Meanwhile in Iraq

Old fashioned honor killings flourish with police and politicians blessings

Abdel-Qader, a Shia, says he was released from the police station ‘because everyone knows that honour killings sometimes are impossible not to commit’. Chillingly, he said: ‘The officers were by my side during all the time I was there, congratulating me on what I had done.’ It’s a statement that, if true, provides an insight into how vast the gulf remains between cultures in Iraq and between the Basra police the British army that trains them.

A Moslem country that likes us!

An article by Michael Totten on Kosovo. This is a country filled with Moslems of the kind we want to dominate the future of Islam.

Sample quotes:

I’ve been in Prishtina, the capital, for four days, and I can count the number of women I’ve seen wearing a hijab on one hand.

The largest street downtown was renamed Bill Clinton Boulevard. Many businesses are likewise named after Clinton. One cafe owner called his establishment “Hillary” and placed two gigantic pictures of Bill and Hillary on the walls. Don’t assume, though, that this makes Kosovars Muslim versions of Euro-lefties. Clinton is rightly hailed as a liberator, but one resident told me “We are Republicans here in Kosovo.” They want a strong American President who won’t back down from commitments.

Accomplished businessman and practicing Muslim Luan Berisha told me that 90 percent of Kosovars support Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict. I don’t know if that’s really true. But if so it means Kosovo is more pro-Israel than even the United States. And even if he was exaggerating, it was an intriguing– and telling–exaggeration. No one in any Arabic country would say such a thing. Whatever sneaking sympathy for Israel might exist here and there in the Arab world is vehemently denied by just about everyone else. Kosovo sharply contrasts also with nearby Serbia on this question, where General Wesley Clark is seen as a sinister Jewish figure who plotted Belgrade’s destruction, and where Saddam Hussein was considered an ally

The Great Filter

Through a post at Topmost Apple, I found this article dealing with the so-called Great Filter, the theory that somewhere there’s an evolutionary bump in the road so big that almost no species can get over it, but instead become extinct. The article poses it as a reason why we have no evidence that other species are “out there” somewhere in the universe; Topmost Apple takes it as a pointer to Divine Guidance of which we are the unique benificiary. But I would propose my own version of the Great Filter.

This version has one advantage over that discussed in the post and article: it doesn’t require that species become extinct.