Help with smoking

I need some help with my smoking. I never smoked tobacco when I was younger. I'm 58 now and I think it would be appropriate to my dignity to start smoking a pipe. My father smoked one and I have often remarked on the attractive fragrance of pipe tobacco. I bought myself a pipe and some tobacco and tried it out. Twice so far. The second time I felt a bit sick and disoriented. I still want to smoke, though and don't want to fail at this endeavor. I don't seem to be able to get myself to keep at it long enough to make it a habit. Sort of like playing my violin. I wonder if there's some easy way to get started. I aspire to the Sherlock Holmesian state of heightened mental functioning, which he attributed in part to smoking shag tobacco. Maybe I need a deerstalker cap. Hey, and he played the violin, too!

What he said

From the Ayn Rand Institute website (hat tip to Diana Hsieh):

It is often said that we must win the "hearts and minds" of supporters of totalitarian Islam. Indeed we must: their hearts must be made to despair at the futility of their cause, and their minds must be convinced that any threat to our lives and freedom will bring them swift and certain doom.

Amen, brother. Amen.

Discovery

I am impressed by this Adamant guy. I just can't see why he has so few commenters when idiots like Kos and Andrew Sullivan have hundreds. You don't think that's because most people are idiots, do you???

Here's a sample of Adamant:

Al Qaeda cadres and Islamist Kashmiri separatists can readily lose themselves among the flux of refugees in a region famed for discreet hospitality. It cannot have escaped Osama Bin Laden's attention that in the 19th century the Aga Khan spent tranquil years in Hunza while internecine war made him a hunted man elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Lots of stuff you won't see anywhere else.

John Buchan, Greenmantle:

As I follow events, there's a skunk been let loose in the world, and the odour of it is going to make life none too sweet till it is cleared away. It wasn't us that stirred up that skunk, but we've got to take a hand in disinfecting the planet.

Plus ca change, eh? And at that particular time British troops were having a hot time in Basra and the Persian Moslems were stirring up trouble.

As I continue to read Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West", I get a clearer and clearer picture of just what Islam is and how it works. This is useful in an era when, as related by Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics:

Islamic fascism is also anti-democratic and characteristically reactionary. It conjures up a past of Islamic influence that existed before the supposed corruption of modernism. Like Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, who sought to recapture lost mythical Aryan, Roman or samurai purity, so Islamic fascists talk in romantic terms of the ancient caliphate.

many are reluctant to call Islamists "fascists" because, after all, they're just like us. Well, they're not just like us. Their thinking is completely different from that of men reared in the Western tradition. To use concepts borrowed from Julian Jaynes' "The Emergence of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", the Islamic consciousness does not recognize individuality at all. For instance, for Muslims there is no such concept as the separation of church and state. It isn't considered and rejected. It just isn't imagined. Anyone who mentions it must be mad or evil or both. The words of the Koran (which word itself, Spengler relates, means "reading") are not just a historical account or a series of exhortations. They are the stuff of life, or, as we might perhaps say, the fabric of space/time.

Rate your spam


Certainly spam can be mocked and hated, but why not get a little more analytical about it? There's well-done, technically and artistically proficient spam - that almost, very nearly gets you to open it - and there's terrible, loser spam. I say tackle some of the boredom of wading through sixteen spam messages when you sit down to the computer and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, or ! to !), if you want to be consistent. I mean, Mrs. Suha Arafat sat there typing for hours to get the information to you that she has six billion dollars that she desperately needs to transfer into your bank account and all you have to do is come up with your numbers. You could at least be grateful and appreciate her grammar, spelling and diction.

It's interesting to consider the art of misspelling spam messages just enough to get past the spam filter but not so grotesquely that the message doesn't get through. There's a PH.D. thesis there for some semiologist or semioticist or linguistician of some stripe. I mean, who would have thought years ago that everyone in the world who spoke English would have known immediately what the string "e*&^$#e your p(*@!s!" meant? It could mean "enrage your pyjamas" if it had a slightly different character count.

If you didn't dance, you can't complain

Today is Primary Election Day in Tallahassee and everyone is going around wearing those self-righteous "I voted" stickers. I've been searching for a metaphor to explain the voting phenomenon. And finally it came to me. It's like a rain dance. Your village is having a drought and everyone gets together and someone says,
"I have an idea! Let's do a rain dance! That will propitiate the gods and bring rain. But only if everyone participates!"
So everyone runs around strong-arming everyone else into doing the rain dance. But when they come to you, you assert your independence and say, "I don't think rain dancing will bring rain, so I won't dance."
They all dance and wear little stickers afterward, saying "I danced for rain".
Now one of two things will happen, although it won't matter to you, because they'll probably kill you for not dancing. It will rain or it won't. If you do survive, and it rains, everyone will mock you and say, "Since you didn't dance, you can't share in the benefits of the rain." If it doesn't rain, they'll be even more likely to kill you, but if they let you live, they might well say something like,
"Since you didn't dance, you can't complain about there not being any rain."
So that's how much sense voting makes. It won't do you any good to explain calmly that not only do rain dances not bring rain, but that, even if they did, your single non-participation in a rain dance would hardly be crucial to the success of a rain dance that had any pizzazz to it at all. I guess I should be glad that society has progressed from rain dances to voting. You don't get killed for not voting. Yet.

Rare Headlines

In the category of headlines you don't see very often, from Fox:

Balloon Fire Kills Circus Clown

Continuing the Eastern Europe theme from the last post, the doomed clown (I know it's heartless to say so, but that's still funny!) was from Belarus.

Cossacks and Tartars and Poles, Oh, My!
I just finished reading Henryk Sienkiewicz's "With Fire and Sword", a mind-bending 1100 pages of fury and passion in the steppes of the Ukraine and Poland. Well, OK, today you've got Belarus and maybe a bit of Moldava in there as well. But I was swept away by the narrative. And there are two more volumes to go! It has pre-echoes of The Lord of the Rings, even Star Wars. It perhaps owes a bit to Gogol's Taras Bulba, but outdoes it by a mile. As a commenter says on another Sienkiewicz work:

This man constructs plots like Alexander Dumas and ranks with Tolstoy's greatest novels for sheer scope.

I like him better than Tolstoy because he is more unapologetically masculine and consumed with notions of honor that are only shamefacedly acknowledged in order to be criticized these days.

I inserted a "meme" I've never seen anywhere else on a backtalk post that opined thusly:

...the only real question is this: what approach would you favor if you became convinced that Iran's actual plan was to develop a nuclear bomb no matter what they verbally agree to do in response to UN demands and no matter what the cost might be in terms of economic sanctions?

What then?

Here's the comment:

If Iran gets the bomb, why not let it slip that the Iraqi government has also been given access to nukes, to establish the same kind of balance of power that has kept the Indian and Pakistani governments from using their nuclear devices against each other? Iraq and Iran are the only two countries in the world that have fought each other in a war with over a million casualties since World War II.

The immediate response would be that we can't trust the Iraqi government to do the right thing, that giving access to a nuclear bomb to Shi'ites and Sunnis is nothing short of suicide. But those critics will have to explain why we're giving Muslims billions of dollars for all kinds of other weapons. Any Iraqi politician who would stand up to Iran, brandishing a nuke, would win over all the various sects within Iraq and gain enormous standing in the Arab world as their savior against the Persians. To say the least, it would change the political calculus.

Comment on Jihadwatch

Radical, infidel-butchering Islam is as powerful an ideology in large parts of the Islamic world today as Nazism was in the early twentieth century in Germany. So it will take as much death and violence, proportionate to population, to extirpate radical Islam from the Islamic world as it did to root out Nazism from Germany. And if that job is not done, we can expect the same results as if Nazism had not been excised from Germany. Not a nice prospect, but where has my reasoning gone wrong?

Name-dropper extraordinaire

Just finished reading The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. What a wonderful book! It starts before the turn of the twentieth century and ends with Zweig's suicide in Brazil during World War II.

I love you, Caroline Glick!

This splendid piece in the Jerusalem Post is delivered by a splendid young woman who may be the last real man left in Israel:

Diplomatically, in the space of five weeks the government managed to undermine Israel's alliance with America; to hand Syria, Hizbullah and Iran the greatest diplomatic achievements they have ever experienced; and to flush down the toilet the unprecedented international support that US President Bush handed to Israel on a silver platter at the G-8 summit.

*****************
The job of the foreign minister is to defend Israel and advance Israel's national interests to foreigners, not to be their friend.

*****************
Because of the Olmert government's failures, ever greater battles await us. As the dangers mount by the hour, we must replace this misbegotten government with one that can defend us.

I don't really have to tell you to read the whole thing, do I?

Government, Lebanese-style

Let it never be said I lack for ideas. I didn't say good ideas, but:

Israel needs to proclaim that they recognize Hezbollah as the only legitimate government of Lebanon and Nasrallah as the head of government and then transfer the state of war to Nasrallah's regime. Then they would be free to attack and destroy the Lebanese army and Hezbollah, wherever they can be found within Lebanon and force Hezbollah to surrender.

Alternatively, they can recognize Syria as the de facto government of Lebanon, with borders containing what is now Lebanon and the capital at Damascus. Then a notice can be sent to Damascus that any aggression toward Israel from Syrian territory will be punished by an immediate attack on Damascus.

This was in response to a post on Pejman's Chequerboard, called "Why Should The Lebanese Government Be Strengthened?" linking to a New York Times story about Hezbollah's role in the reconstruction of Lebanon that they caused to be destroyed. What a bunch of guys! How good is that? Reminds me of that line in Back to the Future where the bully Buzz or Fuzz or whatever his name is (Biff - ed.) wrecks Marty McFly's father's car and then upbraids the wimpish dad thusly: "I have your car towed all the way back to your house and all you've got for me is light beer!@?"

Diana Hsieh's rather despairing post about the outcome of the Hezbollah War of 2006, typified by this line:

Without a doubt, any supposed military victory in which the enemy is also capable of declaring victory to the world is no victory at all.

stimulated me to leave this comment on Noodlefood:

The only good thing about Olmert's half-war is that its outcome seems to have stiffened Israeli spines considerably. I am now seeing talk about transfer of Islamic terrorist sympathizers and reannexation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank (Judea and Samaria) that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago. It is now utterly clear to anyone who really wants to see that Israel needs defensible borders. And I wouldn't worry about the Muslims calling a defeat a victory. They do that every time. There's a huge square in downtown Cairo called Midan Tahrir (apparently "Tahrir" means "victory"). I asked what victory it commemorated. I was told the great victory over the Israelis in 1973 (The Yom Kippur war). That war ended with Israeli armies 101 kilometers from Cairo and occupying all of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Islam is nothing but self-deception.

This VDARE article by Steve Sailer about how to deal with Islam:

"Can we all get along?"
Well, when it comes to Muslims and Westerners, the answer is:

No, we can't.

So, deal with it. When we get in each other's faces, we get on each other's nerves. It's time to get out of each other's faces.

*************
In particular, as I outlined last fall, Europeans need to begin a push-pull system to persuade Muslim legal residents to leave.

prompted me to email Sailer thusly:

Steve,

I agree that we should withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and stop supporting Israel just as soon as we are sure that no Muslims live in this country who could possibly harm us and that we will let no more in. So as soon as Congress passes a Muslim exclusion measure and it is enforced at our borders and all foreign students from Muslim countries are prevented from attending US colleges and universities and all Muslim "scholars" are barred from conferences in this country, we can retreat from their godforsaken dustholes with little danger. And soon after that pigs will fly over the frozen reaches of Hell.

Since our political system will never - as in NEVER - bar Muslims from this country on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, your suggestion is futile at best and disingenuous at worst. Until the concept of "diversity" and the deity called "multiculturalism" are expunged from the minds of liberals in positions of political power, such a measure will never be passed and enforced. When will that happen? Oh, did I mention the word "never"?

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

So the obvious question arises - what to do, since "disconnect" is politically impossible, at least right now? And the obvious answer is to support a policy that makes the Islamic world pay a price that discourages them from causing trouble for the US. Like, for instance, toppling a couple of regimes that support terrorism. And supporting Israel. Just like Bush is doing. And Sailer's obsessive repetition of the mantra "Invade the World, invite the world" is just as disingenuous as his "disconnect" strategy. For Bush hasn't "Invaded the world". We didn't invade Iran. Or Lebanon. Or the Gaza Strip. We left Saudi Arabia, where we had gone in at the request of the Saudis. The main "invite" problem is with Mexicans, who even VDARE would admit do not pose a significant terrorism problem. The US has hardly invited the rest of the world. The presence of millions of illegal, "uninvited" aliens is evidence of that. Sailer's becoming increasingly "disconnected" all right. From reality.

This is excellent:

Dignity is having your entire neighborhood bombed, your children killed, and your only reaction is to dance in the streets like zulu warriors in support of Hezbollah. That's what dignity, pride and honor are all about. I get that now.

You never expect the Objectivist Inquisition!

Polipundit had a news post about the difficulties of controlling Islamic access to airlines after the recent bomb plot:

Tell me again why it’s ok that security isn’t allowed to pull more then 2 Middle Eastern looking passengers off of airport check-in lines for searches or how nuts it is that security is strip searching a 75 year old grandmother or making a new mother drink her babies formula from the bottle

.

I have an easy solution:

Require each potential passenger to step on a picture of Mohammed in order to board a plane. Serve pork with every on board meal or snack.
More realistically, all flights from or to nations with a significant portion of Muslims should be funneled through a "quarantine center" where lengthy and utterly thorough investigations of every Islamic passenger are carried out as slowly as possible. They want to mess up the air travel system? Fine. They suffer.

Come to think of it, they should have to pay for it, too. And they should be required to contribute to a disaster fund to compensate victims of any terrorism perpetrated by any Muslims who are citizens of their countries or who trained or plotted with any citizens of their countries. Let's see how long that oil money lasts.

Mice, bees and Castro

Marginal Revolution had a speculative post on Castro's situation:

Note that Raul has not shown his face either. Are there alternative hypotheses? The desire for a grand reentrance? After all, a growing number of Cuban officials are talking of Castro's return...

I had to respond to a comment about how if you judged someone's potential for continuing tyranny by whether they appeared on television or not Mickey Mouse would be a tyrant thusly:

"a lot of the world thought that Mickey Mouse was a tyrant during the last century..."

Better ask Minnie about that. And maybe, while you're at it, ask her to answer the question of the century: You and Mickey are mice, Pluto's a dog, Donald's a duck but what the heck is Goofy, anyway?

I can't help thinking though, that the queen bee who is born first after the old queen dies has to go around and kill her royal sisters before they emerge from their cells. If she doesn't act quickly and one emerges, there's a fight to the death.

Maybe El Beardo is in a coma. If Raul is his closest relative on the island and the doctor asks if extraordinary measures should be taken to keep him alive, I wonder what Raul would say? Because I think we know what his daughter in Miami would say. I predict a radical reversal of positions since the Schiavo affair on whether people in comas should be kept alive, especially by the lefty Fidel-is-God crowd.

Mark Steyn gets it

A propos of my last post, it would appear that Mark Steyn understands the importance of using the right terminology:

"In the struggle between America and global Islam, ...

After all, since the Islamists are railing against the whole "modern" world, to treat them as a unit would only be "proportionate", right?