The Saudi Connection in Syrian Chemical Attack

Interviews with people from Ghouta, the suburb of Damascus that was attacked last Wednesday, reveal that many people believe it was the rebels, not Assad or his minions, who is responsible for the deaths.

Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons
via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were
responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.

“My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the
weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” said Abu Abdel-Moneim,
the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta.

Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed
inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant,
known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father
described the weapons as having a “tube-like structure” while others
were like a “huge gas bottle.”

Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels.

Like with the missing pages in the 9/11 Commission Report, the Saudi connection in Syria has not received widespread attention.

“They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,” complained a female fighter named ‘K.’ “We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”



“When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them,” she warned. She, like other Syrians, do not want to use their full names for fear of retribution.



A well-known rebel leader in Ghouta named ‘J’ agreed. “Jabhat al-Nusra militants do not cooperate with other rebels, except with fighting on the ground. They do not share secret information. They merely used some ordinary rebels to carry and operate this material,” he said.

Prince Bandar has close ties with both the rebels and many within the Washington establishment. Elements within the US government may be deliberately hiding his involvement so they can use the incident last week as pretext for getting rid of Assad. He is trying to spread Saudi Arabia's influence within the region. Getting rid of Assad and Hizbulla would mean pro-Saudi thugs will run Syria, not pro-Iranian thugs. In the great war between Sunni and Shia some things never change. This Saudi prince is trying to entangle the US into a millennial struggle for control of the Islamic world.

Bandar has tried making secret deals with the Russians before. He promised safety for the Olympic games to be held in Russia, and would turn a blind eye to Russian bases located in Syria if the Russian military helps to topple Assad. However, if they do not, Bandar threatens Chechen terrorists will attack the games.

This is a war that cannot end well for America. It cannot end well for Israel, it cannot end well for Jordan, or Syria, or the security of the entire world. We must seek a peaceful resolution to the Syrian civil war. Killing more people with cruise missiles is the last thing we should be doing to make things better, especially launching cruise missiles without the approval of Congress and without a single ally fighting by our side. This is a debacle that will make Iraq look like going on a road trip and forgetting to buy gas.

The Humanity of Chemical Warfare

John Kerry said in regard to last
week's chemical attack in Syria "this is about the large scale,
indiscriminate use of weapons that the civilised world long ago
decided must never be used at all."

Is he right? Absolutely not. Well, not
the way he means it. Here's the modern history of chemical weapons.

The Nineteenth Century saw the rise of
chemical weapons in warfare, but nothing substantial. Members of the
Napoleonic school of warfare, where men march lock step into
artillery and machine guns, hated the idea of using deadly gas to
turn the tide in battle. Why, poison gas takes the nobility out of
the gentlemanly sport that is warfare! When white men fight against
savages in foreign lands they can use whatever dirty tricks necessary
to bring those subhuman animals under the proper yoke, but when good,
civilised white European men fight they must wear their best dress
blouses and shake hands first before taking their proper sides of the
field and marching lock step to certain death like a bloody good
match of polo or association football. The good white European nation
states got together and signed a treaty vowing to never use poison
gas as a means of ending the unnecessary suffering men would face on
the battlefield by getting shot to death.

The United States disagreed. The
upstart, boorish, backwater that had bested the British twice said it
would not hold back its own technological progress because a bunch of
stuffed shirts thought it ungentlemanly. But what did a bunch of damn
Yanks know?

Scottish
chemist Lyon Playfair sided with the Americans. He wanted to launch
cyanide shells on the Russians to end the Crimean War. He couldn't
understand the reaction of the good civilised white Europeans:

There was no sense in this
objection. It is considered a legitimate mode of warfare to fill
shells with molten metal which scatters among the enemy, and produced
the most frightful modes of death. Why a poisonous vapor which would
kill men without suffering is to be considered illegitimate warfare
is incomprehensible. War is destruction, and the more destructive it
can be made with the least suffering the sooner will be ended that
barbarous method of protecting national rights. No doubt in time
chemistry will be used to lessen the suffering of combatants, and
even of criminals condemned to death.

But he's a Scot! They're almost as bad
as Americans, so you can't trust him.

Well, the good civilised white
Europeans broke their own "rules of war" in 1915 when the
stalemate of the trenches had already condemned a million men to
death. The French used it first, but the Germans were the ones who
figured out how poison gas was supposed to be used.

On the afternoon of 22 April the
Germans released 150 tons of chlorine gas into a stiff wind that took
it over a four mile stretch of the front occupied by French colonial
troops. Heavier than air, the chlorine sank into the trenches and
filled the eyes and lungs of the men, turning into acid and eating
away at the insides of their bodies. Thousands of men died within
minutes and thousands more turned and fled in blind panic. No one had
ever imagined a weapon this effective could exist, not even the
Germans themselves! Stunned by their own success at breaking the
French line the Germans failed to take advantage of the attack and
made only insignificant gains.

Courage only goes so far. When a man
sees his end at the hands of an unfeeling cloud inexorably rolling
across the landscape there is not a thing in this world that can make
him stand his ground. Self-preservation takes over. Deep down inside
every man is the brain of a lizard, responsible for the basic
functions of survival. Whenever the organism is threatened the lizard
brain overpowers the rational mind of man and the inner animal is
unleashed to fight or flee. And there is no way to fight a cloud of
death, so the man takes to his feet and hauls ass in the opposite
direction.

A man whose lungs are destroyed by
chlorine cannot be saved. Doctors cannot alleviate his suffering. He
fights for hours to pull life giving breath from the air to no avail
until he finally succumbs to the inevitable. It's not a good death,
but then again neither is bleeding to death from shrapnel. And
chlorine does one thing shrapnel cannot: it breaks trenches. Chlorine
could have won the war in 1915 if the Germans capitalised on their
initial success. They could have saved the lives of tens of millions
of men and reshaped the destiny of the continent. It's possible the
Holocaust could have been avoided had poison gas been used to its
fullest for a swift German victory, but there is no way to know for
sure.

The point of war is not to kill your
enemy, it is to get your enemy to surrender with the least amount of
force expended and the fewest friendly casualties. A war that can be
won without killing a single man is the most successful war of all.
The Mongol horde utilised terror to force cities to surrender before
their horses even got within earshot of the city walls. Poison gas
can do the same. Men will run away from gas by the thousands,
territory can be occupied without having to kill anyone, and wars can
be won by terror alone. As horrible a death asphyxiation is, it is a
lot better for a few thousand men to die by poison gas than millions
to die from attrition in the trenches.

And that is what happened. The Germans
held back, the Entente developed countermeasures, and the gases got
more deadly. A chemical arms race began that would eventually lead to
the production of enough lethal nerve gas to kill everyone on the
planet several times over at the height of the Cold War.

Once the First World War had ended a
new treaty was signed, and once again the good civilised white
Europeans agreed never to use poison gas. If a war can be won without
attrition, without millions dying from bullets and shells, without
protracted land battles, why that isn't fair! That's not the
gentleman's war, is it? Why should the smartest country, the country
that invests the most in science, the country most invested in the
preservation of land and human lives win the war instead of the
country willing to make the most human sacrifices? Surely chemical
warfare is evil because it spares millions from being interred
beneath soil contaminated with millions more tons of lead fragments.
Chemical warfare does not produce lost villages, so badly
contaminated that they can never be inhabited again. A cloud of gas
rolls over an enemy line and vanquishes it, it does not persist until
the last private has bled out in a shell hole somewhere in the mud.

No, chemical weapons, when used
correctly, are the most humane weapons of all. It is only backward
thinking, the inertia within the minds of politicians and military
planners, that draw a line in the sand and seek to prevent quick wars
that do not throw men and treasure into the fires of destruction. It
is their thinking that is a moral outrage, not the weapons they
revile so fervently.

The Eve of World War Three in Syria

Last Wednesday a chemical attack outside Damascus resulted in the death of over 1000 people. The UN was quick to come in and blame Syrian president Assad without evidence. US Secretary of State John Kerry said this was a moral outrage and requires US intervention (war, or "kinetic action" as the Zero regime likes to call it). Sources claim that attack is immanent, maybe even happening sometime today (Thursday 29 August), if not within a week.



None of this makes any sense. Think about it. Assad has killed fifty times as many people using conventional means. He has the upper hand in the war and the backing of Russia, China, and Iran. The quickest way to destroy his own success and alienate himself from his powerful allies would be to use chemical weapons. There is no sane or logical reason why Assad would have ordered that attack. Assad is an evil man, but he's not stupid. He is focused entirely on holding power, which is something he cannot do if he were to use chemical weapons and have the world turn against him.



BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner shares my suspicion: "the timing is odd, bordering on suspicious. Why would the Assad
government, which has recently been retaking ground from the rebels,
carry out a chemical attack while UN weapons inspectors are in the
country?" He does, however, believe a chemical attack did occur.



UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus agrees: "It would be very peculiar if it was the government
to do this at the exact moment the international inspectors come into
the country....at the least, it wouldn't be very clever."







Regarding the attack a US intelligence official commented "We don't know exactly why it happened. We just know it was pretty fucking stupid."



Why would Assad call in UN weapons inspectors then launch a chemical attack in close proximity to where the inspectors would be? That does not make any sense.



And yet we are rushing headlong into another poorly planned war with no exit strategy in mind and no thought as to the consequences of our actions.



Noah Shachtman writing for Foreign Policy states "However, U.S. spy services still have not acquired the evidence traditionally considered to be the gold standard in chemical weapons cases: soil, blood, and other environmental samples that test positive for reactions with nerve agent. That's the kind of proof that America and its allies processed from earlier, small-scale attacks that the White House described in equivocal tones, and declined to muster a military response to in retaliation."



We are rushing into a foolish war that will only end badly with less evidence than there was for WMDs in Iraq a decade earlier! There were years of UN inspector reports and other intelligence that strongly suggested Saddam Hussein had a thriving chemical and biological warfare infrastructure in place and after the invasion nothing was found. With Syria we have precious little evidence that a chemical attack happened at all.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the US intercepted panicked phone calls between defense officials in Damascus and the commander of a chemical weapons unit demanding details about the strike, Foreign Policy reported early Wednesday.

The report comes just days after a report in a major German publication claiming that an IDF intelligence unit had listened in on similar conversations between senior Syrian officials discussing the chemical attack.

US intelligence says that these panicked phone calls prove that Assad or someone in his government was behind the attacks. Now I'm no intelligence expert, but I was right about Egypt and Libya, and I did predict the Benghazi attack two full years before it happened, but these guys know what they're talking about, right? I mean, when the Syrian Minister of Defense demands answers regarding who the hell ordered the attack that proves that the Syrian government was behind it, right? When they start panicking about a move that would mean suicide in the world of geopolitical realpolitik, a move that is "pretty fucking stupid," and then immediately begin working on damage control that means they must be responsible, right?



I mean, it's not like we have members of the Free Syrian Army (the Islamist rebels who ate a man's heart and posted it to YouTube - note, this is a mirror, not the original) on video talking about how they intend to use chemical weapons







Oops! Just ignore that. Didn't happen.



There are only two possible alternatives as to who launched that attack: either it was the rebels themselves or it was operatives from the US or some other country looking for a "responsibility to protect," a casus fœderis, for which to intervene.



Russia and China have warned the United States not to intervene, as has Assad himself. Intervention in Syria will spread the conflict to neighboring countries. A relatively contained problem will grow into a full scale war between, basically, the United States versus Russia and China. China holds the lion's share of US debt. They have the power to economically destroy the country immediately if they so choose. Israel and Iran will be drawn in. There may be a nuclear exchange, or at least the use of a nuclear bunker buster to take out Iran's own nuclear program. Of course, the problems with nukes is when one country uses them it sparks other countries to use them too, resulting in the mutually assured destruction that the world has tried to prevent for six decades.



At the very least a million Syrians will die and the US will be out another trillion dollars.



We cannot go to war in Syria. We cannot help the rebels. If the US gets involved this will be WWIII and it won't end until millions are dead.

Untitled Rush Limbaugh Rant #2

Didn't I just write about Rush Limbaugh? Well he's been ragging on the same exact topic the whole week and it feels like time wasted. He's talking about "Millennials," also known as the "ME ME ME!!!" generation or the worst generation ever, whom TIME calls "lazy, entitled narcissists."



Limbaugh brings up how they should not lose faith in the country but instead lose faith in the Democrat Party, seemingly ignoring the fact that politicians don't elect themselves, instead it is the people who put them in power (theoretically). The Democrat Party would not have any power if the people stood up to them.



And just what is a country? That is a difficult question to answer. While there is no ambiguity as to what the term "sovereign state" refers, and relatively little ambiguity as to what the term "nation" refers, a "country" is a bit of a head scratcher that occupies the grey area between the two. The United States is the state and "We the people" are the nation (discounting racist supremacist groups like La Raza and the Nation of Islam, as well as legitimate "sovereign" nations such as the Navajo, Blackfeet, and others), but as to what entity is the country is dependent upon who is speaking. Just for the sake of this article I will give a nod to the Greek idea of a polis and show preference for "country" and "nation" being largely synonymous.



If the country is the people of the United States then absolutely the country (in all its laziness or selfishness or whatever reason) is to blame for putting the people in power who have led to the destruction of the US economy and way of life. People get what they vote for, or don't vote for in the case of the millions who decided to stay home, permitting Zero from taking office a second time. America was not conquered by an outside force, it was taken over from within.



But that's not what I wanted to write about.



"I have it hear, folks, right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.  This is an article from NPR.  And I would think a lot of Millennials listen to NPR."



Interesting side note: I first heard of NPR during my time behind enemy lines, getting expensive wallpaper at university. I was in an African history class (very disappointing, it was pretty much a sub-Saharan African colonial history class and didn't focus on the thousands of years of history that took place before the arrival of Europeans in the southern two thirds of the continent), and the professor mentioned how he was listening to NPR in his car on the way to class. Having never heard that word before I looked it up on the Internet later that day and discovered it was an unsuccessful radio news agency.



Rush continues "In fact, when I was in my twenties, nobody was even willing to take you seriously until you were 40.  You hadn't lived long enough to know enough to be trusted with enough when I grew up."



He spends maybe 15 minutes every day this week glorifying that disgustingly backward practice because it is familiar to him and therefor comfortable. For most of history societies were set up so people were ready for adulthood when they actually became adults, somewhere around age 15. Every social institution prepared people for the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood at the age when nature dictated, and people were expected to act like adults when nature dropped the bomb and said "you're an adult now, deal with it."



Then around the time when the Romantics came along and ruined absolutely everything, this thing called "adolescence" was invented where people who are adults are treated like children and made to endure many years of mandatory, mostly useless schooling (indoctrination). Now, I'm not suggesting the Romantics are directly responsible, but I've never let them off the hook for anything so I will implicate them in this fiasco as well (since it is familiar to me and therefor comfortable). Since then the age at which one becomes an adult in the eyes of society has run away from the age at which biology dictates, until now when someone age 26 is considered a "child" and can be covered under one's parent's health care.



I contend – and this is so important I think it warrants its own paragraph – that the invention of adolescence is responsible for the problems of the modern world. The longer you tell people they are children, the longer you treat people like children, the longer their minds will remain immature, hence the lazy, entitled narcissism of today's adults.



Remember, Alexander the Great conquered Persia at age 25 and became Lord of Asia before age 30, Jesus completed his entire ministry and was crucified before he was 40, and Ben Franklin retired at age 41 having made the equivalent of $3 billion in today's money. Steve Jobs started Apple at age 21, left fantastically wealthy in 1985 at age 30, before returning in 1996. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft at about the same age Jobs started Apple and both were fantastically wealthy before Rush's magic age of 40.



And by this point I am approaching 1000 words and I have not even gotten to my main point (or out of the first paragraph of the story linked at the top of this page). If you have stuck with me this far, my valued couple of readers, you have my thanks.



Rush continues "My generation, we were inspired. We were pushed.... I couldn't wait to get out of home. I wanted my own apartment. I wanted my own car. I wanted all that."



"You know, when I was growing up, all the things I was told about
America and about myself, hard work, prosperity, success, whatever that
meant to people.  For some people it means material things.  Other
people it means being the best at what they do.  You know, everybody
defines happiness a different way.  But whatever it was, it was a given
that it was possible.  It was up to you to get there.  Today, they're
not being told that it's possible.  They're being taught that it isn't."



That's very good, having inspiration, drive, and a society which encourages (and expects) it. And I agree that the current generation is not being inspired by the power elite. Academia, the media, the whole establishment, are telling young people to keep their heads down, that success is bad, that achievement is impossible, that America will never be great again. This is all true.



I also want to point out here that Rush is saying that different people can define success in different ways, and that as long as they work toward achieving their own standards of success that it is all good. This is important because in a minute Rush will go in the opposite direction and say that success is all about how much stuff you can accumulate before you die (conspicuous consumption).



Rush begins to read from the NPR article (which I will write about in my next piece). He weaves a yarn about a 27 year old man named Zach Brown who lives in LA:

"Brown is friends with Rosenthal," somebody mentioned earlier in the piece, "who finds herself spending her spare cash less on things and more on experiences. 'I love going to the movies and I like going to concerts a lot,' she says, 'and I like listening to music. I use Spotify and I listen to Pandora and things like that, but as far as purchasing those things I don't typically do it.'" Because that's been stigmatized, 'cause it's material, it's right out of the communist manifesto. It's stigmatized. It's filthy. It's selfish. It's destroying the earth to own things.  If I buy a car I have to buy gasoline. It means I'm a polluter.  These people are being told they are virtuous living lives of literal averageness and no remarkability about them, no risk-taking, no fun.  There's virtue in all this.  It's just 180 degrees out of phase.

Now, here's the final line in the piece at NPR.  "The simple pleasures
and the bare necessities. Perhaps Millennials are on to something."

"Living lives of no fun." Yes, "I love going to movies and concerts" really sounds like the words of someone who is not having one tiny iota of fun. No risk taking, no remarkability? It is impossible to draw those conclusions from that quote, or from the article for that matter. I won't go into too much detail because it will be the subject of the next post and I don't want this one to get too long and confusing, jumping all over the place, what the article actually says (versus Rush's straw man version) is that, instead of accepting the cultural stories that are "a given" as Rush says, Millennials actually think "what do I want for me instead of what society tells me I should want?" Consumption is no longer a knee-jerk reaction, Millennials are actually thinking whether they need something to be happy before shelling out their hard to come by money to fill their homes (or parents' homes) with useless crap.



Well, I'm sorry, folks, that's how they live. Those kinds of low expectations are why around the world so many people are trying to get here.... They're being told that there's virtue in not distinguishing themselves. There's virtue in not accomplishing anything. There's no stigma attached to that.  Achievement, success, those things are not fair because not everybody is.  In LA a grown man doesn't want to have a car.  Do you think that has any roots in traditional America?  A grown man.  In New York, it's another thing.  A grown man, 27 years old, in LA, an actor, what's he gonna pick up on his bicycle?  A makeup artist? 



What's wrong with an actor picking up a makeup artist? "This guy ain't gonna pick up chicks with a bike!" Says the man who rushed into three marriages that failed because he was more interested in spending his spare time after work staying home tinkering with ham radios and watching football on TV than spending time with his wives going out to shows or hiking or other activities that involved the outdoors and other people. Not the kind of guy to get dating tips from.



A grown man, not only does he not want a car, he thinks there's virtue in not wanting one and not having one.  "That's right, Mr. Limbaugh, that's the way we all should be thinking now.  This is how we will save the planet from global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil."  And this is how these New Castrati little sissies think.  Well, I don't know, folks.  All I know is that this kind of stuff is not what built a great country.  A 27-year-old kid who doesn't want a car, we're not talking about John Wayne there.  We're not talking Hercules.  Who are we talking about?



"A grown man who not only does not want a car but thinks it is a virtue not wanting a car." Nowhere in the article does it say Zach Brown does not want a car, and nowhere does it say he thinks people who want cars are reprobates. Rush is just making shit up here. If you read the article, instead of imagining naked ladies, you'll see it talks about being optimistic even if the economy has been destroyed and you can't find a job that pays enough to buy a fleet of black Maybachs, or a giant mansion that you only use four rooms of, or an acre of mahogany wood paneling in your library, or a private jet with your brand logo on the tail. Millennials don't think owning stuff is evil, they think, according to the article, that times are tough but we'll get through it and we should look toward the positive aspects of life instead of dwelling on the negative.



He goes on to imply that a grown man who does not want a car (nowhere does it say in the article that Zach doesn't want a car) is a homosexual and a weakling. I don't think I've been this turned off by listening to Rush Limbaugh since he praised the AIG executives for running the company into the ground and taking their golden parachutes.



What happened to "everybody
defines happiness a different way"? All of a sudden everyone who uses a different definition from Rush Limbaugh is a deviant, a dirtbag, a loser. Everyone who does not want to buy things they cannot afford is crazy. You know what is 180 degrees out of phase? It's not Millennials not wanting to buy cars, it's Rush Limbaugh saying one thing and then five minutes later saying the exact opposite thing all the while blowing over a strawman argument and acting like anyone who is different from an insecure introverted techie radio show host is a fruitcake failure.



My mother, who's getting up there in years, told me "what matters in life isn't a bunch of stuff on a shelf collecting dust, it's people." She's absolutely right, and I take the time to remind myself that every day. If Zach is focusing on enjoying the little time he has on this Earth with his friends instead of buying a car and driving around thinking about being Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate banging some chick and her mother, then Zach definitely has his head on straighter than the average person and his heart is certainly pointing in the right direction.



Toward the end of his monologue Rush makes a cursory promise "I'm not gonna keep on with this Millennial stuff." I sure hope so, because it's annoying the hell out of me.

The American Himmler

The infamous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaiois at it again. This is that guy who likes to put on asinine
spectacles to get attention like everyone else who has ever lived who
has put on asinine spectacles. It's about ego stroking (maybe
stroking something else too).

I am convinced he is violating
the human and Constitutional rights of his inmates through his
practices, putting people awaiting trial in tents where temperatures
soar high enough to cause permanent brain damage and death, feeding
them inadequate or unhealthy food, keeping them in unhealthy crowded
conditions (everyone awaiting trial is innocent until proven guilty,
so he's basically trying to kill innocent people, and even if they
were guilty that doesn't make his treatment of these people any less
disgusting. People have died in his shithole prisons and the county
has paid millions to their families and still this motherfucker stays
in power.). He embezzles money left and right, he uses his power to
silence critics and obstruct justice, and is a worse monster than the
people he is incarcerating.

Well, the American Himmler is at
it again. His deputies, dressed in non-regulation camouflage, left
Maricopa County to illegally police the border when they came across
three militia men who were armed. There was an armed standoff between
the deputies and the men, who thought they were drug smugglers,
ending with one of the men being arrested. The militia men were not
in violation of any law, walking around unclaimed wilderness with
guns. When the deputies identified themselves as law enforcement,
albeit law enforcement outside its jurisdiction, they complied with
orders and put up no resistance.

The militia men were out
protecting their homes from the Mexican cartels who have taken over
the border. Self defense is something every creature has an innate
right to, but the power hungry piece of shit Arpaio, who has
conducted illegal operations on the border, outside his jurisdiction
multiple times, wants a monopoly of force and threw his massive gut,
I mean weight, I mean he's fat around.

“I have to commend
my deputy for not killing this person, which easily could have
happened,” Arpaio said. “He’s lucky he didn’t see 30 rounds
fired into him.” Yeah, I bet he gets a real hard on at the thought
of his personal army going out and killing people. 

30 rounds for one guy, seriously? That's excessive force, which is also illegal. It's also just plain stupid. There were three militia men there. Arpaio's deputy would unload his magazine into one man and then what would happen? If they were real Mexican cartel smugglers or just plain pissed off people he would get killed by the two other armed men while he is trying to reload. Arpaio is posturing, trying to use frighten law abiding citizens from exercising their Constitutional right to walk around the desert with a gun.

I no longer wonder what country I live in. It isn't America, and beyond that I don't care to know which totalitarian state it is.

Why Can't We Be Friends?

From the LA Times (Why do I bother with publications that have "Times" in the title?).



Madeline Janis, some leftist broad, a writer for the Times and the national policy director of a group called the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (yeah, that name is transparent), writes a very disgusting piece about her late father.



Her father - name withheld - was 87 years old and very sick. He was a veteran and, she describes "highly educated — a psychiatrist with multiple advanced degrees in science and medicine. He was Jewish and deeply religious, donating regularly to charities helping those who struggled with life's challenges." This man is at the upper echelon of human achievement. He's very smart, well grounded, and very generous. This is not the kind of man you would expect to be treated as a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, mouth-breathing, kunckle-walking, talks with a Southern drawl, gun owning, Bible thumping, bitter clinging, brow ridged troglodyte, especially by his own daughter. Not with an introduction like that anyway.



"But he hated President Obama and thought that government was at the root of all evil."

Shame!

We do not speak ill, NO, we do not think ill of dear leader! Dear leader is your new god. Bow down and worship him.



His other sin? He not only listened to, as if that was bad enough, but liked Rush Limbaugh! AAAHHH!!!!1 The horror! I...I can't. I have to go sit down and cry for a few minutes, this is too horrible.



He also had a few Rush Limbaugh caps, which he enjoyed wearing. The humanity!



I'm sorry. I shouldn't subject you to torture like that. I'll write it in small print.



Anyway, as I said earlier, her father was old and sick and in 'Murica when a parent can no longer live alone the child throws the parent in the trash. Yep. They put a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food in your mouth for, what, fifteen years, and you can't return the favor when they get old. They changed your diapers when you were a baby and you can't do the same when they're an invalid. You disgust me.



So this broad was going to put her father, who she claims to love, in a home. In case you didn't know it, a home is not as good as it sounds. A home is a place where old people go to be abused, neglected, have their social security money stolen, and their prescriptions sold to teenagers who are looking for drugs. And this broad was not only going to put her father in a home, where she would not have to lift a finger to care for him, or ever have to see him again, but she whined "why can't we throw these Limbaugh caps away, which bring you so much joy in your final days? Limbaugh is a big, fat, smelly meanie. He is a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, and I know if he ever met me he would hate me! WAAA! WAA!"



He wouldn't hear it.



A few days later (I'm guessing; this article is written so poorly, jumping back and forth like a leprachaun who has had a few too many and has energy to burn), she goes back and her father tells her "sweetheart, I want to tell you something."



"Nope! I don't want to talk about it!" She pouted.



He continued anyway, "I've come to the conclusion that although I really like Rush Limbaugh, I love you more. So I'm going to give up the caps."



Maybe he really loved her that much. Maybe he was dying and didn't want to argue anymore. I think it's a little of both. The point is, this man decided to be the bigger man and give up his own happiness to make his spoiled brat daughter happy by throwing out his most prized possession which she hated. Then he died.



The worst is yet to come, folks. Yes, worse than what I've already told you. She writes an article in the LA Times about the incident with her deceased father. Wait, it gets worse! She says this "our love for each other and our family helped my father and me transcend the enormous ideological divide between us. It makes me wonder if there isn't something in these experiences that might help us, as Americans, transcend our political differences."



Did I miss something? She use her father's death as an opportunity to write about her selfish, arrogant, narrow-minded political ideology and claim that Rush and all people who listen to him are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, and she has the conceit to say at the end "why can't we all just get along?" She whined until she got her way from her dying father. Yep, she beat a dying man in an argument and then writes an article about it in a major newspaper. And she claims the moral high ground!



This broad then closes with "that could be a start, at least, at reaching across the gulf of ideology to work cooperatively and respectfully to solve the challenges facing the nation."



What a bitch.



You know why we can't be friends? You know why we can't get along? Let me tell you why we can't get along. YOU ARE THE REASON WE CAN'T ALL JUST GET ALONG!



Why is it that only conservatives are expected to compromise? Why must conservatives be the only ones who "cross the aisle"? The left is absolutely perfect and doesn't need to change, but the right is racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe and has to transform into their very opposite to stop being meat eating, mouth breathing, truck driving, gun owning troglodytes.



You, madam, are the problem. You are the intolerant one. You are the one who needs to compromise. You complained and whined and didn't yield, while your father kept giving in, and you were never happy. You threw your father away like garbage when he needed you most. If you were to die tomorrow and rot in Hell I would throw a party celebrating the fact that the world got just a little bit better without you being in it. You never listened to Rush Limbaugh and yet you judged him and condemned him. You never listened to your father's point of view and you judged him too and berrated him in his dying days for liking a man whom you despise for purely blind ideological reasons. You are what is wrong with this country, nay, this world. People like you are the reason we can't get along.



By the way, I saved the original article just in case the LA Times takes it down so that a permanent record exists.

Idiots, Normals, Smarties, and Genii

 An article from Yahoo claims that "more intelligent" people tend to be atheists.



Who are these "more intelligent" people who are less likely to believe in God? Isaac Newton, probably the most influential scientist of all time, spent thousands of hours more studying Biblical prophecy than he did physics. All his scientific endeavors were conducted as an act of worship. James Clerk Maxwell, the second most influential scientist of all time, was also very religious, going so far as to become an elder of the Church of Scotland. Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Nikola Tesla, Gregor Mendel, Michael Faraday, Robert Boyle, Galileo Galilei*, Gottfried Leibniz, Johannes Kepler, John Eccles, Werner Heisenberg, William Thomson Kelvin, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes all believed in God. Even Charles Darwin believed in God until much later in his life, and so did Alfred Russel Wallace, whom Darwin stole his evolutionary theory from. I'm left to wonder, are these "more intelligent" atheists "more intelligent" than the people I just listed? If they are not then why the fudge should I give a flying feather what they think?



The article says that these "more intelligent" people are really people with higher IQs, and they show a picture of Richard Dawkins holding up a picture of himself as an example, I guess, when the smartest thing Dawkins ever did was buy that really nice suit he's wearing in the picture (his selfish gene idea is intriguing, but I don't think it holds much water, he did create the word "meme", unfortunately, so that'll cost him some points, and everything he did after that is pure garbage). According to the article there was "a life-long analysis of the beliefs of a group of 1,500 gifted children - those with IQs over 135." Well, there's your first problem. Okay, your second problem. It is almost impossible to accurately assess the IQs of children, to say nothing of the fact that IQ doesn't really mean anything anyway.



What do I think? I think it has to do with know-it-all-ism. "More intelligent" people tend not to fit in as well with normal people and social isolation + greater capacity for X = ego boost. "I don't fit in because I'm better than everyone else." Someone with know-it-all-ism is more likely to believe that one knows it all, and is less likely to appreciate just how much one does not know. Someone with know-it-all-ism is also less likely to go with the crowd just because it's something to do, being different for the sake of being different, or because "I'm better than everyone else."



On the contrary, a true genius has risen above the show all together and realises "I may know more than everyone, but in the grand scheme of things I really know shit." A genius is thus more likely to appreciate the mysteries necessary for spiritual beliefs. That is why the vast majority of the world-changing geniuses believe in God or some higher order of the universe while the merely "smart" people are more likely to be atheists.









*Who was imprisoned because he wrote a satire about the Pope, who was also the leading temporal authority of the time, making Galileo's writing an act of treason, NOT because he wrote about a heliocentric solar system. There was no official Church position on cosomology at the time. The ammended geocentric model of Ptolemy made better predictions than the heliocentric model created by Copernicus because he got the orbits of the planets wrong, and it was this greater accuracy with predictability that made most people accept the geocentric model at the time. The idea that Galileo was arrested because the Church is anti-science is a load of horseshit propaganda.