The Prez sounded almost credible the other night but kids let me tell you something. This is a war with Islam, and I mean all of Islam including moderate Islam (if there is such a thing). Just because the Saudis are afraid of ISIS or ISIL or whatever it is, doesn't mean they're our buddies and pals. Under the right circumstances they'd turn on us in a heartbeat, and you can take that to the bank. There is no such thing as "radical" Islam, it's just those who choose to openly fight as opposed to those who war by other means. Again, this is a war, a war of values and cultures, plus it is a war of attrition and it will continue until somebody wins. The war was declared by Muhammad in the fifth century against any and all religions, and nothing has changed. Over the centuries Islam has stamped out a ton of religions (Babism is my favorite, unfortunately not what the name suggests) and those ragheaded bastards have put a lot of deities out of work. Christianity and Judaism are their immediate goals now, and they've made steady progress since the days of Jimmy Carter.
So, what is to be done? In my view not a helluva lot. We can't isolate them economically, they have oil. We can't defeat them militarily, they're too big (geographically speaking, we can't go in and occupy Morocco to Indonesia). We can't get along with them because they won't play nice until Israel is gone and every Jew is dead, and even after that why would we believe they'd stop there? Their goal is a world-wide caliphate. If they achieved their goals in the Middle-East they would just press on. So what to do, hang on until such time as they gets nukes and we all burn up? I wish I had an answer short of World War III.
On a lighter note (but not much lighter) 9/10 came and went without much notice. What's 9/10 you say? Well my sports-illiterate friends, on September 10th. 1972 the Olympics conspired to cheat us out of our Gold Medals in the sport of basketball.
Here's the rundown for all you youngsters. Up until that time the Americans had won all the Golds in basketball, and we did it with boys against men. All our guys were college athletes but most of the world fielded "national" teams that for all intents and purposes were professionals. Out '72 team was made up of some very good college players, but certainly not the best college players. The two most dominate players in college ball at the time, Bill Walton and David Thompson weren't on the team. Neither was Keith Wilkes or Henry Bibby from NCAA champs UCLA, or for that matter All Americans like Tom Riker from South Carolina or Barry Parkhill from Virginia. Our coach Hank Iba was old, and OLD SCHOOL. He coached a slow methodical game and a lot of the kids weren't interested in playing 1940's set-shot basketball.
Anyway if you're interested here a video that lays it all out. I remember the game, I remember the emotion and I still don't know who pissed me off the most, the Olympic officials, the Russians or the stupid ass American sports bureaucracy that couldn't get their shit together. But I can't help but imagine what the outcome would have been had we Walt Frazier, John Havlicek and Kareem.
Now, the "cuts" she's talking about are a lie, at least according to the Washington Post and WRAL. But hey, that never stopped a union. Hell there's one ad of a teacher in Cary (median income $85.00k per year) saying the schools are so poor she doesn't have a textbook! Lord Lord Lord, what a load of bollox! I can't find the ad on youtube so I think they've pulled it due to it's high bullshit quotient. I'm sure even the low info crowd wouldn't fall for that one. But I expect more of this kinda stuff, stay tuned.
Actually I misspoke. I meant Bob McAdoo from Carolina NOT David Thompson.
ReplyDeleteA VERY Freudian slip.
NC politics was such a disappointment. When I lived there I figured hey we're in the south so it ought to be much better than MD or somewhere kooky like that. Unfortunately LIVs seem to be low-information no matter where you go.
ReplyDelete