"Religion Of Peace"

Actually, the notion that Muslims are perpetrating terrorism in a quest to resurrect a Muslim Caliphate is absurd. Muslims aren't waging jihad, as opposed to terrorism, to resurrect a Caliphate. Muslims are waging jihad, which is holy fighting in the cause of Allah for the establishment/expansion of Islam, because the subjugation of all religions and all infidels into Islamic totalitarianism through jihad and the imposition of Sharia, which is Islamic totalitarian law, is the sole fundamental purpose of Islam. Indeed, jihad is not only the highest pillar in which Islam stands; it is also a fundamental holy obligation incumbent upon all Muslims in one form or another. Thus, all mainstream orthodox Muslims regardless of sect are jihadists in one form or another. Otherwise they are blasphemous apostates that per the texts and tenets of Islam must be executed. Hence, common sense dictates that Islam must be outlawed and mass Muslim immigration, along with all of its excess baggage, which is really stealth and deceptive non-violent jihad for the purpose of demographic conquest, must be banned and reversed ASAP. Moreover, we aren't talking about radical Islam, which is absurd and in which is a term used to garner headlines. Instead, we are talking about mainstream orthodox Islam, which is the only kind, as there is no such thing as a version that is radical relative to a version that isn't, as the texts and tenets of Islam are immutable since they are the direct word of Allah as dictated to Muhammad by the arch angel Gabriel.Anybody ever wonder why the subjugation of all religions and all infidels into Islamic totalitarianism through jihad and the imposition of Sharia, which is Islamic totalitarian law, is the sole fundamental purpose of Islam? It's because the Koran is held by Muslims to contain the divine direct testimony of Allah (God) as dictated to Muhammad by the arch angel Gabriel and as such it is perfectly just since it emanates directly from Allah (God), while no other religion with respect to their individual holy books can make such a similar claim. Therefore, since Islam alone emanates directly from Allah (God), as the Koran contains his direct unaltered words and testimony, it is thus considered to be by all Muslims the one true religion, while all other religions, on the other hand, are considered to be false and counterfeit since they emanate from the writings of all fallible man. Furthermore, the infamous sword verses contained in the Medinan portion of the Koran, which were the very last verses issued by Muhammad shortly before his death, collectively commands all Muslims to wage jihad against all religions and all infidels until such time that Islam has been made supreme throughout the world via the imposition of Sharia, which is Islamic totalitarian law. Additionally, since the universally accepted throughout Islam "doctrine of abrogation" instructs that when two verses of the Koran come into conflict with each other, the latter issued verses of the Koran, i.e., those issued by Muhammad later on in his career, abrogate and replace the earlier issued verses of the Koran they conflict with, the infamous sword verses of the Koran therefore abrogate and replace all the earlier issued peaceful verses of the Koran they come in conflict with. As a matter of fact, those earlier issued peaceful verses of the Koran that have been abrogated and replaced by the infamous sword verses are the same exact verses that Muslims love to show to clueless useful idiot infidels to dupe them into believing that Islam is somehow a harmless "religion of peace". Also, remember again that the Koran is the direct testimony of Allah (God). Thus, it is immutable and cannot be questioned without committing blasphemy at the same time, which in Islam is an automatic death sentence. As altering just one single word of the Koran or otherwise questioning the Koran in any way, shape, or form would be to elevate the word of all fallible man above that of the word all infallible Allah (God). Further, while Islam is considered by 1.6 billion Muslims to be the one true religion, the acceptance of Islam, on the other hand, as being a religion on a par with the other great religions of the world by all non-Muslim infidels would be suicidal. Not to mention as well that the first and foremost prerequisite of Islam is the total, complete, and unconditional submission to the "will of Allah" under the pain of death for blasphemy and apostasy, which not only sets Islam apart from all true religions, it also proves unequivocally at the same time that Islam is not a religion at all, but a cult instead. Indeed, what Abrahamic religions and non-Abrahamic religions compel belief under the pain of death for blasphemy and apostasy the same way only Islam alone does? The answer, of course, is none of them, which again irrefutably proves Islam isn't a religion, but a cult instead. Moreover, the "will of Allah" that all Muslims totally, completely, and unconditionally submit to under the pain of death for blasphemy and apostasy as the first and foremost prerequisite of Islam in essence is Sharia, which is Islamic totalitarian law. Indeed, the only freedom that Sharia allows is the freedom for Muslims to become more devout slaves of Allah. Yet, the GWB State Department inexplicably enshrined the constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan with Sharia, making it the highest law in each respective country, and thereby creating Islamic totalitarian states at the same time. Is that what our boys were fighting over there for? Hardly!

Finally, because Sharia emanates directly from Allah (God), it is not only perfectly just for the reason that Allah (God) is perfect, it also supersedes all other inherently fallible manmade laws in the world. Since to Muslims the acceptance of inherently fallible manmade laws above that of Sharia would constitute the elevation of inherently fallible manmade laws above that of the infallible direct testimony of Allah (God). As a matter of fact, Islam considers all inherently fallible manmade laws, which includes all democracies as well, to be abominations to be obliterated.

Where Conservatives Screw Up

To anyone paying attention, and who is honest, it is Hollywood that dominates the culture. Hollywood is Gay. Hollywood is a land of dress up and make believe. Hollywood is a land of emotional immaturity. Gay. Gay. Gay. (And Lesbian.) The 'news' media takes its direction from Hollywood. Hollywood TV programming. Hollywood movies. Hollywood style magazines. Everything in our culture is downhill from Hollywood. Not only is the news media pro-Gay, but our whole educational system is pro-Gay (again with our teachers/educators/councilors taking direction from Hollywood). If anyone dares the wrath of the Hollywood Gay mandate, they are relentlessly attacked with hate speech ridiculed and marginalized. Now, mostly thanks to Obama, our Military is pro-Gay, with our Justice department falling in line as well. Our business climate is turning (or has turned) pro-Gay. (Caterpillar Industries recently decided to withhold financial support from the pro-Gay Boy Scouts because they were not pro-Gay enough.) The only people who are consistently anti-Gay are old coots like me who are not afraid of social pressure. The lies and perversions of the Hollywood don't scare us, but we increasingly are in a minority. God help us. It is going to get worse, a lot worse, before it starts to get better.I think America is a naturally Conservative (not Libertarian) society. We believe in God, one man / one woman, and freedom. Politically we believe in Low taxes, Energy independence, and Legal Immigration. Naturally we believe in a strong military. These are all gimme issues. Where Conservatives screw up is that we need to become warriors in a cultural battle. Our leaders need to know how to fight. The Left stages fake outrage after fake outrage, and the Right gets defensive, confused and tries to apologize - because we are really quite decent people. The Left then attacks again with another fake outrage, and the Right again gets defensive, confused and tries to apologize. In the meantime the Left gets some kind of Congressional compromise that gives more money and/or power to a Liberal special interest group. This has been happening ad nauseam all of my adult life, and I am 33 years old.

Saint Ronald Reagan had it easy for two reasons (both the same really). As an actor, he knew how to use the media, he knew how to turn a phrase. Reagan knew how to use make up, lighting and staging to deliver the emotion he wanted delivered, Also, as an actor and as a union president, he was one of them. It was difficult for the Left to attack Reagan (not that they did not try) because Reagan was a Hollywood insider. Conservative Republicans, you have the support of the American people. Your mistake is that you keep trying to talk to Liberal Democrats and find common ground. 'F' that. We have been working for 50 years to heal racial relations, and 50 years later Joe Biden said, "They want to put y'all in chains." They don't care about healing, or compromise, or freaking holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya'. Liberals want to destroy our politics, our culture and our country - and you are letting them. You have yet to find the brass balls to take a constant, vicious war to the Liberals. Take a lesson from George Patton. Fight those Liberal Democrats. Fight the Liberal media. Fight Hollywood. "Cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks."

Stunning new research: cats recognize their owners’ voices—but don’t much care

This will hardly come as a surprise to cat owners, but I suppose it needed scientific documentation.  A new paper in Animal Cognition by Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka (from the University of Tokyo and the South Florida College of Medicine, respectively; reference at bottom and link here) shows that cats appear to recognize the voices of their owners compared to the voices of other people. But the kicker is that they don’t show much response, and certainly don’t move their legs when they recognize the voice. This is in contrast to previous studies of d*gs, which show that they not only recognize their owners’ voices but respond much more readily and with more striking behavior.

It’s a short paper, and I’ll send the pdf on request, though I think you can get it free at the link.

In short, the authors exposed 20 domestic cats (19 indoor, one “kept on a university campus by a male owner”) to a sequence of five recorded voices played over  a speaker.  Each voice simply called the cat’s name, and the responses of the cats to each voice were measured “blind,” that is, another observer was given a single video clip of a cat’s response, and scored it without knowing which voice it heard. “Response” was measured six different ways: ear moving, head moving, pupil dilation, vocalization (any sound made by the cat), tail moving, and “displacement” (“more than one step of displacement of both hind paws to any direction”).

The recordings were controlled for volume and speakers were asked to say the name in “the same manner as the owners” (that, of course, is not easily controlled).  To “habituate” the cats to their names, the five recordings were played in sequence: three strangers’ voices, then the owner’s voice, and then another stranger’s voice.

The results are shown in the graphs below.  The first plot shows that there was habituation: the responses declined between the first and third voice, all from strangers.  Second, when the owner’s voice was played as the fourth sound, the cats perked up, showing higher ear and head movement—but no movement of tails or limbs, and no vocalization.  The last voice, of a stranger, showed responses (measured as the percentage of individuals showing one of the indicators of “attention”) similar to that toward owner, so there was no habituation here. (That has been shown in studies of dogs as well).

The results are statistically significant, but not overly impressive, with p values of 0.03-0.05 (the probability that the increased response would happen purely by chance; 0.05 or lower is regarded as statistically significant):

The figure below shows the magnitude of the cats’ responses (summed over all behaviors) as opposed to simply the percentage of cats responding. There is a significant difference between the size of responses to the third voice—after the cat had been “habituated”—and the owner’s voice, which elicited a larger response.  The last voice, as above, didn’t evoke a response larger than that toward the owner’s voice. The starred comparison is the only one that was significant: between stranger 3 and the owner:

Besides the weak statistical power (and high p values), there’s another problem. It’s possible that the cats aren’t responding to to the sound of the owner’s voice per se, but to the way the owner pronounces the cat’s name. It’s impossible to know from this study which aspects of the owner’s pronounciation or intonation are the ones picked up by the cats, though that could presumably be tested with electronic manipulations of the recording.  Nevertheless, cats do recognize their name when spoken by the owner versus by strangers.  I suspect, though, that the sound of acan opener interpolated in the sequence would elicit all six behaviors, including rapid movement toward the sound!

Finally, the authors give an interesting paragraph that readers might want to ponder:

The communication style of cats is very different from that of dogs, as mentioned above. In fact, Serpell (1996) has shown that dogs are perceived by owners as being more affectionate than cats. However, dog owners and cat owners did not differ significantly in their reported attachment levels to their pets (Serpell 1996). This fact may reflect the difference in expectations between cat owners and dog owners. One research questionnaire revealed that the more affection the dog owners have toward dogs, the more frequently they tended to have physical contact with them. However, no such relationship was observed among cat owners (Ota et al. 2005). Thus, the behavioral aspects of cats that cause their owners to become attached to them are still undetermined.

I’m not sure how a lack of correlation between one’s attachment to a cat and the degree of physical contact with that animal (which is of course determined largely by the cat!) has anything to do with the question of why one bonds with a cat. We ailurophiles can of course give our own answers: the purr, the softness of the fur, the grace of movement, and of course the very independence of the animal.

Finally, a bit of a biology lesson. At the beginning the authors summarize which animals can recognize their own young or individual “herdmates” through vocal cues (they don’t mention penguins):

A social ability widely seen in a number of species is differentiation between conspecifics by using individual differences in vocalizations. For example, zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata castanotis) recognize mates on the basis of their calls (Vignal et al. 2004, 2008); bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) use whistles for mother–infant recognition (Sayigh et al. 1999); mother vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) can distinguish their own offspring’s screams from those of others (Cheney and Seyfarth 1980); and female African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can distinguish the calls of female family and bond group members from those of female outsiders (McComb et al. 2000). Similarly, some domestic animals are also known to be able to recognize individual humans through voice. For example, horses can match the forms and voices of familiar handlers when the handlers were presented together with a stranger (Proops and McComb 2012). Dogs can match owners’ voices and faces from others (Adachi et al. 2007).

I’m curious whether a mother cat can recognize the mews of her kittens versus those of unrelated kittens.  Perhaps work has been done on this, but I think if it had, the authors would have mentioned it.

I wish the authors could use LOLcats as abstracts of papers, because this one is appropriate:

Bosniak Handzar Division

The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army of Alija Izetbegovic reformed and revived the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division from World War II. This startling fact was first revealed by British journalist and military analyst Robert Fox in the Daily Telegraph news report from December 29, 1993. The report was entitled “Albanians and Afghans Fight for the Heirs to Bosnia’s SS Past” and was reported from Fojnica in central Bosnia. This was one of the most remarkable stories to emerge during the Bosnian civil war. The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army had reformed a Nazi SS Division right under the eyes of the U.S. and Western media. And only Robert Fox caught it. That is a remarkable example of media censorship and collusion to cover-up the facts. And this was accomplished the U.S. and Western media. This story started when Robert Fox went to investigate the horrific murder of two Roman Catholic priests in Fojnica. Bosnian Muslim Army troops had executed two priests, Nikola Milicevic, 39, a parish priest, and Mato Migic,56 ,a vicar, were Franciscan priests who had been murdered by Bosnian Muslim soldiers at the Holy Spirit monastery, execution-style. While investigating this war crime, Fox soon discovered that the Bosnian Muslim Army had reformed a Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division from World War II, the 13th Waffen SS Division Handzar or Handschar, “dagger”, which is derived from the Arabic word khanjar, the term for a curved, double-sided Ottoman knife prevalent in Arabic and Muslim countries.osnian Muslims in Sarajevo threatened to reform and to revive the Bosnian Muslim Nazii SS Division Handzar and to cut off the heads of Serbian leaders. The cover of Novi Vox magazine, October, 1991 with the headline: "The Handzar Division is ready!" This is how Fox described his encounter with the reformed Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division: ’DOCUMENTS!’ shouted a man in a beret with an insignia in green Arabic script outside the UN house in the Bosnian mountain town of Fojnica. He was hostile and demanded our presence at the police station. Later the police chief apologised, but made clear that authority had passed to the men with the Koranic texts hanging from their fatigues. These are the men of the Handzar division. ‘We do everything with the knife, and we always fight on the frontline,’ a Handzar told one UN officer. Up to 6000-strong, the Handzar division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar division, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler.” Fox personally observed that Albanian Muslims were part of the recreated Handzar Division, which was also made up of veterans, mujahedeen, from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fox reagraded the presence of Albanian Muslims in the division as evidence that the conflict would spread to Kosovo, which Albanian Muslim separatists sought to detach from Serbia and to create a Greater Albania. How was this event missed by the mainstream media? Why was Robert Fox the only Western journalist to report on the reformed Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division? What does this cover-up and media censorship reveal about the U.S. and Western media? The Bosnian Muslim faction had threatened to reform and to recreate the Handzar Nazi SS Division. In October, 1991, the Bosnian Muslim magazine Novi Vox in Sarajevo, in issue no.3, well over half a year before the civil war broke out in 1992, published a front-cover illustration showing a Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS officer in the Handzar Division stepping on the decapitated and bloody heads of Serbian leaders, including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. The caption read: “The Handzar Division is ready!” Another headline announced: “The Fourth Reich is coming—Welcome!” This revival of Bosnia’s Nazi and SS genocidal past was censored, suppressed, and covered-up in the U.S. and the Western media. But the Bosnian Serb population got the message very clearly. he Bosnian Muslims were reviving the Handzar Nazi SS Division which they had formed in World War II and they were planning to decapitate Bosnian Serb Orthodox Christians. This was hardly a reassuring message about a supposed secular, multi-ethnic society and religious and ethnic tolerance and pluralism. In fact, the message was an incitement to genocide and to racism and racist and religious hatred and enmity. The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army proved good on these threats. The Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar was indeed reformed and recreated and was made a part of the Bosnian Muslim Army.