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9/11 in the Context of the Humiliation of Islam
As we remember the fallen of 9/11 I think it is important to put on our Sun Tzu hats and remember the importance of understanding the enemy.
The important thing to understand is the extent of Muslim humiliation over the last few centuries, starting with the defeat of the Ottomans at the Gates of Vienna in 1683.
I say nothing, nothing, about the normalization of Zionism by George Eliot in Daniel Deronda.
Then Churchill got interested in Middle East oil when he converted the Royal Navy in 1911 from coal to oil. And of course the Brits had to make sure that the oil would not be withdrawn by the local Muslim chieftain.
But it got worse.
After World War I British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot divvied up the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence. Notice that they didn’t ask permission from the local imams.
Then Constantine Zureiq and Sayyid Qutb created secular Arab nationalism and jihadism, and spent the following decades at war with one another.
Then modern Israel was founded and humiliated the Arabs determined to annihilate it.
Then 9/11.
Now we are watching the humiliation of mullahcratic Iran.
I dare say there is more to come.
But it all started earlier than 1683, and I only realized this when visiting the city of Jaisalmer in the desert in Rajasthan in western India. The guide showing us a haveli, or merchant mansion, said that the city was prosperous and great until the Portuguese and the Brits showed up on the west coast of India and ruined the spice trade.
You see, up to that moment, there was a Spice Route from the western Ghats in India — where they grown the spices — all the way across the desert and then up the Red Sea, past your favorite coffee port of, Mocha, then Mecca, up to the trading ports of the eastern Mediterranean. But by the time the spices got to the cities of Italy they cost an arm and a leg, because of all the taxes extracted by the various lords and merchants at each trading city on the Spice Route.
That’s why the Spanish and the Portuguese were so eager in 1492 to sail to “the Indies.” Buy the spices at the port of origin at Kochi and then sail them back to Europe and make a fortune.
Not good for the Muslims.
Then, I learned from “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crisis” by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, about how Arab students showed up in Paris in the early 19th century. Guess what: they inhaled the revolutionary ideology of the French Revolution and mixed it with their Muslim religion and culture.
Then there is the myth of crisis that is a part of Christianity, Islam, and lefty ideology. Those Muslim students in Paris inhaled it all. See, if you are going to change the world with Obamian “fundamental transformation” you need a crisis to justify your ideology of overthrow, whether it’s a crisis of capitalism, colonialism, racism, transphobia, or Gaza genocide.
If you are a Muslim student in Paris, or a Sufi mullah in Iran, or a Muslim Brother in Egypt, the crisis is pretty clear. The problem is the humiliation of the Muslim Ummah. Ever since those bloody Brits and their Portuguese pals wrecked the comfortable spice trade all the way from the western Ghats to the ports of Haifa, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut.
All along, right up to the mullahs in Iran and their proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen, the Muslims have had a choice: fight ‘em or join ‘em.
Up until yesterday the Muslims wanted to fight. Then last year I saw President Trump journey to Saudi Arabia and make a speech to MBS. And who was in the frame with the smiling MBS? Elon Musk.
Anyone talk to Jared Kushner about this? Oh, I forgot, the Foreign Policy experts all agree that Kushner is an amateur.
The Chinese call the century after the Macartney Mission to China in 1793 the Century of Humiliation. Mao was supposed to end all that, but I’d say that, as a Kapital-believing Commie, he was bound to make it worse. And all the Brits wanted to do was a spot of trade, all friendly like.
For Muslims, I’d say it’s been a Half-Millennium of Humiliation. But I have a word for our Muslim friends. The way out of the Valley of Humiliation is not through the Ideology of Crisis and Overthrow beloved of our lefty friends. The way forward and upward is in the image created last year by MBS alongside of Elon Musk. Musk is a fan of the great American philosopher Ralph Cramden and his aphorism about travel to the Moon. And Musk is heir of all the inventors that have transformed the world since the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution, not to mention the extraordinary Founding Fathers of our beloved United States of America.
We will never forget those who died on 9/11. Our mission, if we accept it, is to show the Muslims that there is a better way then jihad.
| Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:09:01 GMT |
AI and Education
For a while now I’ve been saying that AI means the end of education, from pre-K to grad-school.
Because? If you have a question, just ask AI and AI will answer it. It’s up to you to remember what it told you.
But DataRepublican had another kind of problem. She had her kid in public school, but he “had trouble adjusting to middle school”. So she started scouting for a private school. She was
shocked at how far ahead they were of public schooling. The private school was mandating essays written in cursive by third grade, teaching algebra in sixth grade, and actually held students accountable from an early age on.
So her son took an admissions test and flunked it. And she had six weeks to fix it.
Enter AI!
DataRepublican got AI to fix her son’s deficiency in Saxon math. It came up with a plan.
Grammar needed a different repair plan. There, the gap was much more critical: he did not know the difference between a noun and a verb.
What! AI fixed that too.
Now DataRepublican is as smart as paint. Just because she can use AI to get her son to pass the private school entrance test in six weeks doesn’t mean that you or I could do the same.
But hey, give AI a couple of years and I bet it will be able to help Delta-minus moron parents to get their kids into private school.
Or, better, AI could supervise their kids’ homeschooling. How hard could that be?
I was talking to a young acquaintance who is converting his firm’s software development to AI. He says some of the developers just go for it, and some of them are upset, because they were in love with the craft of software development.
Same thing with every hand craft that got buggy-whipped by the industrial revolution.
And I’ll bet that is what happens to the “hand craft” that we call teaching. Some folks will adapt, and some will mourn the death of the craft of teaching.
Hey, whatabout the Saxon math textbooks? I checked on Amazon and they ain’t cheap.
But I bet that AI could do it all, for a smart parent, right now, on the cheap. And next year?
I’ve been reading and blogging Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise over the last few weeks, and one big takeaway is that human language is the most important thing since sliced bread. We communicate everything to each other with it, including our two types of knowledge, ritual and instrumental knowledge: ritual being “how we do stuff in our community” and instrumental being how we do stuff that we learn.
But who teaches a kid to learn language and speak it? Mom does, whether she is the smartest woman in the world, or the dumbest.
So really, once a human child has learned to speak, what’s left? Learning language is the hard part. Learning AI in a couple of years so you can teach your kid language and grammar will be easy by comparison.
| Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:04:23 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
How to unify Germany, by Otto von Bismarck: Ally Prussia with Austria to defeat Denmark; Then ally Prussia and Protestant German states against Austria and Catholic German states to defeat Austria and create North German Confederation; Then ally all German states against France to create the Second Reich.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence — Napoleon Bonaparte
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Government is Protection Against Enemies
