

D'Souza's new book

The Roots of Obama's Rage:

"In The Roots of Obama’s Rage you’ll learn: Why Obama’s economic policies are actually designed to make America poorer compared to the rest of the world; Why Obama will welcome a nuclear Iran; Why Obama sees America as a rogue nation—worse than North Korea; The real reason Obama banished a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House and ordered NASA to praise the scientific contributions of Muslims; Why Obama would like to make America’s superpower status a thing of the past.

Stunning, provocative, original, and telling—no one has better diagnosed who Obama is, what he intends to do, and why he poses an existential threat to America than Dinesh D’Souza in The Roots of Obama’s Rage."

October 4!

D'Souza: "How Obama Thinks"

I would advise Steph to duct tape her head before reading the whole thing.

"But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."

Stewart on Imam Rauf's "threat"

Stewart was in fine form last night.  In this segment, Jon highlights the response of the right-wing media to Imam Rauf's purported threat.  Stewart's take jives jibes with mine.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Islamophobiapalooza
www.thedailyshow.com
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Giddy for public domain poetry: Kipling

One of my dad's favorite Kipling poems.

The Female of the Species (1911)

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the other's tale --
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations-worm and savage otherwise, --
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger --- Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue -- to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity -- must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions -- not in these her honour dwells.
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions -- in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies! --
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges -- even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons -- even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish -- like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice -- which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern -- shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

Check list for my dad's reading list

Here's a table to keep track of Michael's progress on the list. (Scooter and LJ, if you want in on this, just let me know.)

Uncle Johnny's reading list - part 1, Poe

See here for background.

What's not included in the comments is an off-line discussion with Steph in which I marveled at the breadth of Johnny's list and lamented my own illiteracy. That led to Steph's comment that the list could be read in six months and my comment that I was going to give it a try.

I have given various reading lists a go before, with little success, so we'll see.

In the comments to Steph's post I said I was going to start in chronological order (Hawthorne, Three Musketeers, Poe, Tom Sawyer and Prince and Pauper, and Treasure Island).

[All of the background/history noted below comes from my extensive research on Wikipedia or from the introductions to the Poe collection or The Scarlett Letter. The links below take you to the Wikipedia articles.]

Hawthorne and Poe were contemporaries (Poe even reviewed one of Hawthorne's short story collections). Poe died in 1849. Many of Hawthorne's better known short stories were published before then; however, The Scarlett Letter, which I'm reading now, was published in 1850. The Three Musketeers was published in 1844.

I found a Poe short story collection in my bookcase and so started with it. So the initial order will be Poe, Hawthorne, Musketeers, which is close enough to chronological.

Johnny's list called for four Edgar Allan Poe short stories.

I read The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold Bug, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter. I started The Fall of the House of Usher, but could not get past the convoluted sentence structure and overwhelming dreariness. How about a little sample?

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth--in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated--an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit--an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

[I'm not going to attempt to summarize the stories or critique them; the Wiki people can do that better than I.]

The first three in the list are very short "horror" stories with a twist at the end. The Gold Bug is one of the earliest "detective" stories and reflects the popularity of cryptology at the time.

The last three in the list star the first private detective in fiction, C. Auguste Dupin.

Wikipedia:

"As the first true detective in fiction, the Dupin character established many literary devices which would be used in future fictional detectives including Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Many later characters, for example, follow Poe's model of the brilliant detective, his personal friend who serves as narrator, and the final revelation being presented before the reasoning that leads up to it."

Add to those factors the bumbling city cop who relies on the detective for help and you see that Conan Doyle had the structure laid out for him by Poe.

All of Poe can be found on Gutenberg for reasons our copyright attorney can explain.

My general thoughts on reading Poe to follow.

Bated breath

World Wide Words says:

Q: From Steve Gearhart: Where does the term baited breath come from, as in: ‘I am waiting with baited breath for your answer’?
A: The correct spelling is actually bated breath but it’s so common these days to see it written as baited breath that there’s every chance that it will soon become the usual form, to the disgust of conservative speakers and the confusion of dictionary writers.
[Jump]
It’s easy to mock, but there’s a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the unstressed first vowel (a process called aphesis); it means “reduced, lessened, lowered in force”. So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing as a result of some strong emotion, such as terror or awe.

Annabel Lee

While we're waiting with baited bated breath for Michael to post something about his recent Poe readings, have a little Poe poetry.  This is Annabelle Annabel Lee in its entirety.  (Yay for expiration of copyright.)

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,
          In a kingdom by the sea,
    That a maiden there lived whom you may know
          By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
    And this maiden she lived with no other thought
          Than to love and be loved by me.

    I was a child and she was a child,
          In this kingdom by the sea;
    But we loved with a love that was more than love-
          I and my Annabel Lee;
    With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
          Coveted her and me.

    And this was the reason that, long ago,
          In this kingdom by the sea,
    A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
          My beautiful Annabel Lee;
    So that her highborn kinsman came
          And bore her away from me,
    To shut her up in a sepulchre
          In this kingdom by the sea.

    The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
          Went envying her and me-
    Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
          In this kingdom by the sea)
    That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
          Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

    But our love it was stronger by far than the love
          Of those who were older than we-
          Of many far wiser than we-
    And neither the angels in heaven above,
          Nor the demons down under the sea,
    Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
          Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

    For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
          Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
    And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
          Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
    And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
    Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
          In the sepulchre there by the sea,
          In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Imam Rauf on Larry King

I'm days late with this, but I just saw the rerun of Imam Rauf on Larry King last night.  I'd missed the original.

Imam Rauf was "interviewed" by Soledad O'Brien.  Those inclined to be hateful of him are willfully misunderstanding his words and twisting his meaning.  Soledad asked an annoying number of times: "Why build at this location when 71% of the American population is against putting the center at that location?"  He answered the question patiently over and over.  One of the many points he made was that he held concerns that if he aborted the mosque/community center project or moved it in response to protests, that it would be fuel for terrorism, that worldwide headlines that the project was disallowed by the American people would fuel anti-West sentiments and spur violent responses.  At one point he described that he feared there was greater danger from violent acts from radical Muslims than from the radical right.   It was an assessment that you would think the right would embrace:  he just characterized radical Muslims as more violent than radical Christians.  Isn't that what right-wing blogs shout every day? But no, the radical right has construed his comment as a threat.  It wasn't a threat. (Media Matter points out that Gen. Petraeus has said something similar.)

I want to give Imam Rauf credit for not losing his temper with Soledad.  Good grief.  She could not have been more hostile.  Kudos to him for pointing out that calling this location, blocks from Ground Zero, "sacred ground" when there's a strip club in the block is "inconsistent".

He also acknowledged that Hamas is responsible for terrorist acts and that he condemns all acts of terrorism.  I know, I know; he refused to say the sentence "I condemn Hamas" so his statement will be insufficient to prove to some that he's not...whatever horrible thing you think he is.  Knock yourself out with that, as long as you are also suspicious of people who say they condemn the child abuse committed by Catholic priests without being willing to say "I condemn the Catholic Church."

Meanwhile, Media Matters has prepared a timeline of the news stories about the Cordoba house.  It's instructive is you are wondering how to whip the public into a frenzy over something they weren't initially inclined to be opposed to.  It has, by the way, very little to do with uncovering new facts and much more to do with shading and characterizing the facts and playing Six Degrees of People Who Don't Eat Bacon.

Squirrel revenge

As K was walking through our back yard yesterday, an object fell out of a tree.  He looked into the tree and saw that a squirrel had dropped it.  K examined the object and identified it as one of Karma's bones.  That's right.  A squirrel stole Karma's bone and dragged it into the tree.

Since squirrels are vegetarians, I can only figure that the squirrel stole the bone to get back at Karma for killing its friends/relatives in the backyard.  She has caught and killed three squirrels in the back yard, and another two at the dog park, that I know of.

Winnie has a baby dragon

Welcome to the world, Draco Verta.

50 Cent

If you're not following 50 Cent on Twitter, you're missing out on a lot of amused-head-shaking.  I was going to offer some excerpts, but they're too full of banned words to show here.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon

Oy. I finally finished YPU.

I'm sure it's great; I just had a very hard time getting through it. No doubt that's more of a comment on my mental state than on the novel. Because I wasn't reading as attentively as I ought to have been, I didn't remember the characters that show up again in the last quarter of the novel and are crucial to the religious-political aspects of the plot.

I loved the what-if premise of a Jewish settlement established post WWII in Alaska.  I loved the genre-bending; it' a noir murder mystery, historical sci-fi and a love story rolled into one. I appreciated the cynical take on how the expectation of a messiah can be used and exploited, by those trying to make a buck and by governments.  There was way too much convenient coincidence to suit me, although that's maybe a nod to its noir platform.

Trivia: I noticed that Chabon gives Nabokov (Speak, Memory) a h/t for devising the Zugzwang (the condition of having no good moves) of Mendel Shpilman.

Spoilers behind the cut.

Questions for Imam Rauf From an American Muslim

[Dr. M. Zudhi Jasser, a medical doctor and a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Ariz.]

After a long absence while controversy over the mosque near Ground Zero smoldered, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf finally held forth this week both in the New York Times and on CNN.

Imam Rauf and his supporters are clearly more interested in making a political statement in relation to Islam than in the mosque's potential for causing community division and pain to those who lost loved ones on 9/11. That division is already bitterly obvious.

As someone who has been involved in building mosques around the country, and who has dealt with his fair share of unjustified opposition, I ask of Imam Rauf and all his supporters, "Where is your sense of fairness and common decency?" In relation to Ground Zero, I am an American first, a Muslim second, just as I would be at Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy Beach, Pearl Harbor or any other battlefield where my fellow countrymen lost their lives.

I must ask Imam Rauf: For what do you stand—what's best for Americans overall, or for what you think is best for Islam? What have you said and argued to Muslim-majority nations to address their need for reform? You have said that Islam does not need reform, despite the stoning of women in Muslim countries, death sentences for apostates, and oppression of reformist Muslims and non-Muslims.

You now lecture Americans that WTC mosque protests are "politically motivated" and "go against the American principle of church and state." Yet you ignore the wide global prevalence of far more dangerous theo-political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and all of its violent and nonviolent offshoots.

In your book, "What's Right With Islam," you cite the Brotherhood's radical longtime spiritual leader Imam Yusuf Qaradawi as a "moderate." Reformist American Muslims are not afraid to name Mr. Qaradawi and his ilk as radical. We Muslims should first separate mosque and state before lecturing Americans about church and state.

Imam, tell me if you can look into the eyes of children who lost a parent on 9/11 and convince them that this immodest Islamic center benefits them. How will it in any way aid counterterrorism efforts or keep one American any safer? You willfully ignore what American Muslims most need—an open call for reformation that unravels the bigoted and shoddy framework of political Islam and separates mosque and state.

There are certainly those who are prejudiced against Muslims and who are against mosques being built anywhere, and even a few who wish to burn the Quran. But most voices in this case have been very clear that for every American freedom of religion is a right, but that it is not right to make one's religion a global political statement with a towering Islamic edifice that casts a shadow over the memorials of Ground Zero.

As an American Muslim, I look at that pit of devastation and contemplate the thousands of lives undone there within seconds. I pray for the ongoing strength to fight the fanatics who did this, and who continue their war against my country with both overt violence and covert strategies that aim to undo the very freedoms for which so many have fought and died.

Imam Rauf may not appear to the untrained eye to be an Islamist, but by making Ground Zero an Islamic rather than an American issue, and by failing to firmly condemn terrorist groups like Hamas, he shows his true allegiance.

Islamists in "moderate" disguise are still Islamists. In their own more subtle ways, the WTC mosque organizers end up serving the same aims of the separatist and supremacist wings of political Islam. In this epic struggle of the 21st century, we cannot afford to ignore the continuum between nonviolent political Islam and the militancy it ultimately fuels among the jihadists.

Silence

Let me just note that neither of the Christians writing here have used this public space to condemn the Koran-burning event. Should I infer that you approve of the event? And if not, then may we please put an end to giving any credence to new reports or analysis that draw conclusions about Muslim "support" for violent criminals simply because they haven't uttered their condemnation to a reporter whose publication wanted to print it?

Heroes: Susan Retik and Patti Quigley

In the midst of all the hatred and vitriol and Islamophobia and Koran-burning, my faith that humans can behave humanely was restored by Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, whose husbands died in the 9/11 attack.

So at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives.

The organization they started, Beyond the 11th, has now assisted more than 1,000 Afghan widows in starting tiny businesses. It’s an effort both to help some of the world’s neediest people and to fight back at the distrust, hatred and unemployment that sustain the Taliban.

Kristof tells their story here.

Bolton in 2012?

Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower...

was apparently made into some kind of documentary. Did anybody see it on HBO this week? I think it was called My Trip to Al-Qaeda.

Bobcat spotted in Pearland

Home of the Little League Champs [of the the contiguous 48] and just across the freeway from us.

Re: More perceived threats

Another thing that gets the shorts of some of us on the right side of things all in a bunch is the dread EMP. Here's the [link to the] recent report of STRATFOR on the subject by Scott Stewart and Nate Huges.

[Hmmm, for some reason I'm unable to paste the article even though I'm allowed to reprint. Guess anyone who's interested will just have to go read the thing at their site so I'll double check the link.]

My only minor gripe with the article is that I'm not certain the US would or should treat (in terms of retaliation) an EMP attack as a conventional nukular attack.

Bottom line is that an EMP threat is pretty darned remote.

Threats, real and perceived

Because so much of public policy is driven by fear, it's important to have an accurate understanding of the likelihood of harm from perceived threats.

NPR's blog offers a reality check about threats to kids.

Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:

1. Kidnapping
2. School snipers
3. Terrorists
4. Dangerous strangers
5. Drugs

But how do children really get hurt or killed?

1. Car accidents
2. Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
3. Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Drowning

Parents are busy worrying about all the wrong things.  It matters to all of us because parents who are worried about their children being killed by terrorists will vote in line with candidates who reflect that fear and make promises to keep them safe from terrorists, an unlikely threat.  Meanwhile, a candidate who advocates for greater spending on mental health professionals to guard against suicides, a more likely threat, will be dismissed.

(Warning: NPR's post contains not-fully explained statistics.  The threat of death for everyone is 100%.  Period.  I think the writer means "the threat of death before the age of 18..." or something like that.)

H/t Supraluxe.

Internet fun

Since you all are enjoying Xtranormal, I thought I'd offer links to all the fun free tools I know about on the web.

Memes, Macros, Etc.

• Create your own motivational posters
• Meme generator
• Create a word cloud at Wordle (upload text and it'll size words according to how often they're used in the text)
• Custom animated text. There are oodles of sites that provide this. Here's one. And another.
• Add caption bubbles to an image.
• Add text to photo using popular ROLFBOT.
• Sign generator. Again, there are oodles, but here's one.
• Gif animations.
• Graphs that are easy to make and embed at Graphomatic

Artsy stuff

• Make-a-Flake
• Tartan plaid generator
• Make and color patterns at ColourLovers
• Draw "pencil" animations at Pencil
• Make your own cartoons at GoAnimate
• Textures

Less fun but useful is this html testbed.

I will update this post occasionally, without any update notation, as I learn of new things.

A scene from Brett's life

Another shady character at the GZM

Hisham Elzanaty.

Scenes from my life

I've always wanted to be a movie director.....




I need to work on my sets and pacing. But overall, a fairly good effort I think.
I'm addicted to this site now...

Party Post...

HAPPY 5th BIRTHDAY, SSJ



I baked us a cake, figuratively speaking. You'll be familiar with the dialogue:



Lastly, pretend our name is Terrance:

Guess who

For instance, she asks venue owners to “utilize…non-petroleum cups” and other “alternatives to Styrofoam” for backstage drinks. She requests they reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by using “renewable sources and/or to [buying] sustainable energy credits where possible.” She actually asked them to check with their local utility companies to see if there’s a “green power” option they can switch to during her concert. She asks for “eco-friendly cleaning and bathroom products [and] post-consumer recycled toilet paper and paper [towels].”

Answer here.

This is how you handle nuts.

The gunman was reportedly motivated by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth eco-propaganda. Guess what? I’m not playing that opportunistic blame game here. It’s not Al Gore’s fault when an enviro-nut goes off unhinged (and I’ve said that before). The blame in this case lies with the crazy man who terrorized the Discovery Channel employees. Period.

Michelle Malkin

Update: Jim Treacher's headline:

Gun-wielding ecoterrorist calls for reduction in human population, gets wish

Venn Diagrams, part 2

I see your Venn diagram and raise you:

Re: SSJ Birthday

I remember its, er, conception as if it were yesterday.

Did anyone notice...

SSJ has it's fifth birthday tomorrow?

Silence of Left

Remember all the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing on the left during the Bush years about how horrible the deficit was? And all the blather about how expensive the Iraq war was?

We don't hear that kind of thing so much anymore.

Exactly my point

Cool Venn diagram here that makes the same point I made earlier:

Mosque developer Sharif El-Gamal

I haven't followed it closely enough to know that this guy was involved, but it looks like there is more than one shady character behind the GZM. Steph, the link is to MSM so it's safe to click through...

Rauf is a slumlord

Not only is he a shady imam, he's a slumlord to boot.

Not All Muslims

Jim Treacher:

Two men taken off a Chicago-to-Amsterdam United Airlines flight in the Netherlands have been charged by Dutch police with “preparation of a terrorist attack,” U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.

U.S. officials said the two appeared to be traveling with what were termed “mock bombs” in their luggage. “This was almost certainly a dry run, a test,” said one senior law enforcement official…

The men were identified as Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, of Detroit, MI, and Hezem al Murisi, the officials said.

I knew it. Mormons.

All kidding aside, what’s up with this anti-Muslim bigotry? I’ve long advocated the “Not All” rule for these types of stories:

Not All Muslims Arrested on ‘Preparation of a Terrorist Attack’ in Amsterdam
Not All Muslims Kill 14 in Fort Hood Shooting Rampage
Not All Muslims Put Bombs in Underpants and Book Transatlantic Flight
Not All Muslims Fly Planes into World Trade Center, Murdering Thousands

But instead we have this 21st Century lynching party. Do you really want to live in a world where the cops can arrest guys just because they happen to be Muslim and happen to be carrying stuff that looks like bombs? And I’m sure the arresting officers will deny up and down that they’re racists.

Be advised, America: This is what happens when you let your drunks wander into mosques and pee on stuff. This is your fault.

Awww

I answer my own call to find something cuter than the baby elephant in a pool:



The videos playing on the phone are clips of Adam on Idol. The kisses at the end are the cutest thing ever.

This is old, but I was just reminded of its existence.

NPR's 50 Great Voices Series

As noted below, NPR is doing a series on great voices in recorded music over the decades. One episode airs each week. Here's who they've covered so far:

1. Radmilla Cody: Two Cultures, One Voice (May 10, 2010)
2. Enrico Caruso: And Confessions of an Operaholic (May 17, 2010)
3. Lydia Mendoza: The First Lady of Tejano (May 24, 2010)
4. Janis Joplin: The Queen of Rock (June 7, 2010)
5. Sandy Denny: Mercurial Queen of British Folk Rock (June 14, 2010)
6. Donny Hathaway: Neglected Heart of Soul (June 21, 2010)
7. Lauren Hill: The Many Voices of... (June 28, 2010)
8. Fairuz: Lebanon's Voice of Hope (July 12, 2010)
9. John McCormack: The Charming Irish Tenor (July 19, 2010)
10. Khaled: The King of Rai (July 26, 2010)
11. Biggie Smalls: The Voice that Influenced a Generation (August 2, 2010)
12. Bjork: A Celestial Voice (August 7, 2010)
13. Twinkie Clark: Riffing on Gospel (August 23, 2010)
14. Ima Thomas: The Soul Queen of New Orleans (August 23, 2010)
15. Freddie Mercury: Rock 'N' Roll's Humble Showman (August 30, 2010)

TBC

Freddie Mercury

NPR is doing a series on great voices across the decades. Today aired an episode about Freddie Mercury. Adam is one of the people interviewed. He talks about his study of Freddie's voice. He demonstrates a little something about the long-held "wooooorrlld" in We Are the Champions.

Re: This just in

I hope that for today at least that percentage is somewhat better than 99.9% of 1.5B.

I'm not really inclined to jump in to anything GZ Mosque related due to deep ambivalence.

BUT, I met a jenuwine Islamophobe the other day. She's an occasional bridge partner of my mom's and she stopped by after they last played.

She lived in Rhodesia, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Egypt during the 60s, 70s and 80s and had the misfortune of witnessing a couple of behandings.

Granted seeing that could color anybody's opinion but she loathes anything Muslim of any stripe.

To make things a little more interesting, she's also an atheist, Randian libertarian.

Judea Pearl has an explanation

While I await Steph's explanation of what she means by "unconstitutional" reasons, here's Judea's Pearl take:

I have been trying hard to find an explanation for the intense controversy surrounding the Cordoba Initiative, whereby 71 percent of Americans object to the proposed project of building a mosque next to Ground Zero.

I cannot agree with the theory that such broad resistance represents Islamophobic sentiments, nor that it is a product of a “rightwing” smear campaign against one imam or another.

Americans are neither bigots nor gullible.

Deep sensitivity to the families of 9/11 victims was cited as yet another explanation, but this too does not answer the core question.

If one accepts that the 19 fanatics who flew planes into the Twin Towers were merely self-proclaimed Muslims who, by their very act, proved themselves incapable of acting in the name of “true Islam,” then building a mosque at Ground Zero should evoke no emotion whatsoever; it should not be viewed differently than, say, building a church, a community center or a druid shrine.

A more realistic explanation is that most Americans do not buy the 19 fanatics story, but view the the 9/11 assault as a product of an anti- American ideology that, for good and bad reasons, has found a fertile breeding ground in the hearts and minds of many Muslim youngsters who see their Muslim identity inextricably tied with this anti-American ideology.

THE GROUND Zero mosque is being equated with that ideology. Public objection to the mosque thus represents a vote of no confidence in mainstream American Muslim leadership which, on the one hand, refuses to acknowledge the alarming dimension that anti-Americanism has taken in their community and, paradoxically, blames America for its creation.

The American Muslim leadership has had nine years to build up trust by taking proactive steps against the spread of anti-American terror-breeding ideologies, here and abroad.

Evidently, however, a sizable segment of the American public is not convinced that this leadership is doing an effective job of confidence building.

In public, Muslim spokespersons praise America as the best country for Muslims to live and practice their faith. But in sermons, speeches, rallies, classrooms, conferences and books sold at those conferences, the narrative is often different. There, Noam Chomsky’s conspiracy theory is the dominant paradigm, and America’s foreign policy is one long chain of “crimes” against humanity, especially against Muslims.

Affirmation of these conspiratorial theories sends mixed messages to young Muslims, engendering anger and helplessness: America and Israel are the first to be blamed for Muslim failings, sufferings and violence.

Terrorist acts, whenever condemned, are immediately “contextually explicated” (to quote Tariq Ramadan); spiritual legitimizers of suicide bombings (e.g. Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar) are revered beyond criticism; Hamas and Hizbullah are permanently shielded from the label of “terrorist.”

Overall, the message that emerges from this discourse is implicit, but can hardly be missed: When Muslim grievance is at question, America is the culprit and violence is justified, if not obligatory.

True, we have not helped Muslims in the confidence-building process. Treating homegrown terror acts as isolated incidents of psychological disturbances while denying their ideological roots has given American Muslim leaders the illusion that they can achieve public acceptance without engaging in serious introspection and responsibility sharing for allowing victimhood, anger and entitlement to spawn such acts.

The construction of the Ground Zero mosque would further prolong this illusion.

If I were New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, I would reassert Muslims’ right to build the Islamic center and the mosque, but I would expend the same energy, not one iota less, in trying to convince them to put it somewhere else, or replace it with a community-managed all-faiths center in honor of the 9/11 victims.

Fellow Muslim Americans will benefit more from co-ownership of consensual projects than sole ownership of confrontational ones.

[Emphasis added]

This just in

About 1.5 BILLION Muslims did nothing violent today. Or yesterday. Or the day before that . . .

Imagining with reason

Paul Mirengoff:

Since [9/11], we have learned that the radical ideology behind 9/11 is not quite as alien as we thought. Some portion of the American Muslim community - presumably small, but we don't know how small - is drawn to it.

Moreover, what looks like a considerable portion of those who hold themselves out (and are held out by the MSM) as leaders of American Muslims refuse to disassociate themselves from terrorist groups. They don't countenance al Qaeda, though they do blame America for that outfit's terrorist acts. But they won't repudiate other bloody terrorists, notably Hamas.

Thus, while only the most highly informed Americans probably could have imagined terrorist plotting or even pro-terrorist rhetoric in an American place of worship back in 2001, many can imagine it now, and with reason.

Agility training: Tracy Sklenar

I’ve now had two episodes of having my mind blown about dog training. The first was the first time I saw free-shaping demonstrated. (We’ve talked about free-shaping here several times.) The second was last weekend. I audited one day of a weekend course given by Tracy Sklenar on handling skills for agility. Tracy is a nationally-known expert who has competed with her own dogs at world championship levels.

Before I describe what I learned, though, you need a little background. Before I started agility training, the only agility competition I’d seen was the very high level competition that gets television coverage. I was amazed at two things: that a dog can be trained to weave in and out of poles and that a dog can be trained to run across a teeter totter. While these are the most challenging obstacles to master, teaching a dog these maneuvers is a piece of cake compared to what the core of the training is about. The real challenge is “handling” which is communicating to your dog where they’re supposed to go as they run the course and for this communication to be timed right and clear made clear so that the dog can run the course as fast as possible without making mistakes.

What I’ve been taught to do and what I’ve been doing to date has been pointing at obstacles and calling its name as I run the course (“Jump!” “Tunnel!” “Teeter!”). Tracy Sklenar teaches that you should instead only point and call out the names of obstacles in specific circumstances, and never point or name obstacles when the obstacles are on a line that you’re already running or a gentle arc. So that seems impossible, right? How will the dog know where to go if you don’t point at things or call out obstacles?

She teaches that your dog should have two modes when running a course: extension (running all out) and collection (wherein your dog slows, gathers its feet and gets its balance to be able to turn or jump). She teaches that you cue extension entirely through the way you move your own body. It needs to look to the dog like you are running all out. You should be in a leaning-forward posture and should pump your arms and take big steps. If you don’t have room to run all out, then fake it, taking high steps, rather than long ones. Your dog, partly as a result of practicing this but largely as a result of what he/she has observed about how humans run, will understand that this means “run as fast as possible along a generally straight or gently-curved line, taking any obstacles in this line. If I need you to turn, I will let you know.” By not using your arm when you’re running on straight lines your dog doesn’t have to turn his head to focus on your arm and can confidently run straight ahead.

To cue the dog to collect, you use a deceleration cue. The “decel” cue is to stand straight up and put out an arm or finger. At all times when running agility, you should be watching your dog, but you may need to be especially intense about it (i.e. turn your shoulders toward the dog, lower your chin to your shoulder or chest so that your face is square to them) during a decel cue.

I tried this with Karma at practice this week. Even though we’d never practiced running without pointing/naming, we didn’t have a single miscue when running in extension mode. This was completely amazing to me.

Lots more for another day.

I KNEW that Republicans/conservatives were mean, stupid, and evil.

Krauthammer:

And now the mosque near ground zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" - blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims - a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

Tracy Jordan's repressed childhood memories

And now for something completely different . . .

On the rerun of 30 Rock that aired last night (Season 4, Episode 21), Tracy Morgan's character, Tracy Jordan, visited his childhood home and was flooded with repressed childhood memories. It's essentially a list of some of the best "we were so poor" jokes ever written. Tracy's delivery, of course, made them all the more funny.

As transcribed by Everything Tracy Jordan Said:

It’s all coming back to me, oh my God.

I slept on an old dog bed stuffed with wigs.

I watched a prostitute stab a clown.

Our basketball hoop was a rib cage! A RIB CAGE!!!

Why did you bring me here? I blocked all this stuff out for a reason. Oh, Lord. Some guy with dreads electrocuted my fish!

All my life I’ve tried to forget the things I’ve seen. a crackhead breast-feeding a rat, a homeless man cooking a Hot Pocket on a third rail of the G train! The G train, Nermal!

I’ve seen a blind guy bite a police horse.

A puppy committed suicide after he saw our bathroom.

I once bit into a burrito and there was a child’s shoe in it.

I’ve seen a hooker eat a tire.

A pack of wild dogs took over and successfully ran a Wendy’s.

The sewer people stole my skateboard.

The projects I lived in were named after Zachary Taylor, generally considered to be one of the worst presidents of all time.

I once saw a baby give another baby a tattoo! They were very drunk!

Thoughts on the Ahem discussion

In the comments of Steph's Ahem post, SupraLuxe and I had an exchange that didn't go well. I was all set to write a snarky, blazing Fisk and in fact started something yesterday morning but got bogged down in diversions and formatting chores before I had to get B to the bus stop.

After thinking about it for a day, I don't want to do that. I'd rather make just a couple of comments.

First, when I told SupraL that Freereplublic and World Net Daily were NOT "leading conservative websites," he took offense. It was not my intention to criticize SuperL's research skills or his choice of sources. However, SupraL's characterization of the Freepers and WND as "leading conservative websites" told me (1) that he hasn't spent much time looking at conservative websites, and (2) he thinks conservatives are crazy. (Note for SupraL: Until fairly recently, I was a hard-core lefty. I proudly called myself a socialist, which lefties seldom do these days, even if they are. I KNEW that Republicans/conservatives were mean, stupid, and evil.) I don't expect that anything SupraL reads here or on any conservative website will change his mind about any of the topics we discuss. But to the extent that SupraL is curious about what conservatives think, I wanted to steer him away from the Freepers and WND and to a place where conservative thoughts are expressed sanely and intelligently; NRO is one of those, there are many others.

Second, a note to SupraL on argument. When in the course of a discussion/argument you find yourself questioning the motivation or character or sanity of your opponent, you are engaging in an ad hominem attack, and it generally means you have run out of thoughtful things to say on the subject. Ad hominem attacks are fun (I know because I do it all the time*) but rarely productive if your goal is a meaningful discussion.

*See, for instance, in the same comments, where I told Steph she was "beyond the bend."**

**But she provocated me.

Curious

I'm curious to know whether my Republican blog brothers regard Sarah Palin's success in helping candidates get elected as a good thing for your party.

Emerson's tapes

My post "Imam Rauf to be exposed..." linked to Ace's post, which linked to a post on Weasel Zippers, which linked to the original post on Pam Geller's Atlas Shrugged. If you go to the original post on Atlas Shrugged and read since then, you'll find the tapes. I haven't read most of it, but what I have read you will not find controversial and will probably agree with. To you it won't be any big deal, and certainly no expose. Others, including me, will disagree with you.

How's that for sourcing?

Tapes

Any sign of the tapes yet? How long does it take to upload 13 hours worth of recordings? It's been almost a week. Maybe we could all chip in to buy Steve Emerson a faster internet connection.

Here's my prediction: there's nothing clearly problematic on those tapes (assuming there are tapes at all). If there were anything offensive in the tapes, the tapes would be published already.

Ahem

Haven't there been some revelations about Imam Rauf's nefarious connections that you want to share, Michael?  I rely on you for such news, so I was disappointed to have to get it from Jon Stewart.

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I think maybe NOW I'm opposed to the building of the mosque because of its frightening connections to Fox News.

Tags

Can I talk you gentlemen into tagging your own posts from now on?   (You're also welcome to go back and tag historical posts. I went back as far as 2/19/09.)

I started the tagging project because I wanted to find all the book posts.  Because they don't necessarily contain the word "book", there's no way to find them easily.

There are tags for the broad topics of: Economics, Politics, Religion, Books, Music (Other than Adam), Movies, Food, Dramatic Life Events.  If that's all you use, it'd be something.  Pixels are free, though, so feel free to include everything you'd ever want to use to find something.  Also, I see tags as an opportunity for editorial comment.  Feel free to create tags.

With regard to names, I've included people's first names and have not included titles. The result is that you can find them under their first name in the alphabetical list of tags.

Tip: Blogger interprets a comma as the end of one tag and the start of another.  Thus, if you tried to tag something with "Lambert, Adam", it would bear two tags, one for Adam and one for Lambert.

Tag away.

Update moments later:  Also, consider adding tags to reflect what's in the comments.

Steampunk

Iranian style.