The ISIS Crisis Redux

If I had a dime for every time there was some megalomaniac who claimed that God ordained him to re-establish the Roman Empire, I'd be set with an income for life. Now, if I had a dime for every time each of these megalomaniacs were challenged to their perceived ordinance by making the same but competing claim,  I'd have more gold than the Pope.  Now here comes a bunch of Islamic megalomaniacs that don't think that the demise of the original "Califate Empire" wasn't the will of Allah in the first place and are under the delusion that they can build another one without Allah to will it to be.  They think that Allah is so weak and helpless that he can't do without them.

ISIS/ISIL in Iraq are, we're told, former Ba'athists of Saddam Hussein's, but the problem with that is that Ba'athists were by and large secular--secular enough to have permitted an ancient Zoroastrian-era religion to persist within Iraq's borders the entire time these same Ba'athists were in power under Saddam.  WTF?

Abu Bekr Al Baghdadi likes to fancy himself not only as a world leader but as an expert scholar of Islamic history, and will yet defy that history by excluding tribes and Shiites when the original empire was all-inclusive.  He can't "restore" the old empire by going against everything the old empire stood for and flourished by.  The old empire was ruled by Sunni AND Shiite governments, which chose to overlook differences ever since the truce agreed to on the Day of the Camel.  Al Baghdadi, you can't amass a local army when you kill off the local nationalists, you idiot.

You're just an insane megalomaniac who has a death wish, as are all of the imbeciles that follow you.  Same is true of Boco Haram.  Imbeciles all.  Never heard of the Day of the Camel, never heard of Saladin, but always following the ways of Genghis Khan, not any great Muslim leader. Not even the original Abu Bekr thought that doing what ISIS is doing was ever a good idea. Omar "conquered" Jerusalem by treaty (The Treaty of Medina), not by bloodshed.

Speaking of imbeciles, we have a few of our own over here. Those are the ones whining about how we should arm the Kurds.  Yes, they are complete imbeciles who don't have a clue as to why the UK isn't backing the current U.S. efforts.  The elephant in that room is Turkey.  Arm the Kurds and the U.S. gets two more enemies of a sort, in the form of both Turkey and the UK.

Imbeciles.  Turkey and the UK are of paramount importance to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as is Egypt.

Sunday talking-head addendum: it's just come down the pike that Turkey is more receptive of the Iraq-side Kurdistan. From this point one must consider the PKK as a separate problem.  Good news, this. 

UPDATE, beheaded journalist edition: Just do the numbers, ISIS--you now have one less hostage.  Each time you do an execution, you're reducing your inventory.  As for selling/raping captured females, I'm guessing that you're showing the world how the original Abu Bekr pawned off Ayisha on Mohammed, which doesn't do your religion any credit at all. To non-Muslims, consider this: we occasionally talk about working with Shiite-run Iran. Why? Because the people who think they can succeed by terrorist tactics are invariably Sunni, and the why for that is the fact that the Sunni branch was founded by a military man who pawned off his daughter in exchange for power.  It's this same reason why the original Califate Empire was successfully ruled for a lot longer by Shiites (known back then as Fatimites), the Abbasides, who ruled from Baghdad.  The original Sunni government of the old Empire were Ommyades ruling from Damascus, and even back then they proved themselves to be misguided failures.  Make serious note of that, Saudi Arabia, home of the similarly misguided Wahabs.

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Saturday UPDATE: I was just listening to the conference Obama held this morning, regarding this topic, and I'm sure that the points he made regarding what can be done "on the cheap" should have shut up McCain's mouthings about how his surge worked completely.  It might have been a great stop-gap idea but we can see at this point just how permanent that solution turned out to be.  As in, NOT. McCain is the same imbecile who claimed that we should be arming Syrian opposition to Assad while whining about how pulling out of Iraq gave ISIS a boost--without realizing that the opposition in Syria IS in fact ISIS and he's trying to have things both ways.  Complete imbecile.

Surges just aren't sustainable even if you did have the resources to maintain their results because when you ride any tiger like that, you have to stay on the tiger's back--the result of getting off the tiger is invariably fatal.

In other news, it looks like Fred Waterer is planning a new webcasting effort, begun just today with his website, fredwaterer.com.  I'm definitely looking forward to further developments on this. He also has a website in honor of his father, website in honor of his father: Dognouse Charlie.

Well, today, Saturday, THIS came down the pike from WIRED magazine, regarding quantum physics, which does essentially re-invent the zero after a fashion (paragraphs 7 and 8). "The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct."  Indeed, but so is the concept of proximity, and knowing this permits a TARDIS to be bigger on the inside than the outside AND permits the resolution of a number of paradoxes introduced by the travel of an entity originating in time and space during the lifetime of that entity to a destination in time and space when/where that entity doesn't otherwise exist.  There's hope at last for humanity, scientifically speaking.