By Nathan Barton

Happy Thanksgiving, with friends and family! This week, due to travel and work (about 2000 miles so far, and days that start at 0600 and end at 0400), I’m not recording a lot of commentary this week.  Here are some thoughts on recent news stories.

Although it IS Thanksgiving, the theme of stories on my desktop right now is “fear” and rationality. Fear is something that can be good or bad, depending on how we react to our fears. Do we deal with them rationally, or use them as an excuse for doing horrible things?

The first example is doing horrible things. In the Islamic wars we have “child abuse” – what gives? The Independent, as passed on to me by Ernie, tells about the second of two Bosnian-Austrian girls (originally age 17 and 16, or 16 and 14 as reported by some sources) who had gone to the Middle East to fight for the Caliphate, and were called “poster girls” of the great jihad, has been killed, apparently by being beaten to death when trying to flee from her job of several years of killing and terrorizing people. Note: she was beaten to death by OTHER Muslims of her OWN sect. It is a sad story: Clearly a pretty girl, before she had to don a jihab at least, her heart was obviously ugly and black. Her friend, a couple of years younger and not “eligible” to serve in the military, had been killed in combat some time ago (apparently also by other Muslims).

Seems to me like the media isn’t making much of a fuss of this – imagine if it was older non-Muslim man who lured these girls to their deaths? Imagine if it were a “christian” sect which had recruited them and then beaten this girl to death instead of letting her go back home? Nor does anyone seem to think that just maybe these “children” were not raised well by their parents; not taught to distinguish between reality and fantasy romanticism, or that liberty does not involve going out and attacking and killing people who don’t convert to your religion fast enough or enough. Nor does anyone point out that the spiritual desert of modern Western Europe, including Austria, offers little alternative to the fanaticism of Islamism to teenagers, male or female, with the natural tendency to be attracted to religious and other fantasies and fanaticism.

More Islamic wars and irrational fears: MORE “fratricide” in Mesopotamia, and the Caliphate is given a ‘severe blow’ when an Al Qaeda suicide bomber takes out leadership of key ISIS brigade, or so goes the story from Fox News.

Mama’s Note: This will certainly be something to watch. If the rest of the world left them alone to duke it out, problem might be solved.

Nathan: That would certainly be a good solution: quarantine them until they’ve eaten each other like the Kilkenny cats. Of course, the Tranzis would not like this. Containment is sooo evil. Yet, that is the ONLY punishment authorized for voluntary government: a “withdrawal of fellowship” as some religions term it. Or as Eric Frank Russell put it (in his novella, “And Then There Were None,” “Freedom = I Won’t” (F=IW). I won’t have anything to do with you until you behave like a rational human being. But sadly, most people are NOT rational these days, and for most people, the only response to the Islamists is to fear them.

Sometimes the best way to deal with fear is to – my, oh, my – be prepared to defend yourself. Antiwar.com tells us about a report that the State of Israel has 115 Nukes and 660 kilograms of plutonium. And that Israel’s arsenal includes cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Assuming this is true, I am not sure what to think about it. For one thing, if Israel’s enemies around it have any inking about this, it explains why they don’t really try to support the so-called Palestinians very much.

Nuclear warheads have proven to be far more effective as a deterrent, to prevent being attacked, than for any other use in the last seventy years. Unless you assume that Israel is totally evil, and MORE evil than either the Arab and Islamic states around them or any of the other 200+ states in the world, it is probably far better that Israel and not Egypt or Libya or Iran has these. And it probably acts as a check on Israel itself. They realize that putting themselves into a situation that leads to using even one is a very bad thing, and so they may limit their own adventurism as such use would almost certainly trigger a series of events that would even more seriously threaten the survival of Israel. But I wonder, is this fairly large arsenal something to be used in a “Masada” even in which a small remnant of the Israeli nation, like the Zealots of AD 70, would decide that all earthly hope was lost and suicide is the only course of action? In which they could not just escape from their enemies by death but also strike an incredible blow, dealing death to their enemies? With cruise missiles, and any reasonable range, the Fall of Israel could easily mean a Gotterdammerung of which Hitler’s fanatics could only dream, the destruction of Cairo and Alexandria, Mecca and Medina and Riyadh and Damascus and Tehran and maybe even Islamabad and Dubai and Kuwait City and Sanaa. If some of those warheads were primarily EMP warheads, virtually all of the Ummah could be sent instantly back to the Iron Age or further. Is such a threat really worth risking for the benefits of gaining control of Al-Quds (Jerusalem)? Or to put it another way, are Arab and Muslim leaders rational enough to fear Israel enough to leave them alone?

The fear in America is growing. No, NOT of the Caliphate and terrorist attacks, but of Donald Trump – and the fear is in the hearts of GOP bosses and operatives. World Net Daily reports that a complaint has been filed in New Hampshire, claiming that Trump is not eligible to be in the primary, because he really isn’t a practicing Republican. (No definition of THAT is given; can I speculate? Not enough lying, not enough hypocrisy, not enough statism?) Some people are applying the adjective “Teflon” (which I thought was a noun, really) to Trump: every attack on him by the GOP leadership, Democratic operatives and candidates, and even other GOP candidates seems to have backfired: he keeps remaining high in the polls (and in the pools, the betting pools, that is).

Mama’s Note: Sadly, Trump is simply a politician like all others. I’ve not heard either him or any other “candidate” suggest that even one tyrannical law – let alone the vast weight of government edicts now choking out the last glimmer of life and liberty in America – must be repealed, the theft stopped, and foreign entanglements repudiated…  Oh no. They all have even more wonderful plans for our lives and property, built on the insane myths of the past and the relatively new ones of “climate change” and political correctness gone totally nuts.

I’ll end the commentary with another example of dealing rationally with fear. This is Thanksgiving, and apparently many Cuban (or “Cuban-American”) families have a lot to be thankful to God for. US News & World Report tells us that social media helps drive historic Cuban exodus to the Fifty States. As summer began to bake the central Cuban city of Sancti Spiritus, Elio Alvarez and Lideisy Hernandez sold their tiny apartment and everything in it for $5,000 and joined the largest migration from their homeland in decades. The “thaw” between the socialist/communist regimes in Havana and DC have opened a window of opportunity, and I am sure that fear is an element in this latest migration, fear that Cuba will revert to old totalitarian tactics but now supported by DC, and that the current refugee mess in Europe will spill over to the Fifty States and migration to the Colossus of the North will be cut off. So it does make sense to move while they can, and as bad as things are Stateside, we are much better off than we would be in Cuba. (Or much of the rest of the world.)

Mama’s Note: Yes indeed, and I am grateful, but I do not lose sight of the fact that the “lesser of two evils” – or many of them, is still evil. I won’t let my gratitude for this relative lesser evil blind me to the need to continue the fight for the good. The good of individual liberty.