Note: Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.
First, again I must explain that because of my travels and the circumstances surrounding that, I have had little quality time to spend with my computer. That said, I ran across this;
While Leftist™ Americans express love and support for governments like Cuba ( a Hollywood favorite) and North Korea and hatred for their own country there are people who actually experience the hell that these countries are, and not just a few.
SEOUL: On Nov. 29, 1996, 14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp's torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among those to be put to death.
Instead, the guards brought out his mother and his 22-year-old brother. The mother was hanged, the brother was shot by a firing squad.
"Before she was executed, my mother looked at me," Shin said in a recent interview. "I don't know if she wanted to say something, because she was bound and gagged. But I avoided her eyes.
"My father was weeping, but I didn't cry," he said. "I had no love for her. Even today I hate her for what I had to go through because of her."
Shin's story provides a rare glimpse into one of the least-known prison camps in North Korea.
Shin, now 24, was a political prisoner by birth. From the day he was born in 1982 in Camp No. 14 in Kaechon until he escaped in 2005, Shin had known no other life. Guards beat children, tortured grandparents and, in cases like Shin's, executed family members. But Shin said it did not occur to him to hate the authorities. He assumed everyone lived this way.
Ahn Myeong Cheol, who worked as a driver and guard at four camps before reaching South Korea in 1994, has no doubts that Shin was in a total-control zone. Ahn said that when he met Shin in June, he immediately noticed the telltale signs: the avoidance of eye contact and arms warped by heavy labor from childhood.
"An instruction drilled into every guard's head is: Don't treat them like humans," Ahn said.
There are too many excellent quotes to take from this piece. I'll give you a few, but you really should go and read the whole thing. Mr. Steyn is brilliant and entertaining at the same time.
The other day, six Anglican archbishops called for the church to bless the unions of same-sex couples. The Anglican Church of Canada is about to have a big vote on the issue, and depending which way they swing it will either deepen the schism within the worldwide Anglican Communion or further isolate the Episcopal Church of the United States.
But never mind all that. What struck me was the rationale the archbishops came up with. This gay thing, they sighed. We've been yakking about it for years. Let's just get on with it, and then we can get back to the important stuff. "We are deeply concerned that ongoing study," they fretted, "will only continue to draw us away from issues which are gradually destroying God's creation — child poverty, racism, global warming, economic injustice, concern for our aboriginal brothers and sisters, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor."
That's it? Anglicans need to fast-track a liturgy for gay couples so they can free up time to deal with the real issues like global warming? Half that catalogue of horrors seems to be different ways of saying the same thing ("child poverty … economic injustice … growing disparity") in order to give a bit of pro forma padding to the totally cool cause du jour of global warming. Which is so cool that, if an Anglican archbishop shows up at a climate-change conference, he'll be lucky to get in the room and if he does he'll be stuck at the table with the wonky leg next to the toilet, barely able to see the Most Reverend Almer Gortry up on stage doing his power-point presentation and warning that rising sea levels will send tidal waves crashing through every gay wedding reception in Provincetown by Saturday afternoon.
And on health issues,
The argument for this is that the state has an interest in a healthy workforce: If you're poor and you get lung cancer, you'll be filling up hospital rooms at public expense. If that's true, then the state arguably has a greater interest in you continuing to smoke and dying young: the ever aging population of the western world will be the biggest single burden on state resources in the coming decades.
But in the broader picture it might be truer still to say that the individual, unlike the state, therefore has an interest in stopping and reversing the government annexation of health care — because that argument can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom — and, in the end, you may not get the government health care anyway.
Under Britain's National Health Service, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacement. Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Today, it's smokers and the obese. But, if a gay guy has condom-less sex with multiple partners, why should his "lifestyle choices" get a pass? Health-care costs can be used to justify anything.
And, if becoming a charge of the state is the issue, then Governor Schwarzenegger is a complete squish on California's real health crisis. His state's emergency rooms have been reduced to Quebec-level waiting times because of the strains of providing free health care to the legions of the undocumented Americans. One third of the patients in Los Angeles County hospitals are illegal immigrants, and they've overwhelmed the system: dozens of emergency rooms in the state have closed this decade after degenerating into an unfunded de facto Mexican health-care network. If you're a legal resident of the State of California, your health system is worse than it was a decade ago and will be worse still in a decade's time. Fortunately, by then your action-hero governor will have cured "all these terrible illnesses" and there will be no need for California's last seven hospitals.
After more than 2000 years a Christian community that is so ancient that when it formed Mohammad (the Voice of Satan) would not be born for CENTURIES will be exterminated at the hands of the Islamists of Hamas. Of course the very trustworthy leaders of Hamas (a terror organization that also seeks to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East) tells us that there is no problem and they are committed to the protection of Christians.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Broken crucifixes and shards from a statue of Jesus have been swept up, but Gaza's tiny Christian community says the violent warning sent by Islamic militants cannot be erased.
The ransacking of a Catholic convent and an adjacent Rosary Sisters school during Hamas' sweep to power broke more than wood and plaster. It signaled the end of a relatively peaceful, if sometimes uneasy, relationship between Gaza's 1.4 million Muslims and 3,000 Christians.
Despite promises of protection by Hamas leaders, Christians fear more attacks, and some say they want to leave. Gaza's flock already has been hit hard by emigration in recent years, and a new exodus could remove what is left of one of the Arab world's oldest Christian communities.
"We don't trust them. Our time is coming," said a Greek Orthodox Christian, who in the current climate of fear asked not to be identified.
Pray for the Christians of Gaza. They are set to be destroyed.
Officials at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) dropped Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center from its America at a Crossroads series. They give numerous false reasons for this. Simply, PBS is a leftist™ outfit that supports Islamism and want us to understand that we deserve the terrorism directed against us. Their support of Palestinian terrorism against Israel is well documented so I'll not address that just now.
During a hearing before the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the federal budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Rep. Jim Walsh (R-Syracuse) asked the leaders of those two organizations about the suppression of Islam vs. Islamists. He wanted to know why the voices of moderate Muslims (who liberals™ presumable care a great deal about) were so hard to hear. Where is their voice of outrage at terrorist attacks?
You would think that supporting moderate Muslims concerned about what is happening to them would be something on which liberals and conservatives would be able to agree.
"The answer," Rep. Walsh explained to PBS President Paula Kerger and her CPB counterpart, Pat Harrison, "is that there’s a concerted and substantial effort on the part of radical Wahhabist Islam to silence these voices with physical intimidation [and] verbal intimidation. And [the filmmakers] document it in the United States, in Canada and around the world: Denmark, France."
Then Walsh threw down the gauntlet: "Based on what I’ve heard, there has been a longstanding and concerted effort to ensure that the American people, who paid for the production of this documentary, do not see it."
The responses to these remarks were, at best, inaccurate and misleading. Two exchanges are illustrative. At one point, PBS’s Kerger told Rep. Walsh that Islam vs. Islamists had "not been rejected for air. The film is still in development and production. The film that you have is not a finished film." Mr. Walsh replied, correctly, "I spoke with the producer. That film is finished."
Then CPB’s Harrison interjected: "The problem is…they have two hours of material. They must get it down to one." The congressman held up the finished, 52-minute show, saying, "I believe this…DVD is an hour long."
The barefaced mendacity of officials of the CPB and PBS is staggering. This is your tax dollars at work.
Most probably the objection was spurious, having much more to do with my political beliefs than with PBS guidelines. One of the "Crossroads" producers actually asked our colleague, accomplished filmmaker Martyn Burke, "Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?" Imagine the uproar if a conservative (say, former CPB chairman Ken Tomlinson) had asked such a question of a liberal director.
Mendacity and hypocrisy, that is the CPB and PBS.
It is no small irony that, in a $20 million, taxpayer-underwritten series like "Crossroads," whose very purpose is to expose PBS’s audience to a broader array of filmmakers’ stories and perspectives, our film is being black-balled by the Left, which largely decides what will be broadcast on publicly funded airwaves.
Tonight I watched (most of) Banned by PBS: Muslims Against Jihad. Of course the fact that this was broadcast by FOX News by itself sends liberals into blithering fits. None the less, it was an excellent production that actually serves to make one more sympathetic to what is happening to the regular people who are Muslims and who are suffering under the extremists as much, or more than, anybody else.
To see the pain of the face of a mother who can no longer recognize her son because of what he became under the influence of the jihadis is to understand the evil of the Islamists at the level where we live. Most of us will never witness a suicide bombing, but we can all see the suffering of a mother who sees that she has lost her son. Yet, the Leftist™ morons at PBS believe that this is not fair to the Islamists, and so will not show it.
PBS' big editorial complaint against Islam vs. Islamists is that it was not sympathetic to the Islamists, and therefore unbalanced and unfair to the Islamist extremists. Again, from Mr. Gaffney's piece;
Then there were the myriad efforts by PBS and its "coordinating entry station," Washington’s WETA, to force us to change the character, structure, and content of Islam vs. Islamists so as to make it less "unfair" to the Islamists. These changes are not to be confused with constructive editorial suggestions. We received a number of those, and repeatedly incorporated them into the finished film. Rather, they were incessant demands from PBS and WETA that the film be redone so as to tell at greater length the story of "conservative imams" and others who oppose the anti-Islamist Muslims we set out to profile. The stated object of this revision was to provide more "context" for the positions taken by the former group. [Yes, it is unfair not to give terrorists their "context"]
Banned by PBS: Muslims Against Jihad is an excellent program and reminds us that Muslims love their friends and family too. But, PBS doesn't want you to see that.
Officials of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting often point out that the money that they get from the Government is insignificant to their operations. They are bluffing. I say that we should call their bluff and defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting including PBS and NPR (National Public Radio). They do not deserve our tax dollars.
The musician known as Cat Stevens said in a British television program to be broadcast next week that rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, "I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing."
The singer, who adopted the name Yusuf Islam when he converted to Islam, made the remark during a panel discussion of British reactions to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's call for Mr. Rushdie to be killed for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his best-selling novel "The Satanic Verses." He also said that if Mr. Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, "I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like."
"I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is," said Mr. Islam, who watched a preview of the program today and said in an interview that he stood by his comments.
In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed into immorality and irresponsibility and I think as far as this writer is concerned, unfortunately, he has been irresponsible with his freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again.
Tawfik Hamid, a former terrorist with Jemaah Islamiya has apparently come to his senses and offers a little help for terror enabling liberals™ in sorting out the "roof causes" of terror.
Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.
But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.
These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.
It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.
"This is an occasion for the world's 1.5billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," said Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan's religious affairs minister.
"The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism," he told his country's parliament.
"If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so, unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."
No, we wouldn't want to accuse Muslims of extremism.
That would actually be elegant and expensive food for Kim Jong-il and friends, not for the people of North Korea. You know, the ones referred to in the title Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Nope, not them.
WASHINGTON -- A senior State Department official told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing that funds transferred to the North Korean government by the United Nations Development Program were used by the Kim Jong Il regime to pay enterprises involved in weapons sales, as well as to purchase buildings in Europe and technology that could be used in a nuclear weapons program.
And because UN money is not enough,
The memo, which the State Department says is based on eyewitness accounts from program officials and internal UNDP business records, also alleges that the program's local employees withdrew from the UNDP's account at Pyongyang's Foreign Trade Bank tens of thousands of dollars worth of what UNDP officials identified as counterfeit U.S. currency.
It is instructive to note that this is not shocking to anyone anymore, and that we just let it go on and on.
"It is disturbing but it should not be surprising," said Mike Green, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council until the end of 2005. "Cash transfers to the North Korean regime are tightly controlled at the top to ensure Kim can procure dual-use materials for his weapons programs, finance his operations abroad and provide luxury goods for the elite. This is all fungible money."
How I wish we had a government that would not roll over for monsters.
Here is a post that I planned for early April, but with the chaos in my life (TDY to San Diego, house demolition and remodeling, etc) I was unable to post. I have heard nothing of this in the Fifth Column Fourth Estate. I am not surprised by that, but this is very important. Considering that fact that we are now rolling over for monsters like the Dear Murdering Freak-Boy Kim Jong-il I expect that nothing will come of this. We are now ignoring acts of war being committed against us. Here is the post.
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When one nation counterfeits the currency of another nation, it commits an act of war against that nation. Counterfeiting in large amounts weakens the currency and damages the victim economy.
It is no secret (although Kim Jong-il would like it to be) that North Korea has been manufacturing bogus U.S. $100 bills. It seems that they have had a little help.
UNITED NATIONS — As federal investigators examine how the leading U.N. agency in North Korea illegally kept 35 counterfeit American $100 bills in its possession for 12 years, documents indicate that more officials were aware of the existence of the fake currency — and earlier — than the agency has reported.
Spokesmen for the United Nations Development Program have said top officials at the agency's New York headquarters learned in February that their safe in Pyongyang contained the counterfeit bills and immediately reported it to American authorities. But several documents shown recently to The New York Sun indicate that higher-ups knew much earlier that the safe held counterfeit money.
The documents are part of a worldwide reporting system that allows the agency to keep track of the contents of its office safes.
One "safe contents count record" — shown to the Sun with the stipulation that the paper omit such details as the exact issuing date, which was before February — confirms that fake money was in the safe in Pyongyang. According to a source familiar with the system, this and similar records were filed with UNDP headquarters twice a year.
Internal UNDP communication shown to the Sun also indicates that in at least one incident, a Pyongyang office manager reported the existence of the counterfeit money to his successor. Similar reports were filed with the seven managers that have served in North Korea since 1995. Some of these managers have returned to UNDP headquarters since then and now serve as top officials there.
If federal prosecutors can return an indictment and confirm this activity, the UN will face a much tougher time in the US than it did in the Oil-for-Food Programme scandal. In that case, they turned a blind eye and enabled Saddam Hussein to enrich himself through a vast kickback scheme. If the UN helped hide North Korea's counterfeiting ring, that is a direct insult to our sovereignty, as well as our hospitality.
It would be an insult that we cannot afford to let pass. If the UN does not immediately fire everyone involved in this scandal and revoke their immunity, then we must cut off all funds for the UN and create a timetable for withdrawal from this thoroughly corrupt organization. We have no need of a debating society whose members transform refugee camps into seraglios, who stuff the pockets of dictators with money meant for those they oppress, and who actively assist other nations in undermining our currency. If the UN fails to cooperate, it's time to push Turtle Bay into the water and bid adieu to the last of the Cold War anachronisms.
I agree. The U.N. is worse than useless and should be disbanded.
I again find myself apologizing for lateness. I went home for Memorial Day and was away from my computer. Still, this is a good message and I wanted to share it with you. In the interest of full disclosure, I deleted his personal contact information, which was part of his signature.
CAPT Larry D. Cripps is in the Chaplain Corps of the U.S. Navy serving the 4th Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force in New Orleans, LA. I received this as an email at work. I am very sure that it was originally an official message to the 4th Marine Division that was forwarded about the Navy.
Memorial Day: A Day for Honoring Our Heroes
By: CAPT Larry D. Cripps, CHC, U. S. Navy Division Chaplain/Assistant Chief of Staff for Religious Ministry, 4th Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force, New Orleans, LA
Daniel Webster once said, "God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."
While in Washington, DC recently, I decided to get up early before the crowds gathered and visit the Vietnam Memorial. There are four friends and an uncle whose names are inscribed on the Wall. Persons whose memory is surprisingly as fresh to me today as it was some thirty plus years ago. As I stood before each panel listing their names, it occurred to me that their tragic death helped earn for me every hour I live in freedom.
Memorial Day is a day of celebration and sadness. As Americans, we rejoice in our freedom and prosperity that is unmatched by any the world over. But when reading your way through the seemingly endless list of names reverently etched in the black granite wall of the Vietnam Memorial, they take us to a place in our hearts where there are wounds that can never quite heal, and where our grief must be gathered up like garlands in the arms and warmth of family and friends.
The late historian Stephen Ambrose wrote a book in recent years about America's citizen soldiers of World War II. He said, "They knew the difference between right and wrong, and they were unwilling to live in a world where wrong triumphed, and so they fought and they won, and we and all succeeding generations are the eternal beneficiaries of their sacrifice."
The same must be said of all who have fought in every conflict before and since that time-Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen. All have been unwilling to sit on the sidelines of history and witness dictators and demagogues crush the voices crying out for freedom.
That is the reason Memorial Day is so important and why people gather in every city and small town across America-to remember the sacrifices of our heroes, to celebrate their patriotism, to mourn their loss, to give thanks to those who in the prime of their youth gave their all and forever so that we and our children might still drink from the fountain of liberty.
And so Memorial Day is a day we remember heroic lives, known and unknown, brave souls lost in battles past and present. Brave souls like my four friends and dear uncle plus thousands more like them who now rest in hallowed ground across this nation and around the world. We remember and we reflect not merely on the memory of their loss, but on the meaning of their lives. They whisper to us in the stillness of our reflection-freedom, opportunity, and prosperity are precious blessings; they were not left to you in perpetuity, they were not gained without great sacrifice by us, and they will not be preserved without purpose and without valor by you. We must never forget their undying expectation of us and our unending obligation to honor them by protecting what was hard earned.
On this day of remembrance, we salute those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. We also salute our disable American veterans, not just for their sacrifice in war, but also for their continuing contribution to our nation in peace. And we salute all of our honored veterans for their years of distinguished service, for reminding us every day what we must do to keep our country free.
May God bless you, your families, and all that you do in the service of this great Nation and in the cause of freedom!
Semper Fi! Chaplain Cripps God first...Marines and Sailors always CAPT Larry D. Cripps, CHC, USN Division Chaplain/AC/S Rel Ministry 4th Marine Division, FMF New Orleans, LA 70146
I understand that this is a little late as news items go, but in an example of mind-boggling arrogance and stupidity JimmyCarter recently pronounced President Bush's administration as "the worst in history". You have probably already seen or heard this discussed in the media.
I enjoyed reading a column discussing Mr. Carter's self serving comments by the moderately conservative Christopher Hitchens at the reliably liberal Slate magazine.
"Worst in history," as the great statesman from Georgia has to know, has been the title for which he has himself been actively contending since 1976. I once had quite an argument with the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who maintained adamantly that it had been right for him to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 for no other reason. "Mr. Carter," he said, "quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had."
And Eugene McCarthy could never be classified as anything like a conservative.
Here's more;
In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president's dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House "Bible study" sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev's occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter's mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence.
Amity Shlaes at Bloomberg has a few things to say as well;
But it is in the area where Carter assails Bush -- foreign policy -- in which he took the missteps that turned out to be of greatest consequence. By negotiating the soft Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) with Moscow, he suggested to the Soviet Union that his administration wasn't serious about protecting American interests. This emboldened Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to send troops into Afghanistan in 1979. The later Soviet withdrawal led to the chaos that allowed Afghanistan to become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda.
Hostage Crisis
Then came a new kind of crisis. Heretofore, Arab nationalism had dominated unrest in the Middle East. Now Islamic fundamentalists stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage. Instead of seeing the attack as an assault on U.S. interests, Carter treated the terrorists as if they were college sophomores staging a sit-in at Columbia's Low Library. His approach involved group-prayer sessions at home and endless negotiations, telling the press that "we are using every channel." This virtually ensured the year-and-a-half-long siege that the hostages endured.
Carter did veer from his passivity to make a half-hearted rescue effort, a catastrophic mission. But shocked by the photos of malfunctioning helicopters, Carter retreated. His handling of the embassy crisis sent a message that the U.S. prefers sanctimony to fighting back against violent fundamentalist Islam. That picture of wishy-washy America is still costing lives today.
As both of you, my dear readers, have noticed, I have been away for a bit. My employer, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard(PSNS), has assigned me to work on the USS Ronald Reagan at North Island NAS in Coronado California. I will be here for a few months and then return home in late summer/early fall.
The disruption to my normal routine cause me to suspend blogging for a time, but now I shall start again.
This sermon is read every year at the end of the services that we celebrate for Holy Pascha. Read this beautiful sermon out loud. It is wonderful.
The Easter Sermon of John Chrysostom
If any be pious and a lover of God, let him rejoice in this fair and radiant festival. If any be a faithful servant let him enter into the joy of his Lord. If any be weary with fasting, let him now enjoy his payment.
If anyone has labored from the first hour, let him receive today his just reward. If anyone has come after the third hour, let him now be thankful that the feast is at hand, If anyone has waited until after the sixth hour, let him not be anxious, no loss shall be his own. If anyone has tarried until the ninth hour, let him draw near also, shedding all his doubts. If anyone has come only at the eleventh hour, let him not be fearful because of his delay.
For the Master is bountiful and receives the last even as the first. He gives repose to him who came at the eleventh hour just as to one who labored from the first. The tardy are shown mercy and the timely are made whole. To the one he gives, on the other he bestows. He honors the deed and praises the intention.
Let all therefore enter into the joy of our Lord, (let both the first and those who came later receive their wages) Let rich and poor dance with one another. You sober and you heedless celebrate the day. You who have fasted and you who have not rejoice in this occasion.
The table is full-laden let all enjoy the feast. The calf is fatted, let no one go forth hungry. Let all partake of the banquet of faith, let all partake of the riches of goodness.
Let none mourn his poverty, for the kingdom stands before us. Let none lament his failings, forgiveness has risen from the tomb. Let none fear death, for the death of the Savior has set us free.
He quenched death when it had tasted his flesh. He despoiled Hades when he descended thereto Foreseeing this, Isaiah cried: 'Hell was embittered when it met you face to face.'
It was embittered for it was made void, It was embittered for it was mocked, It was embittered for it was slain, It was embittered for it was despoiled. It was embittered for it was led off in chains.
It received a body and encountered God, It received earth and came face to face with heaven. It received what it saw and fell where it could not see.
Death where is thy sting, Hades where is thy victory?
Christ is risen and you are cast down, Christ is risen and the demons are fallen, Christ is risen and the angels rejoice, Christ is risen and life is made free. Christ is risen and there is none dead in the tomb.
For Christ is risen from the dead as the first fruits of those that fell asleep.
The MSM has been baffled, wondering if there is a common thread in the many acts of terror that have been occurring in the past several years (or decades).
In my previous post I quoted Walid Phares who argued that the Iranian government was playing for time in holding the British hostages. Even though they released the hostages sooner than expected he may have been right. How can this be? It could be that they were not going to get what they wanted and they were increasing their isolation as a result of the kidnapping.
Namely that the country's leadership is in deep political trouble. The Iranian government is desperate to provoke the West to win back friends in the Islamic world, and to quell growing unrest at home. Subsidizing food and gas, providing billions for terrorists and building nukes all cost money at a time when the state-run Iranian economy is in shambles.
Because of incompetence in their oil industry, the Iranian mullahs have achieved the impossible: Despite having among the world's largest petroleum reserves, their production is shrinking and they have managed to earn increasingly less petrodollars even as the world price has soared.
While the Iranian theocrats understand that the entire world, including many of their own citizens, is turning against them, they also know that this could change if a Western nation would just attack them. Their strategy seems to be to find a way to provoke someone to drop a few bombs on them, on the naive assumption that such an assault would be of limited duration and damage. Such an attack, they may figure, would earn them sympathy in much of the world.
As always, read the whole thing for background and supporting information.
Since Day One of the planned operation to snatch British sailors from Iraqi waters, the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) "War Kitchen" in Tehran had already drawn multiple recipes for the following weeks and potentially months to come. Indeed the regime, reacting to rising pressures from sectors of its own population and from the American-British-led coalition, engineered an "escalating" incident. The main scenario, as projected inside the minds of the Iranian "Jihadi-cooks," is based on one request from the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime: waste time, as much time as possible. To the mullahs and their men in power, it is crucial to win the race between rising internal pressure inspired by the political changes in the region and pressure against the Iranian-led "axis" in the region, directed at the U.S. and the U.K. initiatives in Iraq. In short, Tehran's regime wants to crumble its enemies before they crumble it.
"Catching" a British Navy unit off the shores of Iraq -- regardless of the GPS positioning of the unit -- is the opening play. In ten days, Tehran has already scored one success: The UN is discussing what to do about the 15 British sailors instead of how to shut down the 15 nuclear centers in Iran. The debate has been deflected and is now in the hands of the Iranian cooks. The opening play is followed by the dramatization of the "incident." First, the regime begins showing the captives and swings media attention between details ("were they in Iranian waters?") and outcomes ("will they be tried?") of the phony case. Another psychological victory is scored: The international press follows the Iranian maestro's gesticulations. As usual with the Western mainstream media, the story's details become the devil, and their readers are denied the big picture. Here is how the mullahs' "psych-war" develops and could evolve in different directions.
Read the whole thing to see how this is playing out. Once explained, the shape of it is clear. A sample;
What is also to be expected is the circulation in the media of stories about an "internal struggle" between the good guys and the bad guys in Tehran. Media reports are already talking about two poles inside the military security apparatus, giving some hope to the Western voices calling for calm and diplomacy.
On April 1, the Sunday Times reported that "Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi is said to have told the country's Supreme National Security Council on Friday that the situation was 'getting out of control' and urged its members to consider the immediate release of the prisoners to defuse tension in the Gulf." Expectedly, the article's headline was "Power struggle in Iran over hostages." The Times adds, "However, Safavi's intervention was reportedly denounced by another senior general at a meeting of high-ranking commanders yesterday. Yadollah Javani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards' political bureau, was said to have accused him of weakness and 'liberal tendencies'."
How interesting to see that this "internal information" was obtained only now by Western (and some Arab) media from "well informed sources." Until this incident, few in the Western press have uttered the names of these Iranian generals. But now, they have become the Good Cop and the Bad Cop of Tehran. And on top of it, it works, because the logical western reaction would be then to wait for the "good guy" to prevail. That is precisely what the astute propaganda machine out of Tehran wants: Time.
I am a retired Navy Chief Petty Officer and a freelance performing 'cellist who brews his own beer. I am an Orthodox Christian. I am NOT a professional journalist, therefore nothing prevents me from writing what is true. I am now working as an Engineering Technician at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
