House of Eratosthenes

Like it or not, the civilized world looks to the United States in times of need. Since World War II, we’ve been the protector of freedom, the superpower to stand against evil. We aren’t worthy of that trust anymore.

Barack Obama squandered America’s pinnacle position in world leadership through feckless moral equivalence and empty platitudes in the face of opportunity. The chance to lead, to rally the world against the evil of our time, has been flushed by a man who seems to believe the sins of our nation’s past are no different than the sins of those who murder in the name of their God.
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“This is yet another reminder that the world must unite. We must be together regardless of nationality or race or faith in fighting against the scourge of terrorism.” Meaningless…Is the world not already united? Has it not been united against terror since 9/11? Since Paris – the first or second time? Since any and all terrorist attacks, beheadings, burning alive of prisoners? Aren’t we always united in opposing such actions?

That’s not the problem. The problem is, without American leadership, we’re also united in impotence when it comes to doing anything about it.

The problem here is not a lack of saber-rattling. Not necessarily, anyway. It’s a leadership problem. The head honcho is confronted with this job that has to get done, and He’s shown Himself over and over again to be obsessed with just doing the easy parts of it. The immediately-gratifying parts. Repeatedly. The part that has to do with making a “We Must Unite” speech and then reading in the papers about how He just gave the greatest speech in all of humankind. Again.

There’s more to it than that.

Europe, sad to say, is more far-gone than we are. Doug Giles has been noticing. Just like in the last century, they bear the responsibility for having created, or at the very least emboldened, an enemy from which we are going to have to one day liberate them. As the parent of an eighteen-year-old, I’m hopeful that there will be less spilled blood involved this time around. Somehow.

They take verbal abuse from Islam and then sit there in befuddled wonderment when Islam follows through with Brussels attacks while asking themselves, “What happened? I didn’t see that coming.” And I’m screaming at the TV, “Yes, you did see it coming! You just chose to view the Islamic invasion through your Hello Kitty, rose-colored glasses. The selfsame glasses the jihadist just ground to powder.”

What more does Islam have to do before Europe wakes the heck up?

Islam, like my buddy’s horrible little bride, tells Europe they hate them and they’re going to kill them and, yet, Europe doesn’t believe it’s going to happen; or they’re self-deceived to such a degree that they think they can talk them away from a malevolent worldview that does not include Europeans.

So, keep on living in denial, Europe. Keep blaming yourself. Keep telling yourself it’ll “get better”. Keep on cutting Islam slack and excusing their verbal abuse and see what happens. I predict it won’t end pretty.

Thing of it is, on both sides of the Atlantic radical Islam is not the actual problem. It’s more like a ritual challenge. There are always threats. Someone is always out to kill someone. The problem, on both sides of the Atlantic, is this: Our leaders are more concerned about looking like charismatic, inspiring, revolutionary figures ushering in new ages of HopeChangePeaceLove etc., that they’re not even paying lip service to the idea of performing merely adequately at their jobs. Which would start with doing all of the parts of those jobs, not just the fun, immediately gratifying parts.

Peace In Our Time It reminds me of what one of my bosses said, the one who was often accused of getting a rise out of firing people (and was likely guilty). “I don’t ask much of anything at all,” he said in one meeting, right after the termination that demoralized the workplace more than most of the others. “Just finish something.” This was, I think, one of the more profound, respectable things he had to say during his tenure as human woodchi– er, I mean director. It’s a truth, from which I notice a lot of supposedly accomplished people in technology tend to stray. Do all of a job. Getting part of it done is the same as getting none of it done.

In fact, one might reasonably graduate to the next level of bluntness-yet-truthiness, since a lot of people are missing out on what follows as well: If you only do the parts that makes you look wonderful and awesome, then move on to the next thing without achieving the basics, we would be accurate in postulating from that that you’re firing yourself. It connects to this main subject because if you read your history, you see this is the real problem; this is what made the twentieth century bloody. Guys wearing suits, speaking into microphones from behind lecterns, a bunch of nonsense about how This Is The Moment or This Is Our Time or some such…and then, going on to the next thing. Leaving the actual problem unaddressed and unsolved. You’re going to find that is the common precursor to the bloodlettings, lots of talking that never actually meant much of anything.

The problem here is not a lack of saber-rattling.

Damn straight. This is what the Left — and increasingly large portions of the Right — don’t get: Sometimes war IS the answer, and it’s the Commander-in-Chief’s decision to make that call.

At the risk of sounding (even more) pretentious, I sometimes feel like I’m the only guy who’s reading the real history books. George W. Bush wasn’t a warmonger, you know. Not even a little bit. I was there, and I remember his campaign — he wanted to be the “education president,” and he talked about it all the time…. when he wasn’t criticizing Clinton/Gore for their interventionism. But that’s the thing: the United States was attacked. I’m pretty sure FDR wasn’t hoping to be a “war president,” either — ditto Lincoln — but sometimes it just works out that way.

When you let it be known that war is off the table — that no matter what anyone does to us, our response will be a few airstrikes at most — you abdicate one of the fundamental responsibilities of your office. That was Chamberlain’s fundamental mistake — he forgot his Machiavelli. He knew Britain was in no way prepared for war, and didn’t remember that you fight with what you have when you have to (“war cannot be avoided, but only delayed to your disadvantage”).

I’m not saying we should “bomb the shit out of ISIS.” I’d prefer to not bomb anybody. But the threat of swift and terrible retaliation must be credible for a nation to function as a nation. That used to be International Relations 101… before we started elevating our feelings above everything.
- Severian | 03/27/2016 @ 06:31
1. sput…sput….did I see the word Lecterns? (yay)
2. I’ve only heard ONE coat-and-tie address the bill for “security”, and “free” trade, around the globe, I’d LIKE to think in response to $20,000,000,000,000+ “tab” that Progressive Socialism “nudges” have drummed up THIS time.
Be a shame if all that cash “lost” in conversions was grounds for a VASTLY simplified IRS.
- CaptDMO | 03/27/2016 @ 13:08
They are delusional. There’s nothing else that explains it. An Islamic group targets a group of Christians in Pakistan. They admit they targeted Christians, although they say they wanted to kill Christian men. (The park area was reserved for women, so mostly women and children.) And they killed them as promised. So what do we get from our State Department? “Well they said they targeted Christians, but it was really Muslims that were hurt.” No, no it was not Muslims that were hurt. It was Muslims that targeted innocent women and children that were Christian and they killed and maimed a whole bunch of them. Just like they said.

You cannot deal with an enemy if you refuse to actually acknowledge who the enemy really is. And if they keep going this route, they will accomplish what they are worried about. They will get a backlash against Muslims in this country and elsewhere because people are fed up with a government that can’t admit that the real problem is the Islamic fundamentalists that are killing people.
- teripittman | 03/28/2016 @ 17:13
“Leaving the actual problem unaddressed and unsolved.”

But that assumes and gives him the benefit of the doubt that Barry considers terrorism a problem. In so far as that we, God Damn America, don’t deserve it. It’s hard to conceive or wrap one’s head around the very fact, even as presented time and time again over 7+ years, by this President in Name Only. Let me put bluntly, this Poser in Chief does not like U.S.

Skipping the bloviating about this man’s destructive behavior towards this country unrelated to terrorism let’s stick to his attitudes/rhetoric etc. just with terrorism itself. Look at his lack of support of the Iranian uprising of a few years ago. Why not support people yearning to be free of an Islamic theocracy? Barry doesn’t considered it a bad thing, that’s why. Lump in the rest of the Arab spring “missteps”. Except they weren’t missteps.

Same, same with Iraq. He completely ignored the advice/ warnings by the Pentagon overwhelming foretelling of exactly what is happening now – ISIS. Barry don’t care.

Look at his response to ISIS itself, underwhelming. Barry don’t care.

Look at his press conference after Ft. Hood…”I’d like to give a shout out to Chief White Feather” and his disgusting indifference.

Same, same with all the beheadings, Paris attacks, Brussels and any other numerous incidents…Barry don’t care.

Islam has a special place with Barry, he’s proven many numerous times. From his Ramadan dinner remarks (especially versus his Prayer breakfast remarks), from his countless remarks about Islam that are either flat out lies, Islam is the very fabric of America”, or pathetic exaggerations “Islam has many important historical achievements”.

I’m not sure what a person, much less our president, needs to do convince us, or at least many of us, how he feels about terrorism and or Islam itself. It’s self-evident at this point…if we’re willing to see.

BTW, hopefully someday, soon, we all also come to an understanding that it isn’t “radical Islam”, but just Islam that is the problem. Europe is finding out…too late.
- tim | 03/29/2016 @ 08:35
tim is spot on. I have several theories about why Donald Trump is doing so well with various parts of the population, but the most basic is: He seems to actually like the United States of America. All the other candidates give off a “hurry up and vote for me, you idiot rubes” vibe. We’re so used to seeing open contempt from politicians that we react like puppies when someone asks us to vote for him.

That’s also the reason I could never take Obama seriously, and figured nobody else could, either — I’m around professors all the time, and this guy is just your typical instinctive capitalism-hating, Jew-baiting, Christian-bashing, Marx-sucking anti-American pseudointellectual fraud. Just like everybody else in the faculty lounge. Alas, lots of folks seem to like that.
- Severian | 03/29/2016 @ 10:25
“He seems to actually like the United States of America.”

Yup, Sev, it’s one of things I like about him. Though I’ll be voting for Cruz in the People’s Republic of NY’s primary.

And conversely one of things that I was sure was going to take Obama down – Rev. Wright’s hatred of AmeriKKKa. Still can’t believe the voters just didn’t care that Barry sat in his church for 20 years. Mind blowing stuff.

Though what do I know, Bernie Fucking Sanders is doing well…heavy freakin’ sigh…

We are not long to survive the ineptitude of the average voter.
- tim | 03/29/2016 @ 12:31
I’m far from the first guy to make this observation, but Bernie Fucking Sanders is the Democrats’ Donald Trump. Not because he’s an “insurgent populist,” but because he actually offers a vision of where he wants to take the country. It was old and busted by Eugene V. Debs’s second run, but at least it’s coherent and — if you aren’t aware of anything that happened after 1890 — compelling.

I think the reason voters didn’t care about Rev. Wright is — sadly — that we’re just used to that kind of nonsense spewing from black “leaders.” Every black with a microphone in America says something similar — Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle are funny about it, while Wright, Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, etc. are noxious, but it still boils down to hating on whitey, and it’s not particularly subtle. Hell, even middle class blacks do it. They don’t mean it, and they’ll give you a guilty laugh after saying it, but get a few beers in ’em and they will say it — OJ was innocent, the KKK is a real problem, the CIA sent crack into the ghettos, blah blah blah. At this point it’s just a tribal identification marker, no different from SWPLs complaining about “American football” being on tv when they want to watch their beloved Premier League.
- Severian | 03/29/2016 @ 12:47
He’d care about fomenting a larger war if his daughters could be drafted. I don’t need to be told how ridiculous that sounds – it still needs to be said.
- wch | 03/29/2016 @ 13:16
In multiple places on the Net, you will see people talk about the similarities between Bernie and Trump supporters. If they screw Bernie out of the nomination and Trump manages to win it, I think you will see some Bernie voters cross over. They know the system is broke. They are trying to apply the wrong solutions.

Bernie said he’s going all the way to the convention and he’s planning to try and get more delegates if it’s brokered.Compare and contrast to Hillary in 2008. She should have gone to the floor and fought it, but decided to be bought off instead. She’s one of the worst candidates I’ve seen in my life.She wasn’t great in 2008, but at least she appeared to be human then. I’ve advocated letting her and Kasich debate each other. They could beat each other to death with the hand chops.
- teripittman | 03/30/2016 @ 09:34

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United in ImpotenceSunday, March 27th, 2016

United in Impotence
Sunday, March 27th, 2016