Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It is the cackling of the nihilistic geese, like Kervick’s, embittered by the fact that their loquacious gaggle is persuading no one other than the mentally ‘scleroid’ and unimaginative, that makes them spit their bile over the great political, economic, and scientific achievements made in the image of unflappable rugged individual action of capitalist America imbued by the ethos of captain Ahab—who would strike the sun if it insulted him–and Atlas Shrugged. It is the complete and total failure of Kervick and his ilk to approach, and least of all to reach, the mountain tops of this ethos of unsurpassable individual success that turns them into irredeemable nihilists and whose cynicism attempts to belittle and blemish America, the best of all possible worlds.

Is it conceivable to Kervick, the student of David Hume, that cosmopolitan America would have accomplished all these great achievements in the field of politics, economics, and science, and having the greatest number of Nobel Laureates in its midst, if it was populated by “cretins?” (It is interesting that he uses Lenin’s word which reveals on whose lap he was sitting as a junior learning his politics.) It is clear that Vergil’s apophthegm Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito, is not Kervick’s motto.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A short response to: Afghanistan Exposing Huge Limits on American Power By Steve Clemons Washington Note September 09, 2009

Clemons, from his political labyrinth as the modern Theseus but without his Ariadne with any hope of escape, sends desperate signals about America’s “limits” in Afghanistan and the dire repercussions these will have on American power and prestige. From the boundless darkness of his labyrinthine domicile he is bound to be pessimistic of any prospect that the US could defeat the Taliban. It’s the same kind of pessimism that he also had for years about the war in Iraq, which he had also pontificated as being unwinnable–and he has as yet to acknowledge that the US under General Petraeus had defeated the insurgency in Iraq.

Only Clemons, in his strategic myopia, could make the statement, “One really can’t tell what our overall goal is at this point.” Really, the Taliban which was a host to al-Qaeda and which would continue to be so in the event it took over once again Afghanistan, and moreover threaten the Talibanization of Pakistan, is not a strategic goal for the United States? The US would be strategically foolish to abandon this aim of defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in one stroke and hence inflicting a devastating blow of global dimensions to the holy warriors of Islam. Nor can he envisage that any withdrawal from Afghanistan would be perceived as a defeat of America by Islamists and would embolden their threats against, in their eyes, a weak America. And the consummation of these threats would be of a greater magnitude of destruction than that of 9/11. Afghanistan therefore is pivotal to America’s strategy to defeat borderless Islamist fanaticism on a world scale.

The United States is not in a ‘labyrinthine’ situation wasting and reaching the limits of its military power in Afghanistan from which it needs to escape. Its task is, like in Iraq, to persevere in the defeat of the Taliban and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary and a training ground for the recruits of al-Qaeda from which it could launch its ‘apocalyptic’ attacks against the Great Satan America and on the infidels of the West. In this task a combination of American intelligence, military professionalism and might, and strategic nous and determination, has a better than an even chance in defeating ‘blindfolded’ fanaticism.

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By Con George-Kotzabasis

In traditional Africa the medicine man by uttering a name he would identify and cure evil. In contemporary America an Afro-American modern medicine man who by a caprice of a volatile electorate became president, believes in contrast, that by not uttering the name of ‘evil’, America will be safer. This is the presidency of voodoo sorcery as depicted in the National Security Strategy of Obama who refuses to identify the great danger of our times by name, fanatical Islamist Terror. Instead the Obama administration prefers to name it as “violent extremism.”

In Benjamin Franklin’s “Tree of Liberty,” the United States of America, a spineless malignant worm is crawling on its trunk sucking its sap and strength that has been sustained by the water of blood of past and present generations of Americans.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Dan Kervick is the liberal pendulum of a unique antique clock that swings from the serious to the comical. He swings from his serious proposal that Arabs “need to set their sight on multiple and diverse improvements drawn from many separate sources of inspiration (M.E.), to the comical one , “Or maybe most of them can just go on doing their old world, traditional things(which nadine aptly described as ‘romanticize camel herding’) without lusting after the almighty buck…” This is very similar to his profound insight about Iran’s election when under the rubric of “Rumsfeldian Unknowns,” to quote him, he made the statement in one of his posts to The Washington Note, that there might be “anti-democratic” forces that would aim to “overthrow” the democratic election in Iran.” And the liberal pendulum continues to swing on.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Yes Nadine, Norheim is pretentiously “morally pure” as any person of inveterate weakness would be. You have noticed of course that whenever he finds himself deplete of cogent arguments he resorts to smart ‘Alecry’, as above. And you must have noticed that Kervick too, the disciple of David Hume is not immune from this intellectually debilitating disease, as his above laconic comment reveals. And his hypocrisy in his “quick question” is astounding, as if his own cascading passionate defence and suggestions of where America’s real interests lie could be supplanted by “…no other life.”

Passion and intellect are vital forces of human action and envelope one’s life. And their value depends on the aims and goals one expends them on. Nadine expends them passionately by defending the justified concerns of Israel of being deluged and destroyed by fanatical Islam and in protecting an outpost of Western civilization in the midst of resurgent barbarity from the malevolence of the prattling and historically ignorant classes that for a long time now attempt to turn the defender against aggression, Israel, into the aggressor. Norheim and Kervick, likewise, are passionately expending these vital forces for their own aims and goals. The difference being between Nadine and Norheim-Kervick that while the former is fighting injustice and malignity the latter are fighting for their manmade phantoms and for the cause of black magic. As their Archimedean point for ‘shifting the world’ is no other than the voodoo politics of a bygone ‘progressive’ demi-monde socialist era.

The above piece emitted the following responses

Posted by Paul Norheim, Mar 26 2010, 1:59PM – Link

Kotzabasis’ intellectual mission at the Washington Note seems
to be to weaken Dan K., Steve C. and myself. I think he’s been
working on this for a couple of years now. Steve creates a new
post, the commenters argue about the topic, and in comes Kotz
saying that we are weak and delusional.

By claiming that we are weak, not strong, Kotz somehow
expects that we get weaker than we were before he made his
claim. And by repeating this claim, by typing it again and again
from somewhere in Australia, and posting it on a thread read
thousands of miles from his home, he hopes that we slowly get
weaker and weaker. Voodoo!

Although I can’t speak on behalf of Dan and Steve, I would like
to inform Kotzabasis and TWN’s readers that it actually works. I
have no idea how (there must be some black magic going on
here), but immediately after reading Kotz’s last post, I felt
weaker! And I also felt Kotz’s increased strength. Weird!

Repeat your claim once a week, Kotz, and I’ll be completely
paralyzed around June or July. And you yourself will gain an
enormous intellectual strength and willpower; before Christmas,
you’ll become a veritable intellectual Superman in your fight
against Islamo-fascism and the delusional left.

Voodoo!

Go for it, Kotz!

Posted by Dan Kervick, Mar 26 2010, 4:49PM – Link

Paul, it turns out that one only needs to change two proper names in a famous poem by William Blake to capture Kotzabasis’s sentiment fairly clearly:
______

Mock on, mock on, Kervick, Norheim:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

Kotzabasis says,

Kervick

It would be insolent to argue against the great poet William Blake. But you forget that the wind is ‘contrarian’ and can blow Aeolus like the other way and “blind” the mocked eye. And that is why you cannot see “Israel’s tents” shining “so bright.”

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The Massachusetts result showed pellucidly that the American electorate-whites in large numbers-has turned into a shoal of piranhas threatening to tear the flesh of Obama and the Democrats. What it craves for is economic and political stability, the preservation of conservative values, not the ostensibly unstable progressive left-wing policies of a picaresque president. In this context, any implementation of progressive economic policies by the Obama administration will solely employ the gravediggers that will dig its grave.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s impossible to conceive that after the series of rebuffs by Iran to Obama’s diplomatic overture that the White House would “endorse’ this “highest-level American visit to Tehran,” in the person of John Kerry, with a new “message.” In the context of this Iranian rebuff the U.S. persistence to continue its attempt to engage in diplomacy by sending its high plenipotentiary John Kerry to the Mullah-Land will be sending just one “message” to the Mullahcracy, the perception of the furthering decrepitude and weakening of the Obama administration. Within such perception it’s beyond comprehension that anyone could believe that the Iranian regime, even in the context of “comprehensive negotiations,” would abandon its strategic goal to acquire nuclear weapons. And such potential endorsement of John Kerry to visit Tehran shows quite clearly, that President Obama is surrounded by a coterie of unimaginative and inept advisors. The latter are making a laughing stock and a misalignment of Metternichian diplomacy.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The New America Foundation (NAF) poll is most doubtful, if not a wishful concoction, that President Obama has not significantly reduced Israeli support for his Middle East policy with the fateful diplomatic error he made with his insistence and demand that Israel cease all settlements. An overwhelming majority of Israelis rejected this demand of Obama as being not only against Israel’s interests, but also, for its political naivety, as shown by a poll of the prestigious Jerusalem Post last August. That such a significant majority of Israelis against Obama can now be transformed in such a short time by the NAF poll into a 41% favourable for Obama goes against the grain of elementary logic and places a great question mark about the credibility and objectivity of the NAF survey. Moreover, the perception among a huge majority of Israelis that Obama is pro-Palestinian, according to the same poll of the Jerusalem Post, makes the NAF poll a “bull’s trail”.

The above post elicited the following comments in The Washington Note.

Posted by PissedOffAmerican, Dec 11 2009, 9:43PM – Link

Kotz, considering that Steve provides a link to the poll itself, and its methodology, it might help your argument if you actually gave us chapter and verse about why you think the NAF poll is skewed.

And I find it hard to believe that you are too stupid to see how this works in Netanyahu’s favor. Not only does it demonstrate that the Israeli’s appreciate a cowardly and subservient American President, it also telegraphs to Obama that if he continues with the same kind of toothless horseshit the Israelis will abstain from using his middle name when feeding our worthless sack of shit Fourth Estate the script for the next edition of….

“Israel, (the good guys), necessarily exterminate more Palestinians, (the evil doers), while continuing the ethnic fumigation of Jerusalem.”

Posted by JohnH, Dec 11 2009, 10:59PM – Link

Yes, nice poll numbers are moot if you don’t have the spine to use them to promote American interests…

It’s charming that Kotz thinks that stopping the settlements is the problem. For Kotz’ information, most of the rest of the world thinks that constructing the settlements is the problem, and that Obama had it exactly right–before his spine turned to mush.

Posted by nadine, Dec 12 2009, 12:26AM – Link

“According to the New American Foundation Poll, President Obama has a 41% favorable / 37% unfavorable rating among Israelis. His unfavorable rating is only four points higher than the unfavorable rating for George W. Bush, who is routinely characterized as very popular among Israelis.”

ROFL. Here is the question they asked:
“Q.20 Now, I’d like to rate your feelings toward some people, with one hundred meaning a VERY
WARM, FAVORABLE feeling; zero meaning a VERY COLD, UNFAVORABLE feeling; and fifty
meaning not particularly warm or cold. You can use any number from zero to one hundred, the higher the
number the more favorable your feelings are toward that person or organization. If you have no opinion or
never heard of that person, please say so.”

It was purely on Obama’s personal popularity. It had nothing to do with his policies at all, and nothing to do with his Mideast policies. It had nothing to do with his job approval either. Totally misleading. His personal popularity is higher than his job approval in the US too.
The rest of the poll is packed full of push-poll questions about good things that will arrive after an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty. I’d love to see Scott Rasmussen analyze these questions.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Dec 12 2009, 11:37AM – Link

Looking over all of the numbers in the poll that pertain to Obama, we get this picture: On the whole, Israelis think Obama is honest and trustworthy, don’t think he is particularly naïve, think he will improve America’s standing in the world, and think his election is “good for the problems facing the world”.

But most don’t think he supports Israel or shares their values. So there is some significant number of Israelis who think Obama is good for America and the world, but bad for Israel, and thus admit to a divergence between Israeli interests and non-Israeli interests.
And then there’s this stunner: 39% of Israelis believe Barack Obama is a Muslim! And as I read the supporting numbers, over half of Sephardic Jews think he is a Muslim.

Obama might be able to help himself in Israeli if he could just figure out how to bring that number down to 25% by convincing some of these folks that he is actually a Christian. Maybe he should send them Christmas cards.

As others have mentioned, the key results are hard to interpret because they don’t show a breakdown into Arab and non-Arab Israelis. That data appears to be on the supporting “Crosstabs” PDF. There is a section for questions 20 to 29 that breaks the responses down by respondent identification.

As expected, Obama is more popular among Israeli Arabs than Jews. For some reason, Obama is very unpopular with Israel’s young people. I wonder if that has something to do with demographics. The Jewish birth rate in the colonies is higher, as I understand it, than the birth rate in the rest of Israel.

Kotzabasis says,

JohnH

It’s true of course that the political “tyroism” of ‘the world thinks that constructing the settlements is the problem.’ But the cardinal question is not what the world thought about the freeze of the settlements but what Israelis felt about it. And with Obama’s diplomatic faux pas on a total freeze he missed the wood for the trees as to the feelings of an overwhelming number of Israelis.

Kervick’s post is brimming, as usually, with contradictions. While 39% percent of Jews and over half of Sephardic Jews believe that Obama is a Muslim, nonetheless Kervick deduces from the poll that ‘on the whole Israelis think that Obama is honest and trustworthy,’ and that he is ‘good for the problems facing the world.’ That Israelis could make such a positive assessment about a “Muslim” president is beyond belief. Kervick takes a flight in the face of glaring contradiction.

What is interesting and revealing at the same time however, is that Clemons cleverly abstains from making a direct positive assessment of the NAF poll and uses a mouthpiece, Congressman Robert Wexler, to evaluate and wax lyrical about the poll. Is it because Clemons is concerned that he would compromise his political nous by directly accepting the dubious results of a dodgy poll?

JohnH says,

As Kotz notes, “the cardinal question is not what the world thought about the freeze of the settlements but what Israelis felt about it.” And what makes Israel great is that it can lead the US around by its nose…
If the US wants to be respected as a leader in the world, it will have to solve its Israel problem.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Dec 13 2009, 12:02AM – Link

“Kervick’s post is brimming, as usually, with contradictions. While 39% percent of Jews and over half of Sephardic Jews believe that Obama is a Muslim, nonetheless Kervick deduces from the poll that ‘on the whole Israelis think that Obama is honest and trustworthy,’ and that he is ‘good for the problems facing the world.’”

Kotzabasis, rather than allowing you to go further in making a fool of yourself, I will instead suggest you follow the link Steve provided, and read the results for poll questions 30, 39 and 42. Take note of the numbers under the “Very Well” and “Well” columns – which are summed up in the “Total Well” column. After you have absorbed those results, you will see that I didn’t “deduce” anything about majority opinion in Israel, but simply read it straight off the poll results.

Posted by kotzabasis, Dec 13 2009, 4:14AM – Link

Kervick

Well, well, you might not be a fool but you certainly are sans political insight. That you ‘simply read it straight off the poll results’ without seeing the flaunting contradiction or commenting upon it if you had seen it, that is, while stunningly, according to you, a majority of Sephardic Jews think that Obama ‘is a Muslim,’ yet according to questions 30, 39, and 42 a majority of Jews consider him favourably. The fact that you missed this glaring contradiction of the poll and didn’t sniff its “bull’s trail”, i.e., the cozenage of the poll, makes you a political simpleton.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Dec 13 2009, 10:10AM – Link

Kotzabasis, you’re just trying to cover your embarrassment now with more ad hominem sneering and ad hoc arguments.

The statistic about Sephardic Jews is also to be found in the results in the Crosstabs page. It’s not just “according to me”. What you seem to be suggesting is that the poll must be faulty in some way because these results are a “glaring contradiction”. The fact that you see them as contradictory reflects only your own bigoted preconceptions, not any incoherence in the poll results.

It is possible that many of these Sephardic Jews only distantly follow American politics. They know that the US president’s father is of Kenyan origin, and that they are both named “Barack Obama”, so assume, not knowing much else about his personal history and religious conversion, that he is a Muslim. It is also possible, as I think Nadine suggested, that these Sephardic Jews’ attitudes simply reflect their own traditions, in which a person’s religious identity isn’t something one can choose, but is a result of parentage. Just as they believe that what makes them Jews is that their mothers were Jewish, they believe that the fact that Obama’s father was a Muslim makes him a Muslim.

Kotzabasis says,

Kervick

You are a very bad reader. The phrase ‘according to me’ follows the word ‘stunningly’ and applies to it, which in your first post you typed as ‘stunner,’ and did not apply to the results in the Crosstabs page.

Just answer one question and you will see clearly by your own answer that the ‘contradiction’ is free from any bigoted preconceptions. Can you imagine that a majority of Sephardic Jews that assume correctly or wrongly-in this case of course wrongly-that Obama is a Muslim would also consider him favourably, when the whole Muslim world is deadly against them? By being overly logical in your second paragraph you continue to miss this glaring contradiction in its bellicose context of Muslims and Jews. This contradiction in itself speaks volumes about the cognitive status of the poll which you parroted sans critical scrutiny.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Robert McClelland and the denizens of his Department are the direct descendants of Voodoo Magic. In past primitive Africa the Medicine Man would utter a word and evil would disappear. In modern Australia, America, and Europe it appears that most of their politicians believe that by not uttering the word “jihad” or “Islamist terrorist” the evil of terrorism would disappear. The enlightened Attorney-General’s Department by practising Voodoo Magic might just eradicate Muslim terrorism.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Knowledge is more poiesis (creative imaginative thinking) than mimesis. Friedrich Nietzsche

Since the beginning of the Renaissance that emerged from the entrepreneurial, adventurous, and calculating spirit of the burgher and mercantile classes of the city-states of Southern and Northern Europe, all the great scientific discoveries and achievements sprang from an unprecedented uniquely fertile soil that was ploughed by the mental and indomitable spirit of an intellectual elite endowed with the cultural values of their unsurpassably rich Judeo-Greco-Roman heritage. Copernicus’ heliocentric system, Galileo’s “E pur si muove,” and Kepler’s elliptical orbits of the planets, were the invaluable harvest from that scientifically fecund soil. It was the bullish age of originality that no obscurantist cassock could possibly prevent from running toward its highest peaks; and the laws of Nature could not be suspended for the benefit of the Church, to paraphrase the sublime Edward Gibbon. It was this creative originality and fearless spirit of a few that since that time brought to the many throughout these centuries to our own, knowledge and enlightenment followed by a cascade of political freedoms and economic prosperity to the denizens of Western civilization. But while creative originality is the Cinderella of the scientific world no Cinderella is without her ugly sister, and in its case its ugly sibling is imitation.

In our contemporary times of the twenty-first century, all the scientific discoveries and innovations originating in the cradle of entrepreneurial capitalism in their imitating form are at the disposal of, and adopted and used by, a caste of Islamist fanatics whose sole and irreversible goal is the destruction of the West and its Great Satan America. Armed with the earthly scientific gadgets of Silicon Valley, and becoming ever more proficient in their use, the holy warriors of Mohammed are pursuing and implementing their heavenly agenda: The destruction of the infidel West and its replacement with the new Caliphate. And there is no paucity of recruits for this grand goal of the religious fanatics. In an incomparably demographic outburst of growth the young teeming generation of Muslims under thirty, unable to find useful employment of their increasing social and technical talents in their poverty stricken countries whose natural wealth is sapped by their klepto-oligarchies, are full of envy and hate of their cognate young counterparts in the West who climb the ladder of their professional success to ever higher and higher heights, and who are profusely and meritoriously rewarded that opens to them the doors to an exuberant emulative consumption of goods and services that are beyond the reach of the Arab masses. For aeons Muslims having being educated and nourished by an incomparably proud culture and sanctimoniously blindly believing in a religion that is primus sans pares which vouchsafes only to its believers their entry to paradise, whilst the votaries of all other religions are to be cast into hell fire, have a propensity to see their regressive political, economic, and social status as an outcome of the political and economic dominance of the West, especially of the United States, which hampers and prevents their own development and growth. Hence for the leaders of fanatical Islam it’s not difficult within such a context to persuade vexed, acrimonious, and enraged young Arabs that all their ills issue from the rapacious exploitation of Western capitalism. By making a scapegoat of the infidel west they provide the motif to the disgruntled young Muslims to become terror-fodder for al-Qaeda and its sundry affiliates.

And once this ostensibly technically educated young along with those educated in the religious madrassas join the ranks of the jihadists they are trained to imitate all the military techniques and gadgets, i.e., computers and cell phones, and more ominously the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) including nuclear ones all originating from the cognitive fathomless streams and brain power of the ‘Silicons’ of the West. It’s this imitative adoption by the jihadists of the instruments of war that have been invented by western science that makes the holy warriors of Islam, who are hostis humani generis, most dangerous to civilized peoples, especially when these instruments are fanatically used by suicide bombers in pursuit of the seventy-two virgins. In the past asymmetrical power in conventional warfare was the ineluctable warranty that the weaker enemy would be subdued by the stronger. In our contemporary times this indubitable cannon that protected the strong and ensured their victory over a weak foe is reversed. Asymmetrical power used furtively, resolutely, and unconscionably can subdue a stronger power. The Islamist terrorists acting furtively and dressed in civilian clothes have become almost an invincible force. In the near future with the great potential of terrorists acquiring WMD and nuclear ones supplied by rogue states and attacking the metropolises of the West in a form of an encircling and in-depth concerted strategy, they can paralyse and defeat even a superpower. No serious objective thinking can avoid from coming to this dire conclusion.

The Presidency of Idealistic Premises

This is why it’s of paramount importance that the leaders of the West and especially of the United States must deal with, and confront, this ominous and incendiary threat unequivocally with all the diplomatic and military means in their disposal and deploy them remorselessly and relentlessly against such implacable and irreconcilable enemy. As in the art of war a sagacious strategist once he recognizes and discerns an intransigent foe he destroys him while he is still weak and does not allow him to become stronger.

Moreover in the case of fanatical Islam the West and the U.S. will be facing in the near future a ‘bacteriological’ enemy of epidemiological proportions if it does not defeat decisively the avant-garde of terror, i.e., al-Qaeda and its various fanatical offshoots, such as al-Sabaab of Somalia, Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, and the AFPAK Taliban. For if the Obama administration injudiciously decides to wrap-up its military engagement with the Taliban in Afghanistan this will be seen by radical Islam as a definitive defeat of the United States whose corollary will be a monstrously huge increase in Islamist fanaticism and a massive rallying point of its votaries to continue remorselessly their fight against the infidel West and its Great Satan America. It’s in this pool of Islamist success in the field of battle that fanaticism will be nourished and spread like unchecked deleterious bacteria and its host, in the form of suicide bombers, will ultimately threaten the existence of Western civilization.

That is why the United States that is involved in a relentless implacable war with fanatical Islam cannot quit the field of battle until all quite is in the jihadist front of war, until the holy warriors of Islam are defeated decisively. The question however is whether the Obama presidency of idealistic premises, in its attempt to placate and appease its irreconcilable foes by the ‘miraculous’ prowess of diplomacy—which demonstrably both in the Middle East and with Iran has been a total failure– is qualified to deliver this victory in the field of battle. The omens rather are that President Obama has neither the sagacity, nor mettle and resolution, or inclination, to win this war against the jihadists.

Being an effete ‘Carteresque’ president, he is more prone to settle for an “endgame” of the war in Afghanistan than winning it by increasing the number of troops by forty thousand as requested by his general on the ground Stanley Chrystal. One can presage therefore without letting one’s guard down that President Obama in his coming decision on Afghanistan will reject General McChrystal’s core recommendation by falsely declaiming that the U.S. cannot deploy its sons and daughters and treasury in foreign wars with no end in sight that are not essential and tangential to America’s long term interests. But this will be tragically the legacy of the weak President Obama: By enfeebling American power against irreconcilable enemies he will be putting America’s vital interests at the greatest of risks.