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war

Linkpost, 12/6/10 to 12/9/10

Linkpost, 12/13/10

I’m up early this morning because of this stupid cold, waiting for some tea to heat. While I wait, I figured I’d try and clear out my links. Today’s:

Linkpost, 10/22/2010

Linkpost, 10/18/2010

OK, so I’m really behind. Hopefully, none of these have lost anything in the intervening week and a half:

  • Beating the incandescent bulb ban. Or, if you’re in San Diego, the 100-yen shop on Mercury has got tungsten bulbs. (Sadly, they’re designed for your work space and not your living room.)
  • The Muslim Brotherhood calls for jihad against the United States. It’s been pretty much ignored the same way al Qaida’s declaration of war years ago.
  • Facebook apps apparently share your information, and your friends’ information, no matter what the privacy settings say. At some point, I’m going to install the SSL plug-in for WordPress, and everybody can just switch over to No Serf.

Linkpost 10/13/2010

Yeah, I know I’m posting on the 14th, but I found these all yesterday:

  • Reason’s got an article about how the FDA is managing to stifle the growth of the personal genomics industry.
  • A safe-for-work article over at the NSFW site Vice about how to “beat” SimCity — by creating a police state akin to North Korea.
  • The U.S. has declassified some of its interviews with Tariq Aziz, and his testimony supports the idea that Saddam was in bed with terrorists. It’s not news to those who’ve been paying attention for the last twenty years, but I figured it was worth highlighting.

Mecca delenda est?

Those of you familiar with my old LiveJournal writings will remember that I occasionally joked that I was channeling Cato the Elder, he of “and Carthage must be destroyed” fame. As I was drifting off to sleep last night (and after linking to Doc Zero’s post), he came to me in a dream and said, “Mecca delenda est.”

The heck? Really?

Driven by Cato’s ghost, I have begun pondering the proposition. It is an odd thought for a modern American — we look upon religion as something separate from the state — but is not, so far as I understand, the way our enemies think of religion. For al Qaida (and those of its ilk, such as Iran), religion is government; they are inseparable.

The government espoused by Islam is not an acceptable one. If my sources are correct, sharia law is incompatible with the Constitution. Islam is, in this sense, similar to fascism and communism. If it is acceptable to resist Nazis and Commies (and it is), then why should the attachment of a god to the ideology suddenly make it tolerable?

If the Carthaginians were suddenly reborn, would we put up with Moloch simply because the sacrifice was religious custom? Or would we intervene, a lá Kosovo?

Is it acceptable for the orcs to pillage the country simply because Gruumsh demands such?

The answer is clear, but only if the assumption holds. Thanks to USC, I can follow up on this question; the Quran and the Hadith are both on-line. Hopefully the prose is nowhere near as turgid as Mein Kampf.

(For completeness: the Communist Manifesto.)

To Battle the Unimaginable

I’m not good at the schmaltzy stuff, so I point you to this from Doc Zero:

[…]the American flag has never been desecrated.

She is the symbol of a unique nation: born in the defiance of tyranny, baptized in the destruction of slavery, and coming of age when it rescued the world from genocidal evil. Those who destroy our flag earn nothing but our contempt. They abuse their freedom of speech to level such an insult… but if you embrace the freedom to perform only virtuous deeds, you will soon find that what you’re holding isn’t “freedom” at all, as the arbiters of “virtue” lay their heavy hands upon your shoulder.

Anyone who seeks to desecrate the Stars and Stripes, on either foreign or domestic soil, is a fool. The power of that flag is far beyond their reach.

As they say, read the whole thing.