Archive for February, 2015
21 Feb 2015

Global Warming Impacts Manhattan

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NYCIce

21 Feb 2015

DEBKAfile: Nisman was Killed By Iran in Cahoots With Kirchner Regime

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Nisman
Natalio Alberto Nisman, 1963-2015

DEBKAfile, the Mossad mouthpiece, claims to have the inside story on the assassination last month of Argentone prosecutor Natalio Nisman by a supposed Iranian defector.

A special investigation conducted by debkafile’s intelligence, Iranian and counter-terror sources has discovered that the Argentine-Jewish prosecutor Natalio Alerto Nisman, 51, was murdered on Jan. 18 by an Iranian agent, who had won his trust by posing as a defector under the assumed name of Abbas Haqiqat-Ju. His killer struck hours before Nisman showed the Argentine parliament evidence that President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman had covered up Iran’s complicity in the country’s worst ever terrorist attack, the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center in which 85 people died, two years after 29 people were killed by a blast at the Israeli embassy.

Nisman’s evidence had it been presented would have ultimately proved Iran’s culpability in the two terrorist attacks. …

Nisman had made the powers-that-be in Tehran jittery, because a) he was ambitious, honest and a courageous searcher after the truth; b) he was Jewish and had active connections with Israel; and c) in pursuit of his inquiry, he spread his net wide to include contacts with the Israeli Mossad and the American CIA.

Furthermore, in 2006, after three years on the job, the prosecutor had put together an intelligence file on the unbelievable scope of Iranian intelligence penetration, using Lebanese Hizballah agents, deep into the government and intelligence establishments of many Latin American countries – not only Argentina, but also Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Surinam, Trinidad-Tobago and Guyana. …

Iran’s security organs are no strangers to political assassination at home and among its exile communities, in such places as France, Austria and Germany.

But at first, they tried to win the Argentinean round by bribery, which had always worked before in Buenos Aires. For $10 million, Carlos Saul Menem (Argentine president from 1989 to 1999) and his minions agreed to close the investigation of the two terrorist bombings in its tracks.

Tehran handled President Kirchner differently. She was promised economic and trade benefits for Argentina, along with financial perks for government and intelligence heads.

debkafile’s Buenos Aires sources report that, at first, Kirchner feared that Nisman’s sudden demise would bring her under suspicion at the cost of her presidency. But Tehran assured her through their private channels of communication that the deed would be accomplished cleanly without leaving the slightest trace.

Read the whole thing.

20 Feb 2015

Looking In

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FoxLookinginWindow

Hat tip to Ratak Monodosico.

20 Feb 2015

Dug Falchion

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Falchion1
Falchion2
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Falchion4
Falchion5
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Dated: 4th quarter of the 13th century – 1st quarter 14th century
Place of Origin: France (Paris, Seine, site du Pont-au-Change)

Source: Copyright © 2015 Musée de Cluny – Musée national du Moyen Âge/Jean-Gilles Berizzi

From Art of Swords.

19 Feb 2015

A Farewell Note From Oliver Sachs

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SeventhSeal9

Oliver Sachs shares some bad news he received recently in the New York Times.

A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

Read the whole thing.

19 Feb 2015

Bostonians Have Accepted Their Fate as Canadians

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19 Feb 2015

It’s All About Employment Opportunities

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JobsForMuslims

18 Feb 2015

ISIS Planning to Use Libya as Gateway to Attack Europe

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IslamicEmpire

The National Post has a story describing some interesting possibilities for residents of Italy and the rest of Southern Europe.

Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham jihadists are planning to take over Libya as a “gateway” to wage war across southern Europe, according to letters written by supporters of the terrorist group.

They hope to flood the North African state with militiamen from Syria and Iraq, who will sail across the Mediterranean posing as migrants on human-trafficking ships, according to plans seen by Quilliam, the British anti-extremist group.

The fighters would then run amok in southern European cities and also try to attack shipping.

The document is written by a propagandist for ISIS, who uses the alias Abu Arhim al-Libim. He is believed to be an important online recruiter for the terror group in Libya, where security has collapsed after the revolution that unseated Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

The group has already established Libyan-based cells, who on Sunday released a video showing a mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Christian guest workers.

Read the whole thing.

18 Feb 2015

Snowy in New England

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Snowiest

It’s bad enough here in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania, but all that Global Warming really buried New England in white stuff this year. Buzzfeed has a compilation of really impressive photos from Twitter.

AlpsofMIT
“The Alps of M.I.T.”

17 Feb 2015

What ISIS Wants And How to Deal With it

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Isis
ISIS armed troops

Graeme Wood has an excellent, must-read article in the Atlantic, describing clearly the religious ideology underlying ISIS, and identifying this movement as yet another outbreak of apocalyptic Mahdism.

Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws. …

The caliph is required to implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel those who have pledged allegiance to inform the caliph in private of his error and, in extreme cases, to excommunicate and replace him if he persists. (“I have been plagued with this great matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a heavy responsibility,” Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates.

[A sympathiser] said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead murderers and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work could do so. …

For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.

“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted. “You could imagine large battles taking place there.” The Islamic State’s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state’s magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” A recent propaganda video shows clips from Hollywood war movies set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient weapons.

Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. …

The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely. …

Some observers have called for escalation, including several predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of American soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly genocidal organization is on its potential victims’ front lawn, and it is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.

One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

The whole thing.

The obvious answer is for the United States to do to the contemporary “mad mullahs” the same thing Victorian Britain used to do to earlier specimens. As Hillaire Belloc noted long ago:

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

Our “Maxim gun” advantage is far greater than Kitchener’s at Omdurman. The carnage on the Muslim side will be more appalling. But Islam, as Churchill noted, is to men as hydrophobia is to dogs, and outbreaks of demented Islamic fanaticism have to be put down with blood every so many decades.

ISISTerritory
ISIS Territory

17 Feb 2015

Ayn Rand 110th Birthday Humor

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Ayn Rand laughing and smoking in Valhalla.

Ayn Rand would be 110 years old this month. Her birthday was February 2nd.

Mallory Ortberg (who keeps everyone at Galt’s Gulch in stitches every summer) imagines a Harry Potter novel as written by Auntie Ayn:

“Don’t you see?” Dumbledore said. “Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one that rises against them and strikes back!”

“Of course,” Harry said calmly. “Tyranny is any political system (whether absolute monarchy or fascism or communism) that does not recognize individual rights (which necessarily include property rights). The overthrow of a political system by force is justified only when it is directed against tyranny: it is an act of self-defense against those who rule by force.”

Harry took up his wand. “First I’m going to kill Snape,” he said evenly, “and then I’m going to dissolve the estate tax.”

“But why -” Dumbledore began.

“Wealth must be earned, not kept,” Harry said. “A man who inherits wealth he does not deserve will lose it in a generations’ time. He has no inherent right to keep it if he cannot earn it, but it does not then stand that the government has a stronger right to it. It is his, to keep or to lose, as long as he is living.”

Read the whole thing.

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Meanwhile, Jim Dowd contends that Ayn didn’t really die in Manhattan in 1982, but has been living on, all these years until quite recently, secretly in Massachusetts.

110 year old philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand perished in a snowstorm that covered much of the Northeast this week. Thought to have died in 1982, it was revealed she simply faked her own death to avoid paying debts on the successful treatment of her lung cancer which ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, her being philisopically opposed to Medicare.

Having escaped to East Gloucester to live under an assumed name, she was known for loudly rejecting help from neighbors. “Do not condescend to me with charity,” she shouted at Bob D’Palazola who just recently tried to remove snow from her driveway with his snowblower as he had for many elderly neighbors on the street.

“I thought she was nuts,” said the plumber and good Samaritan, “Considering how much she smokes there is no way she should be out there shoveling herself. I tried to get her reconsider but she started yelling about how indebtedness corrupting the fiber of the soul of man and I’m like screw it, Ill just go do my brother-in-laws house.”

Other neighbors were shunned by the centenarian objectivist when they attempted to bring gifts of fresh baked cinnamon buns and hot cocoa during a “senior wellness check” organized by residents. Mary Ellen Katzen, a local volunteer, claimed to have been berated at Rand’s door. “She started yelling about how the strong owe nothing to the weak and I was just like, ‘have some cinnamon buns’ but she batted them away told me to blow them into brass coins and spread them at the winds for the poor of spirit. What does that even mean?”

Read the whole thing.

17 Feb 2015

New Jersey Justice: Retired School Teacher Faces Ten Years in Prison For Possession of Unloaded 18th Century Flintlock Pistol

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Flintlockpistol

Legal Insurrection has the utterly outrageous story.

When a 72-year-old retired school teacher faces a 10 year felony sentence (a likely life sentence) for possession of an unloaded 18th century flintlock pistol, one knows immediately that we can only be talking about a handful of states in which such a travesty can happen. In this case, not surprisingly, it’s the “Garden State” of New Jersey. (h/t Sebastian over at the Shall Not Be Questioned blog.)

Gordon Van Gilder, who taught in the New Jersey school system for 34 years, is a collector of 18th century memorabilia. He acquired a genuine antique flintlock pistol from that era, and had it unloaded and wrapped in a cloth in his glove compartment when he was pulled over for an alleged minor traffic violation.

Van Gilder consented to a requested search of his vehicle, and when asked by the officer if there was anything in the car the officer should be worried about, Van Gilder informed him about the flintlock in the glove box. Although not arrested that day, the next morning several patrol cars woke him at his home and placed him under arrest.

New Jersey’s draconian gun laws explicitly include antique firearms such as this 300-year-old pistol. Indeed, possession of a slingshot is a felony under New Jersey law.

Van Gilder is represented by Evan Nappen, a well-known attorney specializing in gun law cases, and thus is as well-represented as could be hoped for in this case. It was Nappen who successfully represented Philadelphia nurse Shaneen Allen when she was charged with unlawful possession of her PA-licensed handgun in New Jersey. The mother of two small children was ultimately permitted to enter pre-trial intervention rather than be subject to trial and New Jersey’s mandatory minimum sentence of 3 1/2 to 5 years imprisonment. That outcome, however, took direct intervention by the state Attorney General, likely at the prodding of the presidential-aspirant Governor Chris Christie.

(We covered the Allen story here PA Nurse Arrested on Gun Charges Given Reprieve and here The Memo that let Shaneen Allen — and Chris Christie’s political future — off the hook.)

Van Gilder will be fortunate indeed if Nappen can win him a similar arrangement. Even a plea agreement that avoids jail time but convicts Van Gilder of a felony would likely jeopardize the teacher’s pension he spent 34 years earning.

As Van Gilder states in the video [below]–”Avoid New Jersey. Don’t come here.”

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Via Bird Dog.

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