I read that Netanyahu and Sharon had a disagreement, which led to a decision not being taken about a response to Iran's developing nuclear weapon. It seems like here in the U.S. we have devloped a posture of putting our heads in the sand and hoping that if worst comes to worst our butts will only fell a litle toastier than they do now. Maybe I should check the Church calendar and see if there are any novenas for special ops; praying to do something would be a start. Would be curious if Nathalie in Israel has any comments on the aforementoned issue with the Israeli leadership.
Update:

The NY Times has a somewhat reassuring article on the Iranian bomb. Maybe the Israelis could, using Saatchi as a go beween, negotiate with Hamas. The basics of the deal would be that Israel could abolish it's name, thus 'ceasing to exist,' and change it's name in Arabic, to 'the Canary in the Coal Mine.' Hamas would accept this as total settlement of all claims, words and pictures being of utmost importance to Allah. I think the canary would be kind of cute on F16s. 'Float like a buttefly; sting like a ..' Ferlinghetti would be so pleased with demonstrations too; 'Death to the canary in the coal mine' could be Gregorian and absurd. Amadinehad saying he is going to 'wipe the canary off the map' has a nice childish touch.

The word hippie seems to be a conflation of 'on the hip,' referring to the posture of the opium smoker, and the West African Wolof language word 'hipicat' referring to 'someone with their eyes wide open.' Then, positively it would be someone aware of what's going on but also a good description for someone drugged. Is there an etymologist in the house? One with a cool picture and who can also explain 'chick.' Cool. Maybe we can get her to explain more words.

Iran more exposed to risk in the disorder in Iraq than the US?

Spengler has an interesting post on this hypothesis now. Also of interest is his link through the heart of darkness to a book by Aldous Huxley on an origin of the European madness, Cardinal Richelieu and his spymaster. Part of the experience is to look back on the Hapsburg empire, the patron of music from at least Mozart to Strauss, the home to Freud, and a government beyond nationality.

Sympathy for Dubai

Your humble author has been accused of 'projection' in his seeing narcissism in Muslim actions. People play a reciprocal neuronal process in assessing an encounter with others. If that reciprocal process tells them that the other is enraged and threatening then they engage in flight or flight from the other. That a 'fight or flight' reaction is appropriate to engaging the Muslim other is demonstrated in spades by the public and political reaction to Muslims owning a port process here. One can charcterize the Muslim behavior as narcissistic as I have or tyrannical as instapundit does etc.

In the case of the port business, Muslims approach us with an apparent commercial desire. Contrary to the construction in the The Death of A Saleman, for a person, including the Muslim to engage in commerce, is for him/her to recognize others and find value in this, himself, his sevice and his acceptance. It is in the context of such a Muslim approach that Jesus' "Turn the other cheek" is appropriate. We do not violate natural law, as St. Thomas Aquinas would not have us do, by submitting in attack but rather we allow some individuals with characteristics of the other to establish a different relationsip with us.

The Grandiose Self and Muslims or Jihadism

You know the ad where the thoroughly nerdy guy says 'I am .. (whovever the big deal is)!' Heinz Kohut wrote an accessible book on narcissistic transferences. Transferences are the relationships that a person develops with others based on their state of psychological development. In a psychoanalysis, which involves one person, the patient, saying whatever comes to mind and there not being external contingencies in the relationship, a person tends to go to type, to the person he or she is. This might be a narcissistic transference. One of the transferences is the grandiose transference, the other is the mirror transference. In the grandiose transference, the self feels 'I am everything' and as necessary corollary to that 'You are nothing.' In the mirror transference, the self idealizes the other and, though nothing, has value due to the idealization. One could view, psychologically, communism as an idealization of 'The Working Class' in either or both transferences. I cite this to give some sense of how one might adapt this transference idea to a social or political context historically. The odd thing is that we 'just had the end of history' and immediately, it seems, we have another set of people seeming to claim, "I am the Grandiose Self!"

That said, Cheney has his uses (see at end of post).

A columnist with the nom de plum of Spengler compares and contrasts the Western and Islamic worlds as to their cultural evolution to give perspective on the current humiliation. Heine's poem in footnotes is good. More interesting columns are found at side left there, click 'The Complete Spengler.' Also, Nathalie, not only do you have my sister's name but you are going ahead and making sense.

Al Jabar taught us that there can be placeholders x and y in a statement such that, for any random value of x, we can calculate the value of y. Thus we don't have to memorize or create a table. Similarly, a phrase like 'Yankee, Go Home' conveys a message to Paul Hamilton or Michael or any other person, male American citizen, not inclusive of people, if there are any, just with the name 'Yankee,' and conveys also a sentiment about that class to a nonmember except to Tom Hanks in the character he portrayed who knew he wasn't being talked about. Similarly, there is a class of people with the name Mohammed and their name is associated with being a member of a religious class which is called Mohammedan or Muslim. This class might be represented by a member Mohammed, x, which we might translate into the category, y, of being Muslim. Now when a picture, let us for the sake of argument call it a cartoon, is made of Mohammed, or x, that depiction is not of a particular historical person but rather is taken as an instance of a person in class y, Muslim. Thus no image of the person for whom Mohammed is named is made.

Dean's world talks about how Christianity is also a religion of submission. Good Catholic that I am, the rigidity of the Mass didn't appeal to me today; so I went to a Methodist Church. The celebrant used Mark 1: 29-39; in it "he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him." Mark says Christ had demons in so many words. Well, I can't say you heard it here first. That may be why it is so hard to read the New Testament. Passages can be taken with a hard stricture or in a more nuanced way, but it is just those passages that fall into a person's unconscious fears that will bind them painfully. George Orwell's 1984 and particularly the ending is an externalization of that phenomenon. The Catholic Church has an annually recurring set of Scriptures that go with Mass one of which is 'It is as easy for a rich man to get into heaven as a camel to get through the eye of a (the) needle.' Being bound by that stricture and imagining that Jews weren't has, I think, been the biggest cause of Catholic antisemitism. Thankfully, Leftism informs me though that it was the German Lutheran areas that voted for Hitler. Luther was a famous antisemite; perhaps the mechanism has in some way to do with what I am discussing. Also, I think that a reaction to an overly severe conscience, which the person associates with 'religion' or religious teaching is why there is the 'Piss Christ' and why The Boston Globe, among others, has defended it. Max Ernst's 'The Virgin spanking Christ' was done without goverment funding. I'll let you decide; I wish I could find a better link.

In the first comment in Augean Stables, it is pointed out that Hamas did not get a majority of votes in the Palestinian election. Representatives were apparently elected out of single member districts and perhaps needed a plurality of votes. The comment author suggests that proportional representation would have been a better system. I think, as in primaries here, runoffs would be better.