DARK SKIES BLOG

Last weekend, Ian McEwan, the award-winning British author of Atonement, found himself in hot water because of an interview in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in which he defended his friend Martin Amis. Amis, you may recall, is himself in hot water for his criticism of militant islam in his essay “The Age of Horrorism” and elsewhere (he was accused last year of being Islamaphobic after he said that “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”).

Here’s what McEwan had to say (in part)…

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist,” he said in an interview in “Corriere della Sera.”

“This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on - we know it well.”

Source: Telegraph UK

After reading McEwen’s defense and the criticism leveled at Amis and him by Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, I decided to dig up Amis’ essay and see for myself if he is guilty as accused (by Bunglawala) of “…advocating that the Muslim community be made to suffer ‘until it gets its own house in order’.

Actually, I found nothing of the sort (notice the not-so-subtle shift in “voice” between what was actually said and what was restated in the accusation itself — emphasis mine) .

What I did find was a deeply satisfying exposé on “islamism.” I can see why Bunglawala is offended because Amis pulls back the currently popular veneer so carefully crafted by the defenders of Islamism to reveal what the defenders hoped you wouldn’t discover.

You may not agree with all his points but you will agree (I think) that this essay is powerfully and beautifully presented. IMO, we will all walk away from this article with a much clearer picture of the existential threat of radical islam.

Here is a brief excerpt (link below)…

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence.
(…)
And it remains an accurate measure of the Islamists’ contortion: they hold that an act of lethal self-bespatterment, in the interests of an unachievable ’cause’, brings with it the keys to paradise. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, stresses just how thoroughly and expeditiously the suicide-mass murderer is ’saved’. Which would you prefer, given belief?

‘… martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven. Rather than spend centuries mouldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah’s garden…’

Osama bin Laden’s table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the president’s weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the USSR (in whose defeat, incidentally, the ‘Arab Afghans’ played a negligible part). Still, a sympathiser like the famously obtuse ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh, if he’d been there, and if he’d been a little brighter, might have framed the following argument.

Now would be a good time to strike, John would tell Osama, because the West is enfeebled, not just by sex and alcohol, but also by 30 years of multicultural relativism. They’ll think suicide bombing is just an exotic foible, like shame-and-honour killings or female circumcision. Besides, it’s religious, and they’re always slow to question anything that calls itself that. Within days of our opening outrage, the British royals will go on the road for Islam, and stay on it. And you’ll be amazed by how long the word Islamophobia, as an unanswerable indictment, will cover Islamism too. It’ll take them years to come up with the word they want - and Islamismophobia clearly isn’t any good. Even if the Planes Operation succeeds, and thousands die, the Left will yawn and wonder why we waited so long. Strike now. Their ideology will make them reluctant to see what it is they confront. And it will make them slow learners.

Source: “The Age of Horrorism” by Martin Amis (Guardian UK)

I thought this was a solid, if brief, biographic study of Cindy McCain. She’s a remarkable woman and will make a great First Lady! Here’s an excerpt and link…

“In Search of Cindy McCain”
By Holly Bailey | NEWSWEEK
June 30 Issue

(…)

In the spring of 1979, Cindy joined her parents on a trip to Hawaii. At a Navy cocktail party, a cocky captain came up and introduced himself. John McCain was the Navy’s chief liaison to the Senate in Washington. He was 41, but told her he was 37. Cindy was 24, but told him she was 27. By both accounts, it was love at first sight—though for McCain, it was far more complicated. He was a married father of three. His relationship with his first wife, Carol Shepp, was coming apart, and the two were separating, though he didn’t divulge any of that to Cindy that first night.

“I monopolized her attention the entire time,” McCain writes in “Worth the Fighting For.” Afterward, he persuaded her to join him for drinks at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. At first, Cindy had no idea that her date was a celebrated war hero who’d endured years of torture in a Vietnamese prison. Her parents had to tell her his story. In his book, McCain writes, “they were more welcoming of my attentions to their daughter than I had a right to expect. I doubt I could match their graciousness should I find one of my daughters attracted to someone who reminded me of me.”

(…)

Click on the the Pic to read the entire article…

In Ralph Peters’ current article in the New York Post, he doesn’t mince words about Obama’s painfully poor grasp of national security issues. He also makes another point that is completely new to our ears and shocking if true. Peters says:

Those who knew Obama in his university days claim that he couldn’t be persuaded to study history.

This would go a long way in explaining many of Obama’s gaffes and misstatements. If true, and we have no reason to believe Peters would make such a claim if not based on evidence, Obama would be as dangerously naive as he seems.

One can only hope that the MSM eventually comes to its senses and helps to expose this “Chauncey Gardiner” for the empty suit he is.

Read the Ralph Peters article here…

“OBAMA VS. OSAMA: PROMISES AREN’T PLANS, BARACK”

Michelle always thought Obama was too “empathetic” to be a politician?

Saaaay whaaaaat?

If she has doubts about his abilities as a politician, I wonder if she thinks he is strong enough to be “Commander-in-Chief” of our armed forces? The actual job is much harder than the interview process.

And in Obama’s case, the MSM has made the interview process unduly easy with their fawning, leg-tingling, worshipful press coverage.

Keywords: obama, Michelle, empathetic, obama strong enough, leadership, CIC, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Military, Military, armed forces, wimpy, obama sissy., Mr. Limpet, Mister McFeely, Barack McFeely Obama, Mister Obama’s Neighborhood

[Click here to check out all Crossfit related posts!]

Those of you who are familiar with Crossfit will agree with me that it is the best exercise program in the world to date. Because it is scalable, it works well for elite athletes as well as regular people who want to improve their physical conditioning (beginners should start slowly and carefully, however).

To the best of my knowledge, Crossfit is based, in part, on Dr. Izumi Tabata’s shocking findings of how short intense exercise mixed with short rest intervals produces huge improvements in anaerobic capacity and VO2Max. Here is a good article on how the Tabata method works.

Tabata Anything - Four Minutes of Pain to Gain
By John Harker

The Tabata workout is a high-intensity training regimen that produces remarkable results. A Tabata workout is an interval training cycle of 20 seconds of maximum intensity exercise, followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated without pause 8 times for a total of four minutes. In a group context, you can keep score by counting how many lifts/jumps/whatever you do in each of the 20 second rounds. The round with the smallest number is your score.

Credit for this simple and powerful training method belongs to its namesake, Dr. Izumi Tabata and a team of researchers from the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo, Japan. Their groundbreaking 1996 study, published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports & Exercise, provided documented evidence concerning the dramatic physiological benefits of high-intensity intermittent training. After just 6 weeks of testing, Dr. Tabata noted a 28% increase in anaerobic capacity in his subjects, along with a 14% increase in their ability to consume oxygen (V02Max). These results were witnessed in already physically fit athletes. The conclusion was that just four minutes of Tabata interval training could do more to boost aerobic and anaerobic capacity than an hour of endurance exercise.

Continue reading…

keywords: Crossfit, exercise, fitness, interval training, john harker, tabata, tabata method, weight loss, Izumi Tabata

I don’t usually post items like this but, with all the excitement caused by the FOIA release of docs by the Ministry of Defence, I thought it might be fun. BTW, I have never seen a UFO and have not formed an opinion as to what such phenomena might be.

This report was included in the information released by the Ministry of Defence under the Freedom of Information Act (UK). Tip o’ the hat to Nick Pope who discovered this report in DEF 31/173 (we sifted through the pdf and found this info starting at page 240).

The reason this report is so interesting is because not only was the sighting witnessed (in April, 1984) by a local resident and her neighbor, but by the local police (when they arrived to take her report, the object was still visible). The police viewed the object with binoculars and then made a drawing of what they saw (pic of drawing is below).

So…we have the civilian report, the police report, an actual drawing made by the police (included below), and a transmittal letter by New Scotland Yard to the Ministry of Defence.

I present the evidence below. Have fun! BTW, a “Section 40″ is where a name has been withheld to protect the person’s privacy.

Here’s the New Scotland Yard notice to MOD…

Here’s the report filed by the officers that saw the object…

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Page 2 of 2

Here’s the officer’s sketch of the object…

Here’s the report to the Chief Superintendent by the local resident who called the police…

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UPDATE: Here’s a LINK to another interesting article on this subject…

Here’s a timely article that addresses some of the questions many of us have had regarding Bill Clinton’s behavior during Hillary’s campaign…

‘Bypass Brain’: How Surgery May Affect Mental Acuity

By MELINDA BECK
6/10/2008
Wall Street Journal

Aides to Bill Clinton last week vehemently denied speculation that the former president’s intemperate remarks on the campaign trail were due to mild cognitive damage from his quadruple-bypass surgery in 2004.

“This theory is false and is flatly rejected by President Clinton’s doctors, who say he is in excellent shape….” the statement said.

But the condition dubbed “pump head” or “bypass brain” has long been recognized by doctors, even if they seldom warn patients about it.

Symptoms include short-term memory loss, slowed responses, trouble concentrating and emotional instability. In a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, researchers at Duke University Medical Center tested 261 patients before and after bypass surgery and found that 53% of them had significant cognitive decline when they were discharged — and 42% still suffered from it five years later.

Continue reading…

This messianic talk ought to be funny, but no one is laughing.

Whenever I read articles like the one Jonah Goldberg just wrote (in NRO) that sifts through the downright apocalyptic language used by some of Obama’s glassy-eyed fanbois, I get a Chris Matthews tingle too. But not the kind that runs up my leg…the tingles I get are in the pit of my stomach.

Well, enough about my stomach, here’s an excerpt of the article and a link…

(excerpt from “Messiah In Our Midst”)
…
Obama’s apostles are hard to dismiss. Oprah simply calls him “The One,” because “we need politicians who know how to be the truth.” (Jesus says in John 14:6 “I am the way, the truth …”) Oprah goes on to say Obama will help us “evolve to a higher plane,” which would put Obama in the role of our Intelligent Designer.

According to the New York Times, Obama’s volunteers are taught to eschew discussions of the issues and instead “testify” about how they “came to Obama.”

For many, he’s no retro-redeemer, but a 21st-century savior, a Matrix-messiah and Neo for our modern-day Nineveh. Self-help guru Deepak Chopra dubs Obama “a quantum leap in American consciousness,” while prominent “leadership coach” Eve Konstantine assures us that, “He’s our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence.”

Obama willing, I will never be stuck next to these people on a plane.

Michelle Obama is arguably Obamanity’s greatest evangelist, even though she has a streak of Old Testament smiting and wrath to her. She insists her husband has redeemed the entire nation (hence her newfound pride in America). She proclaims her husband is the sort of leader who will fix our broken souls. But don’t hope for grace on the cheap. “The change Barack is talking about is hard,” she insists, “so don’t get too excited, because Barack is going to demand that you, too, be different.”

Read it all here…

These much-talked-about videos do a good job of presenting the troubling aspects of Barack Hussein Obama…

Part One (Youtube link)…

Part Two (link)…

We have posted excerpts of and links to Jeffrey Lord’s articles in The Spectator on several occasions and confess to being great fans of his work. This article demonstrates how our freedom can evaporate in the blink of an eye (even in the Hamptons)…

“Orwell Does the Hamptons”

By Jeffrey Lord
6/3/2008
The Spectator

The Hamptons.

Yes, those Hamptons. The bucolic, upscale precincts of Eastern Long Island that provide so much fodder for the tabloids, particularly in the golden days of summer. The place where at any given moment the media’s A-list of rich and powerful celebs can be found shopping, sipping, and supping. The home of Steven Spielberg’s manse with the dinosaur weather vane, a sly reference to his hit film Jurassic Park. The space shared at any given moment by such as Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld or Mr. and Mrs. Billy Joel or Ms. Martha Stewart or that well-known Amagansett resident Sir Paul McCartney. If you have a hankering for celebrities, charity, and softball, this is the place to be for the every-August Writers and Artists softball game that features Alec Baldwin in the outfield with Carl Bernstein at the plate and Rudy Giuliani calling the balls and strikes.

Yet there’s something disturbing going on in the Hamptons lately, cautionary tales not of celebrity but freedoms lost and privacy invaded.

As it happens, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Hamptons and elsewhere on Eastern Long Island purely out of the accident of birth to two parents who are natives of the area. This has bequeathed to me a large and beloved extended family spread over Long Island’s two “forks” that is decidedly not among the super-rich or super-famous. Long before the Hamptons morphed from a collection of sleepy villages into some sort of cross between Beverly Hills and an international resort, this meant a lifetime of summers, holidays, spring and fall vacations in a geographic location that is without doubt one of the most beautiful in the nation, getting to know every beach and back road with the intimacy that is only possible over decades.

WHICH BRINGS ME to cautionary tale number one, an incident involving the namesake of a much treasured Long Island institution called Dan’s Papers. Founded in 1960 by a young Dan Rattiner, the paper is free, found weekly in just about every commercial institution imaginable from grocery stores to gas stations. Chock full of news stories about the South Fork (which stretches to Montauk Point, harbors the Hamptons and borders the Atlantic Ocean) and the North Fork (the area that reaches to Orient Point and borders the Long Island Sound — my personal favorite where I hang my hat in decidedly un-Hamptons surroundings since I’ve seen lots of celebrities and have more fun with family), it blends local news, commentaries and restaurant reviews with schedules for art events, movies, fishing updates, used book sales, and the happenings at local vineyards. This is added to lots of real estate ads, info on where to pick up a good second-hand boat and, but of course, celebrity news of the local variety. (One of the more recent read “…Jerry Seinfeld was involved in a car accident on Skimhampton Road in East Hampton last week.” Note here to worried Seinfeld fans…the brakes failed, the car flipped, but he was OK.) Dan’s became such a successful institution, now stuffed with expensive ads, that Dan himself (the spitting image of Sir Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park) was eventually bought out. He still writes for the paper, though. Surely one of the most prolific writers on the planet, his byline is liberally salted throughout each issue. A few years back I had the pleasure of spending an evening in his company at a barbeque, and I understand he is now happily engaged, has a dog named Moo, and a new book that will surely be a great beach read. In the Hamptons it has even been favorably blurbed by Spectator favorite Tom Wolfe.

To our tales.

It seems that back at the end of March, Dan, his fiancee, and Moo set out of a late Saturday afternoon to perform the usual chores. Pick up the eye glasses, stop at the dry cleaners etc. A quick drive from house to the center of East Hampton village, carefully parking the car on the street (relatively easy in the off-season) and Dan was on his way for the eye glasses. Retrieved, he emerges for the short walk to the dry cleaners when he notices a policeman carefully studying Dan’s new Chevy Tahoe. Approaching, he is addressed by name (the cop seemed not to recognize Dan yet knew his name). He notices two police cars are now stopped, blocking one lane of traffic. Within a minute or so Dan is told: “You are lucky I caught you before you drove off. We’re only going to impound your car. You won’t be arrested.”

He won’t be arrested?!!! Hello! For what?

Says the cop: “There was a lapse in your insurance. We now have radar sensors on the roofs of police cars. And we can check the license plates of every car on the road just by driving by. Your registration was suspended. The insurance had lapsed. The plates have to be taken off and sent to the Department of Motor Vehicles. And the car goes to the impound.”

Suffice to say, knowing all his paperwork was in the Tahoe and was completely current — and then producing same for the cop — Dan was astonished. Yes, the paperwork certainly did seem in order, but, well, too bad. No go. Literally. If Dan got behind the wheel of the Tahoe now and tried to drive away he would be arrested. “So we’re just dumped out here on the street?” asks an incredulous Dan.

Yep. Moo too.

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