Yellow Peril is back off the bench and warming up, as evil Mohammedans fail to maintain sufficiently scary image

Wow, it looks like it isn't enough for us to be constantly baited and terrified by images of the dreaded Saracens coming at us in the night, it is necessary to start getting the next threat up and ready, you know just in case the Islamists lose steam or something. So the Pentagon is taking the dreaded Chinamen out of the closet of fears to dust off and re-introduce to impressionable folks here in the Greatest Country on Earth! And so now here it is, run by newspapers on Memorial Day weekend....Behold the New Chinese Threat!:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052501954.html

Yep, it looks as if the U.S., which with its paltry 6% of world population nonetheless feels the need to account for 50% of the entire world's defense expenditures and also spends more on its military then the next ten biggest military spenders COMBINED......is needing to pretend that China's military and defense spending is excessive! The article claims that the Chinese might be spending more on their defense than they are owning up to officially, perhaps even three times more. Now if it's true and the Chinese military spending actually is three times higher than they are reporting, then that means that their defense spending is still less than one third of that of the U.S., and they have at least three times the population of the U.S. plus an even bigger land area to defend. How dare they spend a full one third of what the U.S. spends?

And the article even says that the Pentagon is worried that the Chinese may be trying to acquire a pre-emptive capacity to wage war. I wonder who they learned that kind of thinking from? Perhaps the people that gave us the doctrine of pre-emption? Nahhhhhh, 'couldn't be!

Honor Killings?

There is a horrible irony in the expression "honor killing," which describes a situation where the men of a family grab, drag, and publicly kill one of the women of their own household in order to basically make a statement about how much integrity their family possesses. And where I am amazed that any father is capable of stoning his own daughter, I am even more amazed that the father that does so can pretend that he has just committed a supremely moral act.

I'd like to say to the societies that condone this behavior, that even if they don't get how horrible and hypocritical this act is, they should at least understand that it is practices such as these that will ensure that their societies will basically be at the mercy of relatively tolerant, enlightened societies until such time as they wisen up. Every time an honor killing is permitted, that society is further distanced from viability and independence in a 21st century world. And the more clannish and unenlightened they choose to be, the more sure they can be that the circumstances of their lives will remain hard and precarious.

Having said all that, it would appear that one thing that does not prevent honor killings is for one of our societies to invade, occupy, and attempt to directly control the societies that do this sort of thing. The 17 year-old girl that was stoned by her family a few days ago was a Kurdish Iraqi living in Nineveh, which is the most Coalition-friendly ethnic group and geographic area in Iraq. If THEY still do honor killings, then the war has achieved less than nothing.

Not under the bed this time around...

In the 50s it was "Reds under the Bed". Now that there appears to be the high-profile prevention of a home-grown terrorist attack (the Fort Dix Six) by people who were so ingenious and devious as to try to have their terrorist training videos duplicated by some clerk at a local Circuit City store, there are already newspaper articles popping up even in liberal papers with the headline, "The Terrorists Next Door?" (WP). So now, it's just about guaranteed that a violent act of vigilante "justice" is right around the corner and it will undoubtedly be visited upon someone innocent. Let me just take the time to thank the print media for being such incredible inciters!

Additionally, there were articles yesterday claiming that there are Iranian-backed operatives in South And Central America ready to swarm up here like Killer Bees....Great! That brings it all home by combining the Terrorists-Next-Door with the Hordes of Illegals Streaming Across the Border! Perfect! It's almost too perfect, though isn't it? Is this how they want to bring the Lou Dobbs fans back over to the President's side?

Now please don't tell me that nobody sees what a boon all of this is to the approval ratings of the Administration. Every time I see something that automatically hits the primitive fear section of people's brains, I am tempted to ask questions.

Quote

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."

George Bernard Shaw