"The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood" -Martin Luther King, Jr. Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_003.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_002.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_004.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_005.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_006.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_009.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_008.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_010.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_011.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_012.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_013.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_014.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_015.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_016.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_017.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_018.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_019.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_021.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_020.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_022.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_023.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_024.jpg Image: http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6304/brattleboro_VT_025.jpg

Blog by half-American 'ultimate outsider' describes dangers of political and sexual dissent

She is perhaps an unlikely hero of revolt in a deeply conservative country. Female, gay and half-American, Amina Abdullah is capturing the imagination of the Syrian opposition with a blog that has shot to prominence as the protest movement struggles in the face of a brutal government crackdown.

Abdullah's blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, is brutally honest, poking at subjects long considered taboo in Arab culture. "Blogging is, for me, a way of being fearless," she says. "I believe that if I can be 'out' in so many ways, others can take my example and join the movement."

Her blog really took off two weeks ago with a post titled My Father the Hero, a moving account of how her father faced down two security agents who came to arrest her, accusing her of being a Salafist and a foreign agent.

Abdullah's family is well-connected – she has close relatives in both the government and the Muslim Brotherhood whom she prefers not to name – and she says being politically active was a "natural thing". "Unfortunately, for most of my life being aware of Syrian politics means simply observing and only commenting privately."

That changed when protests broke out and Abdullah joined them, blogging about her experiences. "Teargas was lobbed at us. I saw people vomiting from the gas as I covered my own mouth and nose and my eyes burned," she wrote after one demonstration. "I am sure I wasn't the only one to note that, if this becomes standard practice, a niqab is a very practical thing to wear in future."

The blend of humour and frankness, frivolity and political nous comes from an upbringing that straddles Syria and the US. "I'm the ultimate outsider," says Amina. "My views are heavily informed by being both a member of a small marginal minority as an Arab Muslim in America and as a part of a majority as a Sunni in Syria, and of course as a woman and as a sexual minority."

Homosexuality is illegal in Syria and a strict taboo, although the state largely turns a blind eye.

"It's tough being a lesbian in Syria, but it's certainly easier to be a sexual than a political dissident," she says. "There are a lot more LGBT people here than one might think, even if we are less flamboyant than elsewhere."

Writing in her blog, she said was terrified when she realised at 15 that she was gay, becoming a devout Muslim and getting married. She came out aged 26 and decided to return to Syria, where she taught English until the uprising closed classes.

Her posts vividly describe falling for other women, finding a Damascene hair salon full of gay women and having a frank conversation with her father about her sexuality. "For my family it is a preferable outcome than a promiscuous heterosexual daughter," she jokes.

Born in Virginia to an American southerner mother and a father from an old Damascene family, Abdullah moved to Syria at six months and grew up between the two countries. She spent a long period in Syria after 1982, when an Islamist uprising was being brutally quashed.

Despite facing prejudice – in both the US and Syria – Abdullah sees no conflict in being both gay and Muslim. "I consider myself a believer and a Muslim: I pray five times a day, fast at Ramadan and even covered for a decade," she says. "I believe God made me as I am and I refuse to believe God makes mistakes."

Having family members in high places and dual nationality has, as some blog comments have pointed out, made her more able to speak. But on Monday Abdullah and her elderly father went into hiding in separate places after the security forces came round again. She has refused to go to Beirut with her mother, and is blogging when she can, moving from house to house with a bag of belongings.

Abdullah is also writing a book, in the hope that a revolution will bring more freedoms, both sexual and political. "The Syria I always hoped was there, but was sleeping has woken up," she says. "I have to believe that, sooner or later, we will prevail."

What a difference ten years makes? On September 11, 2001 America was attacked by Al-Qaeda. In that moment Bin Laden succeeded in initiating a series of events that would eventually kick over the delicate house of cards that was the American Empire. On September 14, 2001 President Bush would stand triumphantly over the rubble of the World Trade Center where he would proceed to beat the drums of war and blow the trumpets of patriotism. A fews later, speaking to the best impulses of Americans as citizen-consumers, Bush told us that to defy the terrorists that we should all go shopping.

Ten years later, President Barack Obama would return to the site of the World Trade Center and bring some closure to the events of that horrific day. Obama put the hit on Osama. The bogeyman was dead. Now we can move forward as a nation. The symbolic politics are powerful here: The President is our national cheerleader, an informal Head of State, and the embodiment of America's hopes and dreams. Thus, the fixation by the Birthers and the New Right in denying America's first Black President the legitimacy of his position as Commander in Chief precisely because the white racial frame cannot accept a person of color as Chief Executive.

The President's return to the hallowed grounds of 9-11 is also pregnant with no small amount of irony in how the politics of race are punctuated by occasional deviations from the script in the Age of Obama. Black folks have always been loyal patriots. We loved a country that did not love us back.

However, our patriotism is also sophisticated and qualified for we are suspicious of power and are keen to the lies (both big and small) that leaders tell--and how American democracy was exclusive of people of color. Moreover, the flag waving drums of war moments that accompany America's call to battle and triumphalism are often moments of violence, where white Americans renew the brotherhood of citizenship by shedding the blood of black and brown folk.

The Zoot Suit Riots, the lynching of African American GI's while still in their uniforms, the Bloody Summer of 1919, and the acts of discrimination both subtle and gross by the Greatest Generation against black and brown folk in the Age of Jim Crow are testimonies to this ugly history. History is not dead. It lingers in our collective consciousness. For a Blues People, history's echoes run deep. By comparison, one of the historical advantages of Whiteness is the ability to be ahistorical--a people without roots, origins or responsibility.

Thus, when black and brown folks hear chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" we are right to be suspicious and fearful, for those nationalist orgasmic utterances have often accompanied a trip to the lynching tree or a bloodied blow to the head as the imagined fraternity of white men was reinscribed and renewed at our expense. The Birthers, White Populism and the Tea Bag GOP's embrace of real American White Nationalism is one more reminder of this exclusive club's continued existence into the 21st century. But for a moment, Obama's trip to Ground Zero has--for a few days--upset this dynamic.

Here is one from the archives (wow, four years have gone by?). Today, we have quite a few new visitors curious of the kind people at Crooks and Liars, so it always fun to reach back and bring out a classic piece. The following post is on John Horn's shooting of two burglars in Texas a few years back. This essay remains one of my favorite pieces of all time for a variety of reasons.

There is a nice synergy here: the post speaks to the noxious brew of racialized Patriotism and nationalism that is channeled through those old howls of "U.S.A.!"; the coveted shit-huffer award was introduced here; and there is no small dose of ghetto nerdness on display. Good stuff...at least in my opinion.

****

We are a Nation of Liars, Crooks, Fools, Thieves, and Idiots

A few months back, a story circulated regarding a drug called, "jenkem." Apparently, this "new" drug, a product of Africa of course--where those poor natives do nothing but fight famine, suffer under genocide, live in failed States, and huff shit--consists of human feces and urine in a bong. Here, the "user" would take a "hit" by inhaling the noxious fumes generated by this ungodly concoction:

Egyptians are proud of their role in the Arab spring, but September's elections may expose the revolution's fragility

In Cairo last week I found myself buying a couple of "I love Egypt" T-shirts. When a woman then came up to me and, with much the same solemn pushiness as a squeegee merchant, began to paint the colours of the Egyptian flag on my hand, I did not resist. Speakers in one corner were working up a thin crowd, promising retribution for the ancien regime, justice to the masses. Indifferent to them, large Egyptian families picnicked on a freshly laid lawn, the clumps of grass still springing up unevenly from the ground.

Not far from the square, on the corniche, a small pro-Mubarak demonstration was under way. Earlier in the day, radical Islamists had demonstrated before the American embassy in their first public show of strength. Adding to the confusing reality of post-Mubarak Egypt, thousands of demonstrators in the southern city of Qena had been agitating for days on end against a newly appointed Christian governor. But, here, in Tahrir Square, the main stage for Egypt's festival of democracy, day-tripping revellers like myself easily outnumbered protesters and activists.

The great drama of Mubarak's overthrow behind it, Egypt now copes with an agenda as full as that of a country newly liberated from colonial rule: self-government, social equality, economic consolidation and cultural regeneration. At least one of the many post-revolutionary promises – reassertion of national pride – is already being fulfilled. Mediating the Palestinian agreement between Fatah and Hamas, and releasing Gaza from a brutish captivity, the new Egyptian foreign minister realises a long-thwarted Egyptian desire for dignity and prestige in the wider world.

Political groups are scrambling to get themselves into shape for the national elections due in September; there are already rumours of secret deals between the army and the Islamists, and of other crass expediencies of party politics. Now that it is here, the post-Mubarak era is not as marvellous as it seemed in the imagination. Still, the visitor to Cairo is quickly infected by the excitements of sovereignty, the new political emotions and ideas suddenly in play.

It's true that tourists to the revolution like myself have been traditionally prone to ideological self-deceptions; we tend to see what we want to see, and we suppress anything that doesn't fit our preconceptions. Later, when we are inevitably defeated by reality, we grow bitter, turning against our own naive enthusiasms. But as I stood among the crowds and picnickers in the square, I couldn't resist a pang of confidence and optimism.

Hannah Arendt often spoke of the idea of "natality", the new beginnings latent in human life and action. According to her, every new generation of men and women possesses the creative power to open up fresh possibilities of thinking and action; and, witnessing young Egyptians plan voter awareness campaigns in rural areas, it was hard not to be moved by this latest manifestation of "natality" in the Arab world.

It was disconcerting then to hear in street conversations a high degree of nostalgia for the Mubarak regime – not so much for its brutalities as for the stability it suddenly embodies in Egypt's post-revolutionary disorder. Life, if not exactly sweet then, offered a few certainties. Burdened by the daily imperatives of survival and work, few people could afford the time and leisure to think about the future, let alone form political movements to change it.

For these reflexively conservative Egyptians, long content to mind their own business, their country is now full of threats rather than opportunities. And their mood of foreboding is not an overreaction. For the hard work of creating democratic institutions has barely begun. Indeed, democracy is hardly an adequate word to describe the political system that must not only ensure individual rights and civil liberties but, more importantly, prove itself responsive to the plight of nearly half the population that lives on less than $2 a day.

Egypt's most urgent challenges are unquestionably economic. The western media, inevitably highlighting English-speaking Egyptians, may have given the impression that the uprising was the work of middle-class Facebookistas and the Twitterati alone. It was actually fuelled in its most important stages by the distress and rage of the labouring classes, which has been expressed in sporadic protests over recent years.

A series of workers' strikes in early February proved crucial in forcing Mubarak out. Many more strikes have broken out since; the general economic outlook has worsened since February. Food price inflation is running at over 50%; foreign exchange reserves are depleting fast. Tourists, major contributors to the national GDP, have disappeared. That a draconian IMF bailout and the usual brutality towards the weak will accompany political liberalisation is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Egypt's luck in this regard seems particularly bad from where I write, Indonesia – another former military despotism from the cold war. Indonesia stumbled into multi-party democracy following a regional financial crisis, but its political journey has been smoothed subsequently by a strong economy, primarily the growing Chinese and Indian demand for Indonesian commodities.

Indonesia was fortunate too in having powerful Muslim individuals and organisations that affirmed rather than overturned the country's ideological commitment to religious pluralism. Early in the country's transition to electoral democracy, its president Abdurrahman Wahid, former head of the 30 million-strong Muslim group Nahdlatul Ulama, confidently strengthened the legal rights of minorities and also managed to briefly sideline the military.

It may be optimistic to expect a similarly enlightened attitude from the Islamist parties – Egypt's only organised groups at present – that may be the default winners of September's elections. The responsibilities of power are unlikely to persuade the Muslim Brotherhood to drop its mind-numbing slogan "Islam is the solution". But then not much hope can be invested in the nascent secular and liberal political formations in Egypt. Overwhelmingly Cairo-centric, they seem far from organised. Though well-intentioned, their representatives – upper to upper-middle class – seem no more connected than their counterparts in India or Pakistan to the lives of their struggling compatriots in the countryside.

The elections in September may expose greater tensions of class, clan, gender and religion. Far from being a miraculous panacea, popular enfranchisement in heterogenous societies deepens old divisions and conflicts. Christians in Indonesia feel more rather than less insecure today, as hardline Islamic groups proliferate. Crony capitalists, the bane of pre-democratic Indonesia, have multiplied; members of the military have reinvented themselves, and possess a new authority derived from the ballot box. Assisted by political decentralisation, elected officials have carved out mini fiefdoms within Indonesia's resource-rich territories.

The example of Indonesia proves that many social, political and economic problems do not simply disappear when despotic rule ends; indeed, they can grow more tenacious. It is painful to think that for Egypt, too, democracy may entail the recycling of old elites, and the creation of a new class of oppressors and plunderers. But the experience of other "democracies" cautions us against rejecting this possibility. Indeed, for tourists to Egypt's revolution, it may be the best insurance against cruel disenchantment.

It was already deep into Yom Hashoah, the day that Israel had designated some 60 years ago as the time to memorialize the Jewish catastrophe perpetrated by the Nazis, when news leaked out and then was corroborated by President Obama that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a secured mansion hide-out in Pakistan, actually not far from the country’s capital. Apparently, the mansion was not secured nearly enough: The intelligence and defense forces of the United States had located it eight months before, and it was over that period that the United States—yes, the U.S. alone—had mobilized and meticulously carried out the operation that brought this long sought after mass murderer to justice. We should also not misrepresent and deceive ourselves about the manner in which the ultimate penalty was achieved. This was a “targeted killing,” all at once reasonable, righteous, required. Given the burdens of ingenue innocence with which Obama was shackled from the campaign, it was a brave decision he made to train the administration’s sights (and quite literally his own) on bin Laden’s very life.

My guess is, moreover, that no one will be honing in at the Navy Seals for cuts in the defense budget. Or at the technology which allowed the president to watch just as bin Laden was being shot in the head. The fact is that our country is the defender of civilized societies not of “last resort” but of “only resort.” It is a burden; it is also a blessing and a privilege. We deserve much more ethical authority in the world than we are conceded, and this should right the balance. Still, it is easy to make Americans feel guilty about anything. So I hope that the revelation that bin Laden himself was unarmed when he was killed will not turn into some quibble about whether the shoot-out was a fair one. After all, no one conceived of this as a gentleman’s duel.

The sangfroid with which the Obama apparatus has handled this episode is in welcome contrast to the way the Clinton administration compromised the goal of getting bin Laden dead or alive by focusing on the artificial legalities of whether the man was a war criminal, whether we could bomb his headquarters while some royals from the United Arab Emirates were visiting (by the way, many Saudi princes visited the fugitive), whether we should shoot rockets into premises containing a mosque that might be shot up. But bin Laden was responsible, aside from other brutalities, for the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which took 200 lives and also for the assault on the USS Cole, with 17 dead, in the port of Aden in Yemen. Still, as several chapters of the September 11 report dealing with the prehistory of that calamity make clear, there was something both neurotic and almost comic in the finickiness of the principals about how they might hurt their prey by mistake. What about the president himself? He was otherwise engaged. Madeleine Albright, oh my, oh my, she’d have trouble explaining it to her friends. Sandy Berger, trade lawyer that he was, had a commercial solution to every dilemma. Janet Reno, I think she was concerned with whether the government could secure a guilty verdict for Osama if he came to trial. Or was that George Tenet? The silliness of it all.

Bin Laden’s prime targets were other than the Jews or, for that matter, the State of Israel. He had larger objectives: America itself, the world’s democracies, science, even Christianity, schismatic Muslims, many as jihadist as he. But Jewry and the Jewish nation have a special place in the poisoned hearts of his Muslim followers and in the hearts of many who aren’t quite his followers. So the redemption of Zion is a fact that nags at those who live angrily with their own cultural self-humiliation, rebukes them, haunts them. How could it be, they may ask themselves, that nearly 80 percent of the 7.5 million Jews in occupied Europe (and others elsewhere) were murdered and yet the promise of Jerusalem—their own third holiest blah blah—in the broadest sense has been fulfilled?

Nazism was the first ideology in modernity to aim at killing an entire civilization, Jewish civilization. The Turks, after all, were content to murder the Armenians on their own turf. Not so the Germans. Make no mistake about it. Almost no one wished to recognize that somber fact. The shabby excuses for why the Roosevelt administration refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz (it would make it seem too much like a war for the Jews which, Lord knows, it wasn’t) make this clear. The genocidal ambitions still live. But certainly not in Europe. For nearly a decade the Reich disguised its ultimate intentions for the Jews. Dr. Ahmadinejad has no such tricks in his hat. He is as plain as day, and is an applauded figure at Columbia University, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the General Assembly. Something else has changed. In fact, there are two features of the world that were not present when the terrible homicide of the Jews occurred. The first is that there is a Jewish state.

This Jewish state literally rescued and paid ransom for at least two million Jews who would otherwise have disappeared. From the Soviet Union, from Poland, from Rumania, from Ethiopia, from Argentina, from other little pockets here, there, everywhere. Of course, another million, maybe more from the Arab countries earlier on in Israel’s history. There is a place for Jews to go, a place that is their own, their home. But this place is also a temptation to the new genocidalists who happen also to be candid genocidalists. One percent of the Jewish population of Palestine was killed in the War of Independence. Those are added to the Jewish nakba of less than half a decade earlier, except that this time the Jews (just like the Arabs) had guns.

Now more than guns. And no, not just nuclear weapons of their own. But, more important, an ingrown scientific temperament and its extraordinary consequences which produced a technological universe of defense and assault. Be assured that this is shared with the United States, as the U.S. shares many of its innovations with Israel. I’ve heard—I do not know—that every helmet on every American soldier includes a component contrived by Israeli military engineering. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that, aside from the work done at Siemens and the Idaho National Laboratory, some team of Israelis made the happy match between Stuxnet and Iranian centrifuges. Mazal tov.

The new parameters of war—to take care not to attack innocents, which was hardly a consideration by either the Axis or Allied countries during the Second World War—are quite scrupulously adhered to by Western military establishments, especially including Israel. But, while “underdog” fighters often employ quite sophisticated technologies, they have no compunctions about killing at random. Often without specific targets, like Hamas against Israel.

Or, as has been apparent these last three months in sequential bloodlettings in the Arab world, the very states of Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen. To say nothing of a motley assortment of butchers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, some official, mostly not.

Osama bin Laden brought this butchery to America, and he spooked the American people for nearly a decade. His ghostly and ghastly presence in the shadows of time and geography had transformed him into an ubermensch, at least to those millions (and more millions) who saw the mass murderer as a message and messenger of the Prophet. I myself had seen in several places over the Muslim world, in stalls and booths lining bazaars and even in book shops, the long wiry hatchet face that did not look you in the eye. (Verso Books, the publisher which puts out every nasty revolutionary idea for which assistant professors contrive arcane theories, had gathered Osama’s Messages to the World into print, and likely it will have a macabre new run in the wake of his death.) Still, in some places, many places, the violent seer remains the incarnation of hate-filled hope, not just by some wretched of the earth but also those pampered Arabs who contributed to his till.

In his dignified address to the nation and the world, the president cut him down to size. But he was no pollyanna. Osama is dead. His movement, not entirely one movement, in any event, still lives and may be reinvigorated by the resentments of his followers and hangers-on. Nonetheless, this episode will surely help Obama’s political standing, and Republicans will be hard-put to fault him on the facts. His predecessor, George Bush, made a gracious statement which was probably heartfelt, as well. We are all more liberated now, and this lift from fear was also experienced in Israel as Holocaust memorial ceremonies drew to a close and the news sunk in that bin Laden was no more.

Yet there were a few elements in Obama’s address that trouble me. It’s not exactly that he iterated and reiterated, as he has been doing since the start of his presidency, that “the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam ... our war is not with Islam.” No one wants a war with the Muslim religion or with the Muslim world. No one and certainly no American ... except maybe the crazy Florida pastor who, with his flock, puts the flame to the Koran. Obama reverts to his trope so often that it seems, at least to me, that he is trying to convince himself that there is no space between Islam and the USA.

Obama pointedly observed that “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader. He was a mass murderer of Muslims.” True enough. But then one wonders why, in societies that take easily to the streets, there were no demonstrations against his faithful and those who organize them for suicide and killing. Am I wrong? Was there even one? Please tell me if I am wrong.

I do not care that the president failed to place this intricate military operation within the context of Bush’s “war on terror.” Bush had his vanity. Obama has his. We go on.

But Obama is certainly among those few who almost tactilely experience the politics of the Muslim faith in Pakistan. Yes, there are also tribal differences. But Islam is a great motivator. After all, it’s what motivated the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan to provide Iran and Libya (plus North Korea) with atomic materials and intelligence. Alas, Pakistan is also less an ally against Muslim terrorism than its protector. Steven Lee Myers and Jane Perlez have written a story in today’s New York Times about the deceptions practiced by the country’s intelligence elites against American efforts to close down terrorism in the country. After bin Laden was killed, “the Pakistani government issued a defiant statement calling the raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader ‘an unauthorized unilateral action.’” That’s an ally for you. No one has ever really come clean about Pakistan.

The Washington Post has an astute column by Richard Cohen which states precisely the president’s predicament with one of his Muslim allies. (The other Muslim allies pose similar predicaments, poor man: Turkey, for instance.) 

He seized the spotlight, as he did the moment, offering us a crescendo of the word ‘I’—’I directed’ and ‘I was briefed’ and ‘I met repeatedly’ and ‘I determined.’ But what he did not mention was that he decided to go it alone. Our nominal allies in the fight for Afghanistan, the unreliable and unpredictable Pakistanis, were kept in the dark. Their sovereignty was violated, they lost face, and the United States, as a consequence, lost some cover. It cannot be said that Osama was killed by another Muslim. A martyr has been made.

For too long now the Obama administration has shown a touching but sometimes counterproductive sensitivity for the sensitivities of the Muslim world. It has proceeded as if it was more important to be liked than to be feared and as if some differences were not fundamental but always a product of misunderstanding.

I’m going to repeat Cohen’s meaningful last phrase: “as if some differences were not fundamental but always a product of misunderstanding.” And then Cohen continues.

This is not the case. The US can do little to mollify Islamists and others who seek the obliteration of Israel and the return of holy Jerusalem to the Muslim fold. It can do little with bigots who loathe America’s culture of tolerance.

We shall see if the killing of Osama signals the emergence of a new Obama.

It was as if Obama thought he could charm these guys, reason with them—that their antipathy toward him was based on some sort of misunderstanding and not, as it was and remains, their ideology.

Obama attempted something similar with Iran. He wanted accommodation, less belligerence. They know very well who we are, and we should know who they are. The same holds for Syria.

This is devastating. By the way, does Obama still want Israel to relinquish the Golan Heights to Assad which, of course, might strengthen him? Or to wait until the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power when Assad falls?

And now Obama faces “Palestine.” It is a new Palestine, to be run (if a phantom can truly be run) by a reunion of Fatah (or the Palestinian Authority) and Hamas, a certified terror organization which was sired by the Muslim Brothers of Egypt. Bin Laden’s is not a popular death. After all, he had brought cheer from Jenin to Gaza after September 11, as he had in every Arab state and the tiniest and wealthiest principality. No sooner had Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyah announced their organizational nuptials—an occasion on which Obama has not yet commented—than the Gazan “prime minister” denounced the assassination of a “holy warrior.” Why should he not have? They were both practitioners of random and mass death terrorism.

Bin Laden’s killing is arguably the most daring and difficult undertaking executed by the administration. Should it now accede to one of his acolytes sharing power and extending the dominion of stealth and death? If it does we will look back on this achievement as a sham.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic.

Follow @tnr on Twitter.

In previous posts, I have discussed bipartisan attempts to find a fiscal policy compromise (here and here), and also Republican plans for closing the budget gap through spending cuts alone (here and here). Today's post turns to the less widely publicized People's Budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. What is there to like about the progressive fiscal plan, and what not to like?

First what I like. On the spending side, the People's Budget does not limit itself to swinging a meat-ax at tiny targets like NPR and AmeriCorps within the 12 percent of the budget that is made up of discretionary nondefense spending. Instead, it goes after some really juicy chunks, including defense. Not just at waste, fraud, and abuse in the military budget, either. It comes right out and proposes an orderly but swift end to the military adventure in Afghanistan, thereby saving something between $400 billion and $1.6 trillion, depending on what baseline you compare it to. But the progressives do not really have a monopoly here. Concerns that the United States has not gotten its money's worth from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly voiced  on the Republican side of the aisle, including like Ron and Rand Paul, Jason Chafitz, and Walter Jones.

Next, the People's Budget takes aim at the nation's infrastructure deficit. As I argued in an earlier post, cutting infrastructure investment below what is needed to cover depreciation, as has been done in many areas, is an illusory way of improving the national balance sheet. What is saved in terms of reduced financial liabilities is offset by more rapid depreciation of real assets like bridges, dams, and power lines. In fact, since deferral of needed maintenance almost always means greater spending later when something breaks, cuts to infrastructure spending often end up making the nation's consolidated balance sheet weaker, not stronger. On the whole, without endorsing every line item, I would count the $1.7 trillion added to infrastructure investment over ten years as a plus for the People's Budget.

On entitlements, the People's Budget recognizes, as every observer must, that any realistic plan for fiscal consolidation must do something about the projected growth of government health care outlays. The Republican budget plan deals with this problem largely by shifting the cost of Medicare from the federal government to senior citizens themselves. There are relatively few cost-saving measures in the Republican plan except for malpractice reform and a vague hope that competition will force costs down in the future, even though it has not done so in the past.

The People's Budget takes cost saving in health care more seriously. Its initiatives include adding a public option to the array of private plans to be offered on health insurance exchanges and allowing the government to bargain with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. Big insurance companies and big pharmas are terrified of these ideas: They might work!

The experience of countries like France and Germany shows that when a full array of cost-saving strategies are used, it is possible to provide better quality health care at lower cost, and to do so without moving to British-style, single-payer, "socialized medicine." The People's budget picks up some good ideas that have been shown to work elsewhere, although more could be added.

Let's turn now to the revenue side of the People's Budget. Out of $5.6 trillion in projected deficit reduction in the progressive plan, $3.9 billion, or nearly 70 percent, comes from revenue increases. That contrasts with the one-third revenue, two-thirds spending-cut formula of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan, and even more with Republican plans to balance the budget with spending cuts alone.

What disappoints me about the revenue side of the People's Budget is the degree to which it depends on higher marginal tax rates rather than on tax reform. The biggest piece of revenue, an estimated $873 billion, is to come from enacting Representative Jan Schakowsky's Fairness in Taxation Act (HR 1124), which would create several new income tax brackets, ranging from 45 percent on incomes over $1 million to 49 percent for incomes over $1 billion. The second biggest piece, $330 billion, is to come from Senator Bernie Sanders' Responsible Estate Tax Act (S 3533), which introduces estate tax rates up to 65 percent. Some smaller new taxes for the financial sector are added, as well.

The revenue estimates for the tax increases are set out in a technical analysis of the People's Budget prepared by the Economic Policy Institute. Those, in turn, rely on analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation that has not been released to the public. From context, it would appear that we are looking at static estimates, which do not take into account behavioral responses to tax rate changes, in contrast to dynamic estimates, which do. Static scoring tends to overestimate the revenue from tax rate increases, although it is often hard to know by how much.

Popular discussions of dynamic scoring often focus on the idea that corporations and small businesses won't try as hard to innovate and create jobs if their tax rates go up. However, the real damage of higher marginal tax rates comes not from decreased work effort, but from increased efforts to avoid taxes. Given the complexity of the federal tax code, the possibilities for legal tax avoidance are almost limitless. Everyone has heard the horror stories: Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary; the corporate giant General Electric no tax at all.

Tax avoidance does not just reduce revenues; it leads to efficiency-killing distortions when investment decisions or operational strategies are modified to make income from one source look like something else from somewhere else. Raising marginal tax rates only makes the problem worse. Tax reform that keeps marginal tax rates low while closing loopholes is a much better strategy. Reform could raise as much, or more, revenue than boosting rates, while reducing opportunities for tax avoidance rather than increasing them.

 To its credit, the People's Budget does close a few loopholes. For example, it equalizes the tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income, although it sacrifices potential efficiency gains by raising the marginal rates on both. It leaves most itemized deductions in place, but does take the modest step of capping the degree to which top earners' taxes can be reduced. It eliminates the deductibility of municipal bond interest, although the deduction is replaced with a subsidy to municipal bond issuers that not everyone will like. It broadens the corporate tax base by eliminating oil and gas preferences and taxing foreign corporate income as it is earned, although it leaves the marginal corporate tax rate unchanged at what is already one of the highest in the world.

But these tax reform proposals are half-steps compared with what could have been done, in complete consistency with the progressive agenda. For example, why not repeal the mortgage interest deduction? As I noted in an earlier post, the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates the mortgage interest deduction to be worth $5,393 a year for tax units in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (average income $1,302,188) but only $215 per year to those in the middle 20 percent (average income $43,678). For households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, the deduction has almost no value. Getting rid of the deduction would raise $108 billion in 2012, rising to $162 billion a year by 2019. What keeps the mortgage interest deduction off the progressive hit list? Who knows. Maybe campaign contributions from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

In all, the People's Budget leaves untouched the entire top half of the dirty-dozen list of tax loopholes. All of those loopholes—from employer-paid health care to mortgage interest to charitable deductions—are regressive in their impact. All of them encourage efficiency-sapping tax avoidance strategies, the effects of which would be even worse if the higher marginal rates of the People's Budget were to be enacted. Collectively, eliminating the top six loopholes could raise close to $500 billion a year in added revenue, enough to pay for a cornucopia of progressive delights.

The bottom line: The People's budget does represent a real alternative to Republican budget plans. It takes on some sacred cows that the Republicans fear to touch, most notably defense spending. It correctly recognizes that cuts to infrastructure investment are false economies that reduce the headline deficit number without really improving the national balance sheet. It also deserves credit for seeing that real cost savings, not just cost shifting, will be needed to make health care affordable.

Finally, the People's Budget is more realistic than Republican plans in recognizing that both spending cuts and revenue increases will be needed to close the budget gap. Sadly, though, the way it seeks added revenue is just plain bad. Its "millionaire's tax" plays to the class warfare instincts of the progressive base, but its efforts fall flat when it comes to tax reform. The People's Budget could have been very much better, and without giving an inch on its progressive principles.

 Follow this link to view or download a short slideshow with graphs, data, and other highlights from the People's Budget.

 

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In previous posts, I have discussed bipartisan attempts to find a fiscal policy compromise (here and here), and also Republican plans for closing the budget gap through spending cuts alone (here and here). Today's post turns to the less widely publicized People's Budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. What is there to like about the progressive fiscal plan, and what not to like?

First what I like. On the spending side, the People's Budget does not limit itself to swinging a meat-ax at tiny targets like NPR and AmeriCorps within the 12 percent of the budget that is made up of discretionary nondefense spending. Instead, it goes after some really juicy chunks, including defense. Not just at waste, fraud, and abuse in the military budget, either. It comes right out and proposes an orderly but swift end to the military adventure in Afghanistan, thereby saving something between $400 billion and $1.6 trillion, depending on what baseline you compare it to. But the progressives do not really have a monopoly here. Concerns that the United States has not gotten its money's worth from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly voiced  on the Republican side of the aisle, including like Ron and Rand Paul, Jason Chafitz, and Walter Jones.

Next, the People's Budget takes aim at the nation's infrastructure deficit. As I argued in an earlier post, cutting infrastructure investment below what is needed to cover depreciation, as has been done in many areas, is an illusory way of improving the national balance sheet. What is saved in terms of reduced financial liabilities is offset by more rapid depreciation of real assets like bridges, dams, and power lines. In fact, since deferral of needed maintenance almost always means greater spending later when something breaks, cuts to infrastructure spending often end up making the nation's consolidated balance sheet weaker, not stronger. On the whole, without endorsing every line item, I would count the $1.7 trillion added to infrastructure investment over ten years as a plus for the People's Budget.

On entitlements, the People's Budget recognizes, as every observer must, that any realistic plan for fiscal consolidation must do something about the projected growth of government health care outlays. The Republican budget plan deals with this problem largely by shifting the cost of Medicare from the federal government to senior citizens themselves. There are relatively few cost-saving measures in the Republican plan except for malpractice reform and a vague hope that competition will force costs down in the future, even though it has not done so in the past.

The People's Budget takes cost saving in health care more seriously. Its initiatives include adding a public option to the array of private plans to be offered on health insurance exchanges and allowing the government to bargain with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. Big insurance companies and big pharmas are terrified of these ideas: They might work!

The experience of countries like France and Germany shows that when a full array of cost-saving strategies are used, it is possible to provide better quality health care at lower cost, and to do so without moving to British-style, single-payer, "socialized medicine." The People's budget picks up some good ideas that have been shown to work elsewhere, although more could be added.

Let's turn now to the revenue side of the People's Budget. Out of $5.6 trillion in projected deficit reduction in the progressive plan, $3.9 billion, or nearly 70 percent, comes from revenue increases. That contrasts with the one-third revenue, two-thirds spending-cut formula of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan, and even more with Republican plans to balance the budget with spending cuts alone.

What disappoints me about the revenue side of the People's Budget is the degree to which it depends on higher marginal tax rates rather than on tax reform. The biggest piece of revenue, an estimated $873 billion, is to come from enacting Representative Jan Schakowsky's Fairness in Taxation Act (HR 1124), which would create several new income tax brackets, ranging from 45 percent on incomes over $1 million to 49 percent for incomes over $1 billion. The second biggest piece, $330 billion, is to come from Senator Bernie Sanders' Responsible Estate Tax Act (S 3533), which introduces estate tax rates up to 65 percent. Some smaller new taxes for the financial sector are added, as well.

The revenue estimates for the tax increases are set out in a technical analysis of the People's Budget prepared by the Economic Policy Institute. Those, in turn, rely on analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation that has not been released to the public. From context, it would appear that we are looking at static estimates, which do not take into account behavioral responses to tax rate changes, in contrast to dynamic estimates, which do. Static scoring tends to overestimate the revenue from tax rate increases, although it is often hard to know by how much.

Popular discussions of dynamic scoring often focus on the idea that corporations and small businesses won't try as hard to innovate and create jobs if their tax rates go up. However, the real damage of higher marginal tax rates comes not from decreased work effort, but from increased efforts to avoid taxes. Given the complexity of the federal tax code, the possibilities for legal tax avoidance are almost limitless. Everyone has heard the horror stories: Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary; the corporate giant General Electric no tax at all.

Tax avoidance does not just reduce revenues; it leads to efficiency-killing distortions when investment decisions or operational strategies are modified to make income from one source look like something else from somewhere else. Raising marginal tax rates only makes the problem worse. Tax reform that keeps marginal tax rates low while closing loopholes is a much better strategy. Reform could raise as much, or more, revenue than boosting rates, while reducing opportunities for tax avoidance rather than increasing them.

To its credit, the People's Budget does close a few loopholes. For example, it equalizes the tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income, although it sacrifices potential efficiency gains by raising the marginal rates on both. It leaves most itemized deductions in place, but does take the modest step of capping the degree to which top earners' taxes can be reduced. It eliminates the deductibility of municipal bond interest, although the deduction is replaced with a subsidy to municipal bond issuers that not everyone will like. It broadens the corporate tax base by eliminating oil and gas preferences and taxing foreign corporate income as it is earned, although it leaves the marginal corporate tax rate unchanged at what is already one of the highest in the world.

But these tax reform proposals are half-steps compared with what could have been done, in complete consistency with the progressive agenda. For example, why not repeal the mortgage interest deduction? As I noted in an earlier post, the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates the mortgage interest deduction to be worth $5,393 a year for tax units in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (average income $1,302,188) but only $215 per year to those in the middle 20 percent (average income $43,678). For households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, the deduction has almost no value. Getting rid of the deduction would raise $108 billion in 2012, rising to $162 billion a year by 2019. What keeps the mortgage interest deduction off the progressive hit list? Who knows. Maybe campaign contributions from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

In all, the People's Budget leaves untouched the entire top half of the dirty-dozen list of tax loopholes. All of those loopholes—from employer-paid health care to mortgage interest to charitable deductions—are regressive in their impact. All of them encourage efficiency-sapping tax avoidance strategies, the effects of which would be even worse if the higher marginal rates of the People's Budget were to be enacted. Collectively, eliminating the top six loopholes could raise close to $500 billion a year in added revenue, enough to pay for a cornucopia of progressive delights.

The bottom line: The People's budget does represent a real alternative to Republican budget plans. It takes on some sacred cows that the Republicans fear to touch, most notably defense spending. It correctly recognizes that cuts to infrastructure investment are false economies that reduce the headline deficit number without really improving the national balance sheet. It also deserves credit for seeing that real cost savings, not just cost shifting, will be needed to make health care affordable.

Finally, the People's Budget is more realistic than Republican plans in recognizing that both spending cuts and revenue increases will be needed to close the budget gap. Sadly, though, the way it seeks added revenue is just plain bad. Its "millionaire's tax" plays to the class warfare instincts of the progressive base, but its efforts fall flat when it comes to tax reform. The People's Budget could have been very much better, and without giving an inch on its progressive principles.

Follow this link to view or download a short slideshow with graphs, data, and other highlights from the People's Budget.

The killing of Osama bin Laden marks a great day for America, for the world, and for the hope of justice. As many others have commented, the successful operation ordered by President Obama and carried out by the CIA and Special Forces operators culminated years of effort across multiple domains of intelligence, law enforcement, diplomacy, and the military. Many streams converged to make this happen -- from the counter-terrorism policies and institutions established after the 9/11 attacks, to the first intelligence collected from Guantanamo detainees four years ago about the identity of bin Laden's courier, to the identification of bin Laden's compound last August, to the NSC's careful deliberations and President Obama's decision to eschew bombing the compound in favor of an assault that would bring the tremendous benefit of securing bin Laden's body, to the operation itself. This is a moment in which the White House can take pride, as can all of those dedicated American officials who devoted substantial portions of their lives to the hunt for bin Laden over the past decade. All of them deserve our fervent gratitude. A few additional thoughts:

• It is telling that bin Laden had been hiding for the past few years in a luxury compound with an abundance of amenities. Part of his carefully crafted self-image and ideological appeal to would-be jihadists came from his purported ascetic self-denial and eschewal of the trappings of wealth on behalf of his perverse cause. Now we learn that instead of living in a cave for the past few years, he's been living in a mansion in Pakistan's version of the Hamptons. The Obama Administration should exploit this fact in its ongoing "war of ideas" efforts to delegitimize jihadism.
• Reactions around the world are revealing and provide moments of moral clarity. The vast majority of nations join us in celebrating bin Laden's death. Not so with Hamas or the Iranian government. And the statements from Muslim Brotherhood leaders to the effect of "we're glad he's gone but the United States should leave Muslim lands" are disturbing in their moral equivalency.
• As many have pointed out, this is a serious blow to the global jihadist movement, but the war is not yet over. Hard work and difficult decisions lie ahead, as the US assesses what if anything this might mean for our posture, strategic goals, challenges, and opportunities, in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. An immediate question will be who, if anyone, attempts to take bin Laden's place as the symbolic head of the jihadist movement, whether Ayman Al Zawahiri, Anwar al Awlaki, or someone else. Whoever it may be, he should be on notice about the strength and endurance of American resolve against those who seek to do us harm.

Osama bin Laden's terrorist group had been on the back foot for years, and Middle East uprisings made it even more marginal

If Osama bin Laden had been following the Arab Spring from his Pakistani hideout, his feelings must have oscillated between the hope of new opportunities and despair that they were not coming al-Qaida's way.

None of the uprisings that have shaken the region, from Tunisia's Jasmine revolution to the ongoing protests against the Assad regime in Syria, has involved significant Islamist activity – let alone the violent, extremist jihadi ideas promoted by Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their ilk.

Al-Qaida had already looked marginal and on the back foot for several years. But the dawn of largely peaceful change in the Middle East and North Africa this year rendered it irrelevant.

In Egypt, where the jihad movement was born in the 1980s before merging with like-minded Saudis, the momentous overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's regime was accomplished by a coalition of civil society and democratic forces in which even the powerful Muslim Brotherhood played little organised role.

Facebook and Twitter turned out to be far more effective agents of change than any "martyrdom" attack on apostates, crusaders and Zionists – the most familiar objects of hatred in the jihadi lexicon.

There is, of course, a world of difference between the takfiri ideology of al-Qaida and other political Islamists who come in many stripes of gradualism, moderation and attitudes to violence, reform and secular society.

Al-Qaida's most significant presence in the Arab world today is in Yemen, Bin Laden's ancestral homeland. But it has played little role in the growing movement to unseat President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The activities of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap) have been only one of several factors pushing Yemen towards the status of a failed state. Somalia, just across the Red Sea, provides a grim warning of the way state collapse is good for al-Qaida.

Yemen became a magnet for jihadis because of stabilisation in Iraq, effective US-led attacks on Bin Laden's "core" organisation in Pakistan and Afghanistan and near total defeat in Saudi Arabia – a combination of repression, re-education and straight bribery that was helped by the enormous financial resources of the Saudi state.

The Arab autocracies have certainly been deft in using their own campaigns against al-Qaida to boost their usefulness to the west. Libyan complaints about Nato's intervention include genuine outrage at "ingratitude" over Gaddafi's help in crushing the jihadis. Tripoli deliberately exaggerates the role played by veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – once a significant AQ affiliate – in the Benghazi uprising.

It does not all fall on deaf ears. US officials – their comments magnified by conservative ideologues – have expressed concern about "flickers" of an al-Qaida presence among the Libyan rebels. In this vein, some warn of new opportunities for the extremists in the weakening of the repressive organs of Arab states. "Don't let the Arab spring become al-Qaida's winter," is their mantra. "Our mujahideen brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and the rest of the Muslim world will get a chance to breathe again after three decades of suffocation," was the satisfied conclusion of Anwar al-Awlaqi, the Aqap leader.

In Syria, a beleaguered Bashar al-Assad has been warning that Salafis – a coded reference to al-Qaida – are behind the uprising. Ali Mamluk, the head of one of the country's many security agencies and now facing US sanctions for his role in the crackdown, was valued for his co-operation in fighting al-Qaida by the CIA, MI6 and other western intelligence services.

Outside Yemen, the current focus for concern is in North Africa. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb – operating in Algeria, Morocco, Mali and the "ungoverned spaces" of the Sahara – has adopted the AQ "franchise" and has some operational capacity, demonstrated by occasional kidnappings. Last week's bomb attack in Marrakech was a sobering reminder that it can still function.

But the idea that al-Qaida poses a serious challenge to the Arab regimes is dead – and was dead long before Bin Laden's demise. The main wellsprings of change in the Middle East are happily not fed by his poisonous legacy.

STUB FOR LATER VIDEO INTERVIEW:
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh fingers Qatar for all the Middle East unrest in Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, saying that he'll step down two years before his tenure's up.

In this exclusive interview with Russia Today's Ramzi Hussein, just aired on TV, the Yemeni President says, "Qatar has so much money they don't know what to do with it, and are setting a financial foundation to become one of the big players in the middle east." But who are Qatar globally in league with? Is Saleh suggesting that Qatar is funding the Muslim Brotherhood so favoured by western leaders like Blair (and the current UK parliament) and Bush (and the current US administration? That's the real question I hope this interview (once RT upload it) will answer.

More "ordo ab chao" in the name of New World Order, eh?

Now that Bashar al-Assad is crushing opposition with terrible brutality, no one in the West knows how to deal with him

The Observer's encounter with Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, was an oddly informal one in a country deeply suspicious of the foreign media. An interview with his British-born wife, Asma, had been arranged, but as it ended, an aide to the president invited me to coffee with Assad himself.

Sitting somewhat awkwardly on the vast plush sofas of his reception room in the "official palace" – a place, he explained, where he did not actually live – he asked as many questions as he answered. In a conversational tone, Assad said he wanted peace with Israel, talked about reform, discussed relations with the US, and reflected on his father's harsh line on Islamists.

Syria's new president seemed then, almost a decade ago, a plausible figure, uncertain and almost modest, an impression encouraged by themarketing of him in the west by the British PR agency Bell Pottinger. He had been president for two years, having in 2000 succeeded his authoritarian father Hafez al-Assad, the man who had founded Syria's Ba'athist republic after seizing power during a coup d'etat in 1970. That early image is one that Assad and his wife have continued to promote assiduously, most recently in an interview given by Syria's first lady to a gushing Vogue magazine, which included pictures of Assad playing with his sons.

It is an image that served the London-trained ophthalmologist well, securing him a state visit to London at a time when the government of Tony Blair – as well as other European governments – thought he was a different proposition to his father, who gained notoriety for ordering the deaths in 1982 of up to 20,000 in the town of Hama during a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But in the last few weeks that early image has seemed sharply at odds with the acts carried out in Assad's name in a murderous clampdown on those demonstrating against the regime, which has so far claimed more than 400 lives as Syrian towns have been put under siege – an entire country locked down.

What is less clear now is who Assad really is and what he represents. Indeed, how powerful he really is. On Friday, when a "day of rage" was called to follow Friday prayers – this time endorsed by the banned Muslim Brotherhood – Assad had taken a leaf out of the book of deposed President Mubarak of Egypt and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, flooding the streets with armed security forces even as his opponents demonstrated in more than 50 locations.

Although protests have been taking place weekly after Friday prayers, last week felt different because for the first time, the Assad regime had offered no concessions the day before. There were also the resignations of several hundred members of Assad's Ba'ath party, and reports of clashes between members of the Syrian army's 4th Brigade, commanded by the president's younger brother Maher, and the 5th Brigade outside Deraa, the besieged town that has become the symbol of the Syrian uprising. And last week felt different because of the horrors that have taken place as the regime of Bashar al-Assad has opted for repression rather than concession.

As it has cracked down, so the regime has blamed the violence on a farcically broad range of culprits: armed gangs, Lebanese legislators, Saudis, Palestinian extremists – all with ominous overtones of the 1980s and Assad's father's most infamous massacre.

To underline the message of what might happen should the regime fall, state media and newly printed posters on the streets have pushed fears of chaos, especially of a sectarian nature.

In the coastal city of Latakia, gunmen believed to belong to the shabiha, an Alawite smuggling gang drawn from the extended Assad clan, have shot at Christian neighbourhoods with warnings of a Sunni takeover, before going to Alawite neighbourhoods and warning of Sunni revenge. (The minority Alawite sect, to which the Assads belong, is generally regarded as a branch of Shia Islam.)

But if the tactics used by the regime appear largely identical to that used by Gaddafi, the response by the international community has been markedly different. On Friday, as the US moved to apply sanctions, Assad was noticeably absent from the list of targets, although it named his younger brother Maher as well as his cousin Atif Najib and the Iranian al-Quds forces which the US accuses of channelling riot equipment to the regime. Noticeably absent too has been any threat of military action against a country which – unlike Libya – is seen as having a very well-equipped and trained army and powerful friends, not least Iran.

Officially, the opinion offered by analysts and diplomats in the last few days to explain this difference is that Syria matters in a way that Libya does not in regional and international affairs.

It is for that reason, perhaps, that Qatar, which led the charge against Libya, on Friday quietly absented itself from the UN Human Rights Council's deliberations on Syria.

For Assad, the survival of the police state founded by his father is a very personal affair which he has dressed up as a national necessity to "prevent" his country from slipping into civil war. For the wider region, how events will unfold in Syria is becoming equally pressing.

Gaddafi's regime in Libya has over the decades antagonised most in the Arab region. Syria, however, despite its poverty and waning importance as a leader in regional affairs – not least since its humiliating retreat from Lebanon in 2005 – remains a presence that has to be acknowledged.

It occupies a crucial location, bordering Iraq, Israel and Lebanon. And a Syria plunged into chaos, diplomats fear, would have profound consequences for all of those countries as well as for the Middle East peace process.

Damascus hosts the political bureau of Hamas, including its political leader Khaled Meshaal, although reports emerged yesterday – denied by Hamas – that it is now planning to relocate. Indeed, some have argued that Hamas's peace deal with its Palestinian rival Fatah was prompted by the fear of losing Syria as a patron.

Assad has also allowed weapons to pass over Syria's borders for the rearming of Hezbollah after the 2006 war between that group and Israel.

Despite western efforts to prise it apart from its alliance with Iran, Syria remains close to Tehran. And while Syria played host to a large number of Iraqis fleeing violence, it also allowed passage for foreign fighters travelling to fight the US-led coalition in Iraq.

Joshua Landis of the Middle East Centre at the University of Oklahoma told the Christian Science Monitor last week that Syria epitomised the split nature of the region, describing it as "the cockpit of the Middle East".

"On the one hand," he said, "it has always made a claim to be the beating heart of Arabism, calling for unity and secularism, and on the other, it is a deeply fragmented nation with a regime dominated by a religious minority."

Of most immediate concern to neighbouring countries last week was fear of a flood of migrants fleeing the violence. Cyprus's foreign minister, Markos Kyprianou, announced on Friday that the authorities there are drawing up plans on how to cope with a possible wave of migrants from crisis-hit Syria – a contingency being prepared by other nearby territories.

For others, such as Turkey, with which Syria came close to war at the end of the 1990s over Damascus providing a safe haven for Kurdish separatists, the violence in Syria is deeply embarrassing. These days, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is personally close to Assad, their families have holidayed together, and visa restrictions were lifted for Syrians travelling to Turkey under Ankara's "Zero Problems" foreign policy.

Mubarak and Gaddafi also tried to play on fear of the chaos that might follow the fall of their regimes, but Assad's warnings appear to have found a more receptive audience.

"It's messy," says Jane Kinninmont, researcher at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House. "What makes it different, I think, is the particular nature of the uncertainty over what might follow Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria.

"In Tunisia and Egypt it was known who the opposition were, although it is true that in Libya a recognisable opposition pulled itself together pretty quickly. What is more worrying in Syria, given its geographic position, is the prospect of civil war."

It is a fear that is shared by Syrians themselves. "No one can predict with certainty what would happen if Assad fell," says one Syrian analyst in the capital Damascus who asked for anonymity. "Those suspicions have been stoked by the government alone. We don't trust our neighbours not to be members of the security forces. But the conclusion that there will be chaos is an under-analysed scare tactic. The majority of Syrians want to live together in peace."

The fear of internal violence has been raised by rumours of clashes between different army units outside the key town of Deraa, which has become the symbol of Syria's uprising.

There are some in the region who might actually prefer that to a quick transition to majority – and therefore Sunni – rule, not least Iran, which would see not only the loss of an important ally but also potentially a transit route for weapons to Hezbollah to maintain a kind of proxy strategic balance that threatens Israel's border.

And, unlike Gaddafi, Syria has split international opinion as to the nature of both the regime under Assad and the character of Assad himself, with a significant minority still believing that, despite everything, he can be manoeuvred on to the course of genuine reform that he has spoken about but never delivered.

It is this that explains the absence of Assad himself from the newly announced US sanctions against his state, explained officially as targeting those directly responsible for the violence.

It is a judgment predicated on one reading of Syria's dynamics – that Bashar al-Assad is less powerful than other figures around him, including his brother Maher.

Others, however, believe that, far from being the weak link, Bashar al-Assad is as powerful as his father in a regime which is no longer truly Ba'athist but – like Hosni Mubarak's was in Egypt – one bound together by close and corrupt financial interest.

And whatever the reality, by yesterday there was little evidence that the tactic of selective sanctions was working. A resident of the besieged southern Syrian city of Deraa said yesterday that more troops were being brought in a day after security forces reportedly shot dead dozens.

All of which confirms, for the likes of the Lebanese journalist Hisham Melhem, the naivety that has driven western foreign policy towards Syria for more than a decade.

Writing in Foreign Policy last week, he said: "Over the last 10 years many western politicians and scholars took the road to Damascus, holding out hope that the young Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would lead Syria out of the political wilderness and place it on the path of political and economic reform.

"There was a naive assumption that Bashar had the makings of a modern leader because he was in part western-educated, spoke relatively good English, and married a professional woman who worked as an investment banker in London."

It is the outcome the west is still betting on as the odds get daily longer.

After the extraordinary initial success of Egypt’s popular revolution in removing Hosni Mubarak from power, the supreme council for the armed forces published an interim constitution on 30 March 2011 that is to guide the country through the coming period. Although the text opens up exciting new possibilities and opportunities for change, it is also deeply problematic, particularly insofar as the mechanism for drafting the permanent constitution is concerned.  In that regard, Egypt has much to learn from Iraq, which is the only country in the Arab region to have engaged in a constitutional drafting process in recent memory.

Every country in the middle east has its own share of challenges and attributes, and there is no question that Egypt’s constitutional drafting process will be a far different experience to what took place in Iraq in 2005 (not least because Egypt does not have to suffer the consequences of a foreign military occupation). 

However, there are enough similarities between the two countries (aside from obvious linguistic, cultural, religious and historical ties) that allow for one to learn from the other in relation to specific issues.  Egypt and Iraq have many of the same basic needs, some of which can at least be partly addressed through a successful constitutional drafting process. In that sense, the Iraqi experience has failed miserably and Egypt should take stock and learn from that experience, with a view to avoid repeating the same fatal mistakes.   

An impossible timeline

What is most shocking about the Egyptian interim constitution is the timeline for the drafting of the permanent constitution. Article 60 provides that the constitutional drafting process will last six months and that a referendum should take place fifteen days later. Article 60 does not provide for the possibility that that timeframe can be extended. Remarkably, the United States occupation authorities in Iraq had also imposed a six-month timeframe on the Iraqi constitutional drafters, although mainly in order to satisfy domestic American concerns. 

On the opposite side of the spectrum is the South African constitutional process, widely recognised to have been amongst the most successful in modern history, which lasted all in all around seven years. It is therefore surprising to say the least to see Egypt, on its own volition, mimic what has now been widely recognised as a failed constitutional process.

It is common knowledge that Egypt has a wealth of constitutional and legal scholars to draw from, many of whom will no doubt have much to contribute during the drafting of their new constitution.  However, there is little guarantee that any of these individuals will be able to play an official role in the drafting process itself.  Given the circumstances, there is a strong chance that, as was the case in Iraq, the constitutional drafting committee will be dominated by political appointees that will have little or no experience in constitutional law.  Given also the nature of the previous regime, some of Egypt’s future leaders may have spent a significant period of time either outside the state altogether, or worse either in prison or exile. 

Although constitutional drafters can certainly learn on the job, six months is clearly insufficient, which opens up the possibility that a dysfunctional or incomplete constitutional framework may be created. Egypt deserves a quick transition to a functioning democracy; but it also needs more time to carefully craft its permanent constitution.  

Designing institutional frameworks

Drafting a new constitution in any part of the world necessarily involves an effort to properly understand the workings of the respective country’s institutional framework. Even constitutions that are born in the throes of a popular revolution cannot hope to start a completely fresh page. A large number of existing institutions will be preserved, and their reporting lines, working methods and other traditions will influence the new constitution’s workings. 

As a result, constitutional drafters can and should work to understand which institutions are the most efficient and which are dysfunctional, in order to decide how the new constitution can improve on the existing framework. In addition, changes to the country’s overall governance structure can affect the way in which specific institutions operate, even if those same institutions are not mentioned in the constitution itself. In the absence of sufficient foresight in relation to these issues, any changes are likely to lead to unforeseen results, which can never be a good thing.

In light of Egypt’s recent history, this is an operation that will take significant time to carry out successfully. The revolution was in part spurred by a partial breakdown in Egypt’s state and society, caused in no small part by the state of inertia that Mubarak’s National Democratic Party had instituted. There are however many institutions that have been fulfilling their responsibilities to the satisfaction of Egyptians. Why have some been successful where others have failed, and what can the new constitutional framework do to encourage the emergence of other successful institutions in the future?  What form of oversight should be instituted to monitor a specific institution’s performance, and to what branch of government should that same institution report its findings to?

Comparative constitutional practice provides many possible answers to these questions; but whatever option Egypt chooses will have to emerge from an honest and detailed debate about the performance of Egyptian institutions and cannot rely entirely on theoretical and comparative models. 

That effort will necessarily require close collaboration with a large number of senior and mid-level public officials, who should be invited to participate in the process of the redesigning of the state. That effort will also require much more time than six months. 

In Iraq, the short timeframe meant that constitutional drafters were mostly unaware of how the country’s bureaucracy functioned in practice. There was also no time to consider how general changes in the nature of the state would impact on specific institutions. For example, Iraq made the transition in 2005 from an extremely centralised presidential system that was dominated by the Ba’ath party to a parliamentary system of government that was populated by dozens of political parties. 

Under the previous regime, Iraq’s audit institution, the board of supreme audit (which was responsible for inspecting state expenditure, excluding of course the largesse of Saddam Hussein and his family) was widely considered to be operating effectively under difficult circumstances. Its reports were circulated throughout the one-party state, which reacted to suggestions of misconduct with what has been described by independent observers as ruthless efficiency. 

Since 2005, the new constitution requires the board of supreme audit to report to the parliament, which means that it is now at the mercy of dozens of rival political parties that are either completely disinterested in its reports or who seek to make use of them solely as ammunition to accuse rivals of corruption. The board’s staff has since been targeted in dozens of assassination attempts, and its reports are kept away from the public domain for safety reasons. To this day, the Iraqi parliament and the prime minister’s office are involved in a power struggle to determine which of the two will obtain ultimate control over the board.

The point here is not that the previous system of oversight was ideal (far from it), nor that the Iraqi constitutional drafters should have maintained that system. The point is merely that the drafters clearly contributed to the current levels of corruption by not considering how the shift to a parliamentary system of government with a low electoral threshold would impact on oversight in the state. In fact, because of the six-month deadline, there was not even enough time to consider the possibility that this would occur.  

Limiting political rule

Even more glaring is the need to establish a proper framework within which political parties should operate. The process through which detailed rules relating to financial transparency are decided is a difficult and time-consuming one. In countries such as Egypt and Iraq, where multiparty democracy and true financial transparency were hitherto completely unknown quantities, some time is required for parties to adjust to the rules in principle and in practice.

When the issue of financial transparency is first raised in emerging democracies, political parties tend to baulk at the prospect of state or private auditors inspecting their accounts, and significant effort must be made to convince political parties of the necessity of such rules. A debate on specific rules for the country in question, taking into account its individual context and circumstances, would be most appropriate. These rules can be extremely complex, particularly when it comes to enforcement, which means that significant time is required for careful consideration and drafting.

In their eagerness to see Egypt transition to a fully fledged democratic society as soon as possible, many commentators have brushed aside these issues as secondary concerns, arguing that Egypt already has rules relating to financial transparency and that any remaining detail can be left to after the new constitution has entered into force. Iraqis learned the hard way that politicians should not be allowed to decide the rules within which they themselves operate. 

The Iraqi electoral and integrity commissions established rules that required financial transparency;  but despite this, Iraq lacks an effective enforcement mechanism, which senior anti-corruption have argued is one of the main causes of graft in the country. The Iraqi constitution also contains few rules relating to how elections are supposed to be carried out in practice, such that parliament is solely responsible for the mechanics.

The result in Iraq is that in the 2010 elections, candidates were still elected as part of a list, and electoral districts were so large that they often allowed for more than a dozen members to be elected in a single constituency. In Iraq’s new democracy, a deep chasm exists between politicians and ordinary citizens, damaging the entire system’s legitimacy.   

Debating fundamental rights

Perhaps most importantly in countries such as Egypt and Iraq is the need to engage in an honest debate on the relationship between religion and state. In Iraq in 2005, the matter was discussed within the constitutional committee but a compromise could not be reached in the given timeframe. American officials therefore imposed a solution which provided that “no law may be enacted that contradicts the established provisions of Islam” or that “contradicts the principles of democracy”. 

Although a draft constitution was circulated prior to the referendum date, there was insufficient time to allow the population to properly engage with the issue, to reflect upon possible ramifications of the adopted wording and to suggest alternatives.  Millions of Iraqis voted without even having seen the draft themselves, and the referendum was presented as an option between order and chaos (which feels eerily similar to the choice that Egyptians are being presented with in its own constitutional process). Despite all its flaws, the constitution was approved overwhelmingly.

The absence of an open debate on the role of religion has resulted in the provision being applied inconsistently throughout the country, with some provinces concluding that it should lead to the banning of the sale of alcohol, a lead that other provinces have refused to follow.

Meanwhile, some extremist groups have taken to bursting into Christian organisations’ offices demanding that they leave the country, on the basis that Iraq is now an Islamic state. This is but one of the factors that have caused Iraq to become an increasingly unichrome country, in which religious minorities feel that they have essentially lost their place in society.

The examples set out above are only a few of the difficulties that were imposed on Iraqis after the failed constitutional process in 2005. There is no reason why Egypt should have to endure these same tragedies. The country should remain confident that its revolutionary spirit will continue to guide it through the coming period and avoid the temptation to rush to an illusory “normalisation". The revolution should allow the constitutional drafting committee the amount of time that it needs to fully engage with itself, with the country at large, and to benefit from the experience of others, even if that means learning from their mistakes.   

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 2007)

Niqash / politics

Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak (Yale University Press, 2010)

Alison Pargeter, The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition (Saqi, 2010)

International Crisis Group - Egypt

Gareth Stansfield, Iraq: People, History, Politics (Polity, 2007)

Bruce K Rutherford, Egypt After Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam and Democracy in the Arab World (Princeton University Press, 2008)

Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, A History of Egypt: From the Arab Conquest to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2007)

Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)

Sidebox: 

Zaid Al-Ali is an attorney at the New York Bar, specialising in international commercial arbitration and comparative constitutional law. From 2005-10, he advised on constitutional, parliamentary and judicial reform in Iraq

Among Zaid Al-Ali's articles in openDemocracy:

"Iraq - the lost generation" (6 October 2004)

"The end of secularism in Iraq" (17 May 2005)

"Iraq: a constitution to nowhere" (13 October 2005)

"Iraq's war of elimination" (20 August 2006)

"Saving Iraq: a critique of Peter W Galbraith" (25 October 2006)

"The United States in Iraq: the case for withdrawal" (19 January 2007)

"Iraqis in freefall" (21 March 2007)

"Iraq: a wall to conquer us" (7 May 2007)

"Lebanon's Palestinian shame" (19 June 2007)

"What Obama means for Iraq" (13 November 2008)

"The Cairo speech: Arab Muslim voices" (8 June 2009) - with Karim Kasim

"Iraq: face of corruption, mask of politics" (2 July 2009)

"Iraq: new alliances, old repression" (3 September 2009)

"Iraq's future hanging by a thread" (18 August 2010)

Related stories: 

Iraq: the politics of the local

Looking back on Saddam Hussein

Iraq lives

Iraq's partition fantasy

America and Arabia after Saddam

Iraq, war and WikiLeaks: the real story

Iraq, AfPak, beyond: the global cost of war

Basra’s second battle decoded

Democracy, Iraq and the middle east

Uncle Sam in Iraq: the war of narratives

Iraq in 2012: four scenarios

Iraq's burning season

The rise and fall of civil society in Iraq

Iraq's short century: old problems, new perspectives

Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters

Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited

The ghost of Saddam Hussein

Iraq’s elections: winners, losers, and what’s next

The Iraq project

America in Iraq: power, hubris, change

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston is looking to expand its outreach at Boston-area colleges, Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley said yesterday. The Brotherhood of Hope, a group that focuses on recruiting students from secular universities, is launching an initiative called Hope for Undergraduates in Boston to reach out to the thousands of college students on campuses in the Fenway area, ...

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston is looking to expand its outreach at Boston-area colleges, Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley said yesterday. The Brotherhood of Hope, a group that focuses on recruiting students from secular universities, is launching an initiative called Hope for Undergraduates in Boston to reach out to the thousands of college students on campuses in the Fenway area, ...

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston is looking to expand its outreach at Boston-area colleges, Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley said yesterday. The Brotherhood of Hope, a group that focuses on recruiting students from secular universities, is launching an initiative called Hope for Undergraduates in Boston to reach out to the thousands of college students on campuses in the Fenway area, ...

The test had been only a few minutes long, but to Jermayne Stanley, a 15-year journeyman electrician from Cincinnati, it felt like a lifetime — one that might end prematurely.On the first morning of a week-long class to become certified to safely work on large wind turbines, Mr. Stanley and 10 others were given up to nine minutes to climb and descend an enclosed 60-foot training tower three times, carrying up to 50 pounds in safety equipment and simulated tools. Although he finished the task in 5 minutes, 48 seconds, Mr. Stanley was still physically crushed more than an hour later: sick to his stomach, unable to collect his thoughts, and even unable, at one point, to get up off the concrete floor of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee center in Rossford. “Back when I was younger, that would have been a whole lot easier,” the 39-year-old Mr. Stanley said as he slowly regained his composure.For the last year, journeymen electricians and fourth and fifth-year apprentices from across Ohio and from as far away as Rhode Island have traveled to IBEW Local 8’s campus in Rossford to take the class that, once completed, certifies them to safely work on the nation’s growing number of wind farms. And although it doesn’t guarantee them a job during what has been one of the worst construction downturns in decades, the certification — available from one of just four such training centers in the nation — can give the program’s graduates a competitive advantage and open up job opportunities.At least that’s what Thomas Clark of Englewood, Ohio, is hoping. A journeyman electrician since 1974, Mr. Clark was laid off last year after nine years of continuous work. After passing the test in just over five minutes — “My arms are numb right now,” he said after it was over — he said green-energy jobs are his best hope to keep working steadily for the next several years.“I want to make myself as marketable as I can,” Mr. Clark said. “There are windmill farms going up all over.”Dave Wellington, director of the Toledo electrical apprenticeship and training committee, said he and others with the center began studying a plan to bring a green-energy training program to metro Toledo five years ago. Those plans were assisted by $420,000 in federal and state stimulus funds that have helped pay for a working wind turbine nearby. In addition, the committee built the 60-foot training tower and assists those who come to take the class. Since it began one year ago, Mr. Wellington said, nearly 500 men and women have received the special wind-tower certification in climbing, cable rescue, and high-voltage cable splicing.“This is a case where we’re providing this training, and the workers are going immediately to a job site and applying these skills,” he said.The ongoing training has a stimulative effect on the local economy as well. Many of the program’s graduates over the last year have come from out of town, meaning that during their week in metro Toledo, they are staying in local hotels and eating in local restaurants, Mr. Wellington said.Tom LaFountain, a project manager with electrical contractor GEM Inc., said the extra training electricians receive in the certification program makes those workers more valuable. “A large turbine, or even one of those smaller community ones — that’s still a very, very large investment for somebody, and you want the best people you can possibly have working on that for you,” he said.The 60-foot climbing tower is just a fraction of the size of a full-sized turbine, some of which are up to 300 feet tall and can generate up to 3 megawatts of electricity. But it does provide a good taste of what it’s like to work inside one of the massive devices. The climb, done first, is make or break for some — two of the 11 electricians who began yesterday were unable to complete the climbing test and went home. Similar training is provided in Minnesota, Illinois, and Nebraska. Later classes are being developed that will focus on how to safely work on and maintain the spinning giants once they’re built. Those classes will work on the 100-kilowatt wind turbine that was installed in February at the local center and now provides supplemental electricity to the Lime City Road facility, Mr. Wellington said.Contact Larry P. Vellequette at lvellequette@theblade.com or 419-724-6091.

They are the best Eurovision hope the UK has had for years. But could it be career suicide for the boyband?

The coach comes to a stop in Volendam, a village just outside Amsterdam. Holland's Eurovision song contest organiser, Rene, checks we're all here.

"San Marino?" he calls out.

"Yes."

"Croatia."

"Yes."

"Russia . . . Russia?"

He gives the Russians a look.

"Yes we are here."

"And UK."

"Here," chime Simon Webbe, Lee Ryan, Duncan James and Antony Costa, AKA Blue.

We could be on the road to Euro triumph for the first time in many years. Blue are visiting country after European country to boost support, and show the rest of Europe they really want to win.

The countries are asked to hold a flag to show who they represent. As Blue get off the bus, they are told their flag is unnecessary. Six years since they split up, the band are still famous. Newly reformed, they have been hand-picked as the UK entry. They have a strong song, I Can, and the only way is up. They look little different from their boyband glory years – bigger biceps and more facial hair, but that's about it.

The mayor of Volendam welcomes us to the fishing village with the very best of Holland – salted cod, mackerel and herring – and the Dutch entrants, 3JS, perform live for us. Even though the Netherlands are pleased with their effort, it is unlikely to make the final. And this gets to the heart of the hostility to the UK – not only have most recent songs been risible, but the UK, alongside Spain, France, Italy and Germany, gets a free pass to the final. No wonder they want to kick us in the Baltics.

Way back in the 20th century, when Abba and Celine Dion won Eurovision, the UK treated it with respect. Great artists such as Sandie Shaw and Lulu came home victorious, as did Brotherhood of Man and Bucks Fizz. Then came the bleak decades, when our entries were regarded as ironic at best, or simply rubbish. In recent years, the UK has been dismissed with contempt by the rest of Europe. We had no political allies, we were said to have the wrong attitude, and country after country ganged up against us. The nadir came in 2003, when Jemini's Cry Baby suffered the ignominy of nul points. Last year, Josh Dubovie finished bottom with 10 points.

But now we're ready for a Eurovision renaissance. For three glorious years in the early 2000s, Blue were huge – their three albums topped the UK charts and there were 11 top 10 singles (including All Rise, One Love and a cover of Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word with Elton John). They were not manufactured (though they looked as if they must have been) and dominated the tabloids by saying the unsayable. Then saying it again, only worse. But by 2005, nobody wanted to know – the final two singles didn't chart in the UK.

The boys went on to experience mixed fortunes – Simon enjoyed greatest success as a solo artist. Duncan has done well in West End musicals such as Legally Blonde, Lee has had a few hits and Antony has dabbled in acting. All four now have children, have separated from their partners, and are struggling romantically. Duncan recently announced he was bisexual – cynics suggested it was publicity stunt.

This month they marked their return with a nude photoshoot for the gay magazine Attitude. Blue's former manager, Daniel Glatman, described the decision to enter Eurovision as "reckless insanity", saying: "They will have to win. Anything less and their reputation would be in tatters. It is the equivalent of Lewis Hamilton entering a go-kart race." Do the band think it a risk?

"Honestly?" Duncan says. "I thought it's going to go one way or another. But we were a massive band in Europe, and we want to let everyone in Europe know we're back. What bigger platform could we use to let everyone know in one hit? One hundred and twenty-five million people watch it on the night, not including people watching on the net. So we sat down and went, you know what, it's a no-brainer."

In Amsterdam, the nude shoot is a popular topic of conversation. Are they stripping their way to success? "Well, that's not a bad way of putting it, but if that's the way to get there why not?" Duncan says. "We're in shape, we work hard and it's a good way to let everyone know we're back."

We head back to the hotel. A handful of fans who greeted the band at the airport have reconvened in the lobby. Priscilla Vanhuystee, a big, beautiful girl in her mid-20s, is trying to explain her obsession. "It started in 2003. I can't tell you how many times I saw them. It's a disease, it really is, because normal people don't understand it. They are very good singers, and I like them as a group, and it's just fun to get to know the people."

Is it wise for Blue to make a comeback? "They are still young men. I think they are better-looking now. They are like grownup men now, not the boyish thing now."

She loves the fact that you never know what Blue are going to come out with next. What's her favourite story? "Lee having a baby with his fan. He dated this girl from MySpace who sent him naughty pictures. Hahahaha!" Lee is sitting on the table next to us, so we ask him if it's true. "No, it's bullshit."

Lee, the youngest member of Blue, was only 16 when the band got together, and was often the source of the news stories. He says he has always been. Where does it come from? "Stupid fucking journalists writing what they want to make me look like a cunt. It's really frustrating. I'm not like that at all." Take the 9/11 controversy, which almost did for the band. At the time, they were trying to make it in America, the twin towers had just been blown up, and Lee suggested that worse things were happening in the world. "I just said there were kids dying of Aids and stuff, and the whole country went on a campaign for New York, and I was just saying there are plenty of other things we can change now. Listen, it was a tragic thing that happened, but there have been tragic things that have happened since then that don't get half as much of the coverage. And that's the truth." He pauses. Actually, he says, he knows what really did for him. "The thing is, I said the words 'Fuck New York', but I didn't mean it in a malicious way, it just came out as a 17-year-old articulating himself." What he said was: "Who gives a fuck about New York when elephants are being killed?"

"I got about 20,000 emails saying they wanted to shove anthrax down my throat." Did it scare him? "Yeah, it scared my mum. Cos you get some crazy fucks in America."

He became disillusioned with the industry, and still is. "I will never ever work with a major record label again in my whole life. Cos they're crap, they don't know what they're doing. And if they fuck it up, it's your fault . . . I don't think you need a record label these days." He sips his latte. "You know what pisses me off most about this industry is when people call me thick. I hate that. Because things I say sometimes come out stupid. But I don't need to prove myself. I know what I'm good at."

It's nearly midnight and we're heading off to a club in the centre of Amsterdam where the Eurovionistas are singing. Blue have top billing, and are on last. Everybody has been telling the band they are favourites to win, and this is worrying them. "No," insists Antony, "we're only second favourite and if we finish top five we'll have done well."

I ask Duncan about the different personalities in the band. Well, he says, first there are the voices. "Lee's like the voice of the angels – a really high, beautiful voice. Antony has a rockier voice. Si has got the open kind of sound, very soulful, and I've got quite a husky voice. And personality: Lee is a law unto himself, the crazy one, the genius. They say with geniuses, they're all a bit unbalanced in their head, which, in the most loving way, he is." In what way is he a genius? "His brain works on such a different level. Lyrically, the way he writes, the way he paints, he's just very creative. I'm the worrier of the band, the dad of the band. Sometimes I can be a bit too bossy. I need to learn to chill. Ant is the comedian of the band. He's the joker. When everything gets a bit too much he'll diffuse it instantly and everything's cool again. Si's very chilled, very laidback, very hard-working."

Who's the most popular? "We all have different fans," Duncan says. "I get a lot of the mums and the disabled children. A lot of my fans have got cerebral palsy, but you know what? I love children like that, and I love people who have got disabilities because I spent a lot of time in hospital with my grandparents when they were ill, and Mum was a nurse. It's just in my nature. I'm like a magnet to them, and I treat them like normal people so they latch on. I once had a launch party and there was a queue of disabled kids all in wheelchairs come to see me, and Sara [the band's manager] walked in and goes: 'What is it with you and disabled people?'"

The sound is so bad at the club that they decide to mime. Twelve hundred middle-aged men in checked shirts pump their fists in the air to I Can. After the performance, they retire to a tiny staircase where a journalist interviews the band while squeezed between the knees of Simon and the chest of Duncan. He looks like he's in heaven. I wonder if he knows his trouser buttons are undone.

Later, in a cab, they weigh up their options. "I'd really like to get mashed," Lee says. "It seems mad being in Amsterdam and not making a night of it . . . but we've got telly tomorrow and it won't be a good look." In the old days, yes, but now they've matured. So we retire to the hotel bar for a Glenfiddich or two. They chat away, obviously happy in each other's company. Towards the end of Blue mark one, they were getting tired and irritable, but now it's all fresh again.

It really is like starting out again, Simon says – sharing rooms with other bands, constantly on the road, working around the world. Yes, he says, he enjoyed life as a solo artist, but there was something lonely about it. Was he surprised he did so well? "You bet." He gives me the recipe for his success. "When I grew up there was only one CD I had, which was Bill Withers. And he had a song called Grandma's Hands, and I thought I want to write a song like that so I wrote Lay Your Hands. He had Just The Two of Us so I did After All This Time. And he had Lean On Me, which goes 'Sometimes in our life we all have pain' so I went 'So, is this how it goes?'" So basically he nicked all Bill Withers's songs? "You're damned fucking right I did."

At nearly noon the following day, there is no sign of the boys. I assume they are still in bed. Then I feel a tap on the shoulder. It's Lee, and he fancies heading into Amsterdam for something to eat. Great, I say – what about the others? He'll try calling them. No response, he says.

It's a beautiful day, and we're sitting in the midday sun sharing pizza and pasta and garlic bread, and Lee is talking about his son, Rayn Amethyst (Rayn is an amagram of Ryan, but he's trying to get it changed to Rain), and how he'd like to produce films and write scripts. He's already written one that he hopes to make into a film about a boy with attention deficit disorder who is forcefed the drug Ritalin. Is it autobiographical? "In some ways. They tried to make me take it, yeah. That's why I came up with the idea of the film." And did he take it? "No, and then they kicked me out of school."

When we get back to the hotel the boys are outside waiting for us. "Where've you been?" asks Duncan. "Why didn't you ask us?" Lee did, I say – he rang you. But the boys aren't happy. They start interrogating me.

Antony: "What did he eat?"

"We had pizza, pasta . . ."

Duncan: "We've been measured for our Eurovision suits. He's in trouble."

Lee gets back on the bus just in time to take the heat off me.

Simon: "You're in trouble, young man."

Duncan: "Yeah you're in trouble, bruv."

Duncan gives me a withering look. "You just forcefed him crap, didn't you? Feeder!" Then he looks at Lee. "You're out of order, man. You been eating pizza!"

Lee: "Yeah, what's the matter with that? I had a little bit of pizza."

Simon: "Aha! We've heard, and the garlic bread. He's already grassed you up." The boys are serious, but they're also laughing about it.

We're at the studio of the popular cooking-and-chat show Life 4 You, where Blue will be singing. Sara irons trousers and advises on the routine while the boys warm up with a barbershop number. Their voices are very good. Duncan says they have become better singers since they split up – in his case, largely due to the West End musical training. They sing live, and the mix isn't good – Lee is too low, Duncan can't hear properly. It's not disastrous, just not the impression they'd hoped to make.

Duncan is deflated. "Was I flat?" he asks.

"He's going to be worrying all night now. Checking his Twitter every minute," says Sara. "Anyone taking responsibility for these pants?" she adds, with a pair of briefs in each hand.

Lee arrives a little later. He has been on set cooking with the stars. "Did you see the cooking? I thought I'd get more air time. They gave me a cookbook in Hollish. What's it called, Dutch, sorry. How useful will that be?"

"Just sign that autograph will you, Lee," Duncan says. "In Hollish."

We talk about the hairy moments the band has had in the few months they've been back together. The most public was Antony being caught on camera urinating against a cash machine. To be fair, that's not all he was doing. "I was taking money out, texting my friend to see if she got home all right, and weeing," he says.

"I didn't think you could do that," Sara says. "I thought it was a given that one had to hold one's penis. I didn't think men could multitask, but no one said good on him."

Antony looks shame-faced. "I never got a pat on the back. I've learned the hard way and trust me it will never happen again."

Look, Duncan says, Weegate is already in the past, and now the most important thing is to do the UK proud. "This is just the beginning for Blue," he says.

• Blue's single I Can is released on 1 May on Blue World Records

To employ Gulzar Saab’s lyrics: LISTEN SUNO, CHOOSE CHUNO… TEEN THAY BHAI!

3 loaded stars for this riot of a film from me.

There are three brothers and their lives are screwed up in the ways like most of our lives are. There is hope in the form of a will, written by their grandfather, but that requires them to tolerate each other for a day, for 3 consecutive years, despite their strong dislike for the same. The sum involved is so huge they decide to go for it, so that it straightens out their lives. They may or may not get the booty, but that’s not the point.

This is just as simple as it seems and probably most reviewers felt just this much about this humourous film with its legs firmly rooted in our modern day society where we are still struggling to find our identities what with all this global warning. Director Mrigdeep Singh Lamba’s debut effort should be applauded, mainly for attempting to tell a story that packs in so much; that too without any gimmicks.

The best thing that works for this film is the casting and am not just talking about the lead roles. Casting, followed by some very funny lines add to that a few songs penned by Gulzar Saab and a film set in the snowy mountains… just the perfect watch for this blistering summer. If you are really interested, the film also carries some beautiful messages… but that is for you to choose, as you have the option of walking out of the theater with just a huge grin pasted on your face.

As a filmi keeda, it is my boon or bane to dig deeper into the film and see what more does the film have to offer, than what we all can see anyways… Despite the fact that the premise of the film hinges on a will, it has a back-story that is so unheard of, so sweet, so heart warming and sometimes just goofy. The three brothers Chixi, Happy and Fancy (played wonderfully by Om Puri, Deepak Dobriyal and Shreyas Talpade) are at that stage in their lives where they seriously need some help. They represent most of our desi middle class households and do it with such conviction… it is not a joke!

The elder-most Chixi is a loser and has been so all his life. He has been the escapist who always wanted to take the eaiser route only to land up in a shittier place. There is Happy… this guy is too shy and has hardly any say on how his life has been shaping up and all he knows about is ‘shifting pain’ which is what he does as a dentist and as an idiot. The youngest is Fancy who is a misfit but yet on his own trip. He is the guy representing the India which is trying to catch up with the world by using Inglis, how much ever poverty it may be.

There is so much I would like to say about this film… little nuances here and there, big guffaws that we could share, only I would rather you see the film and find them all yourselves. There are so many subtle indications about how hard we even try to comply with the society’s rules etc. While doing all this the move continues to entertain. For a scene after the interval it goes very very serious but those 5-odd minutes define the existence of the story and it is so well enacted that it can bring tears to any sentimental person. One of those three could be someone you know or have met…

What brotherhood the director Mr. Lamba has shown is believable and awesome. Sometimes in life you need that one reason to come together. Many times it is the death of a family member when the rest come together and give each other love and strength… otherwise in a day and time like ours… saala time kiske paas hai? Having said that do take time out for these three brothers, as they say a lot, without wasting much of your time.

A special mention for the love track in this film between Deepak Dobriyal and Ragini Sharma… jhoot? nahin to… haan to…

P.S.: I leave you with this wonderful track that seems to have come stright out of the pages of Gulzar Saab’s book ‘Raavi Ke Paar’. Goosebumps. Adios.

Assad's regime blames 'extremists', but Syria's young are leading the way, with broad support

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in January, Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, said that his main objective was to address his people's "closed-mindedness". He made it clear that this alone impeded reform, and it might be another generation before Syria is ready for real change.

Dictators (including Assad's father, Hafez) have long presented themselves as suppressors of extremism in the region generally, and Syria in particular. They said democracy would usher in fundamentalists inherently opposed to modernity, civil dialogue, international community legitimacy and civilised human political and economic relations.

Perhaps because of this fear, the whole world was silent when Syria was passed from father to son; there were even some approving statements about the new "young and modern" president. This led to a feeling of hopelessness among the Syrian people.

There had in fact been a fairly successful democratic state in Syria prior to the "revolutionary governments" that took over in the second half of the 20th century. Syria was ruled by national coalition governments, and a parliament that reflected the country's ethnic and cultural mix; moderation and openness prevailed. Islamist parties met, negotiated and collaborated with secular parties from left and right. The Muslim Brotherhood won some rounds and lost others, and accepted each outcome. There was no terrorism or extremism, and it was unimaginable that a law as brutal as the infamous 49/1980 – under which those accused of being Brotherhood members were sentenced to death – would have been passed.

The international community was deaf to the appeals of Assad's victims. In the 1980s, as a result of the shutdown of all channels of expression, the absence of democracy and the consistent and institutional violation of basic human rights, a few individuals resorted to violence – not unheard of in societies existing in similar circumstances. Syria's dictator turned these events into a catastrophe that engulfed the Syrian people, plunging the country into a state of virtual civil war. Around 500 people had been victims of the initial acts of violence; 50,000 were killed in response during the infamous massacres of Hama and elsewhere. Many others were displaced and, 30 years on, more than 17,000 people remain unaccounted for after being arrested.

As a result, the entire Syrian people were disenfranchised. Social, economic and political activists as well as political opponents were accused by the regime of being "Camp David agents", in reference to the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt – though the major disagreement between the regime and the main opposition parties is not over foreign policy, but focuses on internal affairs and the lack of democracy.

When Assad Jr first came to power, the Muslim Brotherhood and others were conciliatory, stating that he was not to be held responsible for the crimes of his father. As recently as two years ago the Muslim Brotherhood ended its opposition activities in solidarity with the regime's support for the Palestinians during the Israeli war on Gaza. But Assad has repeatedly rejected his opponents' extended hand. The recent brutal sentence against the 18-year-old Tal al-Mallouhi – tried for espionage just because she blogged about her longing for reform – and similar incidents mobilised the Syrian people.

In the last few days the Syrian media have claimed that opposition groups, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood, are behind the protests. The aim is to justify the regime's violent response to the Syrian people's peaceful protests. In fact, none of the opposition groups can claim ownership of this youthful revolution. We, along with many others from across the political spectrum, called for the formation of a national coalition to support the youth, but in no way do we claim ownership of these historic events.

We are committed to peaceful means, and we endorse the aims of the revolution to build a civil state committed to rule of law, governed by a new constitution that emerges from the will of the people through a transparent and free vote. It is time that all Syrians – men and women alike, regardless of ethnicity or religion – enjoy equal citizenship.

The dictator is not to be believed. Syrians are a civilised and progressive people; we come from a long line of poets who wrote about love and peace. These protests call for nothing more than the recapture of the people's collective sense of dignity, citizenship and freedom. Let's hope they are met by a changed attitude from the international community, which for so long has let them down. To date hundreds have fallen as a result of live fire from the regime's security forces, and many more will undoubtedly fall before the aspirations of the people are met.

Jammu/Srinagar, April 14 (Scoop News) - The Governor, N. N. Vohra, Chief Minister Omar Abdulla,Dy CM,Tara Chand, PDP senior leaders Mufti Syed and Mehbooba Miufti today felicitated the people of Jammu & Kashmir state on the sacred occasion of Baisakhi and on Ambedkar Jyanti.

In a message of felicitations, the Governor said that historically, this day has a special significance for the people of Northern India, particularly for the Sikh community as Khalsa Panth was born on this day, which also marks the beginning of the New Year in the Indian Calendar.

The Governor said that in the Northern States, Baisakhi also marks the commencement of the harvesting season, when farmers reap the fruit of their hard work. He observed that the celebration of this festival is a shining example of our glorious pluralistic traditions.
The Governor prayed for peace, harmony, brotherhood, progress and prosperity in the State.
The Governor, N. N. Vohra, today paid glowing tribute to Dr. B. R. Ambedkar on his 120thbirth anniversary.
In a message, the Governor said that Dr. Ambedkar was a legal luminary of the highest order and had made a signal contribution to the framing of the country’s Constitution. He recalled Dr. Ambedkar’s contributions towards nation building in the various fields, particularly the uplift of the weaker sections of society.


J&K; Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah has extended his greetings to the people on the eve of Baisakhi. He wished them prosperity and prayed for the peace and development in the State.
In his Baisakhi message, Omar Abdullah expressed the hope that the festival will be harbinger for all round development and progress in the State.
He also remembered Dr. B. R. Ambedker on his birth anniversary on Baisakhi and highlighted his statesmanship and role for upliftment of poor and downtrodden and his contribution in the formulation of Constitution of India.


Deputy Chief Minister, . Tara Chand has extended warm greetings to the people of state on the auspicious occasion of Baisakhi.
In a message of greetings, . Tara Chand said that the festival has a special importance for people at large and particularly for those engaged in the profession of agriculture and farming. He said the day marks the beginning of New Year and start of the harvest season.
The Deputy Chief Minister said that Baisakhi has special significance for our Sikh brothers who also celebrate it as the day of the birth of Khalsa Panth.
. Tara Chand called upon the people of State to celebrate this festival in unison with traditional fervor and gaiety.


Peoples Democratic Party Patron Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and President Mehbooba Mufti has greeted the people on the auspicious occasion of Baisakhi, festival that is celebrated particularly by Sikh Community in different parts of the country and Dr Ambedhkar Day. The two leaders expressed hope that the joyous festival Baisakhi may inspire us to strive for peace, harmony and amity and work for the unity and progress of our state."

Paying tribute to Dr B R Abedhkar , PDP Leaders said that he was one of the illustrious sons of the India who struggled throughout his life to restructure the Indian Society. He not only led various social movements for the upliftment of the depressed sections of the Indian Society but also contributed to the understanding of the Socio-Economic and Political problems of India through his scholarly works on caste, religion, culture, constitutional law and economic development
The PDP president in her greetings said "On the joyous occasion of Baisakhi, I extend my greetings and good wishes to all my people, particularly to all those engaged in cultivation. May this harvest festival be a celebration of the diligence of our farming community," she added.
Extending greetings to the people the party general secretary Mohammed Dilawar Mir in his massage said "This festival traditionally is also an occasion to mark a new beginning, may Baisakhi this year usher in peace, prosperity and happiness for all," he said.
Other leaders include senior Leader Muzaffar Hussain Baig, Molvi Iftikhar Hussain Ansari, Mohd Khalil Bandh, Ab Rehman Veeri, Mohd Sartaj Madni, Mushtaq Ahmed Shah, Syed Bashir Ahmed , Ab Razaq Zawoora, district President Mohd Ashraf Mir and Qazi Mohd Afzal.


Minister of State for R&B;, Javed Ahmad Dar has also felicitated people of the State, particularly Sikh community, on Baisakhi festival.
He said celebration of festivals jointly in our State not only strengthens communal harmony but also testifies the values of our composite culture.
The Minister said the communal harmony remains visible in our religious congregations and appealed people to work towards strengthening future pluralist ethos for which the State is known world over.

To ensure availability of essential supplies to the Sikh Community on the eve of Baisakhi mela in Kashmir, The District Development Commissioner,Srinagar  Mehrahj Ahmad Kakroo on Wedenesday convened a meeting of Officers of various Departments like CAPD, PHE, Power, SMC etc and asked the officers to ensure uninterrupted water and power supply to all the Gurudawars besides sanitation around these particular by Gurudawara Chati Padshahi Rainawari where huge rush of Sikh Community is always witnessed.

He also urged for making better transport facility available for the devotees and the CAPD Officers were asked to make rice, Atta and Sugar available at the ration depots.

www.scoopnews.in

 

And, as I paid$71.38 to fill my Toyota Highlander's gas tank this week, I thought that thisalso is a question that hits close to home. I think U.S.-Saudi relations aregoing to get real interesting in the coming months. Mega-reporter Karen DeYounghas an interesting article about a supposedly conciliatory letterPresident Obama has sent to Saudi King Abdullah. But I think the Saudis sense(correctly) that Obama's heart is not on their side. They saw how he jumped on thefreedom train in his Libya speech, and they fear that train is steamingstraight at Riyadh. By Charles A. KrohnBest Defense guestcolumnistHow can an informed American keep his or her head from spinning out of control,given reports of Mideast violence and conflicting claims from good guys andbad?One day we aremesmerized bydemonstrations in Cairo that Egyptianyouthhope will herald in a new era of democracy and domestic tranquility.The next day we learn that the Islamic Brotherhood that earlier shunnedrevolution and kept its distance from rebels is now supporting elections laterthis year. Is it possible that some Islamics hope to gain power via the ballotbox? In the meantime, rebels who toppled the Musharraf regime are back in thestreets, calling for the ouster of army leadership, based on the army'srepression of new demonstrations. Can students really challenge theinstitutional army with any realistic hopes of winning? If not, are endlessdemonstrations the wave of the future?Who will stand and tell us what Egypt will look like in a year, maybe less? Idon't expect to see any official predictions in writing, given the politicaldifferences, socialmess and regional psychology.Meanwhile, it looks like the outcome of the civil war in Libya is far fromcertain,downgrading the ebullience of the rebels and their allies,including the United States, of just a week ago, when it appeared the rebels'path to Tripoli was nearly open. At what point does President Obama decide whowill have access to the estimated $100 billion in Libyan assets frozen in therush to isolate Qaddafi? Should Qaddafi win the civil war, which appears likely at the moment, someinternational precedent must exist that will refund the money to the legal headof state. And can we deny he's the head of state, if the rebels only control asmall portion of the country?Should the plan to topple Qaddafi fail,seizing Libyan assets only to release them will make us look pretty silly. Butall things being equal, the silliness may be lost in the noise level ofsetbacks elsewhere. Will the European interest fade or mobilize?The news from Afghanistan is mixed, at best, and it's not much better fromPakistan. The hard part for many is to separate the linkage to identify winnersand losers. It seems we may not have visibility into the process for years tocome. That may be the best case, because it looks like our ability to influencethe outcome is waning by the hour. I wish this weren't the case.GeneralPetraeus is a great warrior, and certainly a model of honor, but he's nosorcerer, dammit. [[BREAK]]I hope the resumption of Hamas attacks from Gaza is a temporary phenomenon, butone wonders if the rising blood isn't triggered by the hopes of its supportersinIran andEgypt, via Syria.And who knows where that ends? Onecan visualize a far more virulent Hamas, with little effort, and moreretaliation from Israel that could trigger eventsnearly unimaginable.Saving the worse for last, what happens if sinisterforces in Iraq (hardlya surprise, of course) are determined to make our departure later this year anexercise in chaos, just to humiliate us during what should be our finest hour?Images of rooftop evacuations come to mind, possibly returning our nation tothe days of great malaise last experienced in 1975.After Vietnam, we crawled back into our cave,as it were, hoping a renewed focus on the Soviet Union would draw Americanstogether against a common and very powerful foe. We didn't venture from thecave until 1991, when we responded to Saudi concerns about Iraq invadingKuwait. Saudi Arabia wasn't the only interested party, but the one with thedeepest pockets and most to lose, should Saddam succeed in spreading his power.As we slowly learn that our power toinfluence events in the Mideast isn't what it once was, real or imaginary, theSaudis are again concerned they may be isolated by Iranian ambitions to be thedominant power in the region, now that we neuteredIran's traditionalthreat, Iraq. The region would be tsunamied if the Saudis thought they were inthe fight, alone. At the moment, I think that ain't going to happen. Buttomorrow? CharlesA. Krohn is the author ofThe Lost Battalion of Tet,and is now retired to Panama CityBeach, Florida. He served in Iraq in 2003-2004as public affairs advisor to the director of the Infrastructure ReconstructionProgram. He later served as public affairs officer for theAmerican BattleMonuments Commission.

via press release: National Geographic Channel’s Inside The Muslim Brotherhood Exposes the Hand of This Polarizing Organization in Egypt’s Revolution What Was Their Role in the Uprising?  Do They Hope...

Here’s the official featurette of the making “Gears of War 3″ coming soon to Xbox 360. Game Description: Gears of War 3 is the spectacular conclusion to one of the most memorable and celebrated sagas in video games. Developed by Epic Games exclusively for Xbox 360, Gears of War 3 plunges you into a harrowing tale of hope, survival, and brotherhood. In Gears of War 3, fight on as Marcus Fenix, the grizzled war hero and leader of Delta Squad. Eighteen months after the fall of the last human city, the war against the Locust rages on. Meanwhile, deep beneath the surface, a fearsome new threat is infecting the planet from within. [...]

ThinkProgress filed this report from The Awakening 2011 conference in Lynchburg, VA.

As the Tea Party continues to its quest to pull the Republican Party further and further to the right, fault lines are beginning to open up among conservatives, particularly regarding the future of minority voters and the GOP.

This battle between the conservative pragmatists and hardliners was on full display Saturday as anti-Sharia activist Frank Gaffney and anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist hurled charges against one another at a conservative conference in Lynchburg, Virginia.

ThinkProgress spoke with Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, following his panel discussion on conservative economics. Norquist accused anti-mosque activists like Gaffney of waging “a direct attack on religious liberty.” When I asked if Gaffney was playing a constructive role, Norquist’s distaste for him was so intense that he would not even speak his name, saying instead that “The other guy has his own agenda which is not useful”:

KEYES: There’s a real movement spearheaded by Frank Gaffney to raise concern about Sharia law and a lot of movement in these states. Do you think that’s going to play a constructive role for the GOP or do you think that’s turning off a lot of voters?

NORQUIST: I don’t know that it’s having much impact one way or another. The challenge there is a religious liberty issue. When you say, we’re going to start telling people you can’t build a church, a synagogue, or a mosque somewhere, that’s a direct attack on religious liberty. [...]

KEYES: So you think voices like [Herman] Cain and like Gaffney are probably not playing a constructive role?

NORQUIST: I hope that Cain’s retraction was sufficient and total. The other guy has his own agenda which is not useful.

Listen here:

However, Norquist’s comments paled in comparison to the volley Gaffney unleashed during his panel. In the midst of discussing how the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the conservative movement in the United States, Gaffney put a picture of Norquist up on the PowerPoint presentation, telling the crowd “this is how that has happened.” Gaffney went on to note that it had been his “personal burden for the past 12 years” to expose Norquist, telling the cheering crowd that Norquist has been “actively involved both enabling and empowering Muslim Brotherhood influence operations against our movement and our country”:

GAFFNEY: One might ask, “how did an organization like this with Brotherhood ties and personnel and funding, get into the conservative circles?” I can tell you more about how deeply that’s happened if you like. But this is how that has happened. [Puts Grover Norquist's picture up on the PowerPoint.] I don’t know how many of you were in the room when he addressed this very meeting earlier today. But I have had it as my personal burden for the past 12 years to have been trying to warn conservatives that one of their own has been actively involved both enabling and empowering Muslim Brotherhood influence operations against our movement and our country. And I must tell you, I think this is time to bring it to a stop. I want you to be awakened to that problem.

Watch here:

Though this weekend was the most public airing of grievances between the two men, it is hardly their first. Gaffney has long made a name for himself with fabulous claims like the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the federal government and even the conservative movement.

These repeated falsehoods led Norquist to speak out against Gaffney, calling on the GOP to “marginalize” Islamophobia within the Party. The feud boiled over earlier this year when Gaffney was banned from speaking at the major conservative conference CPAC. Gaffney claimed to be “boycotting” the conference instead, saying it had been infiltrated by Muslim extremists. In the end, Gaffney bravely showed up in order to warn conference-goers about Grover Norquist.

In a moment of candor toward the end of his speech this past weekend, Gaffney called the idea of a “big-tent party” an “influence operation of the worst sort.” Indeed, if voices like his continue to receive a platform in the GOP, Gaffney’s desire to see Republicans avoid becoming a big-tent party may just become reality.

The "Green Lantern" images just keep on rolling in today as three new pictures show off in full detail the DC superhero's suit. It looks cool from the pictures, and you hope that they would've showed this to us back in the summer of 2010 to calm down some of the fans who were spewing venom at the outfit once they saw it on the Entertainment Weekly cover. After seeing the WonderCon footage of "Green Lantern" I'm interested to see more of Reynolds running around and using the ring."Green Lantern" is directed by Martin Campbell with a cast that includes Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Tim Robbins and Angela Bassett. "Green Lantern" will be released in theaters on June 17th.In a universe as vast as it is mysterious, a small but powerful force has existed for centuries. Protectors of peace and justice, they are called the Green Lantern Corps. A brotherhood of warriors sworn to keep intergalactic order, each Green Lantern wears a ring that grants him superpowers. But when a new enemy called Parallax threatens to destroy the balance of power in the Universe, their fate and the fate of Earth lie in the hands of their newest recruit, the first human ever selected: Hal Jordan.Hal is a gifted and cocky test pilot, but the Green Lanterns have little respect for humans, who have never harnessed the infinite powers of the ring before. But Hal is clearly the missing piece to the puzzle, and along with his determination and willpower, he has one thing no member of the Corps has ever had: humanity. With the encouragement of fellow pilot and childhood sweetheart Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), if Hal can quickly master his new powers and find the courage to overcome his fears, he may prove to be not only the key to defeating Parallax…he will become the greatest Green Lantern of all.Source: OliverWillis.com

 

Jammu, April 11 (Scoop News) -  JK Governor  N. N. Vohra, Chief Minister  Omar Abdullah greets people on Ramanavami

 

The Governor,  N. N. Vohra, has felicitated  the people on Ramanavami and expressed sincere hope that this auspicious occasion would be a harbinger of peace, progress and prosperity of the State.

In his message of felicitations, the Governor said that the celebration of festivals, which are an important aspect of our glorious pluralistic history, strengthen communal harmony, brotherhood and secular ethos.

The Governor prayed for the well-being of the people of the State.

 

Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah has felicitated people on Ramnavmi whishing them well-being and prosperity.

            In a greetings message issued here today, the Chief Minister said that the pluralistic ethos of Jammu and Kashmir and its high traditions of communal amity get further strengthened by celebrating the holy occasions in an atmosphere of brotherhood and harmony. “Let us spread love and happiness universally and remember the needy and poor on the holy occasions of festivity and joy”, he said.

            The Chief Minister expressed the hope that this day will herald a new era of peace and development in the State.

 

Deputy Chief Minister,  Tara Chand has greeted people on the auspicious occasion of Ramanavami.

In a message of greetings,  Tara Chand said that the festival has special significance in the region and is celebrated with traditional fervor and gaiety. He said the state has age old tradition of celebrating all religious festival in unison, thus further strengthening its secular character.

He prayed that the festival be harbinger of peace and progress in the State. 

 

 Ram Navami is an auspicious festival celebrated by Hindus all over India and some other parts of world. Ram Navami is a festival that celebrates the birth of Lord Rama, the son of King Dasharath.

 

The story of Lord Rama as told in the great epic Ramayana is one that most Indians know irrespective of caste, creed and religion. Lord Rama is a legendary figure, the epitome of all that is good and true, the man who vanquished the demon king Ravana.

www.scoopnews.in

 

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Hope? Is that what I was supposed to feel when I saw my father decapitated by your henchmen? Hope is a cruel joke, played upon us by a harsh and uncaring world. There is no Hope, there is only Vanessa. Vanessa VanCleef.

A little girl watches her father's demise, manages to escape, survives, and then dedicates her life to rebuilding everything her father stood for. It sounds like the sort of story heroes are made of, doesn't it? Ordinarily it would be, but the villains in this particular story are the nobility of Stormwind, including its king, Varian Wrynn -- and heroes just like you.

The story of the Defias Brotherhood begins during the First War, when the orcish Horde first burst forth from the Dark Portal into Azeroth with the help of Medivh. From there, they launched an assault on the kingdom of Stormwind. With the help of a cleverly mind-controlled assassin, the Horde took out King Llane Wrynn, and with his death, the city crumbled. Lord Anduin Lothar, forced to make a decision, led the people of Stormwind and young prince Varian Wrynn north, retreating to the kingdom of Lordaeron to recoup and grieve.

The once mighty city of Stormwind lay in pieces.

Continue reading Know Your Lore: The VanCleefs, the rise of the Defias, and Westfall

Filed under: Lore, Know your Lore

Know Your Lore: The VanCleefs, the rise of the Defias, and Westfall originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The revolutions in the Arab world that began earlier this year were noticeably low on anti-Jewish propaganda, leading many scholars to express the hope that the West had less to lose from the overthrow of men like Hosni Mubarak than previously thought. But if German scholar Matthias Küntzel is correct, one incident should adjust the expectations that the Muslim Brotherhood - who expect to perform well in Egypt's upcoming parliamentary elections -can be a moderating force in Egyptian politics.

That one incident was the return and reception of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the leading Brotherhood theologian who has praised Hitler and endorsed the Islamic acceptance of terrorism against Israel ...

 

 

 

 Jammu, April 3 (Scoop News) – Jammu and Kashmir  Governor,  N. N. Vohra and Chief Minister Omar Abdulla  have greeted the people on Navratras and Navreh, hoping that the auspicious occasion would be the harbinger of harmony, brotherhood, amity, peace, progress and prosperity in the State.

 

The Governor, N. N. Vohra, has greeted the people on the auspicious occasion of Navratras and Navreh, and prayed for their well-being and prosperity.

 

In his message of greetings, the Governor observed that the Navratras have a special significance for the devotees, who visit the Holy Cave Shrine of Shri Mata Vaishno Deviji in larger numbers during the auspicious period of Navratras.

 

The Governor also extended warm greetings to Kashmiri Pandits, who celebrate the day as Navreh, the beginning of the New Year and the onset of spring.

The Governor expressed sincere hope that this auspicious period would be the harbinger of harmony, brotherhood, amity, peace, progress and prosperity in the State.     

 

Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah has also felicitated people on the eve of Navratra wishing them well being and prosperity.

 

          In a greetings message issued here, the Chief Minister highlighted the State’s rich tradition of celebrating the holy occasions and festivals in amity and brotherhood. He called for strengthening this ethos of the State.

 

          Omar expressed the hope that the day would bring joy, to all and prayed for peace and all round development in the State.

www.scoopnews.in

 

 

 

Jammu, April 3 (Scoop News) – Describing the Kashmiri pandits as an integral part of the Kashmiri ethos, the Minister for Rural development, law and parliamentary Affairs,Ali Mohammad Sagar has said their migration is a human tragedy which has created a vacuum in the Kashmiri society.

The Minister was speaking at a function organized by Aathwass- an organization of the displaced Writers, Artists , producers- the other day. MLC, Vijay Bakaya, senior officers, scores of intellectuals, writers and media personalities were also present.

Referring to the concept of Kashmiriyat, Sagar said that in spite of the fact the some many vested interests tried to create a chasm between the two communities they still share a strong bond, common ethos and culture, which has no parallels in the annals of the history. “The time is not far way when they would return to their to places and once again start living there and strengthen the age old traditions of mutual brotherhood, peaceful co-existence for which Kashmir was known globally.

Referring the historic role of the late Sher-i-Kashmir Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the Minster said that the idea of the mutual co-existence and peaceful living was advocated by the late leader several decades ago and when the whole of the sub –continent was engulfed by the flames of the hatred and communal passions, it was due to his personal efforts that not a single incident of the type was reported from the valley. ‘The role of the leader was even acknowledged by various political stalwarts of that time when they maintained that they saw a ray of hope emanating from the Valley’, he maintained

The Minister said that the Government is aware of the role being played by different organizations working for the promotion and propagation of art and culture and every possible help would be provided to them

Vijay Bakaya also spoke on the occasion and assured the organizers that government would extend all the help to organizations working for the upliftment and enrichment of the rich culture of the state.

On the occasion awards were also presented to different media personalities and writers which included Dr. R. L. Shant, Bharti Zaroo, N. D. Jamwal, Farooq Nazki and Mushtaq Ali, A colourful  cultural  programme was also presented and film dedicated to the legendary broadcaster of Kashmir  Padamshri Pushkar Bhan was also showcased on the occasion.

www.scoopnews.in

 

As soon as you read the headline for this Australian article — “Gunshots Prompt Prayers for Peace” — you know you’re in for the usual ride on the multicultural merry-go-round. Everyone knows the script: culture enrichers shoot and batter and threaten and destroy, and then the rest of us pray for peace — or, more accurately, we pray that we won’t be the ones who get shot, stabbed, or set on fire.

What makes this story interesting is that it’s an enricher-on-enricher case, with Muslims dealing out the punishment and Hindus taking it. This is similar to the behavior of Jamaat ul-Fuqra terrorists here in the USA, who consider Hindus their greatest enemies. Back in the 1980s they staged a series of attacks on Hindus and firebombed their temples.

The Australian case reported in The Sydney Morning Herald is so shot through with politically correct mumbo-jumbo that it’s worth taking it apart to examine the components:

IT BEGAN with minor acts of vandalism, including egg throwing and smashed windows, but instead of remaining periodic footnotes in the night log at Auburn police station, the incidents have grown so violent — and the issue so culturally sensitive — that even authorities are reluctant to speak about them publicly.

The authorities are reluctant to speak about such a “sensitive” issue because it involves brown people doing harm to brown people, and therefore doesn’t fit the mandatory narrative. The white man can’t be blamed in this case — except, of course, that white people are to blame for all bad things, and should somehow have put a stop to all the nastiness before it happened.

Australia’s oldest Hindu temple, the Sri Mandir in Auburn, is under siege and its devotees gripped by fear.

Note: this is a specific fear. It is a non-phobic, rational fear that Muslims will do violent harm to Hindus because of their religion. This is not about some generic form of “violence”, like getting mugged or car-jacked. This is about violent jihad.

The article continues:

On March 19, two men in balaclavas stood at the intersection of a nearby road, spraying the front of the prayer hall with eight rounds of bullets. The building was unoccupied at the time.

The busy Hindu temple opened in 1977. It is surrounded by a predominantly Muslim population and it is no secret among locals that tensions have been simmering in recent years, caused by concerns about noise and parking problems at Sri Mandir.

“There is no excuse [for the gun attack],” the editor of Sydney newspaper The Indian, Rohit Revo, said.

If we weren’t used to this sort of equivocal phrasing, the sentence beginning with “There is no excuse…” would seem somewhat strange. Is it possible that there could have been an excuse? Is there ever a set of circumstances that would provide an “excuse” for attacking a house of worship with automatic gunfire?

Why, yes, there is. If the Hindus had made a joke about Mohammed, or put their feet on a copy of the Koran, then the violent anger of the attackers would be understandable. In that sense, there would be an “excuse” — even if their actions technically broke the law, one could understand their feelings, and everyone would agree that Hindus should not have provoked the righteous anger of Muslims in such an insensitive fashion.

“This was not the work of teenagers; neither was it a petty prank. This is part of a sustained and increasingly violent campaign to scare the temple devotees and drive them out. By definition, this latest attack was an act of terrorism.”

Yes, this is exactly true. It’s one of the few statements in this article that dares to confront the reality of what happened. Such actions are not only terrorism, they are terrorism sanctioned by the Koran, and mandated by the Koran. Allah requires believers to destroy the temples and idols of the polytheists.

The attackers are simply fully observant Muslims.

The Sun-Herald is aware the ongoing feud has caused disquiet among some of the most senior police in western Sydney. In a rare move, details of the shooting were deliberately held back from the NSW police media unit through concern that publicity might inflame hostilities.

This is a strange one. If the police actually revealed the full extent of what happened, something even worse might ensue.

Like what? A firebombing of the temple?

Or are the NSW police afraid the Hindus might retaliate in kind?

I’d be interested to find out the details of police thinking on this one.

Auburn City Council claims the first it knew of the incident was when The Sydney Morning Herald published an article on Wednesday. Since then, the chairman of the Community Relations Commission, Stepan Kerkyasharian, has stepped in as an intermediary between Hindus and Muslims.

“Given the enormity and complexity of the issues, this is a classic example where we need to apply the principles of multiculturalism and get people to understand and accept that we are a religiously diverse community … we live together and we respect each other’s religious diversity,” he told The Sun-Herald.

Ah, yes, this is where we respect each other’s diversity. Over here we have people who chant and burn incense, and over there are people who shoot up temples — a very diverse community indeed.

And if we respect it really, really hard, but that doesn’t solve the problem, then what? Why, we apply the principles of multiculturalism some more, and bring in more foreigners with all their wonderful new diversity! That’ll fix it!

Temple priest Jatinkumar Bhatt is praying for a peaceful solution for the sake of his three young children. Bhatt and his family live behind the temple and are too frightened to go outdoors after dark.

“On the night of the shooting, we heard the noise, but every 10 or 15 days we experience the sound of firecrackers being thrown [over the fence], so we thought it must be that again,” Mr Bhatt said.

“Then the police came. They showed me the bullet holes in the walls and asked permission to come in and investigate. I am too afraid to say why I think this is happening.”

In an attack in November, four men wielding iron bars smashed their way through 10-millimetre- thick windows, showering the hall with glass while devotees were praying inside.

The Hindu response so far has been well within the limits set by Orthodox Political Correctness:

The temple recently held a community open day in the hope of brokering fresh ties with the wider community.

A normal, sensible policy would be for the congregants to arm themselves and stock up on plenty of ammunition. But that’s not the way we solve problems in Modern Multicultural Australia.

Unfortunately, some of the Hindus are beginning to doubt that this really is Australia:

“Many of our neighbours are very friendly but sometimes it feels like we are in a different place to Australia,” Mr Bhatt said. “The attacks are now always. It is like in Libya or Afghanistan.”

Mr. Bhatt is quite right. Multiculturalism means that you live in a little enclave of the Ummah, no matter what might be your technical country of residence, provided the local population density of Muslims is high enough.

It’s not Australia. It’s the Caliphate.

And now it’s time to trot out Keysar Trad, the famous Australian culture enricher and welfare parasite with nine kids, who always speaks for the “Muslim community” at media events:

The founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, Keysar Trad, said he had given a speech at the open day, in which he stressed the need to “respect religious places of all faiths”.

“I am convinced these problems are not being caused by people who are religious and would urge the Muslim community to show support and solidarity to their neighbours at this time,” he said.

The function of the Keysars of the multicultural world is to lull everybody back to sleep with nonsense phrases like these while the Ummah goes about its customary work. Everything bad done by Muslims is said to be the work of a Tiny Minority, and real Muslims have nothing to do with it and cannot stop it.

Then it becomes an ordinary law-enforcement matter, and the police must enter the no-go zones and somehow find the perpetrators — who look like all the other residents of the neighborhood — and bring them to justice.

Flemington local area commander Superintendent Phillip Rogerson said police were trying to identify the attackers. Auburn Labor MP Barbara Perry said: “I’ve got every sympathy for the Hindu community. This type of behaviour should not be tolerated.”

Who should not do the tolerating? The police? The Hindus? Or the Muslims themselves?

It’s important to remember that “moderate” Muslims pray to the same god, read the same Koran, and even worship at the same mosque. Yet they are somehow unable to identify the “extremists” and turn them over to the police.

Again: Who should not tolerate this type of behavior?

Coincidentally, the Gillard Government has just figured out a way to solve the problem: throw more money at it. The Australian taxpayer has been asked to supply fresh suitcases of hundred-dollar bills that will be delivered to “community groups” to prevent “extremism”.

According to The Daily Telegraph:

COMMUNITY groups will be given money to develop programs that tackle violent extremism at the grassroots.

The Gillard Government will award grants worth up to $100,000 to not-for-profit community groups -- which could include youth groups in western Sydney and the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils -- to roll out programs that build resilience [NB — the reporter has chosen the wrong word; she means “resistance”] to violent extremism.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland, who will make the announcement today, said the new program was part of the Government’s $9.7 million investment in supporting individuals away from intolerant and radical ideologies and encouraging positive participation in the community.

“Effective community engagement is a key component of the Government’s approach to building a stronger and more resilient community that can resist violent extremism,” he said.

Under the new program, grants from $5,000 to $20,000, and from $20,000 to $100,000, will be awarded to local initiatives that actively address intolerant or extremist messages and discourage extremism.

The Australian Multicultural Foundation and the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils welcomed the Government’s support.

Notice that the article talks about “extremism”, but never identifies which doctrine has an “extreme” version. Yes, everyone knows the real story — after all, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils is mentioned, and not the Hindu League or the Christian Youth of Australia — but PC rules require that Islam not be mentioned in the same sentence as “violent extremism”.

It’s the same all over the world. In the United States, the FBI, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security follow exactly the same set of rules. These rules were laid down by the agents of the Muslim Brotherhood who have penetrated our government at all levels.

Who do you think might have carried the exact same rules to Australia?

Pray to be delivered from them. That’s all you can do.


For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

Hat tips: DB3 and Nilk.

Just wondering if anyone from Pakistan has played online mode of AC Brotherhood PC? Not looking for a multi player crack, I am rather interested in the overall experience (online game performance using local ISPs, servers availability etc.) so that I can have a better idea whether or not to purchase this game.

And if anyone could point me to best option available locally for game purchase. Steam is an option but I get such low transfer rate at Steam that I wouldn't give it a second thought for a game of such a large size as this. If Steam is my only option, can the game be actually downloaded from somewhere else and only bought at Steam? I will get in touch with Steam Support on this too if it turns out to be my only option. Just asking here in a hope that maybe someone has already tried something like this.

Thanks.

openDemocracy is serialising the novel The Skinback Fusiliers over the next two months. Here, the anonymous author, 'Unknown Soldier', gives an insight into the creation of this fast, funny and deeply disturbing novel about life in the British army. 

The first thing I need to say about this book is that it was not written as an attack on British soldiers. My family has a long tradition of providing fighting men (and women who joined but did not fight as such). One of my uncles was a decorated hero during World War II, several others fought, and my father always resented the fact that as an engineer he was not allowed to go.  

Two of my cousins, long after that huge war, joined up and served for many years, also seeing active service. Incidentally, they taught me most of the filthy songs I know, including the one that provided the title of the book. It was later taken up by Arsenal fans, which we all found very strange.

The question as to why young men join nowadays is not as simple as it might seem. I wrote this book through long friendships and conversation with young people, many of whom had hankered after a military career for years for reasons best described as idealistic. They saw it as a noble thing to do; the chance to fight, and even die, for their country and their birthright. One should be very cautious before one mocks. Look at Wootton Bassett.

It is also true, however, that for the mass of Britain’s soldiers, the reasons are heartlessly mundane. The three I got closest to, the bearers of this story, joined because they felt they had no real alternative, and because they had been lied to, which they learned over a period of a few short months.

Andy had blown his chance of proper schooling skyhigh, and thought the army would give him a civvie street career. Ashton, a young black man skating around the fringes of criminality, joined to escape that yawning chasm. Shahid had inchoate fears based in his religion and community; he wanted to explore the idea of brotherhood. They were all sure, at first, that they had done the right thing. And they were all insistent, when they left, that for other men it was no problem, no big deal.

In that, sadly, they are almost certainly wrong. The stats for crime and homelessness, drunkenness and marital breakdown among ex-servicemen are truly horrendous. The government, inevitably, lies and fudges endlessly – because it has to. At the very least, if the truth were known, their supply of cannon fodder might dry up. Most lately, the Press Association reported that the Ministry of Defence was wasting millions on recruiting “child soldiers” who very quickly drop out, and jailing under18’s for going AWOL.

As ex-soldier Ross Williams put it after serving time for being absent without leave from the Iraq war “The army uses up and spits out young working class men in pursuit of their bloody, illegal wars.” Williams, incidentally, shared a cell at Colchester with Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, who now addresses anti-war meetings, and who said of this book: “Reading it was like being back in the mob.”

The more I talked to my friends and contacts, the more my own anger grew. I wanted to present what I saw as the realities to people who would not normally have access, or indeed much interest, in them. I wanted to get under the skin of people who would not normally even read a book, people who might think joining the army is a reasonable way out of poverty, or is generally “a good thing.”  It's not. It’s not even a necessary evil, if one believes the magnificent Simon Jenkins. He argued in June 2010 that the whole of the armed forces should be scrapped because “We are safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. Yet £45bn is spent defending Britain against fantasy enemies.”

Because I wanted this book read, then, I wrote it in the terms and language of the people I knew and liked and admired in the military. Whether they all believe me or not, I want to show them that they are the victims of a vile and cynical deal, which serves nobody’s interests but the government’s. Our soldiers are paid, pro-rata, far less than the minimum wage – you don’t go home for your tea at the end of a shift if you happen to be in Helmand and your wife and children live in Catterick.

If soldiers do get shipped back injured they have to compete for civilian hospital places. Any special treatment ends as soon as they reach minimum standards of recovery. Mental health problems are disregarded and robustly lied about, which is one reason why so many ex servicemen live on the streets, and partner and child abuse is terrifyingly high. They risk everything for their masters, and receive a vanishing minimum in return. After ten years of prevaricating the government still sends them out in snatch Land Rovers to be killed by IEDs, and now actually boasts that replacements will be available – by the end of 2011. It’s hard to believe that they aren’t completely mad.

I call this book a novel because I can’t think of any other designation, and because I am a much-published novelist, as well as being a playwright and TV and radio script writer. I tried hard to get it published through the normal channels, but it was not the sort of thing publishers seem to want. But every thing and every person in it, every attitude and every conversation, is grounded solidly in truth, sourced from hundreds of hours of conversations, and piles of notes and letters and scraps of paper.  None of the boys is dead, none of them is still in the army.  My hope for this book would be that it could help persuade some others to achieve the same result.  Does that sound unpatriotic?

Below is the second half of the fourth and final installment of Takuan Seiyo’s latest series of essays. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.


Philippe Teuwen, The Great Wave off San Francisco (2007),
after The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1830) by Katsushika Hokusai
The Art of Strategic Citizenship
Part 4(b) — Monodelphia

By Takuan Seiyo

A day in the country of approaching tsunami

Consider the incremental developments that transpired in the Snatcher-ruled United States on a single day, 23 March 2011:

• The NATO coalition of the Unwilling fell apart after its massive military operation on behalf of Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihad forces in Libya twice as crazy as the dangerous weirdo Qaddafi. This is the third unwinnable war that America’s ruling geniuses — in this case three BHO administration yentas pushing a metrosexual — have put on the debit side of the surrealist national ledger and on the estrogen-pumped (females and gays) American military simultaneously. Add a 5th Cloward-Piven to the four iterated in Part 4.
   
  
• Two male Marines are shown kissing in a vignette that’s part of the indoctrination campaign the US Military has launched to prepare its 2.2 million active and reserve troops for full scale gayization. It’s unknown whether the US Military has run simulation scenarios showing the facial expressions of the top honchos of China’s People’s Liberation Army upon learning of this Gay Paree (Parris?) wonder.
   
  
• 13 illegal aliens were arrested in California in a van with government license plates, wearing US Marine uniforms.
   
  
• The BHO administration has shortlisted Jamie Gorelick for next director of the FBI. Gorelick, whom Web journalist Doug Ross named “Mistress of Disaster”, has a permanent perch at the apex of Snatcherocracy and a string of titles at WilmerHale that approximate medieval aristocracy: “Partner; Chair, Defense, National Security and Government Contracts Practice Group; Chair, Public Policy and Strategy Practice Group; Member, Litigation/Controversy Department.” She built the 1995 “Gorelick’s Wall” that proscribed the interchange of information between intelligence and criminal investigation agencies and so facilitated the sneaking of the 9/11 plotters through the large lacunae. The Loon & Crook Club then appointed her as a key member of the 9/11 Commission, so that she could investigate herself. After that triumph, Gorelick, as vice chairman of Fannie Mae 1997 to 2003, co-led that Loon State appurtenance to the subprime bundling disaster that precipitated the global financial tsunami, bankrupted Fannie Mae, and cost the American taxpayer $91.2 billion in bailouts to Fannie Mae alone, so far — and more coming with an unlimited government guarantee. For that effort, Gorelick earned over $26 million in compensation. And now the FBI. So count this as the 6th Cloward-Piven: deluging the system with Loon incompetence, more Yin atop Yin, and congenital inability to process Reality.
   
  
• U.S. Congressman Michael Burgess, a medical doctor, explained that Community Organizer-in-Chief Barack Obama and the Loon & Looter Party intentionally designed the healthcare reform law to crash the American healthcare system so that they could then impose federal socialized medicine. Count this as the 7th Cloward-Piven in this humongous ju-jitsu mugging of a somnolent White population.
   
  
• The U.S. Justice Department under Eric “My People” Holder sued on behalf of a Muslim teacher denied a 3-week vacation to visit Mecca. The U.S. Senate Judiciary scheduled a hearing on protecting Muslims’ civil rights. No one scheduled a hearing as to why America needs and allows in Muslims.
   
  
• African-Americans were fleeing from themselves, i.e. from Detroit to the suburbs, and a Drudge headline read, “Mass exodus of couples with children from San Francisco.”
   
  
• A new report informs that “Hispanics” now account for the majority of students in Texas schools. In Arizona, Lori Klein, a Republican state senator, read on the floor a letter from a constituent teacher that described his (Hispanic and mostly illegal) pupils: “They hate America and are determined to reclaim this area for Mexico.” The reading drew an “impassioned rebuke” from a state senator from the Loon & Looter Party, and the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director called Klein’s reading “a disgrace.”^[1]. The Supreme Loon Court ruled in a “landmark decision” in 1982 that immigration status may not serve as a basis for denying K-12 education to illegal aliens at the taxpayer’s expense.
   
  
• Oil closed at $105, gold highest in living memory, and silver highest in 31 years.
   
  
• George Soros will hold a “major economic conference” on April 8, to discuss rearranging “the entire financial order.”
   
  
• In the day’s only positive news as far as this author is concerned, the blog Philstockworld informed its readers:
  “Brandon Smith [snip] has launched a new website called Alt-Market.com [snip] to facilitate barter networking and the exchange of knowledge and ideas for thriving in a faltering monetary environment. Alt-Market’s developers would like to de-centralize and de-globalize our system of commerce and help us re-localize our economy, in order to insulate cities and states from a possible (and ever more likely) collapse of the dollar.”
   
  
• One day later, it would transpire that Nekiva Vonte Hardy, alias Kinesa Smith, unmarried mother of four (probably not by the same impregnator) and a self-described “first-time spring breaker”, broke spring at a Panama Beach Burger King in this fashion.
   
  “There are more and more videos of people, mostly kids, going nuts in stores. Whether it’s a free-for-all brawl or a deliberate mob robbery, seems like there is more of it going on” was the comment at the “conservative” website FreeRepublic.com.
   
  Except those are not kids wilding everywhere, every day. They are Black young adults, of middle class material means, behaving like the savage barbarians they are. There is no hope for the West if its Whites continue with this level of cowardice in matters of race, politics of looting, and the continuous trail of treason and imbecility by their elected leaders. Since you cannot change others but can change yourself, it’s time to look past all that Free Republic and tea-dumping posturing. It’s time to prepare the boats, and the oar crews. But the issues of destination and destiny are by no means clear, yet.

The City of Monodelphia

Communities thrive in cities. Culture and creativity thrive in cities. Social and intellectual ferment thrives in cities. Freedom and direct democracy thrive in cities, or at least used to. Human potential is maximized in cities. Science advances in cities: MIT is in Boston, Caltech in Pasadena, the Swiss Institute of Technology — Einstein’s alma mater — is in the heart of Zurich, and the University of Heidelberg is called so for a reason.

The city — as long as it was White, not too big or too small and possessing some natural advantages^[2] — was a self-multiplying incubator of new ideas, new technologies, art and craftsmanship of superior level, and wealth; great wealth. Individuals of exceptional ability had an environment interacting with their peers and creating a symbiotic effect that raised the entire plane of their respective fields.

Meanwhile, America’s Whites have abandoned the cities for subdivision Whitopias. Of America’s founding stock, only the rich with pathologies of guilt and decadence, Crooks, and Loons still live in cities. And also their servant White middle class in such service sectors as protect the higher status Eloi from depredations by “Visible Minority” Morlocks^[3]. Freedomians take this farther, individually opting out of the broken social contract with Leviathan — broken by the latter — in order to move to remote areas where prole caps are the haute couture, and you won’t find a Chopin recital, a Czech film, a slice of Camembert or a Cézanne original within a radius of 100 miles. It’s a tragic error.

In “Leaving the Reservation” the blogger Daphne described a breed of middle-aged men who are severing their ties to middle class life and transplanting their families into small rural holdings in conservative counties in order to live on their own terms.

“These men don’t show up at Tea Party rallies, march on Washington or join militias,” writes Daphne. “They go to work, love their wives, pay their never-ending taxes, fees, surcharges and diligently raise [their children]. Politics have become meaningless to this breed, they’re done, disgusted, fed up with whole cesspool. These men are looking at American life in a whole new way. [snip] They reasonably stocked up on guns and ammunition with no intention of ever sparking an insurrection. Flying under the radar, getting out from under the yoke, becoming free men, rather than shackled dogs or besuited grey ghosts, is the juice fueling their passion. These men don’t want to argue politics and they have no interest in fighting, not anymore.”

Tragic error, again. Political, cultural and economic power emanates from cities. Whites who quit the cities have abandoned their claim on power; they had better listen to wiser men. Pericles is believed to have said, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics does not mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” And apocryphal tradition maintains that Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Freedom and self-determination cannot be defended individually from an increasingly totalitarian government. However big your gun, Leviathan has a bigger gun, and it will do almost anything to maintain its grip on power. For defense against Leviathan you don’t need a six-shooter. You need a few thousand women and children standing arms locked between you and the federales who came to arrest you because you failed to genuflect at the 9-meter statue of Martin Luther King that will soon hulk over Washington, DC, one third larger than the statues of Jefferson and Lincoln. And you need your own television crew to be on site filming it, and your own samizdat media channels that will disseminate such news worldwide.

Violent criminals or rioting mobs do not take kindly to lone wolves either. Once the fraying seams holding America’s society, finances, industry, and endless military commitments have really come apart and civic order has broken down, swarms of bad or terminally desperate people will be roaming in search of prey. Safety will not be in your Winchester and a mile distance to your nearest neighbor, but in numbers and in coordinated and endogenously altruistic action of a community standing for itself. Examples of what an organized urban militia can do to the strongest foe abound in European history, starting with the Greeks and notable in Western and Central Europe because it’s the trade guilds of upright, hard-working burghers that yielded those fighting units^[4].

Until 1970, Cleveland, built by Central European immigrants, was a thriving industrial city that supported one of the finest symphonic orchestras in the world under the baton of the great George Szell. The Cleveland Museum of Art, founded by European-origin benefactors in 1913 “for the benefit of all the people forever” was world class. But then the Loons, Crooks and Looters got to the city.

In the last 50 years, Cleveland’s population has declined from 918,000 to 440,000. Concomitantly, American industry was shutting down and moving to foreign lands, pulling the rug from under this city and its state and country. As Blacks and (primarily “Hispanic”) immigrants were streaming in, Whites were leaving. Cleveland’s White population ratio decreased from 69% in 1960 to 50% in 1990 to 35.8% now. It now ranks #8 in the list of top crime American cities [pdf], the seven cities ahead of it sharing its demographic profile.

In Sperling’s Best Places entry for Cleveland, typical resident opinions (from 2009) are like Renee’s: “Run!! Run as far away as fast as you can! I have lived in this cesspool of a town all my life, if I could make enough money I would be out asap. There is absolutely nothing to want to bring people here. Horrific economy and joblessness. Public schools are a disaster. Crime is awful. [snip] Our politicians are currently being raided by the FBI, they are all scheming money.”

The symphonic orchestra that once thrilled the world, now records videos sucking up to someone named LeBron, said LeBron being apparently as prominent an individual in a Black cultural activity, basketball, as Szell was in a White cultural activity, classical music. But then, if you are a voluntary White dhimmi minority, you have accepted a deal that includes a massive jizya tax — fiscally, culturally, and in other ways. The orchestra’s annual budget reported in 2009 was $43.7 million. That’s for 110 musicians. LeBron’s reported annual compensation in Cleveland was $15.7 million; it’s now $18 million in Miami. His Wikipedia entry is 20 times as long as that of the Cleveland Philharmonic.

The Museum that in a White-dominant city had managed to acquire Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, Frans Hals’s Portrait of Tieleman Roosterman, and a large collection of works by the greatest names in modern European painting, now pays its dues in the Black ethnic vehicles of Nia Coffee House and Karamu — with multiculti agitprop, hip hop “poetry,” juneteenth celebrations and so on. Which is okay — Blacks deserve their cities and their culture — but Cleveland is no longer fit for habitation by Whites who care to be counted under the umbrella of Western civilization.

Non-brain-altered Whites need their own cities, in states hospitable for that purpose, where Leonidas (Sparta), Leonardo (Italy), Leibniz (Germany), Lewis (C.S., Ireland) or LeTourneau (USA^[5]), are closer to the hearts of the people than LeBron. The first such a city is the strategic Schwerpunkt from which the rays of American Renaissance^[6] can expand to the rest of the state, then the adjacent states. I’ll refer to that initial seed city as Monodelphia. Mono, for the Greek word omonoia: oneness of mind, and Delphia, like in Philadelphia, for delphos: brother. The City of Brotherly Minds — for the City of Brotherly Love did not work out in the end. It’s called Killadelphia now, and since David Axelrod bamboozled its voters as of 1998 to twice elect a corrupt, incompetent Black man for mayor, it’s been a continuous, sorry example of Paul Kersey’s BRA: Black-run America.

Freedomia must be based on industry, agriculture, and sustainable harvesting of natural resources, but the countryside communities supporting this ought to relate to the city the way the spokes of a wheel relate to the hub. As to Monodelphia, you must be able to imagine White reactionary rightwingers, properly dressed as descendants of Europe should and filling a provincial city to bursting with quality manufacturing, rock-solid banks lending to locals only, science, advanced medicine, spectacular, human-scaled architecture, literature, philosophy, music, opera, famed gastronomy, wise governance and K-12 low-budget schools that are the envy of the world. Or else, you must resign yourself to marginal existence in Blade Runner Multiamerica^[7] forever.

Reader jeppo, in extensive comments to Part 4, recommended Minneapolis-St Paul (81.9% W) as the target site for a future Monodelphia. Minneapolis-St Paul has a central location nationally, wrote jeppo, and is in the middle of the largely Germanic and Lutheran Upper Midwest: the heartland of the heartland. The harsh climate makes it less attractive to colonizers from warmer climates. Reader Zenster added that the access of the city to the Mississippi River, and of the State of Minnesota to the Great Lakes make both particularly attractive.

Maybe, but I have my doubts. First, the population of Minneapolis-St Paul is 668,000. It’s too large for any conceivable influx of Freedomians to tilt the balance quickly. Second, that population, though White, is also Progressive^[8]. It carries its Whiteness like a shameful stigma, striving ceaselessly to get itself more of that wonderful Diversity. There are already over-50% minority suburbs there, and electing Keith Ellison — Black and Muslim: a twofer — to represent it in the U.S. Congress must have been Twin Cities’ pride and joy. Third, the Lutheran North feels an endemic, welcoming compassion for its worst enemies, including obvious jihadi material — as long as they be “refugees” and “immigrants.” Twin Cities have the largest population of Somalis in North America. Fourth, Minnesota is too close to the eastern Loonie-Lootistan, the westernmost citadel of which is Illinois. It’s also too far from the ocean — the only ocean that Freedomians can dream to access: the Pacific one.

For the same effort, it might be easier to alter the destiny of Portland (78.7% W, pop. 566,000) — another attractive city with a Loon White population, two navigable rivers, a river port close to the Pacific, and a Blue exception in almost all-Red Oregon. From there, freedom, prosperity and self determination could radiate eastward, and to the north and south^[9] rather than, as would be the case with Twin Cities, mainly westward.

At any rate, it’s not an issue that can be decided here and now. Perhaps no place can be considered except in a state that’s not only White but also has a consistent commitment to freedom. You start a business and hire employees in Minnesota or Oregon, and fail to comply with the racist-sexist federal employment laws, when your persecution by Leviathan ensues you are on your own. But as a Freedomian, you cannot possibly comply with such laws, or with hundreds of others that are a shameful Loon or Crook-rigged travesty. There is something to be said, therefore, for a state like Wyoming, that might challenge the federal government on your behalf in this and other freedom issues. The semi-Wild West may be the only place where freedom can find shelter during the years of Leviathan’s autogenic decomposition. But that is feasible only if the indigenous population resolves to accept sophisticated, urban Freedomians from the cities and burbs of Equalitania, and the Culture, intellect and dynamism they would be bringing.

First Principles

Reality-based economics

Freedomia must de-link. De-link from the global economy, from Leviathan’s Fed and its inflatable dollars, from the Wall Street con, the big banks’ con, the borrow-and-spend con, the Neo con, the grievance industry’s con, the unions’ ex-cons, and from every other pathology of the Loon, Crook & Looter state.

Bailout, stimulus, quantitative easing, deficit debt financing, manipulated interest rates and tax-and-spend are the main economic con. Freedomia must skirt this con by issuing its own money, quite per Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “No State shall coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender of Payment.” Moreover, Leviathan’s money grabbing can be minimized by a barter system of exchange substituting partially for monetary transactions, and by steering the fiscal policies of Freedomia toward low taxes and high civic involvement with almost all aspects of community management and services^[10].

To propagate healthy capitalism, it will be useful to graft the shoots of Freedomia onto a state with more German-Nordic stock than Anglo-Saxon-Celtic one. The latter, while giving America its great founders, founding principles and civic culture, has derailed in matters of practical economics. It’s no coincidence that America’s main business is financial sleight-of-hand, inventing clever ways to profit by moving fictitious money from the right pocket to the left one, lawfare, corporate paper shenanigans, mergers and acquisitions rather then creation, marketing rather than engineering, and a foreign labor force — domestically too — rather than an American one. Nor is it by chance that Austrian Economics is Austrian, a German Detroit looks like this, a German chap with a Bachelors in Engineering is Herr Diplom Ingenieur while in the U.S. the peddler in a suit is the status guy, and Switzerland and Norway are economically the healthiest countries in the West, with Sweden and Finland not far behind.

Freedomia must make things; things that reflect Freedomian values, that are visionary, superlative in quality, unique and therefore exportable. Take the clothes you wear. At the low end, it’s Asian or Mayan-made cheap junk, with inferior cloth, uneven seams, buttons not sewn-through and capricious sizing. In the middle, it’s the same junk except some marketing shyster has rented for a fee the likeness of a little polo pony or a famous couturier’s name and slapped it onto the garment, and the zillion empty fools are paying for it twice its intrinsic value. At the top, you drape yourself in the ugly though well-crafted expectorations of megalomaniac homosexuals, busting your trust fund anew every single fall with new fashion — the new always sicker and uglier than the old but of a different color palette.

What kind of morons have we become that we buy into this kind of crap? Be the Change. If you believe that at least part of America could revert to 1959, dress like 1959. Better yet, start a clothing company in Monodelphia that will turn out well-made 1950s clothing, like on Mad Men: a Ralph Lauren without Ralph Lauren, better quality and no outsourcing to Asian factories. No supermodels, MBA brand managers and all that manipulative Snatcher goo either. Somehow the Amish manage to consume what they produce — and sell it widely outside — without a TV ad budget or naked tarts sitting on top of Amish appliances in magazine ads.

You can’t compete with the Chinese, you say? There are not enough skilled seamstresses? There is no need to compete with the Chinese. There is a need to educate the Freedomian population that buying and consuming a lot of cheap imported junk is a capital crime against the nation, against Mother Earth, and against your children’s future. The Loons keep crying crocodile tears over Gaia, while allowing their Crook allies to ply the Looters with tens of millions of tons of garbage merchandise from overseas, cheap enough to buy with free Uncle Sam tickets and shoddy enough to end after one year on some Mt. Everest of Junk, leaking toxins into the environment. But one well-made article has the lifespan of eight shoddy ones. And that goes for bicycles and DVD players like it does for shirts. It translates into smaller mountains of toxic trash. And if you can’t find enough skilled Americans in this trade, start a tailor craft school and import some European tailors too; plenty of them still in Eastern Europe. In a few years, the entire North Asian upper-middle class will be wearing what you make somewhere in Middle America.

A people that becomes inured to badly designed, cheap junk, loses its appreciation of workmanship and beauty — but workmanship translates at the end into a rain of gold, and beauty translates into the bliss that comes from the recognition of God’s work on earth. It’s not in vain that those connoisseurs of beauty, the Greeks, had a word, kalokagatia that combined the words for “beauty” (kalos) and “good.” If English had a word combining “workmanship,” “beauty” and “good,” the history of the last 50 years and the 50 future ones would have unspooled differently.

This Mother Earth thing, economics, and the profound spiritual sickness of the West are tied in more ways than one. People who see the harm that NWO (New World Order) and globalism have inflicted on America, who see how many Pandora’s boxes the Loons-in-charge have opened up all over the world, have to envision life in a post-tsunami landscape, and prepare for it now. James Kunstler and Dmitri Orlov have, for years, preached the gospel of Peak Oil and its aftermath. Kunstler’s novel World Made by Hand indicates eponymously where we are going. Peak Oil is another argument for an urban environment in a colder zone. Try living in a suburb of Las Vegas or Tucson with oil too scarce or too expensive to drive or to air-condition your home.

Alas, even if Peak Oil proves to be unfounded, the trashing of the dollar is certain, Leviathan’s thrashing in Muzlands for the sake of democracy is certain, and a steep rise in the future price of oil is certain in consequence. When that happens, the China-based juggernaut is likely to end as well, and with it, the entire disposable junk economy. Walmart and Target will be out, and the village butcher, baker and candlestick maker will be in. But in Freedomia, they ought to prevail now, even as box-stores pollute the landscape everywhere and cheaper alternatives abound.

Bread ought not to have the feel and taste of squares of toilet paper, or come as frozen dough mixed 2000 miles away three days ago. Furniture ought not to be made of melamine and particle board, come disassembled in boxes, and pollute your home with formaldehyde during its useful lifespan of 12 months. Appliances ought to be made with superior mechanics and durability, not a few silicon chips grafted onto shoddy plastic and bent tin. Appliances, cars, hand tools ought to work or at least be home-repairable even if a Black Swan disables every chip in the world. Natural materials, durability, repairability and a small footprint on the ecosystem ought to become a Freedomian specialty.

The Western (+Japan) world is run by a managerial elite of high-IQ, credentialed people who are also stupid, shallow and conceited. Wise leaders do not build an economy based on gutting domestic industry and borrowing and spending, nor build large financial institutions on the premise that real estate always rises in value. They do not build nuclear reactors on a tsunami and earthquake-prone sea-shore with reserve power generators in the basement and the plant designed to withstand maximum earthquake force of 7.9, when Reality can assert itself with 9.9, and just has with a 9.

Rebuilding the core

The problem with conservatives is that they don’t know what to conserve, what to discard, and what to dig out from under 3,000 years of history that’s no longer a part of our mental landscape but should be. Many cling to formalistic Christianity without a thought as to how Christianity itself, having derailed so many times far inside Yang territory^[11] is responsible for much of the Yin deluge now, pushed as though by the pendulum of the eternal Tao toward a cosmic balance.

The very fact that many a Western reader will scratch his head upon encountering Chinese concepts like Tao, Yin and Yang, is a symptom of cultural derailment. Western Renaissance occurred before when new concepts, technologies and goods absorbed from the Far East caused a quantum cultural leap. But now, the West has gone into a stupor of smug imbecility, behaving as though history and destiny are linear and what was until 1990 on top will always remain on top, no matter how stagnant and desiccated its basic precepts (e.g. “democracy,” “social justice,” “progress”), or decadent its ways. Instead of strengthening itself with the highest that only the other high civilization — the Northeast Asian one — can offer, the West has infused itself with the most backward cultures it could import: those of the Muslim Near East/ North Africa, and of Black Africa morphed as Afro-American gangsta and hip hop moronism.

We will all soon be wood choppers and water drawers for the Chinese, and we continue like a windup toy bunny, smug in our superiority, straight to and over the edge, as though nothing needs rethinking and no new ideas need to be borrowed or resurrected. Meanwhile, the Chinese rule the world. Commercially for now, and militarily too from about 2040 on. All by shrewdly borrowing ideas and cultural elements from the West, stealing what they could not borrow, then playing to and taking advantage of Western weaknesses while not sacrificing one iota of what it means to be Chinese.

Confucius is all about societal wisdom and wise personal conduct. So is the Japanese Tsurezuregusa — 700 years old and taught in every elementary school in Japan. Their foreign relations are conducted according to Sun Tzu and the 36 Stratagems. Our foreign relations are conducted by “liberated” menopausal women and utopian male drones with narcissistic personality disorder, the whole +2 Sigma (i.e. “smart”) lot of them possessing the wisdom of a door knob.

There was a time when the West knew and valued wisdom. The Bible is a depository of wisdom, as are ancient Aesop’s fables. Every Indo-European language has a rich trove of folk tales and aphorisms that transmit wisdom. The men who served in the Nordic things 1000 years ago were chosen based on their wisdom and standing in the community, not as per how long they could keep a fake smile on their faces and hug strangers’ soiled babies.

To have a future, Freedomia must restore and understand the difference between smarts and wisdom, and choose the latter, in every instance. It must tear down and completely replace what passes for “education” in Snatcher-ruled America, going back at least to John Dewey. Teaching kids Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” will prepare them for success in the 21st or 28th century far more than teaching virtual reality protocols or multiculti dogma possibly can.

Alas, the West has forgotten its own indigenous cultures that are worth knowing. Western politicians, even the “good” ones like Geert Wilders, keep invoking “our Judeo-Christian culture.” But if we adopted what’s worth resurrecting from proto-European pantheism, the Taoist-like veneration of the Universe and its manifestations on Earth is there, and the deep spiritual fulfillment of finding the sacred in Nature is there, and the fierce particularity of protecting our forests, our rivers, our ancestors’ lands. Right there is the penicillin for Christianity’s maudlin universality and Yin entropy^[12].

To save and regenerate it, the entire footprint of Western civilization has to be shifted from its current Judeo-Christian squatting to its historical and more organic outline encompassing the pre-Christian roots, the Greek and Roman trunk, and only then the Judeo-Christian branches. This way, the Yang will be restored to what is currently a Yin-overloaded, sickly shrub. Reverence for nature and love of beauty must be restored, a taste for a spiritual and aesthetic apprehension of the natural world that has nothing to do with the cancers of perpetual “progress,” “growth,” “justice,” or Platonic sophistry.

Education has to be based on teaching manly virtues to men-in-training and feminine virtues to women-in-training. Equality being a partial euphemism brought forth by unmistakably (and deservedly) superior Virginia aristocrats and Yankee geniuses, it’s time for the common sense of old to make its reappearance. There is supreme wisdom in Charles Murray’s three-part series published in the Wall Street Journal, January 2007: “Intelligence in the Classroom,” “What’s wrong with vocational school?” and “Aztecs vs. Greeks”^[13]. Murray stressed that we don’t live in Lake Wobegon where everyone is above average, and that we ought to identify and properly nurture a Praetorian Guard class and a worker bee class.

If we had schools integrating Judeo-Christian humanistic values with Greco-Roman elitist ones, the kind of scum that constitutes our Ruling Class now would never get a hearing even in a local tavern, let alone in the halls of Congress and in corporate boardrooms. Werner Jaeger’s Paideia is what prospective K-12 teachers in Freedomia will be examined on, not Dewey, Zinn, Freire and the rest of the Body Snatcher landing party.

Ideas matter. Core values matter. The ideas and core values of the United States, and the West as a whole, have reached the end of their useful life expectancy. Everything needs to be rethought from the ground up. It’s Freedomia’s job, and it’s not a job for the faint of heart or the lame of brain.

Coda

You have to live what you believe. You have to be, not talk. A reactionary Freedomian constitutionalist does not buy cheap imported junk, serve in the military with gays under the command of women, or allow his children to get pierced and tattooed on the skin via needles or on the brain via cretin pop culture. A Freedomian does not, cannot live in New York, Chicago or Oakland — except if he must and there is no other way.

Freedomians who are stuck and cannot move from whatever Snatcher territory they inhabit, ought to at least relocate to the same neighborhood. If there aren’t enough of them to fill a neighborhood, let it be a single street. Let it have at least a bookstore where Freedomian books are sold and Freedomians can have coffee together.

A Freedomian takes his son out of softball practice and puts him into pankration practice. This is a far harsher world than the genius of the Founding Fathers and America’s luck of isolation from the main predator nations has enabled Americans to believe. The lucky hand has been badly played for two generations now; Reality cannot but revert to the global mean. Besides, Freedomia will not force school bonds on its residents for the sake of lavish school football programs. Teaching Homer, calculus and boxing is much cheaper — and better for the young.

One important notion to absorb from Sun Tzu is that you must first realize the conditions for victory, and only then seek it. The outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg and world history with it would have been quite different had Robert E. Lee not lapsed in his judgment and ordered General Pickett to charge uphill against the Union’s fortified positions on Cemetery Ridge. You never run uphill, let alone against a hail of bullets.

Snatcher State is doing itself in on its own; there is no need for Freedomians to run uphill. It’s enough to gather and prepare the ground to save as much of America as will be possible after the Loons, Crooks and Looters collapse upon each other. But a formal break and the founding of an independent republic has to be considered inevitable in the future, just as the eventual formation of La Republica del Norte is inevitable. Demography is destiny, and no amount of Snatcher talk will change that. War can change that, but that is a topic for war professionals that we shall skirt here.

Between America’s two founding documents, the Declaration of Independence is, by far, the more unique and remarkable. What greater prose than this can be conceived that expresses the anguish in the necessity of rending a nation asunder:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

How much longer and graver the list of the offenses, depredations and treasons that America’s Loons, Crooks and Looters have committed against the American people than the long list of King George’s transgressions iterated in the Declaration! What follows in that document and is apposite in the future one as well is a list of the attempts that the breakaway group has made to bring its grievances before the proper authorities and to seek conciliatory resolutions — in order to get in return only lawfare, trickery, brush-offs, rebuffs, assaults, and imported predators. With but slight changes (in italics), these words from 1776 could sound fresh 250 years later:

“In every stage of these oppressions we have shown our disapproval in lawful ways: our repeated votes, plebiscites, petitions and demonstrations have been answered only by repeated injury. A democratic government of a Republic, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

When the hour comes, it would behoove Freedomians to stress that separation was not an option until none other was left; that since 1964 they have been doing all in their power to keep the whole together. There is a poignant expression of that in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration that was redacted by either Franklin or Adams. These were the words that flowed from the quill pen of an Anglo-American genius in rented rooms at Market and Seventh in what was then Monodelphia:

“We might have been a free and great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it; the road to glory and happiness is open to us too; we will climb it in a separate state, and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting Adieu!”

Notes:

1.		Are there any Jews out there protesting publicly, proclaiming “Not in Our Name,” when Jewish organizations like the ADL work day and night to turn America into an antisemitic country? For there are Blacks pulling no punches with respect to the profile of the Black community, e.g. the Rev. James Manning .
2.		This topic was discussed more extensively in the essay “Cities and Accomplishment” by Fjordman, and in its comments section. The attribute “White” is used in the sense of demographic and cultural predominance of European-origin people, rather than in the sense of ethnic exclusivity. Many of the most successful cities in Europe had highly contributive Jewish minorities (e.g. Amsterdam, Lwow), booming medieval cities in ex-Russia Slavic Europe had similarly beneficial German minorities etc. —but the governance and culture of each such place always reflected the majority people. And the few larger and more international and multinational cities, e.g. Rome, Samarkand and Victorian London in the past, or Singapore now, have thrived only because of a dominant, higher-IQ group, imposing its values and governance as binding on all.
3.		“Visible Minority’ is the official Canadian Snatcher Government term for what I call here Black and Brown. Morlock and Eloi are a race of predatory troglodytes and the race of human victims respectively in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
4.		The Battle of the Golden Spurs is a particularly compelling example of this type of war. This man, the commandant of Warsaw in the 1794 Kosciusko uprising against Russian occupiers was a working cobbler and activist in his trade guild.
5.		The life of American originals like Robert. G. LeTourneau — a man who had no college education yet became a holder of 300 patents, a titan of industry, a business tycoon and a major philanthropist devoted to Christian principles — is particularly valuable in these days of rampant cretinism, degrees inflation, predatory financial capitalism and propositionism concerning the American identity.
6.		No one toiling in this area ought to use the term American Renaissance without a hat tip to American Renaissance: a pioneering enterprise of a dedicated man, Jared Taylor, who’d given up much for it. For 21 years now it has stood like a lone and unwanted Cassandra, imparting data and news stories documenting that racial differences exist, that the construction of Newamerica on the false premise that they do not is a path to perdition, and that in response to that path’s calamity Whites must start defining themselves in terms of their group interest, just as Blacks and immigrant groups do.
7.		Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, presented in 1982 a visionary picture of the Los Angeles of 2019 that, demographically at least, Los Angeles already resembles. MultiAmerica is the multicultural propositional nation of New America, and the opposite of Monodelphia.
8.		See connection between White city demographics and Loonism here.
9.		From 100 miles north of San Francisco up to Eugene, Oregon it’s all Red country. For hundreds of miles north beyond Eugene, and well into Washington State, it’s all patchy Red too, except for Portland.
10.		See The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society,
11.		Examples of Christianity’s past excesses: Constantine’s Sword, crusades against Europeans (Albigensians, Balts and other Euro-pagans), the Teutonic Knights of the Cross, persecutions of Jews and heretics, oppression of women, stifling of sexuality — of joie de vivre even, ceaseless internecine religious wars, corrupt power-mad popes, the Inquisition, fostering of bigotry and fanaticism, lust for gold and treasure, etc.
12.		Readers may be happy to know that Augustana College — "Lutheran expression of the Christian faith" — hosted a "White Privilege Summit" on March 30 (hat tip, American Renaissance)
13.		These appear to be behind a paywall now, but are probably retrievable elsewhere.

Previous posts by Takuan Seiyo:

2008		Oct		14		The Real Mark-to-Market
		Dec		1		You Say Mumbai, I Say Bombay
2009		Apr		8		The Deadly Jive of Jiverly Diversity
		Jun		2		The American Press: The Unbearable Lightness of Treason
				12		Critique of the Culture of Kevin MacDonald
		Jul		31		Sons of Onan
		Sep		2		Be the Change
		Dec		15		F Street
2010		Apr		25		Vast Canyon of Gas and Dust, Inshallah
		Jul		7		Vast Canyon of Gas and Dust — Progressive Progress Report
		Dec		12		The Art of Strategic Citizenship, Part 1
2011		Jan		7		The Art of Strategic Citizenship, Part 2
				31		The Art of Strategic Citizenship, Part 3
		Mar		20		The Art of Strategic Citizenship, Part 4

So this is what those crazy coeds are up to these days? Things have changed since I was in college and we had the decency to wait until the sun went down. Two USC Trojans had no problem doing it doggie style on top of a building in full view of the quad in broad daylight. Unfortunately the male fornicator, a Kappa Sigma frat boy, was excused from the brotherhood over his public display of manhood. The thrill of exhibitionism aside, I hope they had the forethought to put on a Trojan. [D Listed]

David Yerushalmi is an accomplished and dedicated attorney who has done tireless work, much of it pro bono, for various anti-sharia legal initiatives. He works closely with Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller on legal issues concerning their activism against the Islamization of America.

Abe Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — a notoriously hard-left organization, ostensibly advocating for American Jews — has recently taken against Mr. Yerushalmi.

Alyssa Lappen, an author who writes for the American Thinker, the New English Review, and various other publications, has written an open letter to Mr. Foxman, challenging him for his shunning of David Yerushalmi:

Dear Mr. Foxman,

I am absolutely appalled that ADL has smeared the name of a reputable attorney, David Yerushalmi alongside others who, unlike him, are indeed egregious in word and deed.

Attorney Yerushalmi was rankly faulted in a terribly unprofessional article some weeks ago. In my opinion, as a journalist of 35 years experience, this is a case in which he was genuinely libeled and I certainly hope he intends to sue. I believe he has a cause of action.

As you know, libel in America consists of stating something inaccurate (often intentionally) — and with purposeful malice. The article I note above contained no facts on which to base its opinions, and malice virtually dripped from the prose. In recent years, journalists have often made me ashamed of my lifelong profession, but this piece took the cake and the frosting as well. If it had any role, partial or otherwise, in your determination to add Mr. Yerushalmi to a list of hate-mongers, I would urge you to reconsider.

I have spoken with Mr. Yerushalmi as a source and find him one of the most precise attorneys I know. His information is absolutely credible. He thoroughly and exactly cites many Islamic law texts. He is never inaccurate. Never. He is certainly not the hateful man that you paint him.

Perhaps you are unaware that the national leadership of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), on the other hand, has repeatedly been identified by federal law-enforcement officials to have had links with terrorist organizations. This occurred in Nov. 2008 with the Holy Land Foundation Hamas and terror-financing case. The government obtained 108 unanimous verdicts on ALL 108 terror-financing, money laundering and tax fraud charges leveled against five HLF officers. Some of the funds they sent to Hamas had washed through CAIR accounts, proven by canceled check copies.

Federal evidence was again cited in the civil suit by the family of David Boim in the Chicago 7th District Court of appeals against the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) — CAIR’s predecessor and co-founder — in Dec. 2008. The federal judge in that case ruled that the CAIR predecessor — namely the IAP — was indeed inseparable from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim American Society and he held their agents responsible, fully and finally, for the $156 million judgment in the Boim’s case against them. Thus $156 million less is now available to fund Hamas terrorism.

Then in October 2010, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that hundreds of individuals and organizations named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case — including CAIR — would not be delisted as unindicted co-conspirators, due to the preponderance of evidence against them. CAIR knew and knows that the evidence against its leadership and several CAIR chapters is indeed so strong that it could never have won an appeal, and did not even try. An appeal was filed by another North American Muslim Brotherhood organization with which you may not be familiar, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), a subsidiary of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

It is a travesty that you brand as a hatemonger a man legitimately attempting — via the U.S. courts — to legally defeat efforts of the above groups, among others, to increasingly impose Islamic law through secular U.S. civil courts and institutions. Unfortunately, the encroachment of these laws is not a “theory” but is a well-established fact.

In Florida, in the last few weeks, a judge ruled that a mosque must — under secular U.S. laws — follow sharia to resolve an internal dispute between members. Those suing came to America to ESCAPE sharia law. Yet now a U.S. court has ordered them to adhere to it. They will appeal this egregious decision, rightfully so.

A New Jersey judge ruled some months ago that a man who had badly beaten his wife had the right to do so, since sharia condones this practice. Fortunately, that decision was reversed on appeal.

In Massachusetts, about four years ago, the ACLU motioned for dismissal of criminal charges against three terrorists who fraudulently obtained charitable tax-exempt status to fund suicide murder. Sharia law requires Muslims to give 2.5% of their wealth annually to charity (zakat); funding jihad and jihad fighters are covered by several of eight religiously mandated means to allocate annual zakat payments. The ACLU cited these facts in its motion, arguing that raising monies to fund jihad, fraudulently or otherwise, is Constitutionally protected religious practice under the First Amendment. Fortunately, the federal district justices in Worcester, Ma. denied this motion point blank.

Do you suppose that any of the above instances are part, at best, of some wildly imaginative conspiracy theory? I assure you the ACLU motion to protect the religious freedom of fraudulently collected “tax-exempt” funds for jihad was quite real. I held and read the motion in my own hands, and reported on the case. The argument was all too real — albeit surreal.

Mr. Foxman, contrary to your claims in the ADL commentary on Mr. Yerushalmi, these cases are not the figment of some lunatic’s mind. Unfortunately, in fact, dozens of similar such cases nationwide demonstrate an orchestrated attempt to inject Islamic law into the U.S. secular legal codes, both on state and national levels. In those cases that the goals are achieved, these sharia laws provide exceptions for Muslims alone — to legal standards normally considered foundational to Western civilization — on a vast array of points and issues.

Another difficulty is that, unlike other kinds of religious law, sharia law is composed largely of edicts and regulations to be imposed upon non-Muslims. If it is allowed to continue to its logical terminus, therefore, the only possible conclusion of this trend would be complete decimation of all manner of constitutionally protected freedoms, including freedom of speech, “out of religious respect.” Consider the case of Uganda. Yes indeed, Idi Amin was educated in Saudi Arabia and ultimately he fled to and died there. While this aspect of Amin’s history was barely reported, he hoped to impose sharia law on Uganda. Let us recall the genocidal results.

Certainly we can demand respect for all faiths, without disallowing any criticism whatever. Look, for example, at your own criticism of Mel Gibson’s film on Christ. No one branded you a hatemonger. You merely expressed your opinion as a matter of constitutionally-protected free speech. And so it should be with all faiths — including Mohammed, Islam and sharia. How on earth can people learn any of its dark aspects if no one is allowed to speak on the subject without merciless and baseless accusations of hate mongering like those you leveled in this case.

You may recall Wafa Sultan, who lived under sharia, and spoke quite plainly against sharia and Islamic precepts on Al Jazeera, shocking the Arab and Muslim worlds. She has now done so in America too.

I would think you’d support the Freedom Pledge that Dr. Sultan and her other fearless Former Muslims United co-founders — including Nonie Darwish, who lost her father to a suicide “martyr” mission — have sent to dozens of Muslim leaders across the U.S. They ask these leaders to pledge to protect religious freedom of apostates to Islam, namely to promise to openly oppose fatwas calling for apostates’ deaths, and do everything else possible to protect their freedoms from medieval — not to say unconstitutional and illegal — practices like the Islamic death penalty for public abandonment of faith. Only two Muslims have signed, God bless them both. That is no figment of imagination, either, nor are the fatwas calling for their deaths.

Florida U.S. Rep., Ret. Col. Alan West agrees with Mr. Yerushalmi — that sharia proponents have put America’s secular laws under attack for years now and, via the judiciary, have already had considerable success eroding them. Having served two tours of duty in Iraq, Rep. West is familiar with the Islamic laws and has seen them in action on the ground.

That ADL is unaware of any of the above noted facts does not render “hate-mongers” of those Americans who pay keen attention to their surroundings and do not share your complacency.

Once upon a time, the ADL did excellent work to combat anti-Semitism, which of course was its founding mission. Here, the ADL has apparently taken the side of organizations that for decades have expressed zealous anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel — and indeed of the very concept (much less existence) of a Jewish state. They have done so both through their words at private organizational conferences, and writings in organizational publications and pseudo-academic journals — and with their money, for suicide bombers, in Jerusalem and Israel, among other things.

It is easy to find such statements and positions from their leadership over the last 30 years, and recently too. For years, dozens of hard-working non-profit organizations have researched these organizations to expose them. In several terrorism and related cases, the federal government has prevailed partly on the basis of their solid, professional research. That is but one way in which individuals dangerous to America (and Israel) were convicted of terror-related crimes, deported for fraudulent immigration applications or both.

Furthermore, in part, you label David Yerushalmi “extremist” for asking that the U.S. actually enforce existing immigration laws. You may not like it, but that is a legitimate political viewpoint, for legal reasons of course, but also for humanitarian considerations. It is certainly not grounds for the juvenile name-calling the ADL issued in this case. Actually, “undocumented workers” very often suffer horrendous landlord and employment abuses — and the highest rate of criminal assault, theft, fraud and so on targeting any population. For among those “undocumented workers” live tens of thousands of criminals. Indeed, several 9/11 hijackers were what some might, ten years later, call “undocumented workers.”

Taken together, these two positions in the ADL frontal attack on David Yerushalmi sadly suggest that the organization now opposes those who want only to uphold existing U.S. laws — legally, I might add — yet agrees with groups that regularly break U.S. laws, verbally and financially support anti-Semitism and terror, and have already in effect funded dozens of murders, perhaps even hundreds.

Agreed, there have been Jewish extremists. But they are very few and far between. More importantly, David Yerushalmi is not one of these. I think you do great disservice to the Anti-Defamation League and the time-honored fights against anti-Semitism and racism by siding with extreme, radical, hateful, proven terror-supporting organizations. They are intent upon demolishing his good name — and that of anyone else daring to criticize them or their agenda, much less their precepts of faith and religious law — and thereby to intimidate the American press and leadership into silence. Surely you should recognize this as the tactic of brown shirts.

Opposing the emergence of sharia law in American public life hardly exemplifies racism, or extremism. It is merely an effort to maintain and enforce the Constitutional separation of church and state, based on sad and very real experience over the last decade in particular.

Moreover, it is the earnest effort of many concerned minorities who ought to be ADL’s natural allies — former Sudanese slaves, former Muslims fearful for their lives (even in America), Maronite Christians, Hindus whose temples have been smashed by the thousands, Coptic Christians with families suffering mass slaughter (hundreds burned, alive, in churches), now, in Egypt and on and on.

Yet you attack Mr. Yerushalmi as an extremist.

Shame on you. Shame!

I read your mother’s oral history and am fortunate to have known and to know other survivors of the Vilna ghetto and Stutthoff, generally unknown death camps in its orbit and death marches. They bestowed a sacred blessing and this indelible lesson, to speak out, not to remain silent. Your mother, I think, did not save you from the Holocaust to do something so atrocious as this.

Best regards,

Alyssa A. Lappen
Investigative journalist and poet
www.alyssaalappen.org

CC:		U.S. Rep. Allen West
CC:		Diana West, Syndicated columnist
CC:		Andrew McCarthy, Columnist and former U.S. Attorney
CC:		Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, Cong. Mount Sinai and President, New York Board of Rabbis
CC:		Jeffrey Weinsenfeld, Philanthropist and Trustee
CC:		Debra Burlingame, Co-founder, 9/11 Families
CC:		Tim Brown, Co-founder, 9/11 Families
CC:		Editor in Chief, Jewish World Review
CC:		Gary Rosenblatt, Jewish Week
CC:		Matthew RJ Brodsky, Editor, InFocus, Jewish Policy Center
CC:		Rick Greenfield, Editor, Jewish Ledger
CC:		Susan Rosenbluth, Editor, Jewish Voice and Opinion
CC:		Steven Baum, Editor, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

Good job by muffin man to bring this story to our attention. Front page cred for him! - Chris

Here's a quote from Kevin Seiferts story over on ESPN,

Every time he watches an NFL game, Kenechi Udeze wonders who is next. When will the next retired player absorb a bitter truth about an industry he once considered a brotherhood? 

"You hope what happened to me doesn't happen to anyone else," Udeze said. "But if it does, will they ever be consoled or comforted by anyone in the league office that employed them? I doubt it. The only way they can profit off you is if you're a commodity. You're not a commodity if you're injured or ill." 

You might remember Udeze as the Minnesota Vikings' first-round draft pick in 2004, a solid four-year contributor who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2008. He is in remission thanks to a bone-marrow transplant we chronicled that summer, but side effects of chemotherapyforced him to retire in 2009. 

In the years that followed, the NFL has twice denied Udeze eligibility for its disability program, which requires 100 percent incapacity in cases of non-football illnesses. Udeze has a flexible job as an assistant strength coach at the University of Washington, where Huskies coach Steve Sarkisian -- an assistant on the USC teams Udeze played on from 2001-03 -- allows him to work around his frequent bouts with a condition known as neuropathy. 

 

Here is the Full Story

There's not much else to say, other than this is a damn shame and this sure as hell isn't right.  This has really left me speechless.  I cant imagine any scenario where the NFL is justified in denying  his disability.  The Vikes did what they could to help out, they paid his final seasons salary.  I hope all the best to Kenechi and his fight against the NFL.

Catch up with all the fun from a fortnight's worth of March mayhem on the Chatterbox forum.

What with the Bafta awards and the launch of the Nintendo 3DS it's been a busy fortnight on the Gamesblog – that's my excuse for not posting a 'Best of' Chatterbox for a while.

So, for your reading pleasure, here is a fortnight's worth of gaming jabber, edited by St00 and Tjvs. Lots to enjoy here, from Blood Bowl (as usual) to lists, fencing, horrible food and boring movies. Yes! Boring movies!

Come on in, it is perfectly safe...

Monday March 7

There was plenty of Bloodbowl chat to start the week, all HenryPootle's fault for actually being pro-active and organising people into leagues and such. As I type, Goody is anxiously glancing at his 2010 NaN Organisation award and wondering if there's a cup-upset in his future.

There was also plenty of weekend gaming to recount from resurgent Killzone 3 victories to people sampling the recently re-released Beyond Good and Evil HD, and those enjoying the new Black Ops maps and accompanied double XP. However, as if realising that this is not the place to talk about games (despite what the sub-headline tells us daily) chat soon moved on to football blog, with Liverpool's victory over Man Utd dominating much of the talk, and TV blog with many people enjoying Wonders of the Universe. GrizzlyDeer seemed particularly enamoured:

"'In fact, our entire solar system is made up from the droppings of the giant space weasel. Completely invisible to the naked eye, it circles around the universe, searching for jibbler, a strange cheese-like substance of which almost nothing is known. All scientists agree however, that it is most likely very, very tasy.' - An example of something Brian Cox could say and still make me believe it. I love this show."

Talk veered back to games with news of Portal 2's PS3 version coming with a free PC version. CountGinula was not afraid to ask: "What is Portal?" R042 provided arguably the most accurate response, "a good first-person puzzle game based on exploiting momentum and moving through two-way portals, set in a darkly comic science-fiction universe with an acerbic computer providing assistance", though that description didn't do much to enamour the Count to the game.

Late on, HumofEvil broached the subject of Fencing. Anticipating some typical Chatterbox ridicule, he was instead offered plenty of advice – proof that this place can always surprise you. Hum was especially concerned that taking up the hobby would involve owning a sword, but CrispyCrumb clearly set out the rules: "fencing is a gentleman's pastime. Keeping a sword by your bed is a mentalist's pastime."

Cameroon raised the question towards the end of the day about the feasibility of taking on a masters degree alongside his usual job. General concensus was that the workload would be very difficult. Rollmeister advised that, "(in) my personal opinion, a full-time job and full-time masters is probably too much. It may well be doable, but I certainly wouldn't want to try!" Still it is nice to see the good folks of Chatterbox looking to better themselves in ways that don't involve reaching level 80 in WoW.

As if to immediately wipe away this pleasant notion though, the blog quickly turned to literal murder-blog as the day ran out.
And it was all going so well.

Quotes of the day
"Nothing grows as fast as a tramp's beard. Not even bamboo. Incidentally, I cut a lot of mine off yesterday. Like, two inches. By mistake."
Fantomex compares himself to a homeless person, to no one's surprise.

"Roger Moore.... now there is a man"
SerenVikity again wins the annual gender identification competition.

"My great Granddad fought in a war so I could sit in my pants on a Monday afternoon and watch Doctors."
HereComesTreble enjoys the benefits of winning blogger of the year.

Shrove Tuesday March 8

Pancake day, "That créped up on us" (PicPicPic), was the opportunity for Chatterboxers to discuss their favourite combinations of accompaniments for the battered goodies. CunningStunt revealed he likes his with cheese and beans, whereas St00 takes it all very seriously:

"Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and pudding. It's 'DAY' for a reason people, ALL day. Lemon and sugar, civilised like. I'm not Amerkin'."

HereComesTreble also got in to the spirit of things... sort of: "I had an omelette for breakfast, which, when you think about it, is sort of like a big egg pancake". Marie2490 hates pancakes but if she ever decides to make them then scientists have revealed an equation for the production of the perfect crepe: 100 - [10L - 7F + C(k - C) + T(m - T)]/(S – E).

This formula neatly relates to the horror that is Excel Blog. The least said the soonest mended. Or as StiLted so eloquently put it: "If it was possible to yawn so hard that your face turned inside out, I would be doing so. Where would you be then hey? Sitting there with inside out face on your conscience that's where

Shrove Tuesday coincided with International Women's Day. HateMale felt it was appropriate to recognise all the valuable things that men have given women over the years to help balance out the day: "We even gave you dishwashers. Hairdryers. Ponies. The Clap." To which SerenVikity responded: "I forgot about all those things that men did for me. The pony with clap came as a bit of a surprise but rubbing some ointment on Muffin did the trick."

As part of International Women's Day blog, IntraVenus revealed that Leona Lewis had been voted the most influential woman of the last century. I demand a recount as surely it's Susan Boyle (well my vote counted for nothing then – 1918 was supposed to make my opinions matter).

Games were also mentioned on Tuesday. Although there were discussions on KZ3, Blood Bowl, ME2 and GT5 (CatZilla even managed an indepth discussion about games manufacturers and payment for online multiplayer), it was one game that had 'boxers quivering in anticipation: Dino D-Day. Makar's excitement was palpable: "There is a clip of someone fighting a T Rex with his fists. Brilliant."

Quotes of the day

"Quoting Gilbert & Sullivan. A new low."
Sheep2 to HenryPootle. [Is that really a new low? – Keef]

"=IF(C40=1,IF(ISBLANK(C4),"",C11/C12),IF(AC40=2,(IF(ISBLANK(C4),"",C11/C12)*0.95),IF(ISBLANK(C4),"",C11/C12)))"
Simian. (That's a special request from akaSilky.)

Wednesday March 9

So we enter the mid-game, the hump, a hill of chat from which the only way is down – something the contributors of chatterbox know more than enough about. The day started with some brief discussion of the Gunners exit from Europe the night before, however with a distinct lack of Arsenal fans around, the mood was of general apathy and of the conclusion that the better team had gone through. Despite UncleBen and Makar's efforts late on to stir up some debate there were few willing to bite.

The morning continued with a somewhat undignified discussion – for which we can blame Weecooper – regarding the various romantic opportunities available in the Mass Effect universe. Killerbee did point out that, "your ME1 love interest's picture is on your desk in the Captain's Quarters when you start, but once you start getting friendly with someone else in the second game, the photo frame gets pushed over." Proof that games are edging ever closer to that other artistic and valid medium – soap operas.

A mention of David Cameron's appearance on the One Show opened a gateway to politics-blog. There was a fair amount of Tory hate (shocking for the Gruniad, I know) [it's Grauniad! What an ironic type! – Keef] but there was more than enough reserved for the other two parties as well. In fact, the whole discussion remained (reasonably) tame and good natured, once again proving what a freakish anomaly of the internet the Chatterbox can be at times – I mean everyone even forgot to compare each other to Hitler.

StiLteD entered the chat mid-morning with some very positive feedback on his newly acquired 3D TV. In addition to being impressed by Killzone 3, he waxed lyrical about Super Stardust HD as well: "The 3D effects on it are truly superb. When your ship blows up, the debris properly blows out of the TV at you. Remarkably well done. A couple of the BIG incoming asteroids had me madly ducking in surprise".

However, his effusing didn't seem to do too much to sway the general blog scepticism about the technology – but proved a diverting enough talking point for a while.

The afternoon was largely taken up with a variety of smaller topics, none of which lingered long in the mind. The news that the PSN would be down for the night, therefore putting a quash on any online plans, didn't help and the blog sort of limped over the finish line in a wave of chat-static. It may not have been pretty, but we made it.

Quotes of the day
"Tim - If we lived in a society like that depicted in Minority Report you would've been locked up a long time ago."
SirGiggedy says what everyone is thinking.

"The girl I work with – the one that tried to implicate me in her fraud – said she thought I was her guardian angel yesterday. She said she had a dream about me rescuing her from quicksand. She's quite obviously away with the fairies."
SerenVikity continues to make up stories from her imagined sitcom of a job.

Thursday March 10

Page 1: Bloodbowl. Page 2: Bloodbowl. Page 3: Bloodb...Zzzzzzzzzz...
"Whats the most disgusting thing you've ever eaten?" Bertjansch asked before telling of his surprise at opening a, "Pig's face baguette at a motorway cafe near Malaga... oh, hello, heres Porky Pig whiskers and all."

Our token Bahrain-based blogger Jaykelly's delicacies of "Tripe soup" and "Fish head curry" both sound pretty tasty, but Chubster takes the prize for me with his Chicken feet – the problem not being the taste, but that: "...spitting out chicken knuckles isn't my idea of a good time." Indeed. I was just amazed and disappointed someone didn't bring up egg and prawn sandwiches.

Intra brought up her upcoming girly sleepover; Seren piped up, saying she had never experienced the pleasures of such an event. Naturally, some people's imaginations took it too far... for some bloggers it seems, thoughts of a girly pillow fight is not a Mid-morning Matter.

Somewhere, a tiger killed a lion... reminding me of my old job of staging fights to answer the age old questions like: "Which would win in a fight between a bear and a slightly vexed honey badger?"

CatnameBlog? Really? Really? I mean, names for your cat? No, it's never going to stoop that low surely...what?...Oh.

ElvishBlog? No chance? I mean, talking in elvish? No, it's never going to stoop that low surely...what?...Oh.

Decal got shouty, he had a fair point though. AcidSnake was talking about "organising" a game of Bad Company 2 and "Tic-Tacs", and people calmly waiting for everyone to be ready to play and other such witchcraft instead of just charging forwards blindly running into the opposing force. It's always easy to spot a Non-NaNer.

...Zzzzzzzz....dbowl, Page 14: Bloodbowl, Page 15: Bloodbowl.

Quotes of the day
"6 pages before half 11? Jesus."
My thoughts exactly, PicPicPic

"Jellied eel served on toast. Ich nichte lichte."
BarryEans. It's Deutsche Johan, but not as we know it.

Friday March 11

This morning, news of the earthquake and tsunami spread around the world. Thoughts went out to those with family and friends in the area, and to our bloggers on the Pacific Rim.

The morning also a post-mortem of last night's NAN clan action. Typical NAN clan tears were shed over the regular NAN versus Eurogamer BFBC2 matches, with the most common complaint being that the opposition had people who knew how to play the game. This seemed to outweigh the other complaint that someone had hacked a console to use a steamroller, or some such nonsense.

There was also fallout from the Killzone 3 games too. Seemingly someone on the NAN clan had learned a similar trick of hacking a steamroller into Mawlr Graveyard, giving NAN a 7-0 win on that map. Take a screenshot of that now, we may never see the likes again.

In a move away from his cloning of Tony Hayers, HereComesTreble has started an entirely original writing piece for the gamesblog - The Complete Moron's Guide to Blood Bowl. His first tip was to restart diceblog and point out the difference between red and white dice. More of this every day next week, he threatened.

And it's not like Cunningstunt doesnt have his uses. Frequently he attends pub quizzes and wows us with his knowledge, or in this case, posing the Friday question - Which Film Has The Best Battle Scene? It's things like this that get the Gamesblog's blood boiling. Is it Zulu? Is it Saving Private Ryan? Is it Bourne Ultimatum? But the Gamesblog trumps all, with SirGiggidy's quip: "Best Battle – Crispycrumb fumbling his first 1 v 1 with BigWorv on Killzone".

Of course, that's not all you'll find up Cunnings sleeve – or, if you'll excuse the expression, under his patio. 'The most boring film' was trooped out, and amongst the usual suspects was Lost in Translation [Noooooooo! How can a film with Bill Murray AND scarlett johansson IN Toyko be boring? – Keef], Lord of the Rings, 2001, The Hours, The New World and Eyes Wide Shut (proof that the blog has mostly poor taste – Dave). Although Limni summed it up best with "There are a lot of film idiots around today", I think he meant to include Tom Cruise in that statement too.

The blog then turned to holiday advice. BigWorv is heading for Rome, and apart from avoiding the football hooligans, the best advice came from CrispyCrumb, "Rome? Don't attempt a Leap Of Faith." I think the same holds true for Jerusalem.

Monday March 14

Monday came the void. Wholly cold and unsavoury, like a strange clammy hand that you don't recognise, somewhere uncomfortable. Something was wrong, very wrong. Devoid of their spiritual home, the Gamesblog refuges quickly took up residence in an old abandoned chatterbox and reminisced about times when this was a regular occurrence, hoping to use humour to quieten their unspoken discomfort. Discordant, forced laughs, echoed all too loudly until finally, a box did birth itself mewling on to our collective internet laps. [Look, I've said sorry! – Keef]

Clearly mindful of his tardiness Keef tried to steer the conversation towards 5 specific topics, this was never going to happen, but nice try, you poor, deluded man. [Worth a try – Keef]

Onedaveofmany believed Keefs motives went slightly deeper: "A valiant effort, but I suspect your ulterior motive is wanting a shot at the 'Most On-Topic' category at next year's awards. Shameless."

Much of the early chat revolved around Fanto's assertion that it was, um, 'Steak Day'. This was discussed in some depth, prompting some less liberated box regulars to take a day off from the action. Turns out that even in the chatterbox there are limits! Who knew?

The Blood Bowl juggernaut rumbled (Shouldn't that be 'rambled'?) on, gradually engulfing more and more forum inhabitants. When even Limni and HereComesTreble arrive for the day cursing the name of Nuffle, the end cannot be far away.

Talk of the nursery league and the new coaches finding their feet filtered in throughout the day, with Rollmeister considering the Cunningstunt approach to Blood Bowl: "What's the biggest cheat team going? What will I get most abuse for?"

Blood Bowl agony aunts, Crispycrumb and Henrypootle jumped in during the afternoon, fielding questions relating to team value, dice rolls, inducements and defence.

Stilted summed up the confusion of many, as follows:

"Blood Bowl chat – impenetrable dice blog crossed with PES blog, with the volume of 'at peak' Demon Souls blog."

Rugby popped up late on in the day, with questions on the laws coming from bitter Scots fans. The day wound down with a spot of Timthemonkey baiting from EnglishRed indicating that, finally, all was right with the blog once more:

"Let's hope the Saga of Tim never gets written down because Murphy's Law dictates that if civilisation as we know it was ever destroyed then the sole surviving history of these days would be that book. It would screw future history forever – the Aliens would think we were a race of asexual beings obsessed with cartoons about cheaply made toys."

Games: Blood Bowl, Two Worlds 2, Mass Effect 2, Killzone 3, BFBC2, Black Ops and Dragon Age 2
Films: Scott Pilgrim Vs the World
TV: Breaking Bad, Wonders of the Universe, Spaced and Bored to Death
Books: Shadows of the Apt

Tuesday March 15

Tuesday AM found favoured Gamesblog journo, Keef in some wondrous fantasy world, full of amazing space creatures, scantily clad woman and a feeling of complete contentment, as well a nagging feeling that he could probably fly. The worries of the world were alleviated and there was an utter absence of any shoes about to drop. A squealing, squeaking noise began in the back of Keef's mind, permeating his consciousness. It began to sound more like an alarm... an alarm?

Keef awoke with a start, his heart pounding. Glancing at his Rolex, the realisation that he'd overslept hit him like one of Timthemonkey's chat up lines. Discarding his Chinese silk pyjamas, his valet hurriedly dressed him and passed him his civet coffee. Sprinting from the house grounds, he spoke to his chauffeur. "This is all Greg's fault. I knew I shouldn't have signed off on that leave request."

[All very amusing, but if I see any of you clambering over the walls and staring in through my windows again, I'll set my security staff on you – Keef]

After he'd regained his composure and managed to right click the 'Post Today's Chatterbox' button, Keef announced plans to start a regular Guardian Games Chatterbox mulitplayer night. This was met with a mix of griping about family life and firm, instant replies to the positive. St00 pointed out that there were benefits to an official, Guardian sanctioned mulitplayer games night: "Official multiplayer night is a great idea as long as it's not a Thursday. It'll give me an excuse to use to my wife, "I have to play, it's Official."

Keef's input in the Monday blog seemed to have a lasting financial effect on some, such as SirGiggidyMMVIII:

"After yesterdays blog I seem to have ended up with a Sony Experia, pre orders for a 3DS, an Ipad 2 and also the new build for Dwarf Fortress. I hope you're on commission Keef."

[Yes, I have already ordered my Pagini Huayra – Keef]

The blog went unusually highbrow for a while, discussing band names with an 'adult entertainment' slant to them. Bloggers plumbed the depths of their depraved and twisted minds, with lowlights such as [Oh, for Heaven's sake! – Keef] amongst many of the more stomach twisting 'I needed to look it up on the internet, but my work filtered it' suggestions.

EnglishRed was the first to crack: "Porn names? Really? We've all had a drink, time to go home now." Sorry Red, it's not even lunchtime yet.

Unusually, gaming was brought up – Blood Bowl and the newly released Shogun: Total War 2 were hot topics. Blood Bowl is becoming a recent favourite [No, really? – Keef] with a few of the newer chatterbox community, but we won't dwell on that because as we all know, 'This isn't the place to discuss games'.

Hairy Nipples.

Post luncheon, there was some talk about the ongoing Cheltenham Festival and some bloggers were dishing out tips. A note for the future; taking financial or betting advice from the bloggers may be a poor choice indeed, with FerrisSaved managing to pick a single winner with his tips and Scamander who managed nought out of three. I don't think there'll be many bloggers on the millionaire list next year, thanks to gambling winnings.

The afternoon was subdued by blog standards. A few more impatient residents asked why Tuesday was taking so long. Existential answers aside, the end would come eventually, but no one seemed to believe it would happen.
HereComesTreble popped in late doors to comment on the fashion sense of Yorkshirefolk: "I haven't seen anyone in Leeds today wearing cufflinks. Can you believe that? Not a single person."

And that was that.

Shortly after, and despite rumours to the contrary, Tuesday did indeed, end.

Wednesday March 16

Day three of Greg Howson's holiday from Chatterbox duty, and whether by luck or judgement, Mr. Keith Stuart esq. managed to deliver a 'NooBox', just in time for the start of the working day. Things were looking up and floggings could now cease.

Perhaps even more surprising was the Gamesblog collectively indulging in gaming related chat, prompted by a recent article's bold claim that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was The Best Game Ever.

Naturally, any internet statement, airing one person's subjective opinion is best responded to by similarly subjective opinions, as to why the original point of view is patently wrong and moreover, ignorant and offensive. It's also a fine opportunity to indulge in another favourite pastime of the blog: making lists. Accordingly, although there was consensus that 'AssBroHo', as the game is affectionately abbreviated, is indeed a very fine game, it was determined to be FACT that Final Fantasy VII, Diablo II, Civilization 2, Ocarina of Time and ICO, amongst others, are better.

Vegetunks9000 argued a strong case in favour of Mass Effect 2 being the best game ever, maintaining, that watching one cut scene alone, made him spill his pink gin: "so good it took two boxes of kleenex to get my chest clean." You have to admit, gaming doesn't get much better than that.

Games: Blood Bowl, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2, Killzone 3

Thursday March 17

St. Patrick's day, apparently. A day generally characterised by the attendance of church services, according to wikipedia; a happy excuse to drink Guinness all day according to St00. The chatterbox decided to celebrate it in a different way, by reminiscing about old TV shows, giving tips about hairstyles, groom speeches and by talking at length about fantasy American football. So the usual then.

Nor'n Irish regular, and current Blogger of the Year™ HereComesTreble, wasn't having the best St. Patrickfs day, proclaiming that: "If I hear one more bad Irish joke, I'm going home to get drunk on my own."

Whether he was actually in a pub at the time of the post, or drinking at work wasn't made clear. He also seemed concerned with the upcoming Ireland versus England Rugby Union match, stating that: "If England win I'll step out in front of a bus."

There is nothing like a bit of perspective, and that definitely wasn't it.

Other 'boxers gave insight into their own bleak existences. R042 shared the happy news that: "I'm off to the pub tonight following a meal at Nandos with friends, there's always something to look forward to." You can draw your own conclusions from that – either he's an eternal optimist, or that he really hasn't got much going on in his life.

On the other hand, Timthemonkey seemed to have escaped a life of grinding poverty in the bleak wastes of the North East, exclaiming how:

"They don't have National Geographic mags in Hartlepool, we were lucky to get Shoot! when I were a lad."

The Chatterbox's resident Methuselah, HenryPootle, was on hand to put that comment into stark contrast, however, boasting how the night before: "I didn't actually play any games. I did make a potato and leek souffle though. It was a roaring success"

Throw some R042's way Mr. Pootle, he needs something to cheer him up.

The rest of the day was taken up with two of the Chatterboxers' favourite topics, old TV shows and Blood Bowl. The day deteriorated into chat about Goblins scoring touchdowns interspersed by reminiscences of Harold Bishop, this included a poignant post from SerenVikity:

"Remember when Harold disappeared.... leaving only his big, plastic spectacles floating in a rock pool? I think I cried."

Saint Patrick would have been so proud.

Quotes of the day

"Sitting in a pub on St. Patrick's Day, ignoring people, posting on an games forum. I pray to God that this is the low point"
HereComesTreble takes stock of where his life is going.

"Remember when Joe Mangle's wife Kerry was shot by a hunter who mistook her for a duck? It's a different world"
JohnnyCarnage mistaking Neighbours for a documentary about antipodean life.

"Ben, unbelievably has got even dirtier"
Goody84 talking about PES2011 again. I hope

And so, like a glue factory reject we hobble lamely on to to Friday, surely the greatest of the weekdays, hopeful of a weekend lasting longer than that last drunken black out and more memorable than this week's prose.

Friday March 17

Friday's chat started with eloquent words of sage advice for Keef, from AlexP, regarding this week's late starts:

"Come on, man up."

Luckily, this late appearance didn't confuse too many bloggers and normal service was resumed before anybody wrote a strongly worded letter to their MP, or set fire to something.

The previous night's gaming was, as usual, discussed in some detail. Mainly, this consisted of Killzone 3, which seems like it may be a staple of NaN Thursdays for a while yet, along with the usual suspects of PES, Blood Bowl and BFBC2.

Throughout the day, many new and upcoming releases were mentioned. Homefront was released on Friday with some picking this up and some undecided. Idoru managed to sneak in a quick blast on the subject and posted his initial thoughts for all to see. His informed 'insider' verdict?

"Obviously too early to say"

Crysis 2 also seems to be nibbling away at many a blogger's resolve. There were also some local folks looking further into the future, towards Gears of War 3. Those with a penchant for overly massive space marines running around a world full of chest-high walls, got very excited by this prospect. Some were also talking of picking up Topspin 4, and this served to prompt some ace tennis nostalgia from the big-hitting blog old guard, BigWorv and TonyHayers.

The afternoon saw a quite irregular and wholly unexpected return to listblog, after an offhand comment from Treble opened the floodgates:

"I actually think list blog is one of the better blogs."

Whether this was welcome or not, many took the opportunity to post lists with remarkable fervour. Gangster films, space films, cheeses, westerns, favourite lists. Faced with the listblog shotgun pointed squarely at them, people started talking, seemingly unable to stop themselves. My personal favourite was StiLteD's cheese list:

"Dutch Smoked x 9 Boursin"

Friday finished with some idle banter on a variety of subjects: Tim's job, work hours and the blog's favourite adult film performer. "She seems like quite a sweet girl," said RustyJames.

The tail end of Friday read very much like people winding down for the weekend, or rather asleep at their keyboards. Words came difficultly, it seemed.

And so the week drew to a close with the shadow of Monday's stark reminder, of the impermanence of our internet ramblings, seemingly forgotten. Everyone departed to do whatever it is they do with their weekends, safe in the knowledge that they'd all be back hooting into the abyss come Monday morning. That is of course if there's a working alarm clock, where it's needed most....

If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change, free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.

End game

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This double 'Best of' was edited by St00 and Tjvs, neither of whom saw it necessary to provide a list of authors with their emails. [Let me know and I'll add the names of the guilty – Keef]

"Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward."
Soren Kierkegaard

I don’t know where to begin. So let me start with Bashar Al Assad—whose father, Hafez, Jimmy Carter wrote he had higher regard for than any other leader in the Middle East. Barack Obama never said anything quite that hagiographic about the son. But Hillary Clinton, his pliant chief diplomat, told “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the Syrian president was considered by members of Congress from both parties to be a “reformer.” How many senators and representatives will own up to Hillary’s characterization? It is hokum. The hokum started long ago. One can locate it in time: June 14, 2000, in a New York Times article by Susan Sachs headlined, “The Shy Young Doctor at Syria’s Helm.” Doctor this and doctor that. And, of course, “Dr. Bashar.” There is nothing like a first name to humanize a tyrant. “Fidel,” for example. And more: general practitioner, ophthalmologist, director of the Syrian Society for Information Technology.

Most Syrians have expressed public confidence in Dr. Assad, even while conceding that he is young and inexperienced. They know him as the director of the Syrian Scientific Society for Information Technology, which offers computer courses, though only a small percentage of Syrians can afford luxury items like computers.

Thanks to an orchestrated campaign in the state news media to credit him with fighting corruption and promoting a more open economy, Dr. Assad also is seen as a beacon of hope for a new, more relaxed Syria.

He recently told The Washington Post that he personally favored lifting all of hidebound Syria's restrictions on what people read, watch on television or discover on the Internet.

"As a point of principle, I would like everybody to be able to see everything," he was quoted as saying. "The more you see, the more you improve." But others, Dr. Assad added, have their reservations.

It went on more or less like this for maybe seven or eight years when the reality purveyors suddenly caught on that the dictator’s boy was a dictator himself. Until, that is, this last weekend with the aforementioned discovery of the secretary of state that he was a “reformer.”

The president must have felt similarly because he constantly pressed on Israel the view that Assad was a reasonable and trustworthy man. Or was it that he believed the United States and the Jewish state were so tainted by their histories of haughty dealings with Arabs that Israel certainly needed to take the first perilous steps to conciliate its northern neighbor? I am inclined to the second explanation. In a way, though, he’d boxed himself into a corner. Having forced both Israel and the Palestinian Authority into the cul de sac of settlements as the pivotal issue among the parties (a matter already implicitly but not definitively resolved between the two antagonists), the president needed another key to unlock and unblock the conflict. No scenario looked especially hopeful, not at least to true realists. But the White House thought it had insufficient cachet with the Damascus dictator. So, rather than pressing Syria to stop its arms deliveries to Hezbollah, it began to press Israel on the Golan.

Why Obama thought the Golan Heights could be the big opener in the peace process is anybody’s guess. The fact is that the Palestinians do not care a fig for the Golan, and an Israeli concession on it would not be seen as—and would not be—a concession to anyone but the Ba’athists. Who, of course, cannot be trusted on anything. Which is one reason why Jerusalem was not inclined to experiment on a big swath of high ground that had been the source of death and destruction for first two decades of statehood. I believe that it would actually be more difficult for international interlocutors to persuade the Israelis to give up the Heights than to relinquish parts of east Jerusalem, one reason being that this territory is and was virtually without Syrians, except Syrian soldiers, in 1967: a few Druze, yes; two tens of thousands of Israelis now, yes. Here the principle must be, like the principle from all just wars, that to the aggressed-upon victor belongs the spoils. 

In any case, Assad’s always shaky rule over Syria is now exposed as just that. And just that because it is not based on anyone’s consent but on coercion and domestic terror. The governing 12 percent minority of the Alawite sect is Syria’s equivalent to Saddam Hussein’s clan of Tikriti Sunnis, both having ruled cruelly and bloodily. Indeed, the Assads have nursed a particular grudge against the Palestinians, almost all of them. They had little truck with Arafat and sided in the intra-Palestinian wars with the secular “socialist” schismatics who’d headquartered themselves in Syria’s capital. This did not preclude the first family from enabling the internal sectarian bloodletting that is the program of both (Sunni) Hamas in Gaza and (Shia) Hezbollah in Lebanon, which incidentally Damascus still deems its own. I have not mentioned the ambitions of these terrorist groups against Israel.

In a tangled Sunday dispatch from Washington, Mark Landler reports that the “deepening chaos in Syria ... could dash any remaining hopes for a Middle East peace agreement, several analysts said.” In truth, however, there was almost no hope for such an agreement even before the challenge in the streets. Anyway, which seasoned analysts? The one he quotes is Martin Indyk, who almost always believes that tout va bien, but especially when things are going horridly.

Well, we don’t really know how badly or, for that matter, how well things are going. Still, there is something exhilarating in the Libyan rising against one of the two or three leading political crackpots of the age. And the support of that rising by Western democracies through NATO. That Obama was less than resolute in this enterprise is something we have come to expect. Of course, liberal Democrats have tried to make a virtue of the failing. The National Security Network issued an exemplary statement: “The effective handoff to NATO command and growing Arab state participation show that the United States can lead by letting others out in front.” This is double talk ... or maybe agitprop. The Arab League actually beat a hasty retreat from its much publicized endorsement of a no-fly zone over Libya. As for “growing Arab state participation,” all that this means is Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Hey, let me admit, that’s still more than anyone had reason to expect. A cool accounting of what’s been accomplished through “Odyssey Dawn” can be read in yesterday’s PolicyWatch by Jeffrey White, published by the Washington Institute.

As for Egypt, I cling to the hope that its people will realize social and economic progress with some political and legal justice. But if the new government is overwhelmed by the Muslim Brotherhood, neither of these (in any case) dicey hopes will be realized. The Brotherhood is actually a movement of the restoration of ideals and policies, some more than a millennium old, others going back only centuries, which either way inhibited education, industry, gender equality, elementary fairness. The Shia revolution in Iran is the very model for its Sunni enemy on the Nile. If Cairo reneges on its treaty with Israel, Egypt will find itself in another drama out of which it will not emerge either victorious or prosperous. An article by Barry Rubin in Monday’s Jerusalem Post argues that “another Israel-Hamas war is inevitable” precisely because the theology of Egypt itself will be transformed under Islamist rule.

Just yesterday I received an e-mail from a dear (and brilliant) Moroccan friend in Marrakech musing on the present or rather future state of Arab affairs. He writes: “If they don’t care about Israel as their disciplined and civilized neighbor they will, as usual, accomplish nothing.” Of course, independent Arab intellectuals are a rare species in the world they inhabit. So this is not a widely held point of view. And it is sparsely held especially in Syria where the Muslim Brotherhood has deep and broad rooting. Take your choice: Assad is allied with Hezbollah and Iran, militant Shi’ism on the march. Assad’s embittered enemies are soldiers of the Sunni sword. Obama tried his luck with Assad as, forgive the recollection, he also did with Dr. Ahmadinejad. The president then followed the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, in his royal bankrolling effort to lure the eye doctor away from Nasrallah. Even the dynast’s billions couldn’t do the trick. Barack Obama will not reflect on how in just a bit over two years he got himself and America into this fix.

Martin Peretz is the editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic.

Fear persists among Egypts minority Coptic community despite hope among the rest of the population of greater freedom after the successful referendum to amend the constitution

The well-known author and anti-jihad activist Bat Ye’or — a native of Egypt — was interviewed at the Norwegian website Document.no about the recent upheavals in Egypt and the political prospects there for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Many thanks to Cecilie for translating the interview, and to Tundra Tabloids for posting it. Some excerpts are below:

Bat Ye’or: The Brotherhood wants to Islamize modernity, not to modernize Islam

Q: Bat Ye’or, thank you for letting Document.no. interview you. There has recently been a revolution in your native country, Egypt. Everybody was apparently surprised by the fall of Mubarak’s regime. Were you surprised too?

A: Yes, of course.

Q: Few commentators seem to have any clear idea of where the road leads to for Egypt. The subsequent future events compared with both the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the revolution in Iran in 1979. Where do you think the country is heading now?

A: We are on the way to the end, I fear, for the Muslim Brotherhood is the only well-organized and structured movement with clear objectives and an international power base. It also seems that it has almost unlimited access to financing. I am of the opinion that any comparison with Western revolution is meaningless, because we are dealing with a Shariah society that works within a political view of reality that rejects the foundation of our own. I have also noticed with great sadness that the attacks and murders of Copts have increased.

Q: Foreign correspondents in Egypt say that the protesters’ anger was a cry for justice, and they recognized that there was something genuinely positive in the uprising. But the most cautious would add that this is not something upon which to build a community, given that it is easier to unite against someone than it is to find the way forward together. Can all this youthful energy have some positive impact, or is it disorganized?

A: I agree with the correspondent’s point of view. But democracy, freedom, jobs and justice can only be developed if you develop the right institutions and have a grasp of the economy. Egypt is a poor country with more than 80 million inhabitants, of whom a large percentage are illiterate who cannot cope with the challenges of the 21st century. I do not doubt the abilities of the academic and educated elite, but the social problems are so huge. The general trend towards a more traditionally religious society based on the Koran will also not contribute to modernization.

Q: Do the Egyptian masses want democracy in any meaningful sense of the word, or do they lack a clear understanding of what it is all about?

A: They surely want democracy, but when you listen to what they have to say, it seems they think there is something tangible that they can grasp and carry, and not an abstract idea that needs time and requires effort from the entire nation to be accomplished. Democracy is not just majority rule. It involves a politically independent judiciary, equal rights for all — including non-Muslims and non-Arab minorities such as Kurds, Assyrians, and Berbers — and freedom of expression and acceptance of pluralism and criticism. But all this is forbidden both in Sharia law and in the Cairo Declaration of 1990 on human rights in Islam. In order to achieve democracy, one must first eliminate the Sharia.

Q: Professor Bernard Lewis says that there is something in the Muslim tradition that is vaguely reminiscent of democracy; in other words these consultative groups consisting of key people, clan leaders etc. Is such a corporate model the best you could hope for?

A: Such meetings, in which unelected tribal leaders make decisions have nothing whatsoever to do with a modern democracy as we know it.

Q: The Copts were not particularly satisfied with the election of the leader of the constitutional committee. Do you fear that the constitutional amendments will pave the way for the Brotherhood?

A: As early as 1971 the Egyptian Constitution’s Article 2 specified that “the Islamic legal principles is one of the main sources of legislation.” This rule was strengthened on 30 April 1980, when Parliament changed it to Sharia being the main source of legislation. Egypt has kept many Islamic laws: polygamy, discrimination against women, lack of recognition of the Baha’i as a religion, punishment for apostasy and blasphemy, as well as restrictions on Christian religious and civil rights. I am sure that the Brotherhood influence will give the Christians as well as the liberal Muslims an even harder life if they (the Brotherhood) enter the parliament. In addition there will be no democracy without full recognition of Israel’s rights in its historic homeland, or unless the ideology of jihad against non-Muslims ceases.

Q: Is there a danger that they can win big at an early election?

A: Yes, for the others in opposition consist of a scattered mass without leaders, and political discussions so far show no sign of modern ideas of government, institutions or geopolitics.

Q: In Europe, the Brotherhood is portrayed as a relatively benign movement because it has settled into a less violent rhetoric. After the Coptic church was attacked after New Year, we even heard that some of its members expressed their wish to be human shields outside the churches. Is this a tactical maneuver, or is there any chance that the Brotherhood’s ideas have changed?

A: This is to only a small degree about individual members’ personal inclinations. The Brotherhood has a political program: the implementation of sharia law all over the world — initially to be implemented in Muslim countries, and we all know what sharia is. The believers argue that it (sharia) is perfect because it is Allah’s will, and therefore must be applied without modification and without discussion. In global politics the Brotherhood promote a jihadist theology.

Q: How dangerous is the Brotherhood?

A: It is very dangerous, for it has adopted a Western language to undermine the West. It aims to Islamize modernity, not to modernize Islam. Its founders and leaders promote jihad as a method for the introduction of Sharia, which they believe will cover all aspects of life, personal as well as social and political.

Q: It is sometimes said that the army is a guarantor against full Islamization. But it may well not be completely free of Islamists in its ranks? Is it possible that the army will split into factions in the event of a national crisis?

A: This was also said about Turkey, but there an Islamist government was elected, which set out to weaken the army’s power. The Egyptian revolution created quite a national crisis, but even though the army had Islamists in its ranks, it was not divided. But let us not forget that Sharia schools, media and movies have already poisoned generations into hatred against the West, against Israel, which is the heart of Western values, and against the Bible, which has shaped Western civilization and spirituality.

Q: Is there anything the West can do to exert constructive influence over what is happening in Egypt now?…

Read the rest at Tundra Tabloids.

I am shocked that the Western experts were so wrong. Again.

In post-revolutionary Egypt, where hope and confusion collide in the daily struggle to build a new nation, religion has emerged as a powerful political force, following an uprising that was based on secular ideals. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group once banned by the state, is at the forefront, transformed into a tacit partner with the military government that many fear will thwart fundamental changes.

It is also clear that the young, educated secular activists who initially propelled the nonideological revolution are no longer the driving political force — at least not at the moment.

As the best organized and most extensive opposition movement in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was expected to have an edge in the contest for influence. But what surprises many is its link to a military that vilified it.

“There is evidence the Brotherhood struck some kind of a deal with the military early on,” said Elijah Zarwan, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “It makes sense if you are the military — you want stability and people off the street. The Brotherhood is one address where you can go to get 100,000 people off the street.”

“We are all worried,” said Amr Koura, 55, a television producer, reflecting the opinions of the secular minority. “The young people have no control of the revolution anymore. It was evident in the last few weeks when you saw a lot of bearded people taking charge. The youth are gone.”

In the early stages of the revolution, the Brotherhood was reluctant to join the call for demonstrations. It jumped in only after it was clear that the protest movement had gained traction. Throughout, the Brotherhood kept a low profile, part of a survival instinct honed during decades of repression by the state.

The question at the time was whether the Brotherhood would move to take charge with its superior organizational structure. 

It now appears that it has.
But the more secular forces say that what they need is time.

“I worry about going too fast towards elections, that the parties are still weak,” said Nabil Ahmed Helmy, former dean of the Zagazig law school and a member of the National Council for Human Rights. 

As I said, I am shocked. Only last month the NYT's own Nicholas Kristof waxed lyrical about the courage of the Facebook youth of Egypt and said we should be ashamed to even think that they would not be taking Egypt in a new, liberal, democratic direction.

And I, an anonymous blogger who does not have the prestige or experience of Nick Kristof and who has never even visited Egypt, had the audacity to respond:

Kristof is making a major mistake. He is confusing bravery for political maturity.

No one doubts the protesters' bravery. No one doubts their integrity, or their desire for change, or even their desire for democracy.

But there are serious doubts at their ability to translate the raw desire for freedom into a functional, liberal, democratic government.

It is hard work to create the institutions necessary. More importantly, it takes time - and time is not on the side of the protesters.

It is now fashionable to pooh-pooh the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kristof's liberal circles, but no one can doubt that the Islamists are better organized and much more politically mature than the Facebookers of Tahrir Square. It takes time to set up an organization, to define a clear agenda, to build a fundraising mechanism, to attract volunteers, to build a means to communicate with all the people - including in rural areas, and to do all the myriad details from physical buildings to a phone system to a mailing list.

True freedom cannot flourish until Egyptians have been exposed to a wide range of ideas on a level playing field. The existing Islamist groups are running circles around the "Egyptian youth" we hear so much about. Kristof is so caught up in the emotions of the moment that he cannot think outside Tahrir Square, to the 99% of the country that is not as emotionally invested in who their leaders would be. To them, the nice people with beards who build a free Islamic school for their kids are the only game in town.

Enthusiasm does not ensure effective state building and true freedoms. Kristof, instead of spouting straw-man arguments, should be advocating ways for his jeans-wearing heroes to channel their sparks of enthusiasm and bravery into the hard, thankless and often boring work necessary to build a new Egypt from scratch.

How dare I disagree with such an outstanding pundit and accurately predict nearly everything in this article written by his employer a month later? How could I have the chutzpah to mention that the New York Times is paying someone to spout wishful-thinking nonsense while I, and many others, could see what was to happen from thousands of miles away?

 (I didn't see a partnership with the army, I admit...that is actually stunning and far more worrisome than what I had written.)

Someone once observed that a liberal’s life consists of confronting one unexpected suprise after another. I think it is safe to say that the same can be said of the typical Ivy League foreign policy wonk, to the extent they are different groups of people.

A lot of people of all political persuasions were excited by the “Jasmin” revolution that started in Tunisia and spread, near instantly, to Egypt and resulted in the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak. Just like the situation in Libya, no one took the time to ask what we knew about the demonstrators before we cast our lot with them.

The average citizen can be excused. The stripey pants set in Foggy Bottom, not so much.

From today’s NY Times, who are also shocked, shocked at the happenings:

In post-revolutionary Egypt, where hope and confusion collide in the daily struggle to build a new nation, religion has emerged as a powerful political force, following an uprising that was based on secular ideals. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group once banned by the state, is at the forefront, transformed into a tacit partner with the military government that many fear will thwart fundamental changes.

It is also clear that the young, educated secular activists who initially propelled the nonideological revolution are no longer the driving political force — at least not at the moment.

[...]

“We are all worried,” said Amr Koura, 55, a television producer, reflecting the opinions of the secular minority. “The young people have no control of the revolution anymore. It was evident in the last few weeks when you saw a lot of bearded people taking charge. The youth are gone.”

Hmmm. Committed, ruthless, professional subversives have managed to push aside the Egyptian equivalent of the contributors at dKos. Who would have thought this could come to pass?

And we’re seeing an immediate result of this:

Cairo: Women arrested by Egyptian military personnel during protests at Cairo’s Tahrir Square were subjected to “virginity tests” and other forms of humiliation, claims an Amnesty International report.

Eighteen demonstrators were detained by army officers on March 9 at the end of weeks of protest.

The Amnesty report revealed that the women protesters were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches and photographed by male soldiers.

Women were then given ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges if the medics ruled they had had sex, said the report.

Amnesty has called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate this alleged abuse, which it described as ‘utterly unacceptable.’

‘The purpose is to degrade women because they are women”, “All women of the medical profession must refuse to take part in such so-called ‘tests’,” The Daily Mail quoted an Amnesty spokesman, as saying.

The spokesman said one woman who had told the military she was a virgin and then failed the ‘test’ was beaten and given electric shocks.

The only thing left to make this a rousing success for the Obama Doctrine is the inevitable “one man, one vote, one time.”

Jacob: Chapter 15 Tick Tock Tick Tock Tick Tock

"Two weeks to a day, the days flying by. Her life speeding by in fast-forward. How many days did that give her if she was counting to forty? Four? It took me a minute to figure out how to swallow." - Jacob Black

Jake and his renegade pack are paving the way to make sure the Cullens can leave safely to go out for a hunting trip. Jake notices that Leah's hostility, which is usually directed toward him, is more so directed to the Cullens and Bella. She is not very happy to be protecting vampires. And of course she is still refusing to accept the Cullens hospitable gestures.

The pack starts discussing why the Cullens haven't left town yet. It would make sense for them to jet before Sam and his pack attacks but Carlisle doesn't want to move Bella in her condition, afraid it may do more harm than good. So for now Jake and his pack will stand by and protect them for as long as they need to.

Bella is doing better since she fed the "thristy" thing inside of her, but the baby is running out of room inside of her. It is simply too much for her body to handle. It is breaking her ribs and making it uncomfortable for her but she is still hell bent on keeping this baby. And of course Rosalie is there backing her up the whole way, totally pissing Edward off.

Seth informs Jake that Bella has been talking to Charlie and telling him she is on the way to recovery and Jake thinks this is a horrible idea. He thinks they are setting Charlie up to have a harder fall when Bella just up and disappears, if she even makes it through this mess that is.

When Jake gets back to the Cullen house Bella is once again ecstatic to see him. Bella is a little chilly so Jake provides himself as a heating blanket and keeps her warm. While they were all sitting around Bella, Alice suggests that Rosalie makes Jake something to eat. When she brings him back his food, she has placed it in a silver bowl where she scratched "Fido" on the side. Once Jacob finishes his food...he chucks the bowl and smacks her right in the head with it.

Bella tells Jake that the baby should be coming in a very short time and he can't help but get worried at the thought and he turns to Edward who is the burning man once again. Jake 'is trying to figure out why the pull was so strong to Bella right now. He just couldn't leave her side. Why was that?

Finally Jake gets the courage to ask Bella why she needs him around so much. She tells him that he is one of her most favorite people. She explains that somehow the two of them got out of balance and go off track. She said that she did something wrong. It was her fault.

After Bella dozes off Edward and Jake have a talk and Edward explains Bella's motives to talking to Charlie. She wants to keep him in her life even after she is a vampire. She wants to keep her family if she can. Then Edward and Carlisle explain the process of how these kinds of babies were often born. They use their own teeth to escape from the womb. Whoa!

Chapter 16 Too-Much-Information Alert

"Am I less annoying than Paul now?

Amazingly...yes.

Ahhh sweet success.

Congrats." - Jacob Black & Leah Clearwater

The pack is doing a sweep to make sure its safe for the Cullens to go hunt and while they are out on patrol Leah confesses to Jake that she is happier being apart of his pack than being with Sam's. She wants to stay with him. Then they bond over a wolfy hunt :)

She also opens up to Jake about being a genetic dead. She will not have babies and have a family. Leah is certain this is why Sam didn't imprint on her. Her heart is broken. She tells him she wants to imprint and he tells her she is crazy, that it is just another way of losing control of yourself and your actions.

Jake heads back to the Cullen house to give them the go to leave for their hunt. When he gets there Bella is upstairs and Alice tells him its another break. This time it was her pelvis. Everyone comes back downstairs and in the midst of Jacob and Rosalie's normal bickering...Edward hears something.

Not just a normal sound...but someone's thoughts. Edward can hear the baby's thoughts! He first thinks that he is finally able to hear Bella's thoughts but then he realizes its the baby. The baby likes the sound of Bella's voice and Edwards!

Bella starts to speak to the baby in the way all mothers would speak to their child. She even calls him EJ...Edward Jr. When Rosalie asks her what her back up plan is for a name she tells her if the baby happens to be a girl she will name her Renesmee, a mixture of Renee and Esme.

Edward tells Bella how much the baby loves and adores her and suddenly Jake is standing there feeling betrayed by Edward's excitement. Edward gets a glimpse into Jacob's mind and sees the fear and hurt and throws him a set of keys and tells him to get out! He was giving him a chance to escape.
***************************************************************

Well what a whirlwind of emotion in these two chapters! Feelings are flying all over the place! Let's start with Leah...I am so happy to report she does have a heart ladies and gents! Seriously though I really felt for her. I couldn't imagine being in her shoes. Not only has she lost the man she loved but she would never be able to bear children and it was likely she would never imprint so she would have to go out and find love on her own. Which c'mon being a werewolf would make it a tad hard to have a relationship with someone outside of their world, but still why would you want to live your life being pissed at everyone. These are the cards you are dealt so you can either make yourself miserable and mope around and make everyone else around you miserable, or you can live with what you have and make the best of it...just saying.

Jake. Awww poor Jacob. This guy has taken an emotional beat down these last few chapters. He is so confused, scared, angry, mad, hurt...everything and Bella's weird ways do not help at all. I have to say even though I dislike his wolfy ways I really feel for him. I hate to see anyone in so much confusion. Thank god he took his confusion out on Rosalie...hells yeah Jake! I LOVED LOVED LOVED when he chucked the bowl at Rosalie's head. It was awesome! Also did you notice the bit of foreshadowing on his imprinting on Renesmee? He was talking about how he was drawn to Bella and couldn't understand why. Well duh! He is drawn to the baby not Bella :)

Edward gets husband of the year...hands down. This woman is ripping him apart at the seams and he is still the most devoted and loving man ever. I also have to say I am enjoying the bit of brotherhood that is going on between him and Jacob. Its a nice bond. Also I almost die when Edward's daddy instincts kick in when he realizes he can hear the baby's thoughts. I cannot wait to see this precious moment on film. Daddy Rob may push me over my limit :)

Finally Bella...I am so happy that she finally admits that its her fault that her relationship with Jake got all screwed up. Why could she not have admitted this before? She only put him through hell. I don't know though..Jake probably would not have listened to her anyway. I do however admire Bella for putting herself through so much for the sake of her child and I was so happy that she was rewarded for her efforts by getting to hear the baby's thoughts via Edward. But Renesmee? Really? What kind of name is that ha ha

Ok let's get this discussion going! Its been kind of quiet last few chapters so let me get you guys started. What about Leah? Do you have compassion for her or should she just deal? How much did you love Rosalie getting food all in her hair? Do you like the friendship coming between Edward and Jacob? Are you excited about seeing Daddy Edward on screen? Do you think he betrayed Jacob when he got all gooey and sentimental about hearing the baby's thoughts? Is it Bella's fault that everything between her and Jacob is so screwed up? Comments below!! Hope you all had a great Christmas!!!!!!!!!!

Section: Gaming News, Consoles, PS3, Wii, Xbox-360, PCs, Windows, Handhelds, DS & DSi & DSi XL, Gear, Accessories, Controllers, Ads & Media, Print, Advertisements, Genres, 2D, 3D, Action, Adventure, Casual, Children's, FPS, Shooter, MMO, Music, Puzzle, Racing, Role-Playing, Sports, Sim, Strategy

Last week, we got a quick sneak peek at some of the sale games that would be appearing in Best Buy’s after Christmas ad. Well, now we actually have Best Buy’s December 26, 2010 through January 1, 2011 ad in hand to see exactly what’s available. There are a few good deals, but not as many as you’d think. Plus, you have to look carefully at the ad, as some games are in there and not on sale.

To make things easier, let’s go through the sale games by system.

DS

• America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking - $9.99
• Bakugan - $9.99
• Club Penguin: Herbert’s Revenge - $17.99
• Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies - $19.99
• Picross 3D - $9.99
• Pokemon HeartGold - $19.99
• Professor Layton and the Unwound Future - $17.99
• Toy Story 3 - $17.99
• WarioWare D.I.Y. - $19.99

PS3/Xbox 360

• 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa - $14.99
• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood - $34.99
• Batman Arkham Asylum - $19.99
• Battlefield Bad Company 2 - $29.99
• Bloodstone 007 - $39.99
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - $39.99
• Crackdown 2 (Xbox 360) - $19.99
• Def Jam Rapstar - $39.99
• DJ Hero 2 - $59.99
• Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition - $49.99
• EA Sports Active 2 (PS3) - $59.99
• Fallout: New Vegas - $34.99
• FIFA Soccer 11 - $49.99
• God of War III (PS3) - $39.99
• Grand Theft Auto IV & Episodes from Liberty City - $29.99
• Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock - $39.99
• Medal of Honor - $39.99
• NBA 2K11 - $49.99
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit - $49.99
• Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands - $9.99
• Resident Evil 5 - $14.99
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II - $39.99
• Street Fighter Iv - $14.99
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction (Xbox 360) - $9.99
• Tony Hawk: Shred - $59.99
• Transformers: War for Cybertron - $29.99
• Tron Evolution - $39.99
• UFC Undisputed 2010 - $14.99
• Save $20 when you buy Red Dead Redemption ($59.99) and the Undead Nightmare
• expansion ($29.99) at the same time

Wii

• Bass Pro Shops: The Hunt - $39.99
• Bass Pro Shops: The Strike - $39.99
• The Biggest Loser Challenge - $19.99
• Chicken Blaster - $9.99
• Disney Epic Mickey - $39.99
• DJ Hero 2 - $59.99
• EA Sports Active 2 - $59.99
• FIFA Soccer 11 - $39.99
• Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock - $39.99
• Jeopardy - $19.99
• Just Dance 2 - $29.99
• Madden 11 - $39.99
• Metroid Other M - $29.99
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit - $39.99
• Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time - $29.99
• Sin & Punishment: Star Successor - $29.99
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II - $39.99
• Super Mario Galaxy 2 - $39.99
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon - $39.99
• Tony Hawk: Shred - $59.99
• Wheel of Fortune - $19.99

Computer

• Medal of Honor (Windows) - $39.99
• World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion (Windows, Mac) - $29.99
• Buy two, get one free on $9.99 PC games

A number of accessories are also reduced. So if you received a new system this holiday season but didn’t get all of the extras you need to go with it, you can get some on sale this week with your gift cards.

• Afterglow Controllers (PS3, Wii, Xbox 360) - $19.99
• G330 Gaming Headset (PC) - $29.99
• G930 Gaming Headset (PC) - $129.99
• Logitech Driving Force GT (PS3) - $99.99
• Rocketfish Dual Charge Station (Wii) - $19.99
• Turtle Beach Ear Force X31 (Xbox 360) - $79.99
• Ultra Wireless Sensor Bar (Wii) - $14.99
• Xbox Live Gold 12-month Subscription - $44.99

As you can see, you’re definitely set for gaming items this week at Best Buy. I hope you got some gift cards!

Site [Best Buy]

Full Story » | Written by Jenni Lada for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »

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