The TMI Files. Return Of The Barber Of Bogan Central.
A few weeks back, Magilla was bleating about wanting a haircut. She was sick of having her fringe tied back. She told me she would cut her own hair, I told her no.
She then decided that she should cut the Fat Cat's hair, as she'd done in the past. Again, she was told no, and after some cajoling, I got the scissors out of her hands.
Later that evening, we were sitting on the floor together and I made the mistake of looking at the cat.
The whiskers on one side of her face had been trimmed. I kept a straight face and explained to her that cats actually use their whiskers to help them feel things (real technical and specific, I am), which I hope she understood, but suspect she didn't.
No matter.
What mattered was that last weekend, she took the scissors to herself.
One thing I will give to my daughter - when she decides she's got a problem, she finds a solution and then implements it.
In this case, she just grabbed the hair that was tied back and hacked it off with a pair of scissors she got out of the drawer. These are my shears used for cutting up plaster bandages when I'm taking casts, and they aren't the sharpest in the world.
In this case, I couldn't manage to keep my face straight, so she obviously took in the message that it's okay to cut your hair.
I thought that was the end of it.......
Alas, I was wrong.
Last night, as I was waiting for the babysitter so I could get a bit of work done, it was brought to my attention that she'd been working on her latest surprise for me.
This time, she'd attempted to hack off the ponytail at the back of her head. I had to attempt to tidy up the mess somewhat, but my darling junior primate now has an untidy, lopsided bob a la the luminous Louise Brooks.
Could be worse. She could have a haircut like Julia Roberts in Hook. Now that's what you call a dog's breakfast of a haircut!
Okay, being a bit of a technical nufnuf, I've yeat to learn how to embed vids from MySpace.
The link for Weird Al's MySpace vid is in the title, but I've also (for those too lazy to follow links) managed to grab a copy of White and Nerdy from YouTUbe.
Enjoy, and check out the cameos. I loooove Donny Osmond!
Thoughts On Where We're At. Warning: Linkfest Ahead.
Well, I was commenting over at AWH when I finally managed to put some of my thoughts in order. Because I'm strapped for time, I'm just going to paste my comments across and go to town putting in links. Here goes:
My opinion is that the biggest problem we need to overcome is the chasm between Left-wing and Right-wing before we can effectively deal with the islamic menace.
Please note that this is opinion only, based upon far too many hours googling things like the Frankfurt School.
The way I see it, the longrange ideas set in motion by Frankfurt School finally began bearing fruit with the social/sexual/civil revolutions mainly in the US in the 60s, but also carried across to the rest of the Western World.
For a more comprehensive and much better written thesis on this, please take a couple of days out to check The Fjordman Files. Fjordman has put his viewpoint (with which I wholeheartedly concur) across in a fantastic collection pulled together by Klein Verzet.
The socialist imperative to break down the capitalist system from within has been remarkably successful when we look at the amount of government interference in our day to day lives, and the breakdown of human institutions such as marriage and the (judeo-christian) religious traditions.
Because a necessary part of this was to destabilise the freemarket machine, restrictive and discriminatory practices such as affirmative action and antivilification laws, as well as reducing the effectiveness of practical solutions to anarchic activities (hog-tied police, anyone?) it has also left a power vacuum.
As we know, Nature abhors a vacuum, and we have a readymade ideology to leap into the breach - islam.
Because we were being softened up for our new socialist society, we were unprepared for the totalitarian tendencies implicit in islam.
If you read the quran, it is about islam uber alles. There is no tolerance, although there is provision made to pretend tolerance just in case islam is in a position of weakness.
The doctrine and practice of taqiyya ensure that it's okay to lie through your teeth the the foolish, filthy infidel to take their money and weaken them from within.
Our civilisation has been softened up, no doubt about it.
As for the those who espouse leftist principles, many are so enmeshed in their own worldview that they cannot conceive that islam would not come round to their way of operating, so they ignore it.
I've had the discussion before about islam being misunderstood. I point out relevant verses in the quran and get a blank look and a plaintive bleat of 'oh, you must be reading it wrong' or the 'hijacked by a minority' view.
When I suggest a litany of atrocities such as:Beslan, Bali (twice) NYC and the 9/11 attacks, London, Madrid, the carbecues in France, the cartoon riots and every (not so) little incident of seething, aggressive violence, it suddenly becomes too hard and the topic is changed.
We need to deal with those who are so determined to rid the world of our democratic rights and replace them with their idea of what is right for us.
And we need to address this soon.
Otherwise, we will have more idiocy like Hilali being feted on the telly, and Benbrika hailed as a triumph of multiculturalism
And it will get more and more difficult to combat the real enemy, which is the ideology that permits sex with children, polygamy, slavery, mutilation, wife-beating, rape, murder, theft, lying, throwing acid on people in vengeance of some imagined slight.
The ideology that forbids the separation of Church and State, the representation of the human form in art, women's suffrage, the free practise of religion, a level playing field in education and employment (girls in schools, anyone?).
Sure, there are moderate practitioners of islam around, but let's face it, how many of them actually understand the words in the quran and how they apply when they live in a western world?
That's the way I see things. I don't have the solutions, but I can see the problem.
First we need to unify our own world before we can defeat the jihadis.
I hope that all makes sense.
okay, I've run out of time. Still more links to be added, but since I wanted to get at least some of this out, I'll post this as a work in progress.
I got this in the email this morning, and with permission to post it, I am
Feel free to link this far and wide.
Historical Significance
Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.
At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war.
Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.
France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia. Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe. America's only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the East, was already under the Nazi heel.
America was certainly not prepared for war. America had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WWI and throughout the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW2, army units were training with broomsticks because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have real tanks. And a huge chunk of our navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor.
Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England, which was actually the property of Belgium, given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact). Actually, Belgium surrendered on one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could. Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering shipping loses and the near-decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later, and first turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse, in the late summer of 1940.
Ironically, Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone... 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a MILLION soldiers.
Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brits, then America. And the Nazis could possibly have won the war.
All of this is to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And now, we find ourselves at another one of those key moments in history.
There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world.
The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe , then the world. And that all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is their mantra.
There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East -- for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not known yet which will win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.
If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies. The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC -- not an OPEC dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.
You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.
If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.
We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. And we can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing........in Iraq. Not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing two important things.
(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist.
Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.
(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we get there we won't have to get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East , and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.
World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began with a "whimper" in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China It was a war for fourteen years before America joined it. It officially ended in 1945 -- a 17 year war -- and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again ... a 27 year war.
World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP -- adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WWII cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.
The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 2,200 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning W.W.II would have been unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.
Americans have a short attention span, conditioned by 30 second sound bites, 60 minute TV shows, and 2 hour movies in which everything comes out okay.
The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.
The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.
If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. And now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons unless somebody prevents them.
We have four options:
1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.
2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).
3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.
4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.
If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.
The history of the world is the history of civilizational clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.
Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.
Remember, perspective is everything, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.
The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept.
The US has taken more than 2,000 KIA in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. In WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.
But the stakes are at least as high... A world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms... or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).
It's difficult to understand why the American left does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.
"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it's safe.
Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most?
The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Raymond S. Kraft is a writer living in Northern California. Please consider passing along copies of this article to students in high school, college and university as it contains information about the American past that is very meaningful today -- history about America that very likely is completely unknown by them (and their instructors, too). By being denied the facts of our history, they are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to reasoning and thinking through the issues of today. They are prime targets for misinformation campaigns beamed at enlisting them in causes and beliefs that are special interest agenda driven.
Beryl T. Hubbard, Chaplain, Col (USAF, Ret) Associate Director Presbyterian and Reformed Joint Commission on Chaplains
The Queensland Liberals have called for crocodiles to be culled because people are being eaten.
The party's annual state convention in Brisbane has passed a motion put forward by Senator Ian McDonald for crocodile numbers to be reduced in populated areas.
One delegate, Brett Blade, told the convention that lives are at risk
"You can't allow crocodiles to come into the main street of Cairns and eat people - and that is exactly what's happening," he said.
"If you go up north, believe me they have come into town and they have walked down main streets.
"It also helps create a new industry where we can export crocodile shoes and hand bags - so we're making money out of it."
With this: The Men's-Being-Eaten-by-a-Crocodile Contest from Monty Python's Contractual Obligations Album
(Background music: Sportscast intro) Newscaster: And right now it's time for athletics, and over to Brian Goebells in Paris.
Goebells: Hello, well you join us here in Paris just a few minutes before the start of today's big event: the final of the Men's-Being-Eaten- By-A-Crocodile event. I'm standing now by the crocodile pit where- AAAAAAHHHHH!
(FX: Crocodiles eating, French exclamations and sirens)
Newscaster: Ah. Well I'm afraid that we've lost Brian. While they're sorting that out, we have a report from Barry Loothesom in Lughtborrow on the British preparations for this most important event.
Loothesom: Here at Lughtborrow are the five young men chosen last week to be eaten by a crocodile for Britain this summer. Obviously, the most important part of the event is the opening 60 yard sprint towards the crocs. And twenty-two year old Nottingham schoolteacher Gavin Watterlow is rated by some not only the fastest but also the tastiest British morsel since Barry Gordon got a bronze at Helsinki. In charge of the team is Sergeant Major Harold Duke.
Duke: Aww, well, you not only got to get in that pit first, you gotta get EATEN first. When you land in front of your croc, and 'e opens his mouth, I wanna see you right in there. Rub your 'ead up against 'is taste buds. And when those teeth bite into your flesh, use the perches to thrust yourself DOWN his throat...
Loothesom: Duke's trained with every British team since 1928, and it's his blend of gymnastic knowhow, reptilian expertise and culinary skill that's turned many an un-appetizing novice into a crocodilic banquet.
Duke: Well, our chefs have been experimenting for many years to find a sauce most likely to tempt the crocodile. In the past, we've concentrated on a fish based sauce, but this year, we are reverting to a simple bernaise.
Loothesom: The British team are worried because Olympic regulations allow only the competitor's heads to be sauced. Gavin Morolowe...
Morolowe: Yes, well, I mean, (clears throat) you know, four years ago, everyone knew the Italians were coating the insides of their legs with bolinaise, the Russians have been marinating themselves, One of the Germans, Biolek, was caught actually putting, uh, remolarde down his shorts. And the Finns were using tomato flavoured running shoes. Uh, I think there should either be unrestricted garnishing, or a single, Olympic standard mayonnaise.
Loothesom: Gavin, does it ever worry you that you're actually going to be chewed up by a bloody, grey crocodile.
Morolowe: The only thing that worries me, Jim, is being the first one down that gully.
Loothesom: Well, the way things are going here at Lughtborrow, it looks as though Britan could easily pick up a place in the first seven hundred. But nothing's predictable in this tough, harsh, highly competitive world where today's champion is tomorrow's crocodile shit. And back to you, in the studio, Norman.
As most people who blog would know by now, John Kerry made a complete doofus of himself by denigrating US servicemen and women in Iraq.
If you missed it, he basically said that you should educate yourself or you'll end up in Iraq. That's my reading and paraphrasing of him, anyway.
The soldiers in Iraq, themselves, had this to say:
Good to see the lads (and lasses, to be pc, of course) have a great sense of humour.
Also to add to this, I received in the mail today this letter: nb.I do not know the author of this, but I do trust the source who passed it on to me.
Yesterday John Kerry said, "You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well, and if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq" So I wrote him a letter: I am a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. I am currently on my second tour in Iraq, a tour in which I volunteered for. I speak Arabic and Spanish and I plan to tackle Persian Farsi soon. I have a Bachelors and an Associates Degree and between deployments I am pursuing an M.B.A. In college I was a member of several academic honor societies, including the Golden Key Honor Society. I am not unique among the enlisted troops. Many of my enlisted colleagues include lawyers, teachers, mechanics, engineers, musicians and artists just to name a few. You say that your comments were directed towards the President and not us. If we were stupid Senator Kerry, we might have believed you. I am not a victim of President Bush. I proudly serve him because he is my Commander and Chief. If it was you who was President, I would serve you just as faithfully. I serve America Senator Kerry, and I am also providing a service to the good people of Iraq. I have not terrorized them in the middle of the night, raped them or murdered them as you have accused me of before. I am doing my part to help them rebuild. My role is a simple one, but important. You see Senator Kerry, like it or not, we came here and removed a tyrant (who terrorized Iraqis in the middle of the night, and raped them and murdered them). And we have a responsibility to see to it that another one doesn’t take his place. The people of Iraq are recovering from an abusive relationship with a terrible government and it’s going to take some time to help them recover from that. We can’t treat this conflict like a microwave dinner and throw a temper tantrum because we feel like it’s taking too long. Senator Kerry, you don’t have to agree with this war. You don’t have to say nice things about those of us who choose to make sacrifices for the rights of every American rather than sit back and simply feel entitled to it. But please Senator Kerry, if you’re going to call me a stupid murdering rapist, stick by what you say. Don’t tell me that I misunderstood or that you would never insult a veteran because you’re one too. Having been there and done that does not give you a free pass to insult me. My suggestion for you, Senator Kerry, is to remember that your speeches are recorded, and broadcast to us simpletons over here. You may want to write down what you want to say before you say it, maybe have somebody look at it before you say it and tell you what others might hear. Remember that we can’t read your mind, if there are any misinterpretations in what you say, it’s because you didn’t communicate clearly. Good luck to you Senator Kerry, if nothing else it’s always entertaining to watch you try and climb out of the holes that you constantly dig for yourself. Sincerely, Somebody who is watching his daughter grow up in photographs so that you can have the right to say whatever you want about him.
Sort of puts paid to Senator Kerry's ideas of the forces being people by a bunch of nufnufs.
It boggles my mind that as a so-called leader in his country he has so little respect for the men and women who have chosen to honour their country and its ideals to the extent of willingly laying down their lives in a foreign and hostile land.
It leaves me thoroughly gobsmacked that he can have spent time in the military himself, yet be so ignorant of what it actually means.
I can't presume to understand exactly what life in the forces entails, but it is a high cost in so many areas - physically, emotionally, spiritually. I've seen it with my own family, and there are plenty of tales around of the traps of what those serving and their own loved ones go through.
I think John Kerry should congratulate himself on a job well done. I didn't think he could make himself look a bigger nong, but I guess you should never say never.
Please leave your Political Correctness at the door. Freedom of speech and thought are mandatory.
Good grammar will be rewarded (although posting and drinking may impact upon this at times).
