text:
Standard heat or heater tapes are made from fine gage stranded resistance
wires that are double insulated with braided fiberglass and knitted into
flat tapes for maximum flexibility. A heavy insulated heat tape is made
by taking a standard tape and braiding it between layers of fiberglass
yarn. Wide tapes are made from two or more standard tape heaters that
are sewn between two layers of fiberglass cloth. APPLICATIONS
SRT, FGH, FWH, STH, or SWH series tape are good for direct contact on a conductive surface. Never use FGS or SST series tape on a conductive surface.
Heating Elements: 36-40 gage resistance wire.
Lead Wires: Emerge from opposite ends into separate sides of an integrally molded separable plug
Heating Element Insulation: Double-braided fiberglass
Dielectric Strength: In excess of 2000 V
CAUTION AND WARNING! Fire and electrical shock may result if products are used improperly or installed or used by non-qualified personnel. See inside back cover for additional warnings.
Standard Insulated Tapes Model No. Watts W/in2 Volts Size FGS0031-010468.61203/8"X12" FGS051-0201048.61201/2"X2' FGS051-0402098.61201/2"X4' FGS051-0603138.61201/2"X6' FGS051-0804188.61201/2"X8' FGS051-1005228.61201/2"X10' FGS101-0202098.61201"X2' FGS101-0404188.61201"X4' FGS101-0606278.61201"X6' FGS101-0808368.61201"X8' FGS102-100*10458.62401"X10' Wide Heavy Insulated Tapes Model No. Watts W/in2 Volts Size FWH171-0202084.91201 3/4"X2' FWH171-0404164.91201 3/4"X4' FWH171-0606244.91201 3/4"X6' FWH171-0808324.91201 3/4X8' FWH171-10010404.91201 3/4"X10' FWH251-0203145.21202 1/2"X2' FWH251-0406285.21202 1/2"X4' FWH251-0609425.21202 1/2"X6' FWH251-08012565.21202 1/2"X8' FWH251-100*15705.21202 1/2"X10' FWH321-0204185.31203 1/4"X2' FWH321-0408365.31203 1/4"X4' FWH321-06012565.31203 1/4"X6' FWH321-080*16725.31203 1/4"X8' FWH321-100*20925.31203 1/4"X10' Heavy Insulated Tapes Model No. Watts W/in2 Volts Size FGH051-0201048.61201/2"X2' FGH051-0402098.61201/2"X4' FGH051-0603138.61201/2"X6' FGH051-0804188.61201/2"X8' FGH051-1005228.61201/2"X10' FGH101-0202098.61201"X2' FGH101-0404188.61201"X4' FGH101-0606278.61201"X6' FGH101-0808368.61201"X8' FGH102-100*10408.62401"X10'


text:
The Tubes is the debut album of The Tubes. Songs from this album which received significant airplay include "What Do You Want from Life" and "White Punks on Dope". The latter song peaked at number 28 on the UK singles chart. The album was dedicated to Bob McIntosh and Tom Donahue.
Description provided by Wikipedia under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 4.0

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Where I will be sitting when I finish the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.
Copyright © 2017 Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
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text:
Moving shiftily between Pakistani cricket supporters and panama-wearing MCC members gathering outside the spiritual home of cricket, Henry, a ticket tout, was blunt and to the point in his analysis of the plight of the sport. He said: "I'm worried. You know a game is in trouble if the likes of me look more trustworthy than some of the guys in there playing."
Strong sentiments about the damage being caused by lingering allegations of gambling scams and a spectacularly backfiring counter-assault by Ijaz Butt, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) – who suggested that England players threw a one-day international last Friday – were not difficult to find amid the cricketing faithful at Lord's yesterday.
The tone for the fourth one-day international between England and Pakistan was set barely an hour before play started at 1pm, first by a strongly worded statement from the England and Wales Cricket Board threatening legal action against Mr Butt, and then by a pre-match confrontation between the batsman Jonathan Trott and the bowler Wahab Riaz in the practice nets.
Officials insisted the fracas between Trott and Riaz, who was interviewed last week by Scotland Yard detectives investigating the spot-fixing claims against Pakistani players, was purely verbal.
But there was no mistaking the crackle of despair caused by the renewed descent of the most gentlemanly of sporting pursuits into internecine strife.
Henry, whose trade had been so badly affected by the 5,000 unsold seats for yesterday's match that he had taken to directing potential clients to the official ticket booth for £30 tickets he said he could not undercut, said: "Gambling and sport have always gone together, and so has a little bit of shady stuff.
"But this is all a bit different. People aren't going to come if they don't think it's credible any more. If I sell someone a dud ticket, then I get found out pretty quickly. But with match-fixing, the truth is harder to get at. Unless they sort it out, it'll slowly kill the trust people have in cricket. And that's bad news for the likes of me."
Amid the jumble of gentlemen sporting MCC ties and Pakistan fans wearing jingling jester hats, there was broad support for the decision to play the two remaining one-day games despite Mr Butt's unsubstantiated claim that England players received "enormous sums of money" to lose deliberately Friday's game at the Oval.
The allegations from the head of the PCB provoked the English to consider seriously withdrawing from the series, but in the end, they issued a statement making clear that the team "deplores and rejects unreservedly the suggestion that any England cricketer was involved in manipulating the outcome" of the match. For his part, Mr Butt insisted he had merely been reporting rumours among bookmakers.
Ahmed Yusuf, 26, a civil servant and self-confessed "cricket nut" from Leicester, said: "The game always has to go on. You remove the troublemakers and head out to the wicket. The whole summer has been ugly for Pakistani cricket and I wouldn't blame the England players for being pissed off with Ijaz Butt.
"It's pretty awful when the head of one national cricket board starts slinging around allegations at an opposing team. It looks like a wounded animal lashing out."
With the International Cricket Council now investigating at least three games between England and Pakistan this summer for investigation of spot-fixing, many were firm in their conviction that the sport's governing body needed to take swifter and more draconian action against any wrongdoers.
Alan Watts, 69, wearing an MCC tie, said: "Any player taking money even for slowing the run rate for an over should be out for life. We really do have to be that harsh."
But as Lord's hosted its last international game of the season with a distinctly autumnal chill in the air, there was at least evidence of an abiding passion for cricket.
Shahzad Dar, 55, a businessman, had flown from his home in New York with the sole purpose of watching proceedings. He said: "The damage may have already been done, but we love cricket, and that is what will surely make it survive. Not the players, [but] the fans."
And, if anyone's still interested, England lost by 38 runs yesterday.
Spectators' views: 'The sport is not finished because of these claims'
John Franks, 81 Retired solicitor
"My father told me to always gamble on dogs, because even if you can make them go too slow or too fast, you'll never be sure of the outcome. Humans are just too unreliable in that regard. I think we should sit back and let the investigators do their work before we make judgements about the nature or extent of the problem. It is right that we should carry on playing the game while this process is undertaken. We don't yet know properly what we are dealing with."
Shahzad Dar, 55 Businessman
"I am very happy to be here because cricket is what counts, not what we read in the papers. The sport is not finished because of these claims. It's all very easily dealt with if the ICC gets tough enough. I have travelled from America for this game. England gave the world the game and the sport is bigger than any one single country. It would be wrong to allow our enjoyment to be spoilt by allegations involving a minority of individuals. We should get on with it."
Richard Purnell, 34 Accountant
"These problems have been around for a number of years. Clearly it is time that the governing bodies have to deal with it. I don't think we've got to the stage where as fans we can't believe what is going on before our eyes. I don't think matches are being fixed per se; that would be very difficult to do now. But corruption has not gone entirely and they need to make an example of anyone caught doing it. Nothing seems to have come of previous attempts to stamp it out."
Cyrus Khan, 19 Student
"The claims of corruption and the rows are damaging to the sport. But it would be much more damaging if games like this were not played. It's very important that these matches continue, because we can't let the bad things kill off the game. There need to be tougher sanctions to crack down on these problems. I don't think it's an issue in England but it seems to be rife in Pakistan. Even if it's just a couple of balls in an over, it is immoral and needs to be stopped."
- More about:
- Bribes & Corruption
- Cricket
- New York State
- Shane Warne


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Debt Management for Veterans
Nov 8, 2012
Bankruptcy can help those with too much debt by erasing all or most of their debts and providing a fresh financial start. It can only be granted by a state or federal court.Explore Your Options Now
Bankruptcy is the legal status for an individual or company unable to pay off outstanding debt. It is a status that can only be granted by a state or federal court.
Generally, personal bankruptcy is considered a last resort for people inundated with loans or bills. Although going bankrupt is an effective way to wipe out most or all debt obligations, there are long-lasting consequences.
Bankruptcy will negatively affect your credit and future ability to use money. It may prevent or delay foreclosure on a home and repossession of a car. It can also stop wage garnishment and other legal actions of creditors attempting to collect debts.
In addition, filing for bankruptcy can be a complex and costly process. Experts suggest investigating other options seriously before considering bankruptcy.
There were 936,795 bankruptcy filings in 2014, a 12.5 percent drop from 2013. Still, that is four times as many as there were in 1980. There was a steady climb that peaked in 2005, with 2.08 million bankruptcies, and the number has gone up and down since then.Bankruptcy Filings in the United States by Year
The percentage of bankruptcies filed by consumers also has risen. In the early 1980s, consumer filings made up about 82 to 87 percent of all bankruptcy filings. By 2012, this had risen to 97 percent, meaning businesses made up only 3 percent of the bankruptcy filings.
The overriding principle of bankruptcy is that it wipes away debt -- sometimes all debt, many times a portion of it. All the other consequences are negative impact, especially as it concerns your credit score.
Bankruptcy remains on your credit report for 7 to 10 years, depending upon which chapter of bankruptcy you file under. For example, Chapter 7 (the most common) is on your credit report for 10 years, while a Chapter 13 filing (second most common) is there for seven years.
During this time, it could prevent you from obtaining new lines of credit and may even cause problems when you apply for jobs.
If you are considering bankruptcy, your credit report and credit score are probably already considerably damaged. So, your credit report may not endure significantly more damage, especially if you consistently pay your bills after declaring bankruptcy.
Still, because of the long-term effects of bankruptcy, some experts believe it may be beneficial only if you have more than $15,000 in debts.
Bankruptcy does not necessarily erase all financial responsibilities.
It also does not protect those who co-signed your debts. Your co-signer agreed to pay your loan if you didn't or couldn't pay. So when you declare bankruptcy, your co-signer still may be legally obligated to pay all or part of your loan.
Before you file for bankruptcy, you are almost always required to receive credit counseling within 180 days before filing your case. You must obtain counseling from one of the approved providers listed on the United States Courts website.
While very few counselors are approved for this purpose, most offer online or telephone counseling sessions and do not require you to travel.
After you receive the necessary credit counseling, look into hiring a lawyer to help you file your claim. Legal counsel is not a requirement for individuals filing for bankruptcy, but the U.S. government strongly urges you to seek the advice of an attorney.
If you cannot afford to hire an attorney, you may have options for free legal services. If you need help finding a lawyer or locating free legal services, check with the American Bar Association for resources and information.
Before you prepare to file for bankruptcy, keep in mind that the process must be completed in a federal court rather than a state court and can cost several hundred dollars in fees.
Exactly how you proceed depends on the type of bankruptcy you choose to file.
There are several types of bankruptcy for which individuals or married couples can file, the most common being Chapter 7 and Chapter 13.
Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings make up about 70 percent of non-business bankruptcy cases, and under this your debts are discharged and you are no longer responsible for repaying them. Some of your assets may be sold by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee. The proceeds go towards paying the trustee, covering administrative fees and, if funds allow, repaying your creditors as much as possible.
You are allowed to keep key assets, but property exemptions vary from state to state. You may choose to follow either state law or federal law, which may allow you to keep more possessions.
Under federal law, you are typically entitled to $16,500 in equity in your home and $2,575 in equity in your car, as well as certain less valuable items like household items and job-related tools. If you jointly file as a married couple, these amounts double.
You also retain your right to receive pension, Social Security, unemployment, veteran benefits and welfare.
Chapter 13 bankruptcies make up for about 30 percent of non-business bankruptcy filings. A Chapter 13 bankruptcy involves repaying some of your debts to have the rest forgiven. This is an option for people who do not want to give up their property or do not qualify for Chapter 7 because their income is too high.
People can only file for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 if their debts do not exceed a certain amount. The specific cutoff is reevaluated periodically, so check with a lawyer or credit counselor for the most up-to-date figures.
Under Chapter 13, you must design a three- to five-year repayment plan for your creditors. Once you successfully complete the plan, the remaining debts are erased.
However, most people do not successfully finish their plans. When this happens, debtors may then choose to pursue a Chapter 7 bankruptcy instead. If they don't, creditors then can resume their attempts to collect the full owed balance.
Most people consider bankruptcy only after they pursue debt consolidation or debt settlement. These options can help you get your finances back on track and won't negatively impact your credit as much as a bankruptcy.
Debt consolidation combines all your loans to help you make regular and timely payments on your debts. Debt settlement is a means of negotiating with your creditors to lower your balance. If successful, it directly reduces your debts.
To learn more about bankruptcy and other debt-relief options, seek advice from a local credit counselor or read the Federal Trade Commission's informational pages.
Overwhelmed with debt? You have options for lower monthly payments!


text:
More Videos...
NEW Audi A3 clubsport quattro concept: Future RS3?
Based on the S3 Sedan, the show car is equipped with a powerful five‑cylinder TFSI engine. The turbocharged engine with direct injection in the show car boasts an impressive success story. The 2.5 TFSI powers the production Audi RS Q3. In the show car, the 2,480 cc five‑cylinder produces 386 kW (525 hp) for a specific output of 155.6 kW (211.7 hp) per liter. With a total weight of 1,527 kilograms (3,366.5 lb), this corresponds to a power-to-weight ratio of 2.9 kilograms (6.4 lb)/hp. Maximum torque of 600 Nm (442.5 lb‑ft) is available between 2,300 and 6,000 rpm. The Audi A3 clubsport quattro concept accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h (62.1 mph) in 3.6 seconds and reaches a top speed of 310 km/h (192.6 mph). ► SUBSCRIBE NOW: http://urlz.fr/lEd ► WEBSITE: http://www.youcarnews.com ► FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/youcarpress ► TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/youcartv ► GOOGLE+: http://plus.google.com/+YouCarPress
2015 Audi S8 - Matrix LED headlights
With 380 kW (520 hp), the S8 is Audi's big sports sedan. Paired with quattro all-wheel drive, its sonorous 4.0 TFSI accelerates the S8 from 0 to 100 km/h (62.14 mph) in 4.2 seconds. Average fuel consumption for the S8 is just 10.1 liters per 100 kilometers (23.29 US mpg), corresponding to 235 grams CO2 per kilometer (378.20 g/mile). The COD system plays a key role here, too. Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), a technology that is also used in the A8 4.0 TFSI quattro, the A8 L W12 quattro and the A8 hybrid, uses precise antiphase noise to compensate for intrusive noise in the cabin while operating on four cylinders while active engine mounts dampen vibration. The chassis and many body details reflect the sporty positioning of the S8. ► SUBSCRIBE NOW: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=youcarpress ► FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/youcarpress ► TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/youcartv ► GOOGLE+: http://goo.gl/HpsSa9
Volkswagen Design Vision GTI - DESIGN (interior & exterior)
The production GTI has extremely crisp proportions, making it a good starting point for an even more extreme version. The "Design Vision GTI" looks radical, because it's shorter, wider, and lower than a regular GTI. It's 0.6 inches shorter at 167.4 inches, thanks mainly to a more compact rear bumper treatment. The GTI concept is no less than 2.2 inches lower, at 54.5 inches, and it's 2.8 inches wider (73.6 inches). The track has also increased, of course: at the rear it is now 62.2 inches (59.7 for the production GTI) and 62.8 inches at the front (versus 60.6). The shapes of the dashboard and the center console correspond to the GTI's, but are even more driver oriented, with tauter surfaces and harder edges. The race-car impression is reinforced by the partial use of carbon fiber, which is combined with "Anthracite" and "Titan Black" Alcantara as well as "Black" and "Flash Red" Nappa leather. One pleasing detail on the doors is a red loop that forms the handle, just like a Porsche Cup car. The rear seats have gone, their space taken by an X-shaped cross member that further strengthens body stiffness. ► SUBSCRIBE NOW: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=youcarpress ► FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/youcarpress ► TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/youcartv ► GOOGLE+: http://plus.google.com/+YouCarPress
The Audi quattro story - part 2 - Extreme conditions
Thanks to thorough technical updating, the reputation of the quattro all-wheel driveline is today stronger and more active then ever before. 'quattro' stands not just for traction, but also for emotive appeal, safe driving and dynamism. If you love cars you should subscribe now to official YouCar's channel: http://urlz.fr/lEd Go! It's free! All the Best


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This relaxed spot offers traditional Mexican cuisine, like steak flautas and shrimp quesadillas, as well as a vast selection of more than 150 different tequilas. But Papasito is perhaps best known for its brunch deal—for $19 on Sundays, diners can grab unlimited drinks and eat buffet-style for 90 minutes.
- $$
- Mexican


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Viewing All 2 Reviews Add your review
Certified reviews by travelers like you.
I had a great time with my family using the Scooter Rental. We were able to drive to downtown nassau and to Atlantis. Now my only issue is that when we were bring the scooters back there was a gentleman that worked there that stated that they closed at 4pm. I told him that if that was the case that he needs to put 4pm down on all the paper work and not 5pm if it is going to inconvenience him. Very unprofessional and needed not to be there. Other than his ignorant self. I enjoyed it. Will definitely rent from them again.
Doing what: Nassau Scooter Rental
This tour was amazing!
Doing what: Nassau Scooter Rental
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Skip to comments.VP hopeful Paul Ryan energizes Moon crowd with campaign appearance (Pennsylvania)
Posted on 10/20/2012 5:14:44 PM PDT by smoothsailing
October 20, 2012
Selena Zito
Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan made a mid-morning stop in Moon Saturday between stops in Florida and Ohio 17 days before the Nov 6 election.
Ryan made a dramatic entry, walking onto the stage right off the plane saying, we are going to win Pennsylvania, and we are going to win this election.
Enthusiastic supporters twirled yellow Romney-Ryan towels in Terrible Towel fashion.
It was the first visit to the region by a candidate from either party since August.
Before Ryan arrived, area Democrats conducted a rally in support or President Barack Obamas reelection campaign. They spoke near the War Memorial Fountain at the Airside Business Park, several hundred yards from the hangar where Ryan was to appear.
About 20 people attended the event conducted by area Democrats. The Secret Service estimated Ryan attracted about 1,000 people.
(Excerpt) Read more at triblive.com ...
How many electoral votes on the moon?
A great crowd in Moon for soon-to-be-VP Paul Ryan. To complete the successful journey, he ought to head to Mars (PA) next! :-)
Must be one of those extra Obama states.
The Obama rally attracted 20 people and Ryan attracted 1000? I like those odds.
50 to 1 !!! HA!
Ralph was hopeful his wife could attend the rally...
More like 1000 to 1 since 19 were Obamas press groupies.
Well, I'll never get over just how funny that was! One of the best one-line/one- screen shot cartoons of all time E-V-E-R!
Well Obama wasn't there...just local Dems.
Three of the 20 were local communist politicians and I'll bet the other 17 were union hacks.
E-BAY is fast!
Eomney got the Moon crowd.
Obozo is still flopping around with the moonbats.
I thought it was a spoof and you'd "shopped" the sign but the jokes on me, it's a real town.
Love that flying saucer, is that the town square or a park?
Got me, too. Real town!
Love it, "I'm from Mars"!
That's Moon Saturday..... or at least that's the terminology used Zelena.
...."Paul Ryan made a mid-morning stop in Moon Saturday between stops in Florida and Ohio "......
That's the town square, but the saucer isn't always there, it moves around!
OMG, that's funny!
PA Ping!
If you want on/off the PA Ping List, please freepmail me.
If you see posts of interest to Pennsylvanians, please ping me.
The Obama people were either still asleep, hungover or it was too early for people on food stamps.
Might be a good idea to go to Apollo (Pa) too!
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Yep!, celebrate the moon landing every year, parade, and fireworks too..
I went to one of those celebrations years ago! Great fireworks! I'm in Indiana, Pa so not too far away!
Pretty cool—waving Terrible Towels with the Romney Ryan names on them.
"You cant buy off the Amish with Obama Phones." - Amish for Romney in Lancaster, PA
God love 'em.
I love that photo!!!
Now that's a first for me, never seen political carriage stickers before.
Go Amish!! ;-)
First for me too!
smoothsailing finds the best pics and graphics!!!!!
Yep, Smooth comes up with great stuff on a regular basis.
It's a great one to use in the Freepathon! :o)
Claimed Casey is "congenial."
They go to the moon but they never come to California.
Yep, the Trib endorsed three senatorial candidates; Casey, Raese & Mandel. One Democrat and two Republicans. Go figure.
This same paper used to endorse the detestable John Murtha every two years.
I think Scaife did it just to thumb his nose at us. Weird old duck.
VP hopeful Paul Ryan energizes Moon crowd with campaign appearance
First seeing this headline, I thought he was addressing a crowd of Moonies.
Meanwhile, Obama and Biden excite their MoonBAT crowd at every campaign stop.
LOL! Sounds like a Far Side cartoon...
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Iraq is finished, an expiring, cancerous nation on life support. Pulling the plug might be merciful. It might be cruel. But either way, it's time to accept the fact that this country is likely to die and that we'll all be better off when it does.
The Kurds in the north, who make up roughly twenty percent of the population, want out. They never wished to be part of Iraq in the first place. To this day, they still call the bathroom the "Winston Churchill," in sarcastic homage to the former British prime minister who shackled them to Baghdad. Since the early 1990s, they've had their own government and autonomous region in the northern three provinces, and they held a referendum in 2005 in which 98.7 percent voted to secede and declare independence. The only reason they haven't finally pulled the trigger is because it hasn't been safe; the Turks—who fear the contagion of Kurdish independence inside their own country—have threatened to invade if they did.
The Sunni Arabs in the west, who make up another rough twenty percent of Iraq, aren't itching for independence necessarily, but they sure as hell aren't willing to live under the thumb of Shiite-dominated Baghdad any longer. Millions of them live now under the brutal totalitarian rule of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has declared its own state not only in a huge swath of Iraq but also in much of northeastern Syria. ISIS either controls or has a large presence in more than fifty percent of Iraq at the time of this writing.
Iraq's Shiite majority, meanwhile, is terrified of its Sunni minority, which oppressed them mercilessly during Saddam Hussein's terrifying rule and which now flies the black flag of al-Qaeda and promises unending massacres.
President Obama campaigned on ending the war in Iraq. For years—and for perfectly understandable reasons—he was very reluctant to wade into that country's eternally dysfunctional internal problems, but even he was persuaded to declare war against ISIS in the fall of 2014 when its fighters made a beeline for Erbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region and the only stable and America-friendly place in the country.
But however engaged the US chooses to be, the current war in Iraq is likely to drag on for years. If Iraq somehow manages to survive its current conflict in one piece, another will almost certainly follow. Its instability is both devastating and chronic. Far better at this point if Iraq simply terminates itself as a state and lets its various constituent groups peaceably go their own way, as Yugoslavia did after its own catastrophic series of wars in the 1990s.
In his limited response to ISIS after its seizure of Mosul in early June, Obama called for, among other things, Iraq's "territorial integrity" to be respected.
Obviously it would have been preferable had ISIS not invaded from Syria and conquered Iraqi territory, but generally speaking there is nothing holy about Iraq's current borders. It has never been a coherent nation-state. Nor, for that matter, has Syria. Both are geographic abstractions that never would have existed had European colonial mapmakers not created them in the early twentieth century for their own self-interested reasons, now long obsolete and forgotten. Had Middle Easterners drawn their own borders, whether or not they did so peacefully, the map would be strikingly different—and more organic.
As Lebanon Renaissance Foundation co-founder Eli Khoury put it, "Syria and Iraq have so far only been governed by ruthless centralized iron. It's otherwise hard to make sense of these places."
Theoretically, Iraqis and Syrians still could have forged collective identities and ideals of patriotic nationalism between the time of their nations' founding and now, but that didn't happen in their neighborhood any more than it did in the former Yugoslavia. The dictators of Syria, Iraq, and Yugoslavia all tried to paper over the disunity in their countries with a theoretically binding international ideology—Baathist Arab nationalism, communism—but totalitarian regimes always crash in the end, and their ideologies inevitably go down along with them.
In the absence of tolerant pluralism and democratic political liberalism, the basic incoherence of these states guaranteed one of two outcomes. They'll either be governed by "centralized iron," as Khoury put it, or they'll come apart at the seams. Centralized iron only holds incoherent nations together so long. Removing Hussein blew Iraq apart, and Syria blew apart even without its tyrant Bashar al-Assad being forced into exile or dragged from his palace.
Iraq's current troubles began just one day after the US finished withdrawing its forces, when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant for Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, accusing him of planning terrorist attacks against Shiite targets and of murdering Shiite officials. Hashimi fled to Iraqi Kurdistan before security forces could grab him and now lives in Turkey.
In 2012, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death, along with his son-in-law Ahmed Qahtan.
Is he guilty? Did he do it? I have no idea. Iraq has no shortage of vicious individuals, inside and outside the government, willing to use deadly force both overtly and covertly against rivals. Some of Hashimi's bodyguards confessed, but it's entirely possible they were coerced or even tortured.
Whether or not Hashimi was guilty, Shiite militias carried out death squad attacks against Sunnis all over Baghdad both before and after this happened. Iraq's sectarian violence never entirely dissipated during the American occupation, and after the withdrawal it rose again.
The following year, Maliki's government accused Finance Minister Rafi al-Issawi of the same thing Hashimi had been accused of. Some of his bodyguards were also arrested and charged with committing terrorist acts. But now the conspiracy theories were getting ridiculous. Issawi was and is known as a reasonable and peaceable man. Accusing him and his people of terrorism is like accusing Alan Greenspan of operating his own secret prison on the side when he was running the Fed.
Issawi convinced plenty of the implosive chaos at the heart of the Maliki government when he said, "The tyrant of Baghdad will not keep quiet until he targets all of his opponents." If the finance minister, of all people, could be accused of something like this, any Sunni leader or even civilian could be rounded up and placed in front of a Stalinist show trial.
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My how things change. The Iraqi government is cheesed off at the United States right now because Washington isn't dropping bombs on Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.
"The Americans continue procrastinating about the time it will take to liberate the country." That's from Ali al-Alaa, an aid to the new prime minister Haider al-Abadi, to the New York Times yesterday.
Tikrit is occupied by ISIS. Baghdad wants it back. Washington would like to see Baghdad get it back, but the Pentagon has good reasons to keep its finger off the fire button right now. The Iraqi armed forces consist partly of Shia militias led by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps fighters who are firing artillery and even operating surveillance drones.
The Iranian-Iraqi coalition has made almost no progress at all in Tikrit. ISIS laced the area with mines and is dispatching suicide bombers with reckless abandon--another bit of irony. Iran's Lebanese client Hezbollah pioneered suicide bombings in the Middle East during the 1980s, and now that very deplorable tactic is being used against its own architects closer to home.
Still, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey says Iranian support of Iraq's push into Tikrit might be "a positive thing" if it doesn't exacerbate sectarian tensions. Okay. But in what alternate universe will Iranian armed forces and undisciplined Shia militias not exacerbate sectarian tensions? Tikrit is a Sunni city—and a particularly hard one at that. ISIS massacred more than 1,000 of Baghdad's soldiers there last year when it captured the city. The residents, whether or not they support ISIS, have every reason on earth to fear retribution. ISIS wouldn't have been able to conquer Sunni territory in Iraq in the first place if people in that part of the country didn't already think Tehran and its proxies wanted to subjugate them forever.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter gets it right. "Sectarianism is what brought us to the point where we are," he said in testimony on Capitol Hill, "and so I do look at it with concern. We are watching it very closely."
The offense against Tikrit is a prologue to a planned Iraqi assault later this year against ISIS-held Mosul, the second-largest city in the country. The Iraqis would be well-advised to enlist the Kurdish Peshmerga as its primary backup instead of Iranians. Iraq's Sunni Arabs and Kurds don't get along famously, but at least they aren't divided by sect. (The overwhelming majority of the Kurds also are Sunnis.) And the Kurds are good fighters. They liberated the northern part of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's army after the first Persian Gulf War, and they're holding their own against ISIS right now with American air cover.
So far they're the only ground fighters in the region who can hold their own against ISIS. And the city of Mosul is practically walking distance from the border of their autonomous region. They're even more motivated than Baghdad to keep the wolf away from their door.
In the meantime, the sectarian maelstrom that engulfed Iraq in civil war after the removal of Saddam Hussein is building again and will be with us indefinitely.
ISIS has announced that Lebanon will be the next state to fall under the sway of its "caliphate." According to Beirut's Daily Star newspaper, the only reason ISIS hasn't attacked yet in force is because they haven't decided on the mission's commander.
The Lebanese army is one of the least effective in the Middle East—and that's saying something in a region where the far more capable Syrian and Iraqi armies are utterly failing to safeguard what should be their own sovereign territory.
So France is going to send a three billion dollar package of weapons to Lebanon and the Saudis are going to pay for it. It won't solve the problem any more than a full-body cast will cure cancer, but it beats standing around and not even trying.
It may seem surprising at first that Riyadh is willing to fund a Lebanese Maginot Line. Saudi Arabia is the most culturally conservative Arab country and Lebanon is the most liberal, partly because of its one-third Christian minority, but also because Lebanon's Sunni Muslims are, for the most part, Mediterranean merchants rather than isolated desert-dwellers. They've been exposed to cosmopolitan ideas and culture for centuries while most Saudis outside the Hejaz region on the Red Sea have been hermetically sealed off from the wider world and its ways for millennia.
Despite the vast cultural differences between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, the Saudis want Beirut to remain exactly as it is—a freewheeling Arabic-speaking "Amsterdam" or "Hong Kong" on the Med. The Saudis vacation there in droves when they need a break from their fanatically conservative homeland. The country is like a pressure release valve. If they were to lose it, they'd have to holiday in France where they feel profoundly unwelcome.
But aside from all that, the Saudis feel just as uneasy about ISIS as everyone else. Never mind the ideological overlap between the upstart jihadists and the Wahhabi-backed monarchy. ISIS threatens every single government in the region. It would make permanent alliances with none and conquer all if it could.
The Lebanese, of course, are in far more immediate danger. They can feel ISIS' hot breath on their necks. The army has been scrapping with them along the Syrian border for some time now. A majority of Lebanon's population is either Christian, Shia, or Druze, and all three populations rightly see ISIS as a potentially genocidal threat to their very existence. Even the Sunnis, though, fear and loathe ISIS. Other than the nominal sectarian sameness—ISIS also is Sunni—Lebanon's culturally liberal Sunnis have little more in common with ISIS than the French or Italians do.
A serious invasion of Lebanon by ISIS could unleash a bloodbath that makes the civil war in Syria look like a bar fight with pool sticks and beer mugs. It would be tantamount to a Nazi invasion. Every family in Lebanon is armed to the gills thanks to the state being too weak and divided to provide basic security, but people anywhere in the world facing psychopathic mass-murderers will fight with kitchen knives and even their fingernails and teeth if they have to.
The only good thing that might emerge from an attempted ISIS invasion is that the eternally fractious Lebanese might finally realize they have enough in common with each other to band together for survival and kindle something that resembles a national identity for the first time in their history.
Foreign armies don't do well in Lebanon over the long term. The Israelis managed to invade and occupy a large part of the country during the civil war in 1982 and even exiled Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, but they ended up fighting a grinding counterinsurgency against Hezbollah until 2000. The Syrians invaded and dominated the rest of the country, but the biggest demonstrations in the history of the Middle East forced the Assad regime into a humiliating retreat in 2005. Those are just the most recent examples. At the mouth of the Dog River is a mural of sorts. Seventeen conquering armies carved inscriptions into the stone cliffs congratulating themselves for seizing new territory. All, Ozymandias-like, have been vanquished.
So ISIS will eventually lose if thrusts into Lebanon, but the cost could be unspeakable. Few of Lebanon's prior invaders murdered innocent people with such gleeful ferocity. If ISIS makes any headway at all in that country, the rest of us will see just how barbaric they really are when they violently encounter large numbers of people unlike themselves. And the odds that the West will get sucked even deeper into the great war of the Eastern Mediterranean will only loom larger.
Postscript: My latest collection of dispatches, Tower of the Sun: Stories from the Middle East and North Africa, is now available in both trade paperback and electronic editions.
The Libyan branch of ISIS massacred 21 Egyptian Christians over the weekend. A knife-wielding executioner frog-marched the bound and blind-folded captives to a beach in front of a camera, said "safety for you crusaders is something you can only wish for," and cut off their heads. The Egyptian government responded at once and attacked ISIS positions in the city of Derna near the border with at least two waves of air strikes.
Egyptian Christians in Libya are hardly "crusaders." Like Mexican migrant workers in the US, they're leaving desperate conditions back home and looking for jobs. Not that ISIS will ever see it that way. From their point of view, all Christians on earth, including secular Christians, are "crusaders" fit only for slaughter.
"Avenging Egyptian blood and punishing criminals and murderers is our right and duty," an Egyptian military spokesman said in a statement broadcast on television.
Avenging Egyptian blood, as he put it, is hardly enough to stop ISIS, but there's something else, something deeper, encouraging about Cairo's response: a Muslim army is bombing Muslims to avenge murdered Christians. How many of us would have expected that after the Arab Spring soured and briefly brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power?
Egypt has been an emergency room case since Gamal Abdel Nasser and his so-called "Free Officers" overthrew King Farouk in 1952, but it has something most Arab countries do not—a coherent national identity that transcends sect and tribe. The place is riven by sometimes violent sectarian hatreds, and its Christian minority hasn't been entirely comfortable there for a long time, yet the nation is nevertheless bound together by historic communal memory that stretches back to the time of the Pharaohs.
It isn't prone to civil war the way Iraq and Syria are and it never has been. The Nile River and its Mediterranean delta are far enough removed from potentially dangerous neighbors that a sense of safety and community can flourish, at least during good times. Iraq, on the other hand, is wedged between large imperial-minded powers—in particular the Persians and Turks—and it's as wide open and defenseless as Russia.
"While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic," British explorer Freya Stark wrote during World War II, "Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of men."
"Mesopotamia cut across one of history's bloodiest migration routes," Robert Kaplan added in his outstanding book, The Revenge of Geography, "pitting man against man and breeding pessimism as a consequence…Whether it was the Achaemenid Persian kings Darius and Xerxes who ruled Babylon, or the Mongol hordes that later swept down to overrun the land, or the long-running Ottoman rule that ended with the First World War, Iraq's has been a tragic history of occupation. The Tigris and Euphrates, which run through Iraq, have long constituted a frontier zone where various groups, often the residue of these foreign occupations, clashed and overlapped."
Iraq's chronically fractious condition makes it a perfect incubator for ISIS. Libya, likewise, has no coherent national identity or even a coherent national government. But Egypt, despite its seemingly endless dysfunction, is a bona fide nation-state. The likelihood that it will become a theocratic power like Iran any time soon or a schismatic dismemberment case like Syria and Iraq is low. Partly that's because the military is the most powerful and least dysfunctional institution in the country, but also—and just as important—because the majority of Egypt's Christians and Muslims feel at least some ties of kinship with each other even if those feelings are sometimes submerged and forgotten.
There's nothing like barbaric mass murder to remind regular people that they have things in common with each other that should never be taken for granted. The ISIS view of the world is without a doubt genocidal. Shia Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Alawites, Jews, and insufficiently orthodox Sunni Muslims will all find themselves in mass graves if they're ever captured or occupied. Not even aid workers are safe. Hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims have already fled ISIS rampages in Syria and Iraq. Whether or not the average Egyptian is aware of this fact, the military certainly is. Of that I assure you.
Egypt is hardly the only country threatened by the expansion of ISIS in Libya. After beheading 21 Christians, the man in the massacre video pointed his knife toward Europe and said, "We will conquer Rome, by Allah's permission."
ISIS will not conquer Rome. It's impossible. Not even Russia, with all its formidable might, could conquer Rome any time soon. But ISIS just might be bloody-minded and delusional enough to give it a shot. They can certainly wreak havoc and mayhem. Their supporters already have in Paris and Copenhagen and might have pulled off something in Belgium as well had the police not conducted successful night raids in January.
Libya, however, is up for grabs. ISIS took over the entire city of Derna, where more than 100,000 people live, back in November. They've established training camps throughout the country. They control radio and television stations in Sirte. Their sinister enforcers go on "morality patrols" in the capital. And they took credit for a rash of terrorist attacks across Libya even before releasing their snuff film over the weekend.
They don't have a proper conventional-style army in Libya as they do in Syria and Iraq, but recently ISIS was no more than an elusive shadowy presence even in those countries. So yes, Libya—or at least parts of it—could very well be conquered by ISIS. Parts of it have already been conquered by ISIS.
Egypt's army is both enormous and state-of-the-art by the Middle East's standards. If any Arab country were to become a mini regional superpower again, it would be Egypt. It wouldn't be a benign power necessarily, but it wouldn't be entirely hostile to American interests either. Not if it's run by the military.
For all the faults of its coup leader General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—he is without a doubt a far bigger brute than Hosni Mubarak—at least he won't be backing ISIS any time soon, not even implicitly through inaction. If Egyptian Muslims and Christians can set their differences at least on occasion when facing monsters like ISIS, Washington and Cairo should be able to repair the post-coup rift at least slightly. It wouldn't be the first time a monstrous enemy inspired an awkward alliance, nor will it be the last.
Senator Ted Cruz thinks the United States should arm Ukraine so it can beat Russian-backed separatists in the east. As much as we'd love to help plucky Ukraine resist the giant bear to the north—and we have a solid precedent under our belts—it's a terrible idea.
Backing the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s worked smashingly well. Moscow learned the hard way that it could no longer project enough hard power to shield its vassal states from local uprisings and everything fell apart almost instantly.
Afghanistan was hardly the only country in the Soviet sphere disgruntled with communist rule. Eastern Europeans never acquiesced to it in the first place. They had it imposed on them by the victorious Stalin atop the ashes of the Nazi regime. The Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which began as a seemingly harmless student revolt, brought down the local Russian puppet state. Moscow panicked, deployed thousands of soldiers and tanks, and reimposed the brutal old order. It did the same during the Prague Spring in 1968.
But after the debacle in Afghanistan, Russia lacked the resources and will to repeat it. Nothing could hold back the rising tide of mass discontent in Europe, and barely six months later the Berlin Wall fell.
But Ukraine isn't Afghanistan, and it is not Hungary. It's where Russian civilization was born, as the medieval state Kievan Rus in the 10th century. For Russians, losing Kiev to Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union was a bit like Jews losing Jerusalem. Their toleration of a sovereign Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet system was always conditional on Kiev taking orders from Moscow. As soon as that ended with the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych last year, so did its independence.
Russia will no sooner surrender to American-backed forces in Ukraine than we would surrender to a Russian-backed insurgency in Vermont. The situation is hardly analogous—unlike Vermont, Ukraine is a country—but from Vladimir Putin's point of view it's precisely analogous.
This is all about NATO expansion which scares the daylights out of the Russians. It shouldn't, but it does, and it's not hard to understand why. Just ask yourself how the British would feel if the USSR won the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact expanded to Paris and Brussels. London would feel like it's "next." London would have cause to feel like it's "next." That's exactly how it looked from Moscow's point of view when former vassals like Lithuania and Estonia joined up with Germany and France—and the United States.
It's a paranoid analysis, but Russia has always been paranoid.
"I believe the Russians are mobilizing right now for a war that they think is going to happen in five or six years," said US Army Commander in Europe Lt. Gen. Frederick "Ben" Hodges. "Not that they're going to start a war in five or six years, but I think they are anticipating that things are going to happen, and that they will be in a war of some sort, of some scale, with somebody within the next five or six years."
The solution from Russia's point of view—as always—is to either control or destabilize as many "buffer" states as it can. Any of its smaller neighbors that get a little too uppity will find themselves undermined from within or outright invaded, and in the modern era they're likely to find scraps of territory "annexed" by Moscow to indefinitely prevent them from joining NATO. No one in NATO wants to admit a nation as a new member state that has a disputed territory conflict with Russia. It's dangerous. That's ultimately what Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 was about, and it's the main reason Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula last year.
Putin has already achieved his primary objective and doesn't need to do much else at this point except not lose the rest of the war. If the United States gets even indirectly involved, he'll just ramp it up. He needs to win in Ukraine far more than we do, and unlike us he's more than willing to deploy his own forces directly.
There is no chance Ukraine could ever win a total war against Russia. All it can do is make continued Russian intervention too costly. While it may appear that arming Ukraine will make Russian intervention too costly, it will only inflame Moscow's anxiety and make losing Ukraine too costly for Russia.
Maybe—maybe—if Kiev wins the war in the east on its own and cedes lost territory to Russia, a Ukrainian rump state could join NATO and prevent something like this from happening again in the future, but that's only remotely possible if Putin doesn't feel like he must best the West in his own "near abroad" or lose everything.
The idea that what happens in Syria stays in Syria is as dead as Saddam Hussein, but ISIS is meeting steel as it expands.
The Lebanese army is facing as many as 3,000 fighters in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains along the Syrian border and Nicholas Blanford reports a war of attrition is taking place there. In late January the army "roasted" ISIS with artillery, according to a military advisor he spoke to, then picked up "the smoking remains."
Meanwhile, the Jordanian air force flew devastating sorties over the Islamic State's "capital" of Raqqa in Syria yesterday to retaliate for the gruesome murder of its fighter pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh.
Farther afield, ISIS attacked and killed at least 30 Egyptian security men in the Sinai and killed 10 at a hotel in the Libya's capital Tripoli.
It should have been obvious from the very beginning that a terrorist army like ISIS threatens the entire region and points well beyond, but somehow it wasn't. The prevailing view in the West held that ISIS and the Assad regime might somehow cancel each other out (as if war has ever worked that way in the past), but even right next door a large percentage Jordanians opposed their country's involvement in this fight. Yet after ISIS put al-Kaseasbeh in a cage, burned him alive, and uploaded the video onto the Internet, everything changed. The mood in the capital Amman is eerily similar to that in New York City and Washington DC shortly after September 11, 2001. "These criminals aim to stamp out life and rights everywhere," King Abdullah said. "Their hate and murder has reached Asia, Europe, Africa, America and Australia."
Lebanon is also findings its spine. The army is entirely useless when the country's various communities slug it out with each other. Everyone fears—correctly, I should add—that the army might fragment into opposing militias if the leadership takes one side or another in a sectarian conflict. It happened during the civil war and could easily happen again. But Lebanon isn't Syria, and ISIS is opposed almost monolithically in Lebanon, even among their "natural" Sunni constituency.
ISIS is expanding its deadly operations at an alarming rate, but it's also finding out the hard way that not every country in the Middle East and North Africa is as soft a target as Syria and Iraq. Libya might be. It has been precarious, to say the least, ever since Moammar Qaddafi was lynched outside Misrata in 2011. But taking on Egypt, Jordan, and the Kurdish regions of Syria and Iraq is almost as perilous for ISIS as taking on the Israelis.
Lebanon is more vulnerable—its soldiers are not especially competent—but ISIS would require a diabolical miracle to make any headway in the parts of Lebanon where Christians, Shias, and Druze live. Every family in the country has at least one rifle in the closet, and they'd correctly see ISIS as a potentially genocidal threat to their existence.
Washington's backing of anti-ISIS proxies in Syria may be a fool's game this late in the war, but the Kurds, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Lebanese—and maybe even the Libyans—should receive all the help from the Pentagon they can get.
The Russian government is considering a proposal to condemn the "annexation" of East Germany by West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Even Vladimir Putin knows the only reason East Germany ever existed as a separate political entity is because the Russians occupied it an imposed a totalitarian puppet regime on its subjects.
The Russians are just mad that the rest of the world won't recognize their annexation of Crimea in Ukraine, and Germany has been their favorite Euro punching bag since Hitler invaded the Motherland.
Walter Russell Mead explained Putin's psychology vis-à-vis Germany last week in The American Interest.
From the Kremlin's point of view, western power in Europe rests on two platforms. There is the global American hegemony, and then there is Germany, which has emerged as America's sub-hegemon in Europe. Putin thinks that the Germans aren't wise enough to rule Europe well, strong enough to rule it by force, or rich enough to rule it through economics and that Washington doesn't understand that or, if it does, that Washington itself is too distracted or too weak to care. Either way, from Putin's point of view, Germany's position is much, much weaker than either Berlin or Washington understands.
Putin sees Germany as the weaker, nearer, and, in the short term, more dangerous obstacle to his ambitions than the United States. His current policy is aimed incrementally at reducing American hegemony; it is directly aimed at disrupting what Putin sees as Germany's attempt to create a new post-1990 order in its image and under its aegis.
From the Kremlin's point of view, western power in Europe rests on two platforms. There is the global American hegemony, and then there is Germany, which has emerged as America's sub-hegemon in Europe. Putin thinks that the Germans aren't wise enough to rule Europe well, strong enough to rule it by force, or rich enough to rule it through economics and that Washington doesn't understand that or, if it does, that Washington itself is too distracted or too weak to care. Either way, from Putin's point of view, Germany's position is much, much weaker than either Berlin or Washington understands.
Putin sees Germany as the weaker, nearer, and, in the short term, more dangerous obstacle to his ambitions than the United States. His current policy is aimed incrementally at reducing American hegemony; it is directly aimed at disrupting what Putin sees as Germany's attempt to create a new post-1990 order in its image and under its aegis.
Germany, of course, doesn't threaten Russia even remotely. No nation threatens Russia right now even remotely. But Russians are conditioned to fearing neighbors beyond the buffer states they control, and they don't control much of anything in Eastern Europe anymore except Belarus and Transnistria. Its enormous flat geography has left it vulnerable to invasions from every direction but the Arctic for centuries.
Russia is no more likely to do anything about West Germany's "annexation" of East Germany decades ago than Germany or the U.S. will reverse Russia's annexation of Crimea last year. This silly rhetorical stunt is just a healthy reminder that—nevermind the geography—Russia is not part of Europe.
My first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, is now available as an audiobook from Audible and Amazon.com.
It is narrated by the fantastic Steven Roy Grimsley who also narrated the audio versions of Where the West Ends and Resurrection.
Clint Eastwood's new film, American Sniper, is a blisteringly accurate portrayal of the American war in Iraq. Unlike most films in the genre, it sidesteps the politics and focuses on an individual: the late, small-town Texan, Chris Kyle, who joined the Navy SEALs after 9/11 and did four tours of duty in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Baghdad. He is formally recognized as the deadliest sniper in American history, and the film, based on his bestselling memoir, dramatizes the war he felt duty-bound to fight and his emotionally wrenching return home, with post-traumatic stress.
The movie has become a flashpoint for liberal critics. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore dismissed the film out-of-hand because snipers, he says, are "cowards." "American Sniper kind of reminds me of the movie that's showing in the third act of Inglorious Basterds," comic actor Seth Rogen tweeted, referring to a fake Hitler propaganda film about a Nazi sniper, though he backtracked and said he actually liked the film, that it only reminded him of Nazi propaganda. Writing for the Guardian, Lindy West is fair to Eastwood and the film but cruel to its subject. Kyle, she says, was "a hate-filled killer" and "a racist who took pleasure in dehumanizing and killing brown people."
The Navy confirms that Kyle shot and killed 160 combatants, most of whom indeed had brown skin. While he was alive, he said that he enjoyed his job. In one scene in the movie, Kyle, played by a bulked-up Bradley Cooper, refers to "savages," and it's not clear if he means Iraqis in general or just the enemies he's fighting.
But let's take a step back and leave the politics of aside. All psychologically normal people feel at least some hatred for the enemy in a war zone. This is true whether they're on the "right" side or the "wrong" side. It's not humanly possible to like or feel neutral toward people who are trying to kill you. Race hasn't the faintest thing to do with it. Does anyone seriously believe Kyle would have felt differently if white Russians or Serbs, rather than "brown" Arabs, were shooting at him? How many residents of New York's Upper West Side had a sympathetic or nuanced view of al-Qaida on September 11, 2001? Some did—inappropriately, in my view—but how many would have been able to keep it up if bombs exploded in New York City every day, year after year?
Kyle had other reasons to hate his enemies, aside from their desire to kill him. In American Sniper, we see him in Fallujah and Ramadi fighting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq, the bloody precursor to ISIS. His immediate nemesis is "the Butcher," a fictional character whose favorite weapon is a power drill. The Butcher confronts an Iraqi family who spoke to Americans and says "if you talk to them, you die with them." He tortures their child to death with his drill.
Kyle kills a kid, too, but in a radically different context. The boy is running toward Americans with a live grenade in his hand. "They'll fry you if you're wrong," his spotter tells him. "They'll send you to Leavenworth." He's right. Kyle would have been fried, at least figuratively, if he shot an innocent, unarmed civilian—regardless of age—with premeditation. In a later scene, he has another child in his sights: the child picks up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and aims it at an American Humvee. "Drop it," Kyle says under his breath from far away. He doesn't want to pull that trigger. He'll shoot if he must to protect the lives of his fellow Americans, but the kid drops the RPG and Kyle slumps in relief. How different he is from the Butcher, who takes sadistic pleasure in torturing children to death—not even children of the American invaders, but Iraqi children.
Read the rest in City Journal.
The US military is gearing up to train moderate Syrian rebels this spring, but there's virtually no chance this is going to work by itself.
The US spent years training the Iraqi Army, and for what? Baghdad's forces turned out to be no more effective in the face of the ISIS onslaught than the French were when Hitler invaded.
Had ISIS been nipped in the bud at the beginning this might not have happened, but they've had years to build themselves up and grow stronger while an isolationist White House did nothing and let everything fester.
President Obama's advisors warned him that the Syrian civil war could explode well beyond its borders and even wash up in Europe and the United States if it dragged out long enough, and that's exactly what happened.
The Iranian-Hezbollah-Assad axis is still entrenched in its part of the country, and ISIS—one of the most formidable terrorist armies in history—controls the other half of the country, along with an enormous swath of Iraq. There is virtually no chance that a ragtag band of lightly trained "moderate" rebels can compete with the Assad regime and ISIS at the same time if the much-better trained and equipped Iraqis can't handle ISIS alone.
But this might work if the air campaign against ISIS is expanded dramatically.
So far the air strikes are barely containing ISIS, let alone degrading it, but that's partly because it's so half-assed. Occasional pinprick strikes won't finish off ISIS any more than occasional terrorist attacks in the US would cause Washington DC to implode.
Fighting a terrorist organization or an insurgency with air strikes is a fool's game, but ISIS is much more than that. It's not hiding in alleys and shadows and safe houses. It controls a chunk of territory the size of Syria. Its "state" isn't formally recognized by any real nation, nor does it appear on any atlases, but it has most of the attributes of a state in the making and can be weakened and degraded and destroyed from the skies just like Moammar Qaddafi's regime in Libya was weakened and degraded and eventually destroyed from the skies.
The US-led coalition might be able to do this. It wouldn't mean the end of ISIS any more than destroying the Taliban regime in Afghanistan spelled the end of the Taliban, but it would end ISIS as a "state" and force it to revert to its previous status as a shadowy terrorist organization.
Then it just might be possible for a US-backed force to move into the vacuum. Fighting would continue indefinitely, and the US might have to remain involved to an extent, but at least the Islamic State could be downgraded into a wannabe state that has a much more difficult time recruiting new members. Though I wouldn't expect a tidy resolution any time in the next decade—it's far too late for that now—it would be better than watching ISIS expand.
But if we're just going to train a few thousand people and hope for the best while sending them into a meat grinder without any serious backup, we're better off staying home and they're better off being refugees.
As Washington continues its vain quest for a good faith nuclear deal with Tehran, the Iranian regime continues behaving like the gunmen who massacred French cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo earlier this month in Paris.
Here's Mojtaba Safari in The Daily Beast:
Many in the West talk of the "moderation" of Iran's regime. Foreign Minister Mohamed Zarif flies around the world claiming that Iran is committed to peace, justice and human rights. That would come as news to the thousands of political prisoners languishing in Iranian jail for nothing more than advocating freedom and democracy.
Soheil Arabi is one of those activists whose Facebook posts landed him on death row. What was Arabi's great "crime"? He is charged with "spreading corruption on Earth," (mofsed-e-filarz), punishable by death in Iran.
Soheil was first arrested and sentenced to death in November 2013 on the charge of "insulting the Prophet" (sabb-e-nabi). Article 262 of the Islamic Penal Code of Iran explains:
Anyone who swears at or commits qazf [false accusation of sexual offenses] against the Great Prophet [of Islam] (peace be upon him) or any of the Great Prophets, shall be considered as sāb ul-nabi [a person who swears at the Prophet], and shall be sentenced to the death penalty.
Many in the West talk of the "moderation" of Iran's regime. Foreign Minister Mohamed Zarif flies around the world claiming that Iran is committed to peace, justice and human rights. That would come as news to the thousands of political prisoners languishing in Iranian jail for nothing more than advocating freedom and democracy.
Soheil Arabi is one of those activists whose Facebook posts landed him on death row. What was Arabi's great "crime"? He is charged with "spreading corruption on Earth," (mofsed-e-filarz), punishable by death in Iran.
Soheil was first arrested and sentenced to death in November 2013 on the charge of "insulting the Prophet" (sabb-e-nabi). Article 262 of the Islamic Penal Code of Iran explains:
Anyone who swears at or commits qazf [false accusation of sexual offenses] against the Great Prophet [of Islam] (peace be upon him) or any of the Great Prophets, shall be considered as sāb ul-nabi [a person who swears at the Prophet], and shall be sentenced to the death penalty.
Safari is an Iranian blogger. The only reason he's alive and free is because he's living in Canada.
The fact that the Iranian regime behaves this way at home does not by itself make a deal with Iran impossible. The United States has a transactional alliance with Saudi Arabia despite its government being no less grotesque. But the geopolitical interests of Washington and Riyadh overlap while the geopolitical interests of Washington and Tehran are entirely at odds with each other.
At some point this is all going to change. Iran will eventually get a new and more civilized government that more accurately represents the political views of its citizens who are far less anti-American and anti-Israel than the regime. Then our two countries will be able to have decent relations.
Iranians are not the natural enemies of the West, nor are they the natural enemies of Jews and of Israel. There is little history of hostility between Persians and Jews. There is, however, a long history of unbroken hostility between Persians and Arabs. A democratic Iranian government will be friendlier to the West, but its relations with the countries on the other side of the Persian Gulf will be just as fractious as they right now.
When that day finally comes, our transactional alliance with Saudi Arabia will likely be slowly phased out in favor of a genuine alliance with Iran. In the meantime, both nations will continue using the instruments of the state to commit crimes against humanity that only terrorists are willing and able to carry out in the West.
Jihad Mugniyeh, son of notorious Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyeh, was just killed by an Israeli airstrike in Syria near the Golan Heights.
Hezbollah is fighting against Sunni jihadists in Syria on behalf of the Iranian and Syrian regimes, but that doesn't mean it has abandoned its war against Israel. If the Syrian regime doesn't survive, Hezbollah won't be able to receive high-grade weapon systems from Iran anymore. It already has a formiddable missile arsenal and can now—unlike during the 2006 war—inflict signinificant damage on Tel Aviv and even Jerusalem if it dares. But with Assad out of the picture, once those missiles are gone, they're gone, and Hezbollah would be downgraded from the quasi state-conventional actor that it is now to a mere guerrilla and terrorist organization again.
It's not clear how important the now-deceased commander Jihad Mugniyeh was, but his father was a bloodthirsty psychopath with the blood of hundreds of people under his fingernails. Many of us have forgotten, but he was the most notorious anti-American terrorist in the world before Osama bin Laden usurped the position.
Mugniyeh orchestrated the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that killed 63 people, as well as the suicide truck bombings against French paratroopers and US peacekeepers that same year that killed 299 in one day. The attack against the Marine barracks was the single deadliest strike against the US Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima. He hijacked TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome in 1985 and executed US Navy diver Robert Stethem and dumped his body onto the tarmac. The rest of the passengers were held hostage for weeks in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war.
Argentina charged Mugniyeh with murdering 114 people in Buenos Aires in 1992 by blowing up the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center.
He is also believed to have masterminded the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 20 people and wounded 372.
He was car-bombed to death in Damascus in 2008, presumably by Israeli intelligence. No one else was hurt in the incident.
And now his son, aptly named Jihad, is dead too.
Jihad was working near the Golan Heights alongside infamous child-murdered Samir Kuntar whom the Israelis released in 2008, along with four Hezbollah members, in exchange for the return of the bodies of IDF soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser who had been captured and tortured to death at the start of the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
On April 22, 1979, in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, Kuntar killed policeman Eliyahu Shahar, civilian Danny Haran, and Haran's four year old daughter Einat by placing her head on a rock and smashing her skull with the butt of his rifle.
Trading that guy for two soldiers who were already dead was a raw deal for Israel.
"If we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead," former Chief Rabbi of the IDF Yisrael Weiss said, "we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I'll leave it at that."
Mugniyeh's son may be dead, but Kuntar is an at-large recidivist psychopath who's planning more attacks. The Israelis erred in releasing him, but if they can whack Mugniyeh they can correct it by next whacking Kuntar. The last thing they should do is arrest him again.
Boko Haram galvanized activists all over the world last year when it kidnapped hundreds of school girls in Nigeria and threatened to sell them into slavery, but hardly a peep has been uttered since the Al Qaeda-linked army massacred as many as 2,000 people near the Chad border last week.
"I walked through five villages," a survivor told The Guardian, "and each one I passed was empty except for dead bodies."
The attack in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo office sucked up most of the Western media and political oxygen—understandably so since France is a Western country—but it's also unfortunate because it diverted out attention from the fact that Boko Haram is rapidly turning into the ISIS of Africa. These guys are not mere terrorists anymore. They're behaving more and more like a regular army, and they now control a swath of territory in northeastern Nigeria the size of Belgium.
"The United States needs to recognize we have a problem that's second only to the problem we have with ISIS (Islamic State)," the Atlantic Council's Peter Pham told USA Today. "We have a group holding territory and shooting down jet fighters. ... If Nigeria collapses — it is the strong state in the region — there are no strong states to contain what would happen if Boko Haram succeeds in carving out an Islamic state in that area."
Radical Islamists are immeasurably more dangerous when they organize themselves into states or state-like entities than when they hide in the shadows and strike like serial killers with bombs. Terrorist organizations are bad enough, but radical Islamist state-like entities such as ISIS, the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah are menacing enough to start wars.
The United States isn't directly involved in all these wars—Israel battles Hamas and Hezbollah, and the French took out the proto-Islamic state in Northern Mali—but if a huge swath of Africa collapses and Boko Haram metastasizes fully into an ISIS-linked entity with staying power, what happens in Sub-Saharan Africa may no longer stay in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Gunmen shouting "Allahu Akbar" attacked the offices of French satirical newspaper named Charlie Hedbo and killed twelve people, including journalists and two policemen.
Radical Islamists apparently don't share the paper's sense of humor.
What good is legal freedom of speech if violent enforcers of a different, older, and foreign set of laws take it upon themselves to punish you extrajudicially?
This is not a new problem, not in the Middle East and not in the West. A few years ago I spoke with Christopher Hitchens about it and here's what he said.
Hitchens: Let's do a brief thought experiment. I tell you the following: On New Year's Eve, a man in his mid-seventies is having his granddaughter over for a sleep-over, his five-year old granddaughter. He is attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding maniac with homicidal intent. Your mammalian reaction, your reaction as a primate, is one of revulsion. I'm trusting you on this. [Laughs.]
MJT: Oh, yes. You are correct.
Hitchens: Then you pick up yesterday's Guardian, one of the most liberal newspapers in the Western world, and there's a long article that says, ah, that picture, that moral picture, that instinct to protect the old and the young doesn't apply in this case. The man asked for it. He drew a cartoon that upset some people. We aren't at all entitled to use our moral instincts in the correct way.
MJT: The current president of Ireland said Muslims have the right to be offended by Westergaard's cartoons. I suppose that's true as far as it goes, that everybody has the right to be offended by anything, but why…
Hitchens: Ah yes. This is not new. I've written about this many times. It's reverse ecumenicism. It first became obvious to me when the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989. The reaction of the official newspaper of the Vatican was that the problem wasn't that the foreign leader of a theocratic dictatorship offered money, in public, in his own name, to suborn the murder of the writer of a book of fiction in another country, who wasn't an Iranian citizen. The problem was not that.
You and I may have thought, bloody hell, this is a new kind of threat. But it's an old level of threat. Blasphemy is the problem. That was also the view of the archbishop of Canterbury. The general reaction of the religious establishments to that and to the Danish case—and, by the way, of our secular State Department in the Danish case—was to say the problem was Danish offensiveness. A cartoon in a provincial town in a small Scandinavian democracy obviously should be censored by the government lest it ignite—or as Yale University Press put it, instigate—violence.
Instigation of violence can only mean one thing. I know the English language better than I know anything else.
MJT: Instigate means it's on purpose.
Hitchens: These people are saying the grandfather and granddaughter were the authors of their own attempted assassinations. These are some of the same people who say that if I don't believe in God I can't know what morality is. They've just dissolved morality completely into relativism by saying actually, occasionally, carving up grandfathers and granddaughters with an axe on New Year's Eve can be okay if it's done to protect the reputation of a seventh century Arabian man who heard voices.
MJT: It's hard to psychoanalyze other people, but I sometimes suspect that blaming Salman Rushdie and Kurt Westergaard, as many writers have, for bringing down the wrath of these maniacs from Somalia and Iran, may be a way of convincing themselves they'll be safe as long as they don't cross the same line. Any writer or graphic artist must, at least for a second, think oh fuck, they could come for me if I don't watch out. They can say to themselves they'll be fine if they don't cross that line.
Hitchens: But the line will never stop shifting.
The Iranian clerical regime has repeatedly vowed to erase Israel from the map, but American publisher HarperCollins actually did it.
The company released an atlas of the Middle East for English-speaking students in the Persian Gulf region, and Israel isn't on it. The West Bank and Gaza are on it, which is entirely appropriate since they exist and are not part of Israel, but Israel itself is just…absent.
The Tablet newspaper in Britain originally reported the story, and HarperCollins has since recalled the atlases and promises they will be pulped. Executives at the company headquarters are embarrassed and say they sincerely apologize.
Lower level employees, however, thought they did the right thing.
Collins Bartholomew told The Tablet that putting Israel on the map would have been "unacceptable" in the Middle East and that "local preferences" had to be respected.
He isn't imaging those local preferences. I've seen plenty of Arab maps that don't include Israel. Sometimes it's labeled as Palestine. Sometimes it's a blank space. Sometimes it's there and labeled correctly. It depends on the map and, to an extent, which country produced it. Some Arab nations are less hung up on this than others.
Companies that want to sell products to customers really do need to think about what would and would not be acceptable or they won't turn a profit. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just basic business.
But the map HarperCollins produced is a lie. Right there on its atlas cover are the words, "Learn with maps" in English. But kids can't learn real geography from fake maps. Setting aside the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the product fails to live up to its own description.
Let's get back to politics, though. People who hate a country so intensely that they can't bear to see its existence on maps have a serious problem. I detest North Korea and wish it didn't exist. So much better if it were joined to democratic South Korea like East Germany merged with the west after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But for God's sake, I don't require the maps in my house to show North Korea as blank. If I did, I'd have a problem and I'd need some help.
There isn't much Westerners can do to change reactionary attitudes on the other side of the planet, and publishers aren't generally in the political-emotional therapy business, but pandering to a denial of reality only perpetuates it.
If Middle Eastern customers will only buy a map if it lies, they can make their own damn maps. And if HarperCollins, or any other publishing company, actually wants kids over there to "Learn with maps" as it says, then the local delusional bubble needs to be punctured.
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The Production and Diffusion of Public Choice Political Economy
Reflections on the VPI Center
Edited by Joseph C. Pitt Djavad Salehi-Isfahani Douglas W. Eckel
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Production and Diffusion of Public Choice Political Economy by Joseph C. Pitt
Book DescriptionThis book is about is more than a sub discipline within the field of economics - it is about a new field named 'public choice political economy' that gradually evolved during the 1970s and 1980s at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. What is the field Public Choice Political Economy all about? How did it originate? Who were the main architects and builders? What values and work habits motivated the work? Finally, how did the facts about the development of public choice political economy stack up against what we know about science in general and how it has developed?The authors of the essays included in this volume, originally came together in May of 2000 in Blacksburg to celebrate their scientific achievements and take pride in the regimen of research and the processes that brewed at the legendary Public Choice center in Virginia. This location provided what turned out to be a fortuitous combination of obscurity and rustic quiet for original thoughts and concentrated debates. Inspired by the pioneer attitudes of the Virginians and the dedication and work ethic of James Buchana and Gordon Tullock, a core group of renegade social scientists broke new ground and started a revolution in thought. The big questions about economizing behavior, constitutional limitations on an overreaching bureaucracy and the possible design and redesign of institutions to harness self-interested behavior for the benefit of all are touched on and placed in historical context.The resulting public choice movement occurred first in economics and later extended to political science and beyond. This may have been one of the most important developments in 20th century social science. The book concludes with Nobel laureate, James Buchanan's thoughts about what had transpired largely but not exclusively under his guidance. Other contributors include, Richard B. McKenzie, Geoffrey Brennan, Stephen Medema and Robert Sugden. Professors Pitt, Salehi-Isfahani and Eckel provide a useful introduction to this collection. These essays and comments were originally published in "The American Journal of Economics and Sociology" in January of 2004 as an 'invited volume'. The book contains an index and should be of great interest to historians of economics and the social sciences.
Buy Production and Diffusion of Public Choice Political Economy book by Joseph C. Pitt from Australia's Online Bookstore, Boomerang Books.
Book DetailsISBN: 9781405124539
(229mm x 154mm x 17mm)
Pages: 280
Imprint: Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Publish Date: 12-Mar-2004
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
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Books By Author Joseph C. Pitt
Production and Diffusion of Public Choice Political Economy, Hardback (March 2004)
This book is about is more than a subdiscipline within the field of economics------it is about a new field named "public choice political economy" that gradually evolved during the 1970s and 1980s at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Theories of Explanation, Paperback (January 1988)» View all books by Joseph C. Pitt
An anthology of readings on theories of explanation, one of the major concerns of philosophers of science. Significant readings are included from all major schools of thought on the topic.
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Author Biography - Joseph C. Pitt
Joseph C. Pitt is a Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech. Djavad Salehi-Isfahani is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Virginia Tech. Douglas Eckel is Assistant Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and an Instructor in Political Science at Virginia Tech. He teaches in the areas of Public Administration and Urban Politics.
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text: Teeny Weeny USB Drive Robs Your Computer of Dignity (NSFW)Adam Frucci4/28/08 12:01pmFiled to: JunkClipsPeripheralsUSBteeny weeny33EditPromoteShare to KinjaToggle Conversation toolsGo to permalink If you thought the USB Humping Dog was a bit too sassy, prepare to be made uncomfortable by the Teeny Weeny Drive. This USB flash drive chucks subtlety out the window and is just shaped like a stubby, rubbery penis. You've been warned. Hit the jump for the uncensored photos and promo video. Told you. The worst part? You need to pull the head of the penis off to use the drive, making it a cringe-worthy practice to use it on more than one level. But hey, at least they advocate safe data protection: "DON'T PULL OUT TOO SOON or you could lose your data!" Also, it "blushes" with a red light when it's "turned on." Thank you, internet. [Teeny Weeny Drive via AVN via Jezebel] Reply33 repliesLeave a reply


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It's a place where you can see different types of domestic animals. It's a fun place for any age. I went with my friends and family. All adults. We had a lot of fun. could see and...
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It's a place where you can see different types of domestic animals. It's a fun place for any age. I went with my friends and family. All adults. We had a lot of fun. could see and feed the animals, take pictures. They even have a place full of flowers where you can take a picture. There are a lot...
We visited the Kobe Animal Kingdom in March 2016 and we were very impressed. Japanese loves animal. Once you visit the (or the Monkey Park in Kyoto) you can really feel the love. In addition to observe them, you can also feed animals and hug them! It was super fun to see my girlfriend hugging a capybara, the largest rodent...
This place is clean. We were greeted by a lady with an alpaca. Some of the animals roam free, climb trees, while we people walk through their space. You can buy food and feed the ducks. There's a variety of birds and other animals that are not afraid of people. There's also a small petting zoo. The kids loved it....
My family enjoys this place very much. If you like animals and not afraid of getting close to them, this is a perfect place for you. Kids would rather want to stay here forever instead of going to another Japanese temples or castles. This is not a big place like a zoo. A half a day or less should be...
If you are animal lover, you have to visit this park. The park allow interaction with animals.
Paying 100yen and you could feed the animal as well.
There are indoor and outdoor area suitable for winter or summer
Our 6 and 7 y/o boys had a lot of fun. Feeding the laser pandas was a highlight. It was warm inside on a cold day.
At first it seemed a little strange that there were dogs and cats to play with, so we skipped those sections and walked through the incredibly themed areas. Visiting with sloths and red pandas - the kingdom was well maintained, and we've never been able to get so close to animals before. Everyone was orderly, abiding by the rules of...
we went there with our two daugthers (12 and 7) they and we loved it. great to pet animals, see some of them really close and more lively than in usual zoo. staff so kind and polite, souvenirs shop so good
We spent the whole day here, you can get close to and feed almost all of the animals. From cats and dogs to capybara and kangaroos. It's an awesome place. We finished the day in the bird house near the entrance/exit. Two of the birds landed on my shoulders and went to sleep. It was brilliant to experience.
There were...
If you love animals, please avoid this place. It is solely based on entertaining people and does not consider the animals at all. Very small cages for wild and no hideouts in case they get distressed. Lots of kids screaming which must be very stressful for the animals. It was not a nice experience.
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what animals are there at Kobe?
Can I buy tickets in advance for this place, online? I can't seem to find a link for it on the English version of the website.
Does it close when it rains ?
Is animal kingdom closed from Dec 15, 2016 - Jan 11, 2017 for the holidays?
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