I read that earlier this morning.

Back in 2004, Abu Bakr Naji posted an online treatise called "Management of Savagery" where he said that the side capable of the most gruesome acts of violence will terrify their enemy into submission.

In 2014, ISIS beheaded a Kurdish man in a gruesome manner and the ISIS propaganda machine gave it a title called "Message in Blood". That attack, and most of them since, have been based on the ideas brought forward by Naji. Jihadis use the term "spectacular" to describe the most horrific attacks. You can see how this is developing when you have a guy use a truck in Nice to kill 84 people (including 10 children). Then a 17-year old in Germany attacks people on a train with an axe and in France, the killing of an 84 year old priest etc., etc. Now that ISIS is losing ground in Syria/Iraq, I think they will continue this type of thing. You really only need 1 person to carry out an attack.

I think the worst thing you can do is to sent troops to Syria because they want that. It will just create more people trying to send a message in blood. The second worse is drop bombs as the risk of civilian casualties is high and that will just feed the propaganda.

It seems to me that the only option is one people don't want to hear and that is to have a strong defense.

Very good article.

---

Suffer Well.

That's not an option that will solve the problem. If mice are getting into your house, trying to seal the house probably isn't going to keep all of them out. Killing them after they are in your house is closing the barn door after the horse has left. Trying to root them out of all their nesting places outside the house won't work, either, for obvious reasons. The only real option is to remove any motivation they might have to get into your house in the first place.

---

----------------------------------
"Go yell at an M&M"

The only real option is to remove any motivation they might have to get into your house in the first place.

I think the real motivation is radical Islam, the idea of making a caliphate and converting everyone to Islam. The problem is as much a division within Islam itself and how can a Western country solve that? If we interfere by taking out the bad guys, we create hundreds more to take their place. You could take back their territory in Syria/Iraq but the ideas don't recognize borders.

You could encourage more assimilation, which works here, but has not worked well in Europe and now they are sitting on a powder keg. You could stop immigration completely, but that will also create more anger.

A Western country can't heal the divide between Sunni an Shiite nor can we get them to like us. We can only pressure countries there to do more and for us it means being more defensive instead of going out and trying to solve it.

Think bigger. Hint: had we listened to Jimmy Carter, we'd likely not be in this situation now.

---

----------------------------------
"Go yell at an M&M"

Hmmm...I wonder where you are going with that, since the "Carter Doctrine" stated we would go to war in the Persian Gulf to defend our national interests, one of which is clearly a stable flow of oil, not only to the US but to the world as well.

---

___________________________________________________
Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

one of which is clearly a stable flow of oil

Think "sweaters."

---

"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

Think "sweater" :-)

Heck: http://www.pbs.org/...urces/carter-energy/

See the Tenth Principle.

---

----------------------------------
"Go yell at an M&M"

Well, we did try track suits back in the 90s. Yo!

While we should have done more to look for different sources of energy, I don't think that would have changed much. The Carter Doctrine, for one, was part of his speech in Jan, 1980, which comes after the speech you linked to. That doctrine, elucidated by Carter, and followed by every President since, has kept stability and the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf as a national priority, and kept us engaged there militarily We actually get very little oil from that area; but our main concern is that the supply of oil world wide not get disrupted, and not have a single entity in control of the oil (Russians for Carter; Hussein for Bush).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine

---

___________________________________________________
Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

If we had embarked on a Manhattan Project-scale effort to eliminate the need for carbon-based fuel, what might we have accomplished in the last 40 years? What would the Middle East, and our policy towards that region, be like? The oil-based nations in that region would either be our friends or they'd be so damned broke that they'd be riding camels again. Terrorist groups wouldn't exist: they'd have taken over the nations that currently harbor and foment their radicalization, and nobody would care about the fourth-world countries they'd be ruling.

---

----------------------------------
"Go yell at an M&M"

We might have accomplished much, but I still don't think it would have been enough to get to the point where we put the oil producers out of business, nor really changed the calculus of what is going on today that much. And we don't even need a Manhattan Project...we already have the technology to supply all the power we need in the form of nuclear reactors; we just don't have the will to do it.

ETA: The time from that speech you linked to Desert Storm was only 14 years. I don't think that your timeline for going from 1977 to eliminating Islamic terrorism is very realistic. That, and the fact that much of the underpinning of radical Islamist thought didn't originate in the Gulf, but rather in Egypt with Sayyid Qutb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

---

___________________________________________________
Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

So we should all convert to Islam.

Good plan.

---

Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Btw, we solved our rat problem at our home.

And we still have a house full of food.

Guess how we did it...

We killed all the fucking rats and have cats who kill their babies.

And we still have a house full of food.

---

Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

No, they just have to think that we all converted to Islam. Pull up a bong and ponder on that.

If we had embarked on a Manhattan Project-scale effort to eliminate the need for carbon-based fuel, what might we have accomplished in the last 40 years? What would the Middle East, and our policy towards that region, be like? The oil-based nations in that region would either be our friends or they'd be so damned broke that they'd be riding camels again. Terrorist groups wouldn't exist: they'd have taken over the nations that currently harbor and foment their radicalization, and nobody would care about the fourth-world countries they'd be ruling.

I agree with you but based on what actually happened, we have to deal with how to fight terrorism today. I think Canada and the the U.S have done pretty well on the assimilation part, something European countries have failed with. The U.S has also dramatically improved things like intelligence and border security, something Europe hasn't addressed either.

As the territory of ISIS continues to shrink, I think we will see an increase in attacks and in the short term anyway, don't see how you can stop it. The answer that seems logical is to try to minimize the damage. It would take a long time to change the status by focusing on alternate energy, and that will come, but we still face a generation, at least, of problems.

Never had rats, but did same as you for mice and it worked. In fact, even without a cat, mousetraps have done the trick for me.

It is not that complicated. But long intelligent-sounding verbiage seems to be the solution to simple problems for some.

---

________
It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

We must be bring in more refugees.