“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil” Thomas Mann

The following was quoted from The Jawa Report:

An Indian doctor involved in the autopsies of the victims at Mumbai stated “the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words"

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood," one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Silence Means Approval

Eight Jews were asassinated at Mumbai. A report from Israel offers an insight into the horror at the Chabad House. The body of Rabbi Noach Holtzberg was found next to the assassinated kashrut supervisor. The body of Rivka Holtzberg was found wrapped in a tallit. It is believed that she was murdered before her husband’s eyes, and he managed to wrap the tallit before his own execution. Their baby’s birthday is today. Heartbreaking.

The same report mentions that some of the terrorists were British born. This should give us an insight into the mindset of these savages. These are not fighters for a rational cause. It is not Palestine, and it is not Kashmir. It is not poverty. Nor unemployment. This is pure unadulterated hatred for the infidel. I don’t want to hear anymore that they represent a tiny minority among peace loving Muslims. If Muslims don’t condemn it, their hands are as bloodied as if they pulled the triggers.

I am not talking about the pro forma condemnation of some Muslim leaders designed to make the Le Figaro, The Guardian, and the New York Times happy. I am talking about the ever-effervescent Muslim street ready to riot at the call of an Imam offended by a cartoon or the false report of the desecration of a Koran.

The time has come to tell this over a billion Muslims. You either condemn it, or your silence means approval. If it’s approval you choose, live with the consequences.

$$$

Post-election violence in Nigeria has brought the number of dead to thirty-five.

I only hope that Abdullah Mngambi survived. He is the guy who emailed me that he would give me 10 million dollars if I helped him cash 30 million dollars his uncle Muhammad Mngambi, the former oil minister, had in a secret account in New York.

I only had to send him $10,000 as a sign of good faith. This represents a wonderful rate of return.

I have to leave now. I must send $5,000 for taxes to the guy who emailed me that I won the Canadian lottery. Canada is such a wonderful country. You can win the lottery without buying a ticket.

Obama's Judges

One of the main reasons for my concern with the presidency of B. H. Obama, had to do with the appointment of judges. The Supreme Court has five justices that are older than seventy. However, appointments to the Court of Appeals, is where the real impact will be felt. Obama has offered an insight into his philosophy when he stated:

"And in those circumstance what I do want is a judge who is sympathetic enough to
those who are on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless,
those who can't have access to political power and as a consequence can't
protect themselves from being dealt with sometimes unfairly, that the courts
become a refuge for justice."

This statement represents a demagogic logic that endangers judicial rationale. If we are to have a government with checks and balances and separation of powers, presidents should appoint judges who will interpret the law and not legislate from the bench. It is not the job of a judge to decide to right the wrongs of society because of sympathetic views towards the vulnerable or powerless. This role should be on the shoulders of the legislature.

The assumption that the powerless are right by the mere fact that they lack power is ridiculous and dangerous. Every totalitarian regime has used this view to justify the obliteration of opposing views.
Obama has not become president yet, and I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the more I learn about him, the more I worry.

High Definition Photo Essay

Click on this link Great photo essay from India

The Politics of Jealousy

The great economist Thomas Sowell likes to illustrate his arguments through the use of old jokes from the defunct Soviet Union. Those jokes helped Russians survive in a system designed to crush the individual.

In his last column he uses a tale about two poor peasants, Ivan and Boris. The only difference between them was that Boris had a goat and Ivan didn't. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp and, when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything in the world.

Ivan said, "I want Boris' goat to die."

Somehow this fable comes to mind after every discussion I have with my liberal friends about the American economy.

One such a friend, a newly retired teacher, who collects a pension in the neighborhood of $70,000 dollars a year, kept ranting about the oil companies and their obscene profits. When I asked her if she realized that retirement funds such as the one from which she is collecting her pension were among the greatest stockholders in those corporations she retorted with the same intellectual acumen I have gotten from most bleeding hearts:

Where did you get that from?

The argument was over. The Merlot definitely helped.

The New Beggar Economy

Once again Charles Krauthammer has managed to synthesize a complex issue into a coherent short commentary. The topic of his column this week is the new phenomenon that has developed in corporate America. Whereas in the past you succeeded by making a profit, the new model requires the right connection with Washington to get part of the subsidies. This will change the nature of lobbying from pushing for a break in taxes or the regulatory process to pushing for the actual survival of the corporation.

The Obama administration, which ran under the promise of change and curtailing the power of lobbyists, will actually face an army of petitioners as no administration has ever faced before. How those beggars are handled will determine the nature of our market economy.

The sooner we rediscover that loses and bankruptcies are the method by which the market determines winners and losers, the sooner we will get out of the current economic mess.

I am not holding my breath waiting.

Jewish Targets in Mumbai

News reports are emerging from Mumbai showing that one of the targets of the Muslim terrorists was a Jewish center. Are we going to hear once again that Israel must settle with the Palestinians to end terrorism?

The fact is that these terrorists and their millions of supporters were raised full of hatred for infidels, and carry the anti-Semitic gene inbred in them. Thousands of miles from Israel, and fighting for Kashmir, the Islamist terrorists couldn’t miss the opportunity of attacking the Jews.

I am sure that the Jews will once again seek revenge by sending a planeload of medicine to treat the wounded Muslims. Amnesty International will condemn this action by claiming that one planeload is not enough.

Sharia-Compliant Finances

The Middle East Research Forum has published a very good article dealing with the issue of Sharia-Compliant Finances (SCF). If you are not familiar with this issue, it is worth reading because it exemplifies the way that Sharia is slowly but surely crawling into Western societies. Countries that for decades have been fighting for separation of church and state are kowtowing to petrodollars and Islamist threats and imposing religious concepts that would have never been accepted if demanded by Judeo-Christianity.

Read the whole article by clicking on the link.

Saying Goodbye to The Shield

Yesterday, after seven seasons, FX aired the last episode of The Shield, probably the best police show ever created for television.

I remember Ironside, The Naked City, The F.B.I, Hill Street Blues and other such shows that caught my imagination and entertained me for many hours, but none has brought the realities of crime and life in a precinct as realistically and with the brutal honesty of this show.

The writers were able to connect events years after they took place, the actors were as realistic as the persons you come across walking in the streets of your neighborhood. I was always amazed by the extras. They must have been recruited among the gang members of LA. None of the actors looked like they just came out of a photo session with Vogue.

The acting was superb. I will not mention names because there were so many great actors involved in this show. However, this series will always be associated with the bald headed Michael Chiklis. It was he who created a character that despite the many terrible things he did, deep in our hearts we wanted to see triumph and survive.

If you have not seen this show, and you are not afraid of blood dripping from you TV screen, get the DVD's, buy a large screen television, get rid f anyone who might interrupt your viewing, and enjoy the show. The only other way to get a similar rush of adrenaline is fighting crime in Los Angeles. And we all know that that can be too dangerous.

A Reminder From Mumbai

For a short while we have taken a break from the financial crisis, when the events in India and the threat to attacks on Pen Station in New York reminded us that the threat to our civilization is no coming from some greedy capitalist on Wall Street but from the brutality of Islamism and its adherents.

Just like on 9-11, terrorists struck on Mumbai, a major financial center in India and a symbol of the success of economic freedom. It seems that every success story serves to remind Islamists of their failure to accomplish anything in centuries and like a spoiled child who prefers to break the toy of a friend if he cannot have one, so do they, in their savagery, intend to destroy us rather than strive to climb out of the dark age in which they are stuck.

The usual suspects, better known as “experts”, have crawled out of their offices in think tanks and academia to remind us that we must engage in dialogue with Islam and that Islamists constitute a minority of no more than 10% of Muslims. Is this supposed to make us feel better? Only 150 million savages want to destroy us and are whiling to die with us in the process and this is supposed to comfort us.

I too am for dialogue; the same type of dialogue we had with Nazism.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

Argentinean president Cristina Kirchner has announced a massive program to deal with the global financial crisis by infusing $21 billion dollars into rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. This program is expected to create 362,000 jobs. In addition, the Argentinean government has announced a plan of incentive for the repatriation of funds.

For the last several months the Kirchner administration has started an aggressive program that included the first steps in the nationalization of the country’s two largest airlines and the nationalization of 26 billion dollars of private pension funds.

Given the failure in the past of Argentina to run efficiently its government owned companies such as telephones, railroads and oil, and its inability to upkeep its infrastructure, one can look at the measures taken by the actual administration with skepticism. Furthermore, since some of these policies, such as the nationalization of pension funds have been launched as trial balloons by some of Obama’s advisors, Argentina should be used as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If the past is any indication, the canary will not sing for too long.

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Mario M.