Know how to knock the wind out of the drug cartels? Know how to bankrupt them? Know how to slice a few percentage points from the crime rate? It's simple so Washington won't go for it, for that would mean relinquishing political power and conceding it was wrong and that it's spent billions of taxpayer dollars pointlessly on the "war on drugs.". Repeal all drug laws. Abolish the FDA. Abolish the DEA and fire every last snarky gun-toting, chemical-spraying, crop-destroying goon in it. No retirement benefits. No fringies. Just turn them loose into the real world where they'd need to make an honest living, doing productive work. There was Prohibition. It created gangs and encouraged crime. Al Capone and Company. No one learned anything from that failed experiment in government-enforced puritanism. The economic laws governing prohibited alcohol apply equally to prohibited drugs. Before the DEA, before the federals turned nanny, before prohibitions and controls drove "illegal" drug prices through the roof, drug-related crime was virtually non-existent. Then the fire-fights down Arizona way will cease.
Ravings: Thank you for seconding my position. Today, one can take Islamophobia as a sign of mental health. Can one say as much about Muslims? Not really. There are the run-of-the-mill, average, next-door-neighbor kinds of Muslims, who use Islam as a kind of turtle shell in which to retreat from the responsibility of thinking, of asserting rational values, of living like normal human beings. They live in a state of abject, literal selflessness. Allah commands them. Allah guides them. Allah owns them. Then there are the Muslims who can’t stand the pressure of hiding under the turtle shell; their “selves’ break out of the shell and emerge as vipers to strike with the venom that is the core essence of Islam: death for the sake of death, destruction for the sake of destruction, killing for the sake of killing. They hate their own existence and that of others who are more successful in living. Islam is possibly the most nihilist creed on the face of the earth.
Thanks. What's troubling are the 6,000 clueless ones who signed up on that woman's Facebook page to wear the hijab in support of Muslims. And I mean "clueless." They live in a free country, not in a despotic one. They don't get it that Islam isn't just "another religion," like the Amish; it's tyranny over the self, over one's freedoms. You can bet that they'd have second thoughts if they were forced to live under true Islamic conditions, and faced the prospect of being stoned to death for disobedience or the slightest infraction of "custom." Or, maybe they wouldn't have second thoughts.
If I were in the least show-offy, I'd have a big pin made up that read, "I'm an Islamophobe...and a Naziphobe, a Communophobe, a Fascistophobe, an Obamaphobe," and flaunt it at my own peril. Islam is a system of theocratic totalitarianism. So, of course I'm phobic about it. And I don't trust anyone who submits to it, least of all Americans who convert to it (and there are plenty of them). Islam is like Spandex that fits neatly over one's mind, suffocating it, because Islam doesn't require thought, or value judgments, or having any value beyond Allah and conformity. Islam attracts those who don't wish to have the responsibility of thinking, those who wish to submit to a form of mental sado-masochism with a smile..
I challenge the contention that there's not "an American who doesn't know smoking isn't good for you." Typical Republican me-too "defense of freedom." Smoking is good for you, regardless of its alleged ill-effects, because it's a freedom. Further, the whole second-hand smoke argument used to ban smoking in bars, restaurants, and businesses for the sake of pseudo-hypochondriacs (they have a right to eat and drink in a smoke-free envirnoment, don't you know, never mind private property rights), has as much scientific foundation as the argument for global-warming. It's government "science" that will kill us, not smoking or sugar or soft drinks or transfat. And it's government "science" that is lopping off our liberties, one by one. .
One of your best, Jodie. Keep slamming our vacation-happy President. You must wonder why he's spending so much time out of the Oval Office. Could it be that the office of president isn't the Cloud Nine rapture he expected it to be? And I think it's great that not even incumbant Democrats want him to soapbox for them. He's a hex and a liability.
I saw that one, too, but while I don't recall the DeVito line, I don't doubt its truth. Hollywood is stuck in a rut of its own making. It refuses to receive a good, original idea -- and it's doubtful anyone there anymore would even recognize an original idea -- without putting it through the re-write and re-cast process to keep a bunch of over-paid hacks employed. Every so often something halfway decent manages to squeeze through the barbed wire of stale political correctness and elude the guns of the left-wing guard tower. Then they presume that they'll "give the public what it wants," repressing the doubly damning knowledge that first, what the public wants they'll never approve or vet or produce, and second, that they really don't know what the public "wants."
Good article, and the references to the alleged "Golden Age" of Islam in Spain are especially important. They knock the stuffings out of the contention that Islam can be "reformed" to behave civilly to other creeds and races than "Arab," and explodes the idea that Muslims can do it themselves without prompting. They can't. Their creed, the Koran, the Hadith, requires them to be self-made zombies ready to make war on anyone who doesn't want to be a submissive zombie. Islamic "jurisprudcen"? It's a contraction in terms.
I watched the trailer you provided. Looks strikingly like a remake of the first "Jaws," but with a multitude of smaller "jaws" and babes in jeopardy and a black guy as the town sheriff. Why in hell should I want to see it? I also watched the trailer for "What If...?" and THAT looks like a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life," but turned inside out, coupled with elements of "Defending Your Life." Good God, is Hollywood so bankrupt that all it can do is recycle movies from the past?
Islam is more a political ideology than a religion or creed. Its critics, apostate Muslim and non-Muslim, know this, for otherwise they wouldn't feel compelled to weigh in on the subject. What politicians ever felt compelled to defend Quakerism, or Amish-ism, Scientology, for example, the way they do Islam?. I can't think of any. There is no hidden agenda woven into those creeds' tenets. A totalitarian one is woven through the whole fabric of Islam, in the Koran and the Hadith. Obama, Bloomberg, Cuomo, and other politicians focus on the religious face of Islam, and ignore the far more important political face of it. This is for two reasons: it earns them brownie points with liberal/leftists (and with Muslims, of course), and because they are nascent totalitarians themselves. Examine their statist careers. Of course they're friendly to Islam. It is their own brand of deception a kind of infidel taqiya.
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Brainchild