This is what they do with their prisoners of war

taliban prisoners of war

We just send ours back.

To describe Obama as out of his depth is to suggest any depth at all. A perfect embodiment of the left, filled with shallow sentimentality but with no idea how the world works. Here’s the text that comes with the pictures and with more pictures if you can stand it:

Sunni Islamist militants claimed on Sunday that they had massacred hundreds of captive Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces, posting grisly pictures of a mass execution in Tikrit as evidence and warning of more killing to come…

The group’s announcement was made in a series of gruesome photographs uploaded to an ISIS Twitter feed and on websites late on Saturday night. Some showed insurgents, many wearing black masks, lining up at the edges of what looked like shallow mass graves and apparently firing their weapons into young men who had their hands bound behind their backs and were packed closely together in large groups.

The photographs showed what appeared to be seven massacre sites, although several of them may have been different views of the same sites…

The militants’ captions seemed tailor-made to ignite anger and fear among Shiites. “The filthy Shiites are killed in the hundreds,” one read.

If you don’t know what Cloward-Piven is, you cannot understand what is happening to the United States

Here is an article that says just what I think myself. Most people on the conservative side don’t know enough people on the left, I mean really know them so that you really know what they want. And what they want is the obliteration of the West even if, for them, it is kind of a Kamikaze operation. Read the whole article but this is at the very centre of what he has to say:

At this juncture, one recalls the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy of orchestrated crisis which, as the Discover the Networks website explains, “seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.” Choking the welfare rolls would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, “break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down.” The fear, turmoil and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the “perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.”

And that, I am almost certain, is the theory that Obama, a master of presidential stealth, is attempting to convert into practice — Cloward-Piven in its exponential form: burgeoning debt, calculated unemployment (i.e., freedom from “job-lock”), exploding entitlements, higher taxes for the employed and rising costs for everyone, a chaotic medical-and-insurance state of affairs, an unreliable currency, industrial stagnation, infringement of privacy concerns, a green energy boondoggle, a billion dollar global warming swindle (based on dodgy computer models and selective disinformation omitting the many salient facts that would discredit the AGW theory), and the continued flouting and undermining of the Constitution.

Accompanying this manufactured crisis is an amnesty scheme envisioning the legitimizing of an estimated eleven million illegal immigrants (aka “undocumented workers” and, now, “aspiring Americans”) who have streamed across porous borders to clog the welfare, housing, labor compensation and social assistance programs, foster the expansion of make-work bureaucracies, and, predictably, vote Democrat. As Donald Trump aptly remarked at the March 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), “We’re either a country or we’re not. We either have borders or we don’t.” Borders, however, are anathema to a president who has further troubled the waters by ceding American legal and political space to foreign bodies like the United Nations.

It is not farfetched to assume that such an ongoing concatenation of events as we have enumerated may well comprise a deliberate project meant to inflame social unrest and bring about a civil crisis that would facilitate the ostensible goal of the Obama administration, namely, the “fundamental transformation” of the republic into a socialist welfare state — or a de facto one-party system. Indeed, the various scandals that have plagued the Obama administration — NSA spying on citizens, IRS targeting of conservative organizations, Fast and Furious gun-running operations, illegal deferring of certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the exchange of the dubious Bowe Bergdahl for five battle-hardened Taliban insurgents without consulting Congress, thus breaking a law signed by the president himself — are all forms of autocratic practice and are redolent of police-state actions.

How to have a happy marriage

The best advice on how to have a happy marriage I have ever read. Here is what I found at the core of it:

Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it. In a follow-up study in 1990, he designed a lab on the University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed and breakfast retreat. He invited 130 newlywed couples to spend the day at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out. And Gottman made a critical discovery in this study—one that gets at the heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish.

Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.

The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.

People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”

These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time. Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner’s emotional needs.

You really should read it all.

Via Instapundit

How would it look if we adjusted for the media’s hard-left bias?

Here’s a story from the US: Obama as unpopular as George W. Bush in poll.

A president of such stunning incompetence, the stupidest man in the room everywhere he goes (he doesn’t tend to deal with dills), has fallen to the same level of approval as his predecessor who tried honourably and ably to deal with the problems he met. No one mentions 911, or the meltdown of the financial system that no one could have foreseen, as shown by the fact that no one did foresee it. Even so, by the time Obama became president, all the hard work in forestalling a massive recession had been done in the same way that AQ had been put on the run.

The irresponsible free press has been a disaster for America. It is hard to see how things can get better from here.

Yet you do have to wonder about the other 49% who are uncovered in this Gallup Poll:

Fifty-one percent of the Americans who responded to a Gallup poll conducted June 5-8 said that they do not believe the phrase “is honest and trustworthy” applies to President Barack Obama.

Is that to be interpreted to mean that the remaining 49% do think that the phrase “is honest and trustworthy” does apply to the president? Those hicks, who laugh at the 0.1% of Americans who are Young Earth Creationists, are more inexplicably dull-witted than anything I have come across in years. Words fail.

The crossing of the Rhine – 406 AD

This is known to history as the Barbarian Invasions:

31 December 406 is the often-repeated date of the crossing of the Rhine by a mixed group of barbarians that included Vandals, Alans and Suebi. The Rhine-crossing transgressed one of the Late Empire’s most secure limines or boundaries, a climactic moment in the decline of the Roman Empire that initiated a wave of destruction of Roman cities and the collapse of Roman civic order in northern Gaul.

More here.

The real world is not Game of Thrones

The tepid reaction, even on the conservative side of politics, to the ruin of the American state as well as the civilisation of the West, astonishes me. These events will have real world consequences. It’s not like watching Game of Thrones. There will be consequences and they will affect their very own lives for the worse. Ours as well but we don’t get to vote in the US.

What’s the matter with these people? Obama may well be a hate-filled narcissist who seeks the destruction of the United States so he, at least, is getting what he wants. As for the rest, it is beyond comprehension, but the world we know is disappearing.

The crossing of the Rio Danube

illegals in us

It will take a while, but the end is in sight. Compare and contrast:

The Gothic War is the name given to a Gothic uprising in the eastern Roman Empire in the Balkans between about 376/7 and 382. The war, and in particular the Battle of Adrianople, was a major turning point in the history of the Roman Empire, the first barbarian invasion in a series of events over the next century that would see the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

World War I in photos

world war one anzac

Some quite spectacular photos from World War I starting with this one of the ANZACs.

Looking out across a battlefield from an Anzac pill box near the Belgian city of Ypres in West Flanders in 1917. When German forces met stiff resistance in northern France in 1914, a “race to the sea” developed as France and Germany tried to outflank each other, establishing battle lines that stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea. Allies and Central Powers literally dug in, excavating thousands of miles of defensive trenches, and trying desperately to break through the other side for years, at unspeakably huge cost in blood and treasure. [Editor’s note: Photographer James Francis Hurley was known to have produced a number of WWI images that were composites of pieces of several photos, and it is possible this image is a composite as well.]

A lost generation indeed.

People want to live in a just society

This is Dinesh D’Souza talking about his new book, America: Imagine a World Without Her:

The left is very successful at appealing to the principle of justice, and justice for the man lowest down. Sometimes, as conservatives, we miss the force of that. We reply by chanting “Liberty!” But we have to remember that justice is a key principle. Right, the Pledge of Allegiance: “With liberty and justice for all.” So we can’t ignore justice, and what I do in the book and film is to engage the left on its own terms. I go “Ok, let’s really look at whether or not America has been good for the common man.” Forget about the rich guy, he’s going to do well everywhere. Let’s judge a society by the kind of life it makes available to the ordinary fellow. So I’m willing to argue that the left is actually attacking ordinary people.

People do want to live in a just society and only a society based on individual freedom can deliver it, and as an added bonus it comes with prosperity as well. But we have to be prepared to say it, which first means we have to understand it. D’Souza spells it out remarkably well.