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Category Archives: Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology

FTAC – America – The Presidency – Long Term

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

democracy, dictatorship, distribution of power, individualism, medievalism, military capability, political freedom, political science

I don’t think we’re destroyed, (name withheld): our bombers cover the earth daily; our satellite and other security systems are up 24/7/365; our armed forces have taken some hits in the area of “largeness”, but at the same time they have reinvented themselves in “force-multiplying” technology; our security industry, which includes at least 17 major active institutions is probably better knit together today than at any other time in their turf-divided histories; and we seem to have the capability of operating out of the spotlight.

Some programs run in the background.

I believe that this material — http://www.stripes.com/…/cia-special-ops-cooperate-to… — would not have been released to the public unless the CIA and military had agreed to “leak it” — i.e., to inform ISIS fighters as to just how closely they have been infiltrated and monitored. This has taken place, albeit off the Big Media radar, throughout the course of the Obama Administration. As such, the data argues against the conservative arguments involving appeasement.

I think what has happened is that the west has met and adjusted its tactics to the medievalism represented by, sigh, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and also distant rivals in Pakistan and elsewhere. We are the “Modern” at war with the “Medieval”. Time is the New Space, and we are fighting with these “emperors” and “new nobility” over the essential future models of governance. Colonel President Emperor Putin has found himself — and put himself — center stage in the defense of political “absolute power”. We, the west, remain and stand by “classical liberalism”: we believe in personhood for everyone: the despotic seem to believe that they — each — are the only persons who really matter.

I didn’t vote for Obama because of the Far (Out) Left connections and his experience with the Wright stuff . . . but I firmly believe that he is responsible to the major American institutions — DOD / NASA (that set the standards for the nation) and then the layers of bureaucracy that will survive him and other American Presidents to come. In that way, our democracy captures our elected leaders: they can talk all they want, and they can maneuver quite a bit, but once in the driver’s seat, the chief administrator’s chair, they’re cushioned or padded by all that has preceded them and constrained by other political forces. That despots don’t want that kind of position, and they’re fighting it all the way down.


Some Muslims — and Muslim to Judaism converts that I have encountered — believe that a “clash of civilizations” is taking form.  I take a broader view: the medieval past has inconveniences a great part of humanity, and the Moderns (and the Progressives) have a problem with that.  So do the clerics and dictators who counsel Obedience — or Else!  The autocratic or despotic — malignant narcissists, all of them — fear their own dawning irrelevance.

# # #

FTAC – On Syria – For Syrians

27 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

absolute power, despotism, fascism, feudalism, medievalism, narcissistic leadership, political sadism, Syria

The Syrian war and related conflict are about the persistence of feudal and medieval “absolute power” in the 21st Century. To maintain that illusion, but one bloody and miserable enough — I can’t imagine how it could be more miserable for Syrians — Colonel President Emperor Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Tyrant Assad have had to produce on the ground a play and strategy fit to their own grandiose and inhuman delusions: “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

So far, they have brought about what they wanted — and needed — to create.

In the post-Soviet but neo-feudal Russian period, Putin now has an enhanced military position in Syria, and that presumably suits his desire for empire. Handily enough, Ayatollah Khamenei has gotten out of the deal a foil — a kind of chess opponent for him — in the creation of ISIS against which he may now set loose more Revolutionary Guard and Iraqi Shiite militia (the two are together in this): as long as the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle burns between himself and Baghdadi, he’s in business and may continuing his plundering of Iran. Of The Tyrant Assad, what may one say? How glorious that it turns out himself standing off (in view of the west) the butchery of the al-Qaeda types, who themselves have also a dreadful program.

From an ethical and moral standpoint — from Pharaoh, another tyrant, to this day — everything is wrong about Syria, and the only people who can really fix conditions and themselves are . . . Syrians.

In the 20th Century: Stalin-Hitler (before Hitler betrayed Stalin). In this one: Putin-Khamenei (Assad depends on both). These men need to be seen for what they are, what they represent, and what they have hauled with them into our century, and Syrians would be wise, perhaps, to understand their own complicity in the development of their power. It’s good to leave them with their egomania, their cowardly hate, and their sadism.


Visual coverage of the Syrian Tragedy: lurid.

Painful.

The cause of it: a medieval “will to power” accompanied in the people by insularity and culturally transmitted contempt for others matched to fear and hatred of the Jews and of the west.  When trouble came and the same raised a cry and reached out for help, it appears the world most hated stood aside while the curtain rose on “Assad vs The Terrorists” and darkness came to their seared land.

One hopes that for those who reached across borders and those who have reached back that those mental conditions — habits of mind, learned social grammar, misperception, and fear of the condemnation of one’s own perverse society — will change.

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Ahmed’s Clock In A Box – Exploitation of A Stereotype for Political Gain, Says Arab American Professor

25 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arab American, CAIR, clock in a box, counterterrorism, terrorism, United States

Posted to YouTube 9/24/2015


“This is a racial issue, this is a religious discrimination issue, and now you have a poster child, literally, a poster child for your agenda, and I think that agenda is an agenda of intimidation.  It think these Islamists want to intimidate people in our country from questioning the behavior and motives of people from their group, and I don’t think this is the first time they have tried this.  Apparently, this group they work with, the Council on American Islamic Relationships or CAIR has done other things claiming “Islamophobia” and has sometimes been successful and sometimes unsuccessful, but this is a technique they have used before.”  So what’s really unfortunate about that is western civilization, our nation, and many others are in a state of war with radical jihadism, and unfortunately, people who are Arab Americans like me and other people sometimes have parts of us that because of our appearance fit a stereotype, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason, and this was an exploitation of a stereotype, in my opinion, to advance a political agenda, and I think it’s wrong because we are still not completely safe in this country, and we have to watch out for our safety and the safety of our children.  So my message to you is keep your eyes open.  If you see something, say something.  Suspicious behavior should be reported.  You should not ever be afraid of to report a suspicion of something that looks amiss regardless of someone’s race or apparent religion.”

Additional Reference

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/16/irving-texas-fourteen-year-old-builds-clock/ – 9/16/2015.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260279/ahmed-mohameds-qatari-vacation-muslim-brotherhood-arnold-ahlert – 9/30/2015.

* * *

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/clock-and-bull-story – 10/26/2015:

The case that the teen was deliberately trying to provoke a confrontation was strengthened as more was learned about his family. His older sister, Eyman, was once suspended from her school for threatening to blow it up. His uncle runs a trucking company called Twin Towers Transportation. And his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, is a publicity hungry activist who calls himself a sheik, wears flowing white robes, and is a 9/11 Truther. The elder Mohamed routinely returns to Sudan to run as a presidential candidate, and he once debated Pastor Terry Jones of Koran-burning fame.

Update – December 11, 2015

There’s more to include, including a suit against Irving, Texas officialdom, but BackChannels saw this from PJ Media and has elected to run it as a bookend on this piece (posted to YouTube 12/3/2015).

 

Update – August 2, 2016

The Internet is his refuge — and his attacker. He reads every story and long, rambling conspiracy theory about him. Countless blogs and videos have been dedicated to proving Ahmed’s clock was just a Radio Shack clock he put in a new box. (It was partially made of Radio Shack parts, but the design was all his own, he says.) Others insist that this was all a stunt masterminded by Mohamed to get attention. (“He can’t plan the reaction. And why would he want me to get arrested?” Ahmed says.) Still more have proclaimed that the Mohameds are terrorist sympathizers because they once owned a company called Twin Towers Transportation. (They did own a company by that name, because their offices were housed in a Dallas office building called the Twin Towers.)

Contrera, Jessica.  “A year ago, Ahmed Mohamed became ‘Clock Boy.’  Now, he can’t escape that moment.”  The Washington Post, August 2, 2016.

FTAC – Axis

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

What the Soviet and Soviet-inspired did with mind — information and psychology — has to be addressed and reversed wherever it traveled.

I invite (name withheld) to watch this conversation and, at any point, join it.

The “loyal lie” — told or believed out of fear or want (because people lie primarily to get something or hide something) — has been pitted against “inconvenient truth”, and while the truth may not be favorable in a given instant, it is always more reliable than the lie.

The KGB program had been a program of mass mind control — control of the press; punishment of dissidents; for Stalin, the mass murder of critics — and it was sucked up into Baathist pan-Arabism: there is no mystery as to how and why Bashar al-Assad, with Putin and Khamenei’s blessing, chose to decimate the Syrian state (in area, half lost) and people (half the population displaced or refugee on top of countless thousands dead or maimed — and tens of thousands of those children) rather than cede the assumption of the right to absolute political control or power.


For the despotic, there is not a sucker in every crowd: the crowd is there to be suckered.

# # #

FTAC – In Response to Carson’s Statement

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

religion, secular humanism, zealotry

The ways of “secular humanism” are like a membrane surrounding religious aggregates, lol, but also from which the same more (apparently) satisfying beliefs about man and the universe may be hung. The helpfulness of the moderate outlook is to blunt the power of a narcissistic drive attached to any convenient existing “ism”, including humanism, and then muddle through in an uncomfortable (to all) but reliable (for all) equilibrium.

https://youtu.be/J9CeC3yrcG4

It’s okay in the boxing ring and for entertainment, but in public office, much less high and highest offices, it’s best to know that “God is greater” or “Master of the Universe” and humanity is just guessing, passionately, but guessing, in any case.


The Facebook chat veered toward refusing endorsement of any “fundamentalist” for office.

That’s fine.

I wouldn’t want a First Family handling rattlers to prove to itself on a recurring basis its own favor in the sight of God in exchange for its fervent beliefs.

However, how available is what is opposite the religious zealot, i.e., the irreligious “secular humanist”?

The quest for that right-for-president guy or gal may be impractical, especially if “secular humanism” is either positioned or seen as debunking all religious faith and thereby becoming a faith in itself.  Intuition suggests that the better framework in which to place a “godless humanism” is as a method — not a faith — designed to manage the separateness of differing beliefs and drives: we want to be free, and to be free means to be as we believe God wanted us to be, or to be as we believe we were fashioned by fate or nature, and doing that means “being ourselves” while also keeping out of one another’s way as a matter devolving to custom and law.

That faith — any — which would fail to recognize political, religious, and social boundaries forged in both the forming processes of communal and personal identity, would seem here to doom itself to perpetual conflict and defeat.


Focus of the discussion: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/09/there-was-nothing-illiberal-about-ben-carsons-muslim-president-comment/ – 9/22/2015.

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HUSSEIN Obama’s MASSIVE Geopolitical Blow Back: Israel Veering East, China Ties Burgeoning. What Does This Mean? Commentary By Adina Kutnicki

23 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Adina Kutnicki's avatarAdina Kutnicki

Obama & Kerry Lie

IT is a given, almost akin to a “holy grail” within Israel – particularly, in the political sphere –  that Israel’s “best friend” is America. Yes and no. Regardless, a basic backgrounder is in order to understand what’s what.

YES, due to inherent common values and worldviews, the two nations are bound by mutual underpinnings. While a majority of Americans and Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly support Israel (and Israel’s majority Jewish public returns the sentiment towards America), the increasingly hostile Demster machine is on the warpath. Indeed, yesteryear’s Democratic operatives no longer even maintain the pretense of being pro-Israel, nor are they pro-American. But let’s not digress.

ON the other hand, the Executive Branch, for the most part, has been a fair-weather friend, dependent upon who is POTUS. However, no one, least of all Israel’s politicians, should have been shocked by HUSSEIN Obama’s overt hostility. That’s a vast understatement. In reality…

View original post 2,452 more words

“Hoax Bomb” – “Not a Science Project”

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ahmed Mohamed, clock story, Irving, Islam, Islam in America, Texas

Posted to YouTube 9/18/2015


Posted to YouTube 9/22/2015

Direct from The Blaze:

(9/22/2015)

An excerpt from the interview now appears on Breitbart: http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/09/23/glenn-beck-ahmeds-clock-dog-whistle-islamists/ 9/23/2015.

Slice or dice as any observer may: the “clock in a box” appears to have been manufactured and only the works taken out and moved to the Vaultz box.

Some invention.

(updated 9/25/2015)


“Ahmed Mohamed” has become an international celebrity for “building” a clock, a project that involved no science project, no canned hobby plans, and no discernible reason involving intellectual bravado or curiosity (and none was offered in detention).  That publicity cannot be undone — nor may President Obama’s famous tweet: “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”

In some parts of the world, a loyal lie trumps an inconvenient truth; however, the United States of America, among other nations, is not one of those geopolitical spaces.  It will pick up the tools of good old British Empiricism — reverse engineering everything; recapitulating the building of the clock — and apply them, and I believe it will take that tool kit into the social realm and the realm of language and language behavior.

There may be more to this story than has surfaced, but where there is additional data to be found, it probably will be found — and where permitted by long-standing custom and law, it will be reported.

# # #

Irving, Texas – Fourteen-Year-Old Builds Clock! (?)

16 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ahmed Mohamed, clock that beeps in a black box

Posted to YouTube 9/15/2015.

Reference: Incident in the News

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/15/student-detained-police-mistake-clock-fake-bomb/72348060/ – 9/16/2015.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-ninth-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school.ece – 9/16/2015.

http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Irving-Student-Says-Hes-Falsely-Accused-of-Making-a-Hoax-Bomb-327794401.html 9/15-16/2015.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/16/they-thought-it-was-a-bomb-ahmed-mohamed-texas-9th-grader-arrested-after-bringing-a-home-built-clock-to-school/ – 9/16/2015.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34266389 – 9/16/2015.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9th-grader-arrested-clock_55f96557e4b0b48f6701519c – 9/16/2015.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/09/ahmed-mohamed-texas-arrested-homemade-clock-school-bomb – 9/16/2015.

Ahmed Mohamed’s Dad

http://northdallasgazette.com/2015/02/23/irving-resident-makes-his-second-bid-for-election-as-president-of-sudan/ – 2/23/2015.

As mentioned in the BBC piece:

Ahmed’s father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who is originally from Sudan, said his son had been mistreated because of his name “and because of 11 September”.

The Mysterious Clock Case

On the surface, it doesn’t look too bad: an intellectually precocious kid builds a kit clock or timer, puts the works in a box, and brings it to school to show off to a science teacher, who, I’ve heard, suggests it would have been better left at home.  It beeps in an English class, and that teacher has a look.

Alarums!

Police.

Bomb squad.

Arrest.

Back home: media attention.  Big time.

Unasked, perhaps, unanswered, so far as one might glean from the news: how was the electronics education acquired?  How was the parts list developed?  Why a clock?  How was the box chosen?  Why?

“I made a clock.  I wanted to show her something small at first, but I took a wrong point of [entry?],” says Ahmed Mohamed (0:17 to 0:20).

So there were or are bigger things to come?

And from whence comes that language, ” . . . a wrong point of . . . .”?

Police thinking as expressed through The Daily Dot:

“He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation,” police spokesperson James McLellan said.

McLellan added: “It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/ahmed-mohamed-irving-tx-hoax-bomb-arrest/ – 9/16/2015.

Updates – September 17, 2015

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/you-are-the-kind-of-student-we-want-mit-surprises-ahmed-mohamed-during-live-interview/ – 9/16/2015

“We’re not afraid of Islam.  We’re afraid of bombs.”

Posted to YouTube September 19, 2015.

“He did not invent the clock or build it, and I’m going to show you why” (333,882 views as of 9/20/2015/1448 EST)

Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015

“And the people at the school thought it might be a bomb, perhaps because it looks exactly like a fuckin’ bomb.”  (203,210 view as of 9/20/2015/1515 EST)

Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015

Haunting: ” . . . his sister [listening] over his shoulder, giving him the answers . . . .”  (1:06 – 1:15).

Replication (Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015)

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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