WestViking

We are, as usual, looking for a pill to make the pain go away. There must be something to prevent this tragedy from happening again. Our history has many stories of deranged people committing mass murders. Today we are cursed with instant news of the latest horrors but we are still unable to deal with them. Our civil veneer cracks and we realize that Neanderthals lurk just under the surface. We fear the beast inside us that our civility, decorum and manners may no longer hide one day.

What is truly despicable about the "truce" respecting fighting in Gaza is that (1) Gaza is not a nation. (2) Palestine, per se, is not a nation and does not exist except in the minds of some people, (3) Hamas is neither a nation or people; it is an outlaw terrorist group. How can a true nation such as Israel be required to negotiate with charlatans and terrorists? I expect perfidy from Egypt, and nation that has openly attacked Israel in the past. However, I expect far better of the US State Department and Hillary Clinton. Recognition of and negotiations with Hamas is a de facto bow to the totalitarian regime in Iran. The Ayatollahs have clearly won this round and the US is seen as both rudderless and weak, not just by Hamas and Iran, but by al Qaeda and all middle eastern Arab nations. The damage to US interests is likely catastrophic.

The whole concept that a perceived slight to Islam or its prophet Muhammad is justification for violence directed at whoever produced the alleged slight including the nation where the alleged slight took place is ridiculous. The notion that independent uprisings in several Muslim nations occurred spontaneously in response to an obscure American movie on the anniversary date of the 9/11 attacks in America defies logic and reason. Our governments and the media are presenting an incredible lie as fact. Terrorist groups are testing their ability to produce large crowds of people to cover the activities of a few trained and equipped operatives while they simultaneously test the resolve of local governments to stop their operations. The weak points found will soon be exploited. Basically, the demand of Muslims is that free nations self-censor to avoid any criticism of Islam and Muhammad. This is a direct attack on our liberty and freedoms. You may rest assured that if we accede to this demand, it will immediately be followed by a new demand to avoid a different offence to Muslims. That is the way blackmailers and bullies work. If we do not accede, we are discriminatory racists and religious bigots. Our response needs to be simple and straight forward. Where our embassies are not protected or where anti-American and/or anti-Western riots are allowed, we withdraw our embassies and kick out their counterparts. Where Muslim demonstrations or riots break out in North America, we round up the suspects and check them for citizenship. Those who are not here as citizens or landed immigrants are deported forthwith as undesirable aliens.

The events of 11 September 2001 were neither senseless nor without reason. The attacks were the very definition of terrorism. The objective was to make an attack so amoral, so bizarre, so brutal that it would begin the process of terrifying Americans to the point that they would plead for their lives and sue for peace. I do not accept that modern terrorism is tribal in nature. We are all members of some tribe, of clans within those tribes and families within the clans. History is resplendent with tales of savage warfare amongst tribes as those who face annihilation will react with whatever level of brutality and savagery is necessary for survival. Most of mankind's significant wars have involved some degree of terrorism. The tactics are well known and well honed. While civil society shuns terrorist tactics, pragmatic generals have always understood the genius of terrifying the opposing society to the point that it will at best spike the guns of its soldiers and sue for peace and at worst undermine the support needed to continue warfare. Terrorism has evolved into a separate entity rather than a tactic of conflict. Osama bin Laden understood that the terrorism he espoused would result in awful retaliation on any nation that supported him overtly or that he was connected with. He thus disassociated himself and his followers with all nations which made his band and brand of terrorist more alarming. A target nation had no one to retaliate against. Bin Laden and his band were shadowy figures in an underworld without law or regulation. Another element required to create a separate terrorist entity was to demonize a worthy opponent to enhance recruitment to the cause. First world nations, led by America, were not just worthy of demonization, but were the natural enemies of third world nations living under brutal regimes. Dictators had already blamed the first world for the poverty and squalor suffered by their societies; creating a clandestine terrorist group to strike back at the alleged cause of so much suffering was natural. Bear in mind that part of the bin Laden strategy was to intimidate supporters as well as his perceived enemies. The more successful al Qaeda was (and is) the more power bin Laden acquired over his supporters who did not (do not) want to become targets of his terrorist group. The final element of the terrorist group envisioned was a noble cause. bin Laden chose to distort and subvert Islam and create a terrorist sect based on his interpretations of the Koran. Prior to 9/11, bin laden had created a shadowy terrorist group that: • was not aligned with any nation, but appeared to exist in all nations; • had a noble cause - the spread of Islam • had a worthy enemy - America and other first world nations • had a recruitment strategy and ready supply of people living in hopelessness • had support from nations and wealthy individuals who envied (or hated) America and other first world nations and wished their destruction. What bin Laden failed to anticipate was the American reaction to 9/11. He did not expect America and her allies to vigorously counter-attack and wipe out his support, supply and training facilities in Afghanistan. He did not expect that America and her allies would reoccupy Iraq. bin Laden made the tactical error of throwing resources into Afghanistan and Iraq to prevent an American success. bin Laden's terrorist organization was not designed or structured to conduct a prolonged ground war. The result was decimation and weakening of the al Qaeda infrastructure. The planned follow-ups to 9/11 necessary for a campaign of terrorism never occurred. The occupation of Afghanistan is winding down. The reoccupation of Iraq is bound to wind down shortly. After ten years, many Americans and their allies are weary of the war on terrorism, because they have nothing tangible to show for the efforts of their militaries. They cannot point to specific battles or confrontations where they "won". It is still possible that some conflicts amongst nations will be fought in accordance with Geneva Conventions, but the probability is minimal. World War II was the last deployment of massive land armies in conflict. Air power and the technology of guided missiles and remote controlled drones have rendered conventional warfare obsolete. Behind-the-lines generals are no longer safe; neither are their political masters. The capacity to bridge oceans with lethal air and sea power has changed our world and how we fight. Oddly, the high-tech capability of modern warfare has enabled the low-tech capacity of terrorism. Small groups of determined men can carry out horrendous terror attacks. Currently, 9/11 stands out as THE example of the capacity of terrorism. bin Laden is now part of history, but the dream of al Qaeda is not. If we want to keep 9/11 as a reminder of our failure to grasp the capacity of terrorism, we have to remain vigilant. As we stand down our military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, al Qaeda will commence rebuilding. All of the elements listed above are still in place. The war on terrorist organizations is far from over. Rest assured that if al Qaeda manages some success in its efforts to terrorize first world nations, the blueprint will be duplicated. The 'noble cause' may not be the spread of Islam, but other ideologies are open to perversion. Somali pirates, amongst others, will join any cause to enjoy a share of the spoils. The barbarians are truly at the gates in the form of terrorist organizations and western nations are ill prepared to deal with them.

This is the stuff no one wants to hear and why riots will not be confined to British cities. We have lessons to learn if we want to avoid similar disasters. Britain's liberal intelligentsia has smashed virtually every social value By Melanie Phillips Daily Mail (Britain) 11th August 2011 So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtu-ally every basic social value. The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society. Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as Right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age. Now we can see what they have brought about in the unprecedented and horrific scenes of mob violence, with homes and businesses going up in flames, and epidemic looting. Clearly, there is some as yet unidentified direction and co-ordination behind the anarchy. But what is so notable and distressing is that, after the first day when adults were clearly involved, this mayhem has been carried out in the main by teenagers and children, some as young as eight. The idea that they should not steal other people’s property, or beat up and rob passers-by, appears to be as weird and outlandish to them as the suggestion that they should fly to the moon. These youths feel absolutely entitled to go ‘on the rob’ and steal whatever they want. Indeed, they are incredulous that anyone should suggest they might pass up such an opportunity. What has been fuelling all this is not poverty, as has so predictably been claimed, but moral collapse. What we have been experiencing is a complete breakdown of civilised behaviour among children and young people straight out of William Golding’s seminal novel about childhood savagery, Lord Of The Flies. There has been much bewildered talk about ‘feral’ children, and desperate calls upon their parents to keep them in at night and to ask them about any stolen goods they are bringing home. As if there were responsible parents in such homes! We are not merely up against feral children, but feral parents. Of course these parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or else they are helping themselves to the proceeds, too. As David Cameron observed yesterday, there are clearly pockets of society that are not just broken, but sick. The causes of this sickness are many and complex. But three things can be said with certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family. For most of these children come from lone-mother households. And the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully committed member of the family unit. Of course there are many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon. In such areas, successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transi-tory males by whom these women have yet more children — and who inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and dysfunctional parenting. The result is fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them. Such children inhabit what is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It’s a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos. A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence. A world where the parent is unwilling or incapable of providing the loving and disciplined framework that a child needs in order to thrive. Yet instead of lone parenthood being regarded as a tragedy for individuals, and a catastrophe for society, it has been redefined as a ‘right’. When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement. Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers. This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were deter-mined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family. Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost. One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets. But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman. And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train. Welfare dependency further created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences. And it taught them that the world revolved around themselves. The result of this toxic combination of welfare and non-judgmentalism was an explosion of elective lone par-enthood and dysfunctional behaviour transmitted down through the generations at the very bottom of the social heap — creating, in effect, a class apart. Once, children would have been rescued from their disadvantaged backgrounds by schools which gave them not just an education but structure and purpose to their lives. But the liberal intelligentsia destroyed that escape route, too. For its onslaught upon marriage — the bedrock institution of society — with a tax system that penalises married couples with a wife who doesn’t work, was replicated by an onslaught upon the understanding and very identity of that society. Instead of transmitting knowledge to children, teaching was deemed to be an attack upon a child’s autonomy and self-esteem. Thus it was that teachers adopted the ‘child-centred’ approach, which expected children not only to learn for themselves but also to decide for themselves about behaviour such as sexual morality or drug-taking. The outcome was that children were left illiterate and innumerate and unable to think. Abandoned to wander through the world without any guidance, they predictably ended up without any moral compass. All of this was compounded still further by the disaster of multiculturalism — the doctrine which held that no culture could be considered superior to any other because that was ‘racist’. That meant children were no longer taught about the nation in which they lived, and about its culture. So not only were they left in ignorance of their own society, but any attachment to a shared and over-arching culture was deliberately shattered. Instead of forging social bonds, multiculturalism dissolved them — and introduced instead a primitive war of all against all, in which the strongest groups would destroy the weak. Closely related to this was ‘victim culture’, in which all minority groups were regarded as victims of the majority. So any bad behaviour by them was excused and blamed on the majority. In similar vein, all criminal wrongdoing was excused on the basis that the criminal couldn’t help himself, as he was the victim of circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, or as yet illusory cuts in public spending. The human rights of the criminal became seen as more important than the safety and security of his victims. Pun-ishment became a dirty word. So the entire criminal justice system turned into a sick joke, with young hoodlums walking off with community sentences or Asbos (insert for clarification - Anti-Social Behaviour Order(s) - JF) which they held in total contempt. Mr Cameron has declared that all those convicted of violent disorder in these riots will go to prison. Really? Isn’t it more likely that they will end up on some community penalty which will see them taken on trips to Alton Towers to make up for their disadvantaged upbringing? This is the normal response of our sentimentalised and addle-brained criminal justice officials. In short, what we have seen unfolding before our horrified gaze over the past four days in Britain is the true legacy of the Labour years. The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by Left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism. These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children) and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’. And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense. Britain was once an ordered society that was the envy of the world — the most civilised, the most gentle and law-abiding. Can Broken Britain be put together again? David Cameron is commendably talking tough: but will he have the stomach for tough action? Will he, for example, remove the incentives to girls and women to have babies outside marriage? Will he dis-mantle the concept of entitlement from the Welfare State? Will he vigorously enforce the drug laws? Will he end the kid-glove treatment of ‘victim groups’, and hold them to account for their behaviour in exactly the same way as everyone else? Repairing this terrible damage also means, dare I say it, a return to the energetic transmission of Biblical morality. Anyone heard from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the riots? Anyone care to guess what he will eventually say about them? Quite. When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem. Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ru-ins of the Britain we have so dearly loved; the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out. - 30 - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024690/UK-riots-2011-Britains-liberal-intelligentsia-smashed-virtually-social-value.html#ixzz1V0vSY0lu

Can you manage anything beyond unfounded and unsubstantiated "trash talk" -

What the heck is your problem? Assuming that global warming is real does not indicate that we face any disaster. The degree of global warming has clearly been exaggerated and distorted. There is no clear indication that any form of action is required. Clearly you want everyone to jump on your "global warming crisis" bandwagon. In that case, why do you not so state instead of disparaging those who have a different opinion?

I will call you on that one - the plan was to give the Finance portfolio to a Liberal, but nothing was said about the President of the Treasury Board or Canada Revenue.

I understand that talks have been between Chretien, Romanow and Broadbent.

Why get mad at 'us'? In 1948 Arabs told their bretheren in the sate of Isreal to leave so they would not get caught in the war Arab nations were unleashing on the new state of Israel. The Arab invasion failed and the Arabs bandoned their brothers in refugee camps on the Israeli border and have left these people twisting in the wind for 60 years.

Perhaps you can explain how al Qaeda got to this deplorable state. Hint = it could have something to do with engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, deployment of resources to combat NATO allies.

There is a bit more to it than that. As a parliament wears on, it tends to lose focus as events and a pesky opposition raise issues not covered in a throne speech. Prorogation can be used to refocus the government efforts when they have become scattered. Minority governments tend to bog down after while and everyone takes an entrenched position with gridlock as a result. A proprogation provides an opportunity for a fresh start.

None - zero. Take that to the bank, pal. It never happened. The troika threatened a non-confidence vote, and had they been serious, nothing could have stopped them when parliament next sat at the end of January. The LPC made Dion walk the plank rather then make good the non-confidence threat. Try again with some real sense of what happened. The infamous troika folded like a cardboard suitcase in a monsoon. The truth is tiresome when it does not support your contentions.

Emotional outbursts are for children. Your contention that Harper faced no non-confidence votes after 04/12/08 is nonsense. The troika coalition fell apart faster than a cardboard suitcase in a monsoon and no amount of nonsense from you can change the facts. The opposition has not made good several threats to vote Harper out of office during 2009. Grow up and accept that your rants respecting prorogation ring as hollow as an Ignatieff political threat.

It is not difficult to establish that since confederation, Canadas parliament has been prorogued 118 times. From confederation to the end of WW-II, Prime Ministers employed prorogation 80 times or an average of once every 1.3 years. From the end of WW-II to the present, Prime ministers have employed proroguing 38 times, or an average of once every 1.7 years. The record by Prime Minister is: Mackenzie King - 4 St. Laurent - 11 Diefenbaker - 4 Pearson - 3 Trudeau - 7 Mulroney - 3 Chretien - 4 Harper 2 Those who contend that Harpers proroguing is unique or that we need to curb the use of proroguing are ignorant of our institutions, history and of the sound reasons to employ prorogation. The current hysteria is irrational and pathetic.