Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber convicted of killing 270 and diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2008, was released in August of 2009 under compassionate grounds (where’s the compassion toward the victims?) due to “a Scottish law that allows terminally ill prisoners to die at home. When he was freed, Mr. Megrahi was expected to live three months.”

Instead of 3 months, he enjoyed almost 3 years of freedom, not including the 3 years it took before he was indicted, 8 more years before Qaddafi surrendered him for trial, followed by 2 more years before conviction on 2001.

All in all, he lived 22 years longer than the 259 unfortunates aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and the 11 on ground; and 7 months longer than Qaddafi. A peaceful end in contrast to their violent deaths:

On Dec. 21, 1988, a bronze hard-shell Samsonite suitcase was loaded onto an Air Malta plane bound for Frankfurt. From Germany, the suitcase was transferred onto a flight to London. Upon arrival, the bag was placed inside the forward cargo bay of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Bound for New York, Pan Am Flight 103 held 189 Americans, including a group of Syracuse University college students returning home for the holidays from a semester abroad.

The jet was cruising at 31,000 feet at 7:03 p.m. when a bomb hidden inside the Samsonite bag exploded. All 259 aboard died, and 11 people on the ground were killed when flaming chunks of the plane plummeted into the bucolic village of Lockerbie.

~~~

When he arrived in Tripoli in 2009, he was greeted by hundreds of jubilant Libyans, including some who wore shirts depicting his face. Others in the crowd waved Scottish flags, an apparently taunting gesture.

He earned a reputation as a national hero, and babies were reportedly named after him. He was granted an exclusive audience with Gaddafi.

The decision to allow his release enraged many of the families of Lockerbie bombing victims. President Obama called Mr. Megrahi’s release “a mistake.”

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was born April 1, 1952, in Tripoli. He studied in the United States during the 1970s and spoke fluent English. He received an engineering degree from Benghazi University in Libya.

Survivors include his wife, Aisha, and five children.

At home in Libya for the past two years, Mr. Megrahi lived in a resplendent villa in Tripoli, complete with a garden and swimming pool.

Until his death, Mr. Megrahi maintained his innocence, claiming that he was the victim of an international conspiracy.

“You judge me falsely,” Mr. Megrahi once told an American interviewer. “My life is clean.”

What if he were innocent? Unfortunately, the secrets and details of the plot to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 probably dies with Qaddafi and Megrahi.

Seattle Times:

After treatment at Tripoli’s most advanced cancer center, al-Megrahi lived with his family at a villa in Tripoli at the government’s expense. As civil war engulfed Libya in 2011, Western calls for his return to prison increased, especially after Gadhafi was overthrown and later killed by revolutionary forces.

Tripoli’s new leaders refused to return him but amid international pressures signaled a willingness to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie case, still unresolved after nearly a quarter of a century of struggle among nations and investigations that spanned the globe, touching on Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians and Libyans.

The enigmatic al-Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist, but defended by many Libyans and even some world leaders as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence.

His first cousin was Sa’id Rashid, a senior officer of Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat, the Libyan intelligence service, and a member of Gadhafi’s inner circle. Al-Megrahi was also a senior intelligence officer and director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Tripoli.

U.S. intelligence officials said he became chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines as a cover for his secret work as a military procurer, enabling him to travel widely, often using aliases and false passports. As tensions between the United States and Libya mounted in the 1980s, prosecutors said, al-Megrahi was enlisted for an act of terrorism.

It was to be the worst in British history and a devastating strike against America.

~~~

While they had no direct proof, investigators believed the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Pan Am 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.

After a three-year investigation, al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted for mass murder in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion.

Al-Megrahi lived under armed guard and worked as a teacher. Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999 — the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.

The trial lasted 85 days. No witness connected the suspects directly to the bomb.

But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified al-Megrahi as the buyer, although he seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.

The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.

Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that al-Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.

On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found al-Megrahi guilty but acquitted Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that “there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of al-Megrahi. Much of the evidence, however, was later challenged as unreliable.

It emerged that Gauci had failed repeatedly to identify Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his picture in a magazine and being shown the same picture in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

Investigators said Bollier, whom even the court called “untruthful and unreliable,” had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.

In 2007, Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for explosives residue, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight also was cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.

Hans Koechler, a U.N. observer, called the trial “a spectacular miscarriage of justice,” words echoed by Mandela. Many legal experts, authors and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling al-Megrahi a scapegoat for a regime long identified with terrorism.

A boy stands stands in front of the main headstone in the Lockerbie memorial garden in Lockerbie, Scotland. Families of victims of the 1988 bombing stood sharply divided over reports that the former Libyan agent jailed for life for the attack is to be freed. David Moir-Reuters

Who Made These Bones

This fossil skull is between 11,000 and 14,500 years old, according to radio carbon dating of samples from their campfires in caves of southwestern China. There are unique features of this skull and of at least two other specimens that make this find unique. Notice the bony protrusion of the cheek area, the width of the face in the region temporal mandibular joint, the excessive bony structure of the mandibular rami, the massive molar structure, the anterior portion of the jaw is protruding and massive, the bony structures suggest a massive mandibular musculature, the eye sockets are large and broad, perhaps indicating an individual with superior eyesight. The wear of the incisors suggest a seed and plant eater who relied heavily on those feed sources at least seasonally and probably more often, especially when the hunting or trapping failed. Every hunter/trapper who knows how to set snares, knows that it is much easier to snare deer or trap them in blind canyons and kill them as you need them, a type of primitive animal husbandry and meat preservation, but professional anthropologists have never visited a primitive hunting group like this because there are none.

Did this creature die because his lower incisors overwhelmed the upper incisors, causing infected gums and impacted teeth, making it impossible to eat roots,nuts, and seeds, thus did it become too painful for him to masticate the plant materials with the lower incisors cutting into the upper gum and against the impacted remnants of the upper teeth?

Were his teeth and that powerful jaw that served him so well, responsible for his demise? It happens to older horses all the time and judging from the right angle of the extending rami and the advanced wear of the teeth, this individual was an older male with a limited ability to grind seeds and nuts. Of one thing we can be sure, this is truly a unique creature of this world.

Before we allow the anthropologists to muddy up the water with highly predictable, politically biased, but extremely speculative claims of species migrating out of Africa, species that supposedly represent unique groups or a hybrid product of the evolutionary chain that branched off and eventually perished, let’s look at this new find through the eyes of a former trapper and professional hunter, who survived for years using many of the same analytical skills of the ancient hunter gatherer. Since we aren’t in the caves, we will need to rely on the findings of students and anthropologists; thus, our findings are compromised from the beginning, for no one reads “sign” (traces of life and movement) like a man who made his living reading “sign”.

Because of carbon dating, we know these creatures lived in proximity to modern humans, during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition of 11,000 to 15,000 years ago. We can also conclude that there were more than three individuals, for if the question of which came first the chicken or the egg is enigmatic, the question of the origin of these individuals is just as problematic, for the breeding of a species requires more than three specimens. The coward and the lemming will say they walked out of Africa without leaving a trace and then were overwhelmed by modern man; unfortunately, there is no sign to suggest this scenario, it is just accepted wisdom or should we say stupidity, for academics must accept and repeat unsubstantiated conjecture as fact in order to be accepted by your peers in academia.

We know these individuals were hardy enough to survive the coldest glacial period of approximately 20,000 years ago, back when ice covered one-third of the earth’s surface, the glaciers were over a mile thick, and a good portion of the earth’s water was trapped in these ice formations.

This early hunter liked to live in caves; the temperature of caves is constant, a bit on the cool side, but during an ice age it would seem like central heating. They liked to eat a large red deer, we may assume it is the size of an elk, since we have been given no specifics. The article mentioned that he was probably a stone tool maker, since there is evidence of worked stones at the sight, but the modern bushman knows it is nearly impossible to butcher, transport, cook, and eat a deer as large as an elk without stone knives.

It is the charred bone of the Red Deer that is the tell-tale sign of prehistoric beings with culinary skills, for charred bone survives the tests of time so well it is nearly as impermeable as stone tools. The men studying these people have named them the Red Deer People and one name is as good as another, but more important are the features of this well-preserved skull and the cavalier use of the word People. Notice the bony structures of the face, particularly the supra-orbital ridges above those large eyes and the huge nasal opening. This individual may have had the well developed sense of smell required to track game by using his sense of smell. The large eyes may indicate superior vision or perhaps a night hunter. There is no curvature of the cheek bones, the feature we rely on so heavily to define beauty; instead, we have a flat massive bone structure that would have served well for the attachment of a massive mandibular musculature for the grinding of seeds and roots. The wear pattern of the incisors suggest this possibility.

The forehead is well developed, but begins a distal curvature prematurely, when compared to a modern skull. The high forehead has been a trait of humans for hundreds of thousands of years. In man the frontal lobes protect the region of the brain associated with behavior and personality. The diminished area on top of the skull represents a compromised section of the brain associated with sensory data, but this information is only useful if we assume that this creature and modern man had similar brains with the exact formation and function; with the skull’s variance, should we assume the brain is the same?

This creature survived one of the coldest epics of the last ice age, referred to as the Glacial Maximum, a period that ended approximately 20,000 years ago, and the transition into the equivalent of our modern climate, known as the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, a period of change between 11,000 thousand years and 15,000 years ago. This transition saw a major die off of flora and fauna, but along with the die off came a rebirth of new plants and animals. The large Red Deer that this creature depended for protein, didn’t make the cut and it is safe to assume that most of his plant foods also perished. Was he unable to adapt, did he lack the mental capacity to alter his hunting and gathering knowledge and technology to meet the challenges of changing world? Perhaps, but remember, we are being objective by employing the skills of a modern day hunter and trapper and not relying on political or cultural biases that tend to contaminate the “scientific” findings of anthropologists.

Therefore, we can say with confidence that it is nearly impossible to say. With sadness, it is easy to realize academics with their clueless abilities to relate to real world problems often miss real clues for their lack of experience in the lifestyle that this creature survived in and thrived for eons. Unfortunately, the Indiana Jones persona is a myth. The best that we can hope for is to recover DNA samples and continue to chart the blood of the families and species of the world, but to assume this creature explains or provides proof of evolutionary theory or intelligent design requires more than a stretch of imagination. Remember, if we chart the stored information within the DNA of a one cell organism, it will require hundreds if not thousands of pages of data.

Let’s take into consideration the fact that for the forces of nature to form a fossil, a unique and specialized set of characteristics from the environment need to be present; to assume that early species were thoughtful enough to only travel and die where fossils can be formed to help us in recording the steps of man and other creatures that walked upright, requires either a very weak mind or a very devious mind.

Our anthropologists are quick to theorize about the possibility of interbreeding between modern man and the Red Deer People, it isn’t impossible to “conceive” of the idea, when we think of the breeding habits of some modern men and of some modern women like Ms Fluke who seem to have problems with self-restraint and logic. But there is that cheek problem, the laws of attraction, and how much cultural definitions of beauty or ugliness is someone willing to overlook just to have their ashes hauled, but then we are also left with the mule or hybrid problem, the fact that nearly all cross species breeding, that can produce a viable life form, results in an organism that is sterile. But just maybe, it really isn’t science when we reach out to consider the “but maybe” syndromes.

I’m so sick of this viral fad video, I’m posting this counter-video up on my FB:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anytime you want to tug at heartstrings (attached to people’s purse strings), bring in the children.

Backdrop:

The powerful YouTube upload is by Invisible Children, a non-profit organization seeking to end Joseph Kony’s use of children as soldiers and sex slaves in his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a paramilitary religious group that has been active throughout Central Africa since 1987. Invisible Children is particularly concerned with Northern Uganda, where Kony has been fighting an ethnic nationalist war against the central government’s administration, though he is not believed to have entered the country for six years. They urge the International Criminal Court to take action and arrest Kony so he can be tried for war crimes.

~~~

the advent of the popular fad comes suspiciously soon after President Obama’s (unconstitutional) decision to deploy American Special Forces to the Central African Republic in October 2011. Although Kony is no saint, neither is his prime enemy in Central Africa, the proto-fascist President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni. Museveni, who has been in power for nearly 25-years, is known for his affinity towards the United States Government, as well as his intense disdain for democracy.

Obama’s move also came as China had started to make inroads into the region’s oil production, threatening America’s economic standing. Observers who paid close attention to the president’s similarly dishonest war in Libya based upon national security interests were quick to discover the actual (monetary) goal of his administration.

Does supporting Museveni’s government over resistance forces further U.S. national interests? If it does, then I’d lean toward supporting a brutal dictator over ushering in something worse, if not more of the same, if it also advanced our interests to do so.

A number of links caution readers to think before their knee reflex jerks them into donating to what they assume to be a worthy cause:

the organization is not as innocent as it would like the many followers sharing its flagship video to believe. Financial reports uncovered by Grant Oyston suggest the organization spent $8,676,614 in 2011, allocating a mere 32% to direct aid, while the remainder was put primarily towards advocacy projects such as the major video and concurrent outreach efforts.

What’s even more deeply troubling about the organization is that its mission aligns with the Ugandan government of Museveni, condemning the human rights abuses of the military but otherwise arguing that cooperation with the regional authorities is necessary to achieve change.

If the “bad guys” are the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Ugandan government must be the good guys, right?

CNN:

Jason Russell, the most prominent face of the group Invisible Children, has made the work of bringing about change very difficult indeed. Invisible Children’s campaign is a well-packaged call to leave the state of affairs untouched; their message seems so modern because their tools are. The point made is conformist: Fight violence with violence, dismiss intricate steps of social change and make a narrow ideology mass-compatible by having millions of unquestioning people raise their fists in support. For the U.S., Europe and other generally comfortable corners of the world, this is a worrying picture of a mass culture that easily falls for propaganda.

For the world’s less cozy places, to which the areas in which the Lord’s Resistance Army has been active belongs, mass support for maintaining the status quo is a tragedy.

So what is the status quo? Well, it is indeed complicated. But suffice to say that for decades, this has been an intricate mix of violence that causes more violence, a violent government that garners international support by vilifying one side of the conflict, and international attention often reduced to uninformed celebrities expressing shock and horror. Crucially, it has been part of Ugandan government propaganda to make this war seem like the tour of personal madness of one man: Joseph Kony. This is the status quo that needs to be challenged.

Read the rest.

The main problem in Uganda isn’t even the Lord’s Resistance Army.

How lucky we are, we who mourn the erosion of freedom and bemoan the implementation of Statism; for now, we at least have the consolation and comforting feelings that come with knowing there is a high degree of intellect directing our international diplomacy, designated as “Smart Diplomacy”. The phrase our former First Lady uses to describe her self-professed skills in diplomacy; skills that were apparently acquired in managing the “Bimbo Eruptions,” her husband precipitated during their marriage and sometimes bizarre journey to the White House. Skills that became patently obvious with the Obama Administration’s opening of our embassy in Damascus and Ms Clinton describing Assad, the butcher of Syria, as a reformer. Yes, if the diplomacy of the White House and the State Department were any smarter, the dictators of the world would be cowering in fear when Hillary flexes her brain and farts intellect by the bucket.

Unfortunately, reality has gripped the world; various blood stained “Reformers,” miscreants, tyrants, and benevolent dictators know the US is a war weary country and Hussein Obama is in an election year. The military may be beginning to resent being used as pawns, according to some returning vets, while political leaders make strategic military and political decisions based on popularity polls. Our citizens watch in disbelief as our president goes to the United Nations for a dubious permission slip to engage Libya in a “Lead From The Rear,” war to depose a dictator who by all outward appearances was beginning to reform, but threatened to deal harshly with those in revolt. If only he would have claimed to have a nuclear warhead with inter-continental capabilities, he would have been treated with respect by Obama and others and perhaps still be alive and in power, much like the monster of North Korea who lived out a natural, but surreal comic book existence with Obama’s tacit blessing.

Thus a limited military action, supposedly utilizing air power with surgical precision, our Fearless Slayer of Defenseless Monsters promised a speedy victory over tyranny; unfortunately, the war that wasn’t a war and the precision execution of a tyrant turned into a five month orgy of flexing our military technology and our economic might as we rained down an array of our most sophisticated weapons in an attempt to kill one man. Sadly our proposed orgy of singular execution was but an impotent display of presidential miscalculation and “Smart Diplomacy;” for in the end, a sadistic mob tore the dictator apart, but other dictators were taught to fear the consequences of falling out of favor with America’s own skinny little tyrant.

While Hussein Obama strutted on the world stage and posed in the dual role of Superman and International Bully, our enemies began to see the weaknesses and possibilities or perhaps the impotency of a high tech super power bully engaging a primitive enemy and culture while losing the support of his people. For the absolute absurdity of the situation was never more apparent, than the theater of sublime hypocrisy: a Community Organizer imposing a “No Fly Zone” and using it as an excuse for the bombing of tanks, trucks, and infantry with American air power. With logic that eluded all but the most dedicated sycophants, Hussein Obama continued to rain holy hell on Libya, until a mob tore Qadaffi to pieces. America’s greatness and her beacon of freedom fell several notches during that afternoon of mayhem, but the power of “Smartness” or perhaps dumbness was definitely out in the open, for the world to judge.

Now, the world watches as another dictator slaughters his people who dare to resist tyranny and thumbs his nose at Obama and Hillary with her bucket of smartness. The citizens of the world look up at the throne of Obama, not with a hopeful look, but with a smirk, for they know President Hussein Obama on his throne is really nothing more than a childish Community Organizer on a toilet.

The people that Obama leads, the entitled, self-serving self-designated intellectual snobs, and the ultra-rich Elites, are willing to ignore his military adventurism; except, for those faithful followers in the defense industry. No, it is a delicate balance of a coalition of factions, for the Socialist Pacifists can only stomach a certain amount of military adventurism; until, one day in the future, they look upon Hussein Obama with the familiar fish eyed stare of outage and indignation, formerly reserved for former war-time presidents; yes, even “Smart Diplomacy” can fail, and a benevolent leader may need to whack those who oppose him with a big stick, straight from the Qadaffi and Assad school of diplomacy or tyranny, but on a much grander scale: so a word of caution to you disillusioned pacifists, don’t be too obvious with your revulsion of this man and his barbarism, tyrants with power are tyrants indeed. To grow a perfect Socialist Garden, you must chop up the weeds with a hoe; don’t let Obama see you as a weed that is polluting his garden.

The trick is to be on the correct side of public opinion. Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being America’s first Marxist President is an example of being on the right side of public opinion or perhaps the Left side of public opinion. Being blatant and openly involved with Crony Capitalism is pushing the envelope of public opinion, even for the Socialist with tunnel vision, but they are a forgiving group and able to overlook the most glaring contradictions in their anointed one, their “Gift from God,” according to Nancy Pelosi.

We have learned not to take threats from the self-styled tyrant, Hussein Obama lightly, he boasted of being able to destroy the coal industry and imposing skyrocketing energy prices; by rejecting the Keystone Pipeline and any pretense of a self-sufficient energy policy, he has single-handedly insured America and the world, that we will be paying crippling energy prices for decades. There is a slight problem with manipulating energy prices ever higher: the cost of living and the cost of food quickly follows energy’s lead, for everything is produced by energy and is transported by energy. Thus America’s buying power is reduced and the downward spiral of an economy begins its descent toward an inevitable collapse.

Obama uses his highly overrated intellect, much like a child to cast blame for his personal failures on others:

“Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office, everybody underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3%. It turns it retracted close to 9%. We lost 8 million jobs just in a year’s span, about half a year before I took office and half a year after I took office,” Obama said.

“So, the die had been cast, but a lot of us didn’t understand at that point how bad it was going to get. That increases the deficit because less tax revenues come in, and it means that more people are getting unemployment insurance, we’re helping states more so they don’t teachers, etc. The key though is we’re setting ourselves on a path where we can get our debt under control.”

Yes, for those of us “out there”, back in 2009, who are wondering how such an intelligent man can communicate in such a disjointed and non-sensical manner or more importantly, how or why he occupies the most powerful position in the world. We can’t help but wonder, will America’s entitled classes awaken to the realization, that a deflated economy and runaway inflation spell economic doom to even those who are above the economic vagaries of the once Free Market, that even those under a supposedly benevolent statism and a benevolent tyrant like Hussein Obama will eventually run out of credit or other people’s money and be forced to turn off the welfare pipeline. But in classic Doublespeak, straight from Orwell’s 1984, Obama feeds his entitled people from the trough of Socialist nonsense, during a press conference, he attributes the growing price of oil, not to world tension, his energy policies, and a weakening dollar, but to a strengthening economy that increases the demand for oil:

“And when gas prices are on the rise again because as the economy strengthens, global demand for oil increases. And if we start seeing significant increases in gas prices, losing that $40 could not come at a worse time…”

The world and America can only withstand so much “Smart Diplomacy.”

Libyan militia members man a checkpoint in the capital, Tripoli, in December

Guess no one saw this coming eh?

Armed militias in Libya are committing human rights abuses with impunity, threatening to destabilize the country and hindering its efforts to rebuild, Amnesty International said Thursday.

Militias have tortured detainees, targeted migrants and displaced entire communities in revenge attacks, according to a report the organization released a year after the start of popular uprisings that eventually ended Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year rule.

“Hundreds of armed militias, widely hailed in Libya as heroes for their role in toppling the former regime, are largely out of control,” the report says.
Detainees at 10 facilities used by militia in central and western Libya told representatives from Amnesty International this year that they had been tortured or abused. Several detainees said they confessed to crimes they had not committed in order to stop the torture, Amnesty International said.

At least 12 detainees held by militias have died after being tortured since September, the human rights organization said, adding that authorities have not effectively investigated the torture allegations.

Well almost-no-one.

Thank you Arab Spring.

Meet the new boss…same as the old boss:

A terrified Libyan man is beaten and tortured with electric shocks by youths who appear to be former revolutionary fighters.

The images, taken from a video handed to The Mail on Sunday in a Tripoli refugee camp, will be seen as fresh evidence that those who deposed Colonel Gaddafi with the help of the West are adopting methods as brutal as the dead tyrant’s.

The film shows three men tying up the blood-spattered man before whipping him repeatedly with cables, touching him on his skin with electric wires and taunting him as he pleads for mercy.

The man being whipped with cables on the video was Saleh Barhoun Gersh, who had run a general store in Towerga – which was loyal to Gaddafi during the conflict until the town was ransacked by fighters from nearby Misrata. When the rebels arrived, Mr Gersh was so frightened he wore women’s clothes to disguise himself

The film shows three men tying up the blood-spattered man before whipping him repeatedly with cables, touching him on his skin with electric wires and taunting him as he pleads for mercy

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a new chapter all right…a new chapter in Islamic fanaticism. A new chapter in torture and violence. A new chapter in crazy.

Reality is that everyone was happy that Gaddafi was gone, but not everyone had their head in the sand, ignoring the obvious. He was being replaced by thousands of Gaddafi’s.

Mata wrote last October:

But while westerners set aside their normal respect for rule of law and justice, gleefully rejoicing in a particularly bloody end, the arguments some of us have been making about this “new and improved” Libya looking suspiciously like (if not worse) than the old Libya, is gaining traction as more proof surfaces supporting the the Libyan rebels committed war atrocities.

This goes far beyond just Gaddafi, as mass graves with hundreds of bodes are excavated… the count approx 300 in one alone at this writing.. many with their hands bound behind their backs, executed.

Ali Tarhouni of the National Transitional Council excuses the rebels as young boys who had witnessed murders of family and friends, and praised their “self control”. Hey.. you can’t make this stuff up.

And in the end we helped bring down one dictator and helped prop up a radical Islamic regime.

Obama wants US taxpayers to cough it up for the Arab Spring:

The White House announced plans on Monday to help “Arab Spring” countries swept by revolutions with more than $800 million in economic aid, while maintaining U.S. military aid to Egypt.

In his annual budget message to Congress, President Barack Obama asked that military aid to Egypt be kept at the level of recent years — $1.3 billion — despite a crisis triggered by an Egyptian probe targeting American democracy activists.

The proposals are part of Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2013, which begins October 1. His requests need the approval of Congress, where some lawmakers want to cut overseas spending to address U.S. budget shortfalls and are particularly angry at Egypt.

Obama proposed $51.6 billion in funding for the U.S. State Department and foreign aid overall, when $8.2 billion in assistance to war zones is included. The “core budget” for the category would increase by 1.6 percent, officials said.

Most of the economic aid for the Arab Spring countries — $770 million — would go to establish a new “Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund,” the president said in his budget plan.

And what would that be nurturing? This is what they have in mind:

In a recent sermon, the General Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi’, set out his vision for his movement and for Egypt in the post-revolutionary era. Citing Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Bana, he stated that the movement has two goals. The immediate goal is to prepare the hearts and minds of its members, which involves “purifying the soul, amending behavior, and preparing the spirit, the mind and the body for a long struggle.” The second, long-term, goal is to affect “a total reform of all domains of life,” which will eventually result in establishment of an Islamic state governed according to Koranic law – first in Egypt and eventually in the entire world.

Badi’ stressed that this long-term goal can only be achieved by gradual stages: by “reforming the individual, then restructuring the family, then building society and the government, then [establishing] the rightly guided Caliphate, and [finally achieving] mastership of the world.” He also emphasized that this must be achieved through cooperation among all the forces and sectors in Egypt, and without any coercion: “All these purposes and goals… must be realized… through unity of ranks [not division], by persuasion, not coercion, and by love, not by force.” Badi’ warned against the “attempts to split up the united ranks [of the nation] and drive a wedge between young and old, men and women, Muslims and Christians, and [different religious] schools and groups,” saying that the Egyptian nation will need all of its human resources in order to meet the challenges that lie ahead. Finally, he advised his followers not to follow their emotions but to manipulate the circumstances rationally and realistically: “Do not fight the ways of the world because they are overpowering. [Instead], try to overcome them, use them, change their course, and pit some of them against others.”

Obama wants us to pay for that! And what has Obama gotten us thus far? Nothing but bad news.

Remember the bad old days of George W. Bush, when cowboy foreign policy turned the world against America?

Remember how the dulcet tones and apology tours of Mr. Hope & Change would remake the globe in our favor?

Ah, never mind. The parade of horribles is on the march, and some former allies are leading the way.

Egypt, where President Obama tossed Hosni Mubarak under the bus, is rapidly becoming an Islamist state. The arrest and pending trials of 19 Americans working for nongovernmental agencies puts an exclamation point on how far Egypt has moved away from our orbit.

The Palestinians, blowing off the warning that our aid dollars cannot be used to support a government that includes Hamas, are moving toward a unity government—one that includes Hamas.

Three years of begging with the thugs running Syria got us a slaughter of civilians we are powerless to stop.

Libya, where we helped overthrow Qaddafi, is splintering, with the militias we supported starting to fight one another for power.

Nothing has changed in Iran, except the mullahs are three years closer to a nuclear bomb.

Russia has accepted our “reset” concessions and responded by sticking its thumb in our eye from Iran to Syria.

Meanwhile, how many new allies have we made in the past three years? None.

Rush Limbaugh caused a bit of a stir recently when he asked the question: “What do you think has fed more mouths, greed or charity?” The question seemed particularly untoward given that Christmas was right around the corner. Who besides Gordon Gekko might ask such a ludicrous question? Rush, obviously… and it turns out that it’s not such a ludicrous question after all.

Of course when he says greed, what he is really referring to – and he says as much – is self interest. Basically what he is arguing is that while giving charity to someone may make the donor feel good and sometimes has a positive effect on the recipient, the real way to improve the lot of people is to act in your own self interest – within the rule of law of course – and the benefits will flow to others, either directly or via giving. You might call this trickle down charity.

Not long ago I wrote a piece about Steve Jobs stating that despite giving Jack to charity, he did more to improve the lives of people around the world over the last 35 years than possibly anyone other than Bill Gates. Of course Gates has given away tens of billions of dollars, but in reality he has benefited the world far more by founding and growing Microsoft than anything he has done or likely will ever do with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

To understand the level of failure that charity & giving can accomplish one need only look at Africa. In her brilliant book: Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa“, Dambisa Moyo writes: “Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.” Moyo argues that not only does aid actually destroy much of the potential economic development of African nations and enables corrupt leaders to maintain their power, at the same time it encourages would-be dictators to attempt to overthrow existing regimes, which in turn creates more war and poverty.

Food is one of the most brutal forms of aid. Many countries receive aid in the form of American agricultural products. The result of these gifts is that, as local farmers cannot compete with free food, their farms fail, and any chance of self sustainability vanishes. It’s the whole notion of “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day… Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” In the case of Africa the world’s aid (and food is only part of that problem) is destroying the capacity of the recipients to become self sustaining, resulting in a vicious circle of aid, corruption and poverty.

Here in the United States the record of success via “giving” is largely the same. After six decades and trillions of dollars of government “aid” in the form of welfare and government education, the poverty problem is not only not getting any better, but it’s actually getting worse! We have record levels of people with no discernable skills, little ability to support themselves and most seeking support at the public trough. A smashing success of compassion!

None of this should be taken to suggest that giving is a bad thing. It’s not. Particularly when it’s done to ameliorate incidental or disaster induced problems, big or small. Giving however should not be seen as a long term solution to improving the condition of man. The problem is that giving typically comes with few, or poorly enforced, requirements on the part recipient, particularly when those “gifts” come from the government or international organizations like the UN or the IMF. Compare the different outcomes between 1960 and today of the Asian tigers and sub-Saharan Africa. In 1960 South Korea’s GDP per capita was twice that of sub-Saharan Africa’s, but in 2005 it was almost 24 times as much. The story is similar for countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam, who went from half the per capital GDP of sub-Saharan Africa in 1960 to five times it today. While all of these tigers received aid at some point, in Africa the aid became an end in and of itself while in Asia it was used as a step to economic growth and development.

Andrew Carnegie provides a perfect example of how both greed and giving can work together. In the late 19th century he was the richest man in the world, and in 1889 he wrote a piece called “Wealth” where he argued that the adult life of an industrialist should comprise two parts. The first part was the accumulation of wealth. The second part was the distribution of that accumulated wealth to benevolent causes. Philanthropy, Carnegie argued, was key to making the life worthwhile.

And Carnegie was no piker when it came to giving. By the time he died, he had given away 90% of his wealth (equivalent to $4.5 billion today) with the remainder to be distributed by others.

In Rush’s parlance, Carnegie fed many people via both greed and charity. By creating the heart of what became the most valuable company in the world, Carnegie provided food and shelter to tens of thousands of workers around the world and hundreds of thousands of family members. Whether you call it greed or self interest is immaterial. It supported hundreds of thousands of people and it gave Carnegie the resources to give to charity. Carnegie’s giving did not simply feed a man for a day. On the contrary. He wanted to prepare recipients to feed themselves for a lifetime. The majority of Carnegie’s giving came in the form of financing universities and libraries around the world where men could improve their lot in life through education. His was a gift, but he required something from the recipient in order to take advantage of it. Be it studying or reading, the recipient of Carnegie’s largesse was involved in the improvement of his own condition.

At the end of the day, as usual, Rush was right. The good Carnegie was able to do was driven by his pursuit of his own self interest. Same deal with Gates, Rockefeller, Ford and even Mark Zuckerberg. The result was that they improved the lives of their workers, their customers and the recipients of their gifts… but it all started with a profit motive. And it’s true on a national scale as well. America became the breadbasket and economic engine of the world through the pursuit of profit. That profit motive and the success it created allowed the United States to become by far the most generous nation in the world. But the same thing holds true here, people around the world have benefited far more from Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the mechanical reaper, the American innovation in the early auto, energy and transportation industries and Silicon Valley’s silicon and cyber advances than they have from any charity that was ever given by anyone anywhere.

While charity has its place in the world, free markets and capitalism are the keys to true improvement in the condition of man. They provide the opportunity for investment and innovation to ameliorate most problems on the planet. Not all, but many. If one’s goal is to help a neighbor, a friend or someone across the planet survive a disaster or get through a difficult moment in their lives, charitable giving is the perfect solution. If however one’s goal is to lift a family or a community or a country out of poverty, do what you can to help them participate in capitalism and a free market economy. That’s where long term, sustainable economic advances come from. Now that’s a gift that will pay dividends for everyone involved.

What a shock. This President will send troops into Uganda, drop bombs into Libya, back fanatical Muslims in Egypt, but when it comes to Iran….and our top secret technology, he’s a bit timid:

With early knowledge that the aircraft had likely remained intact, the senior U.S. official also told Fox News that President Obama was presented with three separate options for retrieving or destroying the drone. The president ultimately decided not to proceed with any of the plans because it could have been seen as an act of war.

…One official told Fox News on Thursday that the incident is a huge loss and makes the top-secret helicopter tail lost during the Usama bin Laden raid in Pakistan “look like a pittance.” The official said there are real fears the Iranians will share this technology with the Russians and the Chinese, in addition to using it themselves.

What a pansy.

And then he brags about bin-Laden but allows the Muslim Brotherhood to come ever so closer to their dreamed about sixth Caliphate.

The destruction he has done to this country, and it’s future security is breathtaking to behold.

Prologue: This is a story of two Stone Age chieftains, who migrated to America during the last Ice Age, approximately twenty thousand years ago: one came from the East and one came from the West, but before you begin to recite the teachings of Archaeology from twenty years ago, you might be surprised to know of startling new discoveries about the migration of man and the inconvenient facts surrounding the theories of Anthropomorphic Global Warming.

The Whale People, Their Homeland (Europe’s Western Coast, now submerged)

Yellow Hair was an anomaly; he was ancient, almost forty years old, but strongest among all the men of the Whale People. He was chief of the Whale People, and he ruled his tribe with rules etched in flint. Breaking the rules often meant death for the offender; for life was a tedious and constant struggle between survival and death, and death came all too often twenty-thousand years ago, during the height of the last great Ice Age in the area off the coast of Western France.

Much of the world’s water was locked up in ice sheets that a mile high covering much of Europe, Asia, and North America; in fact, the ice sheets covered one-third of the earth’s land masses and depleted the oceans of so much water, the ocean depths were a hundred meters less than they are now. There were coast lines connecting Europe with North America, and Asia with North America, they extended nearly a thousand miles from north to south on each corridor. It was a temperate area of grasslands and coniferous forests with limited precipitation, because of the amount of water frozen in the glaciers. There were thousands of creeks and rivers fed by springs and lakes that are now a hundred meters under water. It was a harsh ecosystem that supported the mastodon, a creature much larger than the elephant, as well as musk ox, giant sloths, saber toothed tigers, large bears, caribou, giant moose, elk, horses, and camels, all of whom migrated freely back and forth from Asia and Europe to North America.

No one knows why the giant glaciers appeared or why they receded, but the Ice Ages were real events in the story of the earth; the Ice Ages spanned tens of thousands of years and facilitated the dispersal of man all over the world.

The Whale People were a hardy bunch that had drawn their genetic pools from the blue and green eyed traders from the East, the tall, blonde haired, white skinned people from the land to the North, and the darker people of the South. It was a fairly short walk from North Africa to what would become Spain; the drought conditions of the world brought on by so much water being sequestered in ice forced many of the darker people of Africa to migrate north to be near the life giving water from glacial melt in summer and the springs that formed creeks and rivers on the Southern boundaries of the European Glacier and to the western shores of Spain and France.

The Whale People had originally occupied a coastal area that was next to the Southern ice shield of Europe approximately twenty-thousand years ago. Almost nothing could survive on these ever increasing glaciers that covered large portions of the continents, but there was a strip of new land exposed from the ocean depths, extending well beyond our present shorelines, because of so much of the earth’s water being frozen in the glaciers. This strip of land was warmed by the ocean, but it still remained a cold climate in summer, from the cooling effects of the great mass of ice on its borders. On this narrow strip of land, a micro-climate existed that had allowed animals, grasses, and a few hardy trees to proliferate in a wondrous abundance for tens of thousands of years, but the pressure by humans and the ever encroaching ice was reducing the availability of food sources and thus the livable space was under fierce competition by all species, but the competition among humans was the probably the fiercest.

Yellow Hair’s tribe had occupied the Southern coastal regions since the beginning of time or at least as far back as their oral history recorded their time here on earth. Yellow Hair wasn’t a singer who memorized the family lines and history of his tribe, but he knew his fathers had been chiefs far back in time. He had remembered his fathers and his personal history by assigning each of them, one of his fingers. He could go back in time by looking at a finger and tell you the name of that father, going back in time, nine generations.

The Ice People, The Migration (From Central Asia)

Tiger Paw loved to hunt and here in the land of the North Star, this land the North People call Beringia (the land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska), the hunting was better than in the stories of the First Days.

It was told in the oral traditions of history, on the nights of the full moon, of how his people, the Ice People, had followed the herds over the Great Grasslands and forests to the West, just South of the great walls of ice. In the beginning, they were the first people, because the Father of the Ice had shown them great favor by providing them with flint for spears and the many animals to hunt. At first everyone was hungry during the winter, but the Father of the Ice liked the Ice People and gave them the beasts of the Steppes and the stone technology to kill the beasts, he also gave them fire and taught the women how to cook and how to brain tan furs and leather.

They learned that the brain of each animal, when allowed to break down to a gelatinous mass in a covered ceramic bowl, was sufficient to tan its own hide. They marveled at the skills of the ice Father and how he put all these mysteries of life within reach of those with the intelligence to figure out the answers. The Ice Father taught the women to love the hunters and to entertain them at night, so the tribe would be happy and always have new little ones.

Tiger Paw’s belief was essentially correct in the oral history of his tribe, but his concept of time wasn’t capable of comprehending the enormity of his tribe’s migration. His ancestors started moving east through the mountains and grasslands of Southern Russia and Northern Asia, several thousand years ago. Using the logic of 20,000 years ago, they figured the sun was always refueled in the East and traveled overhead to the West, only to get tired at the end of each day, needing to sleep through the night to be strong and hot the next morning, much like the hunter who hunts all day, breeds his woman at night, and then sleeps to be strong in the morning. They wanted to see this land where the sun is refreshed; there is surely much fuel to warm the sun, just beyond the horizon to the east. Sadly, the sun seemed to be weakening, because the great ice sheets were getting larger and eating more and more land. They were over a mile high and moving to the South at the rate of several man strides every day.

The idea of a great source of fuel to the East, was essentially the idea for migrating to the East. For over a thousand years, they followed the basic idea of moving east, always east. There were hostile tribes to contend with and periods of starvation coupled with disease, but they kept moving east.

Their culture and customs were ill suited for sedentary life. It was a simple matter of hygiene; a concept that was understood by sedentary tribes, for they knew that human waste was dangerous and should be deposited in a hole dug specifically for that purpose, they also understood the need to maintain clean drinking water.

It seems a simple concept, but migrating people rarely suffered from the ravages of cholera and dysentery, for they rarely made camp for longer than it took for a kill to be consumed or to spoil, except in the winter and the effects of disease were lessened during the extreme cold of winter.

Sedentary tribes, without cultural customs for contending with human waste, were condemned to die of disease if they stayed too long in one place. The problem was self-correcting in time, since tribes that lacked certain cultural conventions were weakened and often annihilated by other tribes who looked upon them as unclean or they simply died out from the ravages of disease.

During the migration of the Ice People, they had acquired many customs from the women they had traded for and the occasional lost hunter they had adopted. Even though Tiger Paw believed his tribe to be the only true people walking the earth, he understood advantages in acquiring new people with new technologies and customs.

The Whale People of Europe

Nine generations would place Yellow Hair’s father in the time when the great mother whale, Olalla of the big wild salt water, gave birth to man and all the creatures of the earth. In Yellow Hair’s mind, his distant relative was the first human to slide through Olalla’s birth canal and swim to shore; therefore, his birthright was one of leadership and a semi-divinity, for he was a direct descendant of Olalla. He couldn’t explain the bloodlines of other people or even those in his tribe and he forbid himself and others from asking frivolous questions that complicate the simple explanations of their life.

It was this natural birth of Yellow Hair’s relative that intrigued the Whale People and provided the common bond that held them together. The secrets of their existence and their connection with divinity was thought to exist through the navel of Yellow Hair, for that umbilical connection was directly related to Olalla the Whale Mother who had birthed the first relative of Yellow Hair, the very first human.

Unfortunately, it was the natural scheme of their life that was in jeopardy at this time; for the success of the Whale People made them the envy of many tribes. They had mastered the science of not only trapping great bounties of salmon in the rivers, but more importantly, they smoked and dried the salmon over smoldering fires to preserve them for months. This was a quantum leap in technology for the people of the world. News spread for over a thousand miles to the East along with the tasty morsels of the pink colored fish flesh.

Tribes with many huge warriors and advanced stone weapons ventured into the traditional lands of the Salmon People and brought many wondrous trade goods to trade for the smoked salmon of the Whale People. Trade was good for the Whale people, but some of these tribes decided to stay and there were now tribes camped in their winter hunting grounds and on their fishing grounds.

The winters were too cold to fish in the great salt water and the rivers and creeks were frozen. Rather than eat smoked salmon all winter, the Whale people had learned the different migration routes of the Caribou and devised traps to catch the Caribou in blind canyons for the winter. If there was enough feed for the Caribou, they would slaughter them as they needed meat; if the valley floor ran out of the lichens that the Caribou eat, they would slaughter them all at once and smoke the flesh like that of the salmon. In a gaunt world of starvation and hardship, the Whale People lived in a world of plenty.

They were happy to live under the leadership of Yellow Hair; not only was he divine, but he was a fair and intelligent leader, who could sense when and where the Caribou were migrating and when the Salmon started their runs or when there was a whale trapped in a small estuary by the tide. His people made boats with oak frames with greased leather for hulls that worked well if you kept the hide well greased with seal oil or whale blubber.

If his people observed the rules, they lived in harmony within the group: if they broke the law, Yellow Hair might cut their throat or trade them into slavery. He was feared, but loved as well. He was the nucleus that kept his tribe strong.

In these early days and up up until the present, there were several aspects of a society that needed to be worked into a particular culture for that society to exist and thrive. Survival, procreation, food, and leadership were all important elements that had to be defined culturally for a tribe to exist. If the rules or laws were broken, the society broke down.

Yellow Hair could control his own people; unfortunately, there were other tribes moving in and occupying their traditional Caribou hunting grounds. They observed the Caribou techniques of the Whale People and just repaired the log fences and gaits while waiting for the Caribou to pass through the mountain valleys.

This was no problem for Yellow Hair, he knew the mountain passes and could divert the Caribou with fire and by dressing his men in wolf and bear hides to drive the Caribou into different blind canyons. He would just build new gaits and fences at the entrances. These new people would have to live off the few Caribou that might be separated and the odd elk, horse, camel, or moose they could kill. If they were desperate or if they found a mastodon trapped in mud or lame, they could fight the mastodon to the death, for it was only possible to kill one at great risk to the hunters. He knew these new green and blue eyed people would often be facing starvation and that the Whale People almost always had plenty of Caribou and fish; therefore, they were at risk from these starving tribes.

These interlopers should have stayed in their own country, Yellow Hair reasoned. They were unfit for life between the ice and the salt sea. Their eyes were light colored and they suffered from the sun’s glare, their skin was too white in color and they couldn’t work naked in the glacier fed waters to catch the salmon. They didn’t engage in ritual washing and smoking their bodies in the traditional way. That alone prevented them from being hardy enough to survive the fierce cold and winds of these ancient lands. The blue and green eyed people were weak beyond measure, but they were large people and dangerous.

Yellow Hair knew he carried the seed of the first human, but it was this first human’s lusty ways and hunger for wild women of the forests that had produced all these uncultured barbarians. This ancient father had produced these excess humans of his own blood, and were now posing a threat to the very existence of the Whale People.

Yellow Hair had little sympathy for weakness, he had seen a weakness of character in the previous chief, his own father, and challenged the chief to personal combat for leadership of the tribe and to possess the young princess wife of his father. He killed his own father and claimed his father’s earthly goods and wives as his own. He was hardy enough, but that was back when men were men. (The weakest of the men was many times stronger than an NFL linebacker.) In those early days they hunted and killed the near humans for sport. There weren’t enough of them left now to worry over; besides, they can’t speak words, the men run like pregnant women, and they make the crudest tools and weapons. They are laughable, but in a wrestling match they are deadly, for they are strong like the mastodon. No, it is much safer to kill them with spears from a goodly distance. The near humans’s muscles are so large, they can only thrust a spear, if they try to throw a spear it is laughable.

He didn’t like to think about it, but these near humans, might be the result of his relative, the First Human, coupling with some creature of the forest. It was an ugly thought, but how else do you explain the presence of these near humans. He tried not to dwell on the negative aspects of the heritage of the First Human, but sometimes this irresponsible behavior of his family was embarrassing and impossible to ignore.

Yellow Hair had several wives and at least nine children, aged from twenty-four years to one winter. He enjoyed his kids; however, they were expected to meet the same requirements for life and work as everyone else, if the rules were relaxed for his family, he knew there would be resentment among his people.

Women who chose a mate from another tribe were expected to leave, but if a suitable mate was a loner and could prove himself as far as fishing, hunting, courage, and work, he could be accepted into the tribe. Yellow Hair would never allow slackers and free loaders a wooden soup bowl; charming a maiden of his tribe, did not warrant a free meal around the cook fire.

Everyone had to contribute with meaningful work or be banished or possibly executed by Yellow Hair. Life was a precious gift, but the nature of living next to the ice made it imperative that everyone worked to insure survival of the group. When the Salmon got lost and didn’t return to their rivers and creeks in sufficient numbers or the Caribou were called by Olalla to rest a year and not migrate, the old frail people were expected to walk alone into the night and not return, infanticide was also practiced to keep the numbers of the tribe down when food was scarce to help keep the nutritional requirements low. There were always hard decisions to be made, but the Whale People realized they must be ready to sacrifice just to survive next to the ice.

Killing a huge mastodon could mean survival through the winter, but unless they were mired in a bog hole or suffering from a severe lameness, it was far too dangerous to try and kill them and even when they were trapped, it often took hours to kill the monsters and many times his hunters were killed as well.

Sea lions were also dangerous to kill for they could travel much faster than a man can run. They were usually killed with a fusillade of spears when the animal was caught sunning himself beneath a ledge. The spears were made with sharp narrow points and heavier shafts, but the lighter javelin was also used, these weapons were designed to penetrate a tough hide and several layers of blubber; unless, the spear throws were lethal, the animal would run to the sea to escape and a valuable cache of spears and javelins would be lost with him. The sea lions were unafraid of humans and would run over a man who stood in his way as if he wasn’t there. The man would be crushed under several tons of sea lion, traveling faster than a horse.

The wild horses were trapped in blind canyons like the caribou, but they were more wary than the caribou and often sensed a trap and would turn just before being caught, to run over the men and sacrifice a few members of the herd to insure that the herd would survive.

Stealth and hunting discipline was primary in killing any of these animals, for even though man was a strong lethal killer, if an animal turned to fight and a man was caught without his weapon, humans always died. Yellow Hair explained to his elder sons, Sea Otter and Ivory Tusk, that Olalla, the whale mother that had birthed their first father, had given them superior brains to stand against the fierce animals of the grasslands and the ocean; otherwise they would have starved long ago. They accepted these truths without question; yet, there were many unanswered mysteries for the twenty year old lads.

The Ice People of Asia

Often the men had some hunting trick or knowledge of nature that helped them secure food: the women the hunters acquired for wives, always brought new knowledge of food preparation and garment making that made life better for the Ice People.

Several generations ago, the Ice People adopted a small band of tiny people with black silky hair (from the tribes that would form Japan, then a mountainous area connected to Asia and on the Eastern shore of a large lake). Their tribe had been wiped out by barbarians and they were starving. Chief Four Fingers, Tiger Paw’s grandfather, was intrigued by the women and thought if they had some meat on their bones they would be intriguing bed warmers.

The kindness shown by Four Fingers was rewarded not only by having attractive bed warmers, but these people were excellent fishermen, they also knew how to smoke fish and meats, but most importantly, they understood boatbuilding and using a mast with a short gaff rigged sail and rudder.

Although, the Ice People were on the coast, it is important to remember that so much water was frozen in the great ice sheets, that the ocean depth was reduced by over a hundred meters. The land bridge connecting Alaska and Siberia was over a thousand miles wide. Coastal areas often extended hundreds of miles farther into the sea than they do now. Thousands of rivers and creeks existed that are now on the sea floor. Beringia was a dry grassland that teemed with migrating herds traveling freely between Asia and North America.

Four Fingers had welcomed these fishermen into the tribe and did his best to insure the little people adopted the Ice Culture, but the technology that was gained by the little people was transforming their culture. He was primarily concerned with the combining the two DNA groups by spreading his seed around as much as possible, but the cultural and technological aspects of these ancient fishermen kept the Ice People from starving many times.

The original DNA pool of the Ice People had been slowly diluted for thousands of years as they traveled through Asia, along the borders of the ice; but rather than weakening the gene pool of the Ice People, they became stronger. Instead of a fair-haired tribe with green and blue eyes, they were primarily dark haired people with almond eyes. There would be an occasional child born with round blue eyes and fair hair, amid great laughter and jokes directed toward the mother and father, but the Ice People were a loving people and the throwback was always accepted as one of the true people.

The Ice People had managed to keep their own numbers close to one hundred hunters, not counting women and children. They lived well, but there were dangers from larger hostile tribes. Many tribes were driven into Beringia by starvation, but killing the great mastodon required advanced hunting skills and coordination among hunters; and yet, the skills for hunting horses, camels, muskox, caribou, and other animals of this huge grassland were advanced as well. Fishing required the skills and knowledge for building fish traps and a willingness to work naked in near freezing cold water. Boat building skills consisted of carefully burning and scraping a log with sharp instruments, until a boat shaped form appeared. Their sails were abbreviated, since the heavy keel technology would take thousands of years to be discovered; however, with paddles, these fairly fast, sleek canoe type vessels could be used for fishing and sealing and perhaps more importantly for continued migration to the land of fuel to the East.

The Ice People were hunting and fishing on the Northern edge of the glacier that extended into Southern British Columbia and north into the Yukon and Alaska. Although, it was an enormous glacier, in comparison to the glacier to the East, covering the rest of Canada and much of the US, it was a miniature glacier. Tiger Paw’s People knew there was a corridor of excellent winter hunting between the two glaciers, but they were also enjoying excellent fishing and sealing in the stormy salt sea, during the summer months.

Life was good for the Ice People, but with success in the struggle for life, comes those who want to steal that success.

The Whale People of Europe

Both of Yellow Hair’s sons had chosen good mates from outside the tribe. Yellow Hair had examined the potential mates closely for sickness or deformities and then deemed them sound women suitable for work and childbirth. He had paid a man’s weight in smoked salmon and several pairs of winter moccasins for the young girls, but each one had been an excellent purchase from the barbarian tribes of green and blue eyes, since they each produced a healthy son for the tribe. Thus his tribe would be guaranteed to survive with the superior intellect and knowledge that Yellow Hair was passing on to his sons. Yellow Hair was respected by his tribe for his infinite knowledge of nature, animals, survival, food preservation, weather, the seasons, and the land itself.

Mates were an important aspect of tribal life, adultery was not permitted without a formal declaration by a woman in front of the tribe at dinner. A man could have several wives if he could care for them, but if one of them stated her desire to be with another, there might be a fight to the death or the choice might go unchallenged for various reasons. Yellow Hair was a detached observer and official of these domestic disputes. Someone might die in a fight as a result of hard feelings and tempestuous desires, so the divorce option was not to be taken lightly. He thought it was a good system that helped keep his tribe strong and stable and especially, in helping to control these wild mating desires of both men and women.

Yellow Hair liked to keep about a hundred men in the tribe and twice that many women. The number of children fluctuated, because so many children died from the harsh life. It was obvious that Olalla wanted only the strongest of children to survive and she had to test them every winter. Everyone was expected to work in the cold glaciers streams to help catch the salmon and the boys were expected to join in the difficult and dangerous hunts. The work of women was much safer, but many of them died in childbirth, so in time, Olalla provided twice as many women as men. Yellow Hair also purchased wives for his men, when there always seemed to be a shortage of unmarried women.

He gave them a thorough physical exam before purchase. He demanded clear eyes, preferably of the earth colors and not the colors of plants and sky, broad hips for child birth, good sound teeth that met in a fairly uniform manner, well formed milk paps, and a well formed birth canal with no infection.

He had an unfortunate incident in the past, a woman was infected and gave birth to two blind children. Yellow Hair had been forced to kill the babies and after becoming suspicious, he examined the woman and discovered that she was infected. He killed her and drove her husband out of the village to prevent the spread of infection to other members of the tribe. He hesitated to only banish the man, who was a cousin of his, rather than kill him, for he knew the infection would probably continue through the populations of other tribes.

Yellow Hair had picked his eldest son, Ivory Tusk, to succeed him as chief. The lad was strong, had good eyes, and an uncanny way of understanding the animals and fish. He was a good strong son.

It all happened very quickly. A group of several tribes raided the fishing camp in the early morning before the sun chased away the thick fog. They intended to kill and rob the Whale People of their dried salmon. Many of the Whale men were overwhelmed and killed, the survivors were forced to retreat to their canoes. They lost over half the adults and most of the children in the initial minutes of the attack. They had few personal belongings with them, but they felt lucky to escape with their lives. They pushed the canoes into the surf as spears were landing around them. They managed to retrieve a few of the spears that were thrown, but they escaped with only a few stones for knives and a few spears.

Yellow Hair counted people, there were forty-five men and twenty-three women with just a few suckling children and adolescents that had survived the raid. They had suffered a terrible defeat. The raiders might be following them in the extra canoes, they kept paddling all day to the North. Ivory Tusk was wounded in the gut and in a few hours, he could no longer continue to paddle. Yellow Hair took the time to transfer him to his canoe.

He looked his brave, handsome son in the eye and felt tears for the first time, since he was a child. “Olalla is calling you home” he said, “You have the chance to see her in this world, before you cross over to the spirit world. Are you ready, to see the Whale Mother?”

Ivory Tusk nodded his head, yes, and looked to the blue sky of morning, while thongs secured his legs and arms to prevent him from swimming and prolonging his agony. He was proud to be a strong leader like his father and made sure to maintain his honor and dignity as the men prepared him for the depths.

His father said to him, “We will sing of you at the winter fires and I will see you in the Spirit World, my son,” as he slipped his son’s bound body into the great salt sea.

The Whale People all said their goodbyes as Ivory Tusk disappeared under the waves and still looking up at them, the Whale People then resumed paddling as the storm clouds began forming.

The Ice People of Asia

Tiger Paw knew there were food thefts taking place by some of the other tribes and some of them were making threatening signs at kill sites. Life was hard in Beringia, starvation was everywhere, the Ice People were well fed, their women had meat on their bones and produced children every year or two; they were successful, but the other tribes wanted this good life and the riches associated with success and eating well.

The Ice People had a simple life and a simple formula for success, but it required a keen observation of nature, the intelligence to apply the skills of hunting, and the willingness to work tirelessly to secure food; for everything was easier if you secured food. If you had excess food, like dried and smoked fish and meat, you could trade for tools, weapons, furs, and women.

Tribes who weren’t successful had to trade their women and girls for food to live; eventually, the young men of less successful tribes became despondent and angry. They looked at the wealth of Tiger Paw’s people and wondered why their tribe wasn’t rich with the bounty of the world. After all, the bounty was put on earth for everyone, all the tribes should have healthy women and dried fish; the Ice People were just acting like bears, they took their share and everyone else’s share as well.

Blue Duck, the only son of Chief One Eye, of the Muskeg people, was one of those consumed with envy and hatred. He and several of his companions watched as a small band of Ice People brought down one of the giant moose with several well placed spear throws. He was incredulous that women accompanied the men on the hunt. This fact alone made his heart burn with hatred and anger; these people had no respect for the ancient customs of his people and now they were going to enjoy the tasty internal morsels of this magnificent animal, an animal that rightfully belonged to Blue Duck and his people. He decided it was time for the Muskeg people to assert their authority over the greedy tribes of the world and take what is rightfully theirs.

The three men of the Ice People had the moose deboned and cut into roast sized pieces that were packed into six backpacks, while the women prepared a feast of the heart and liver cut into small chunks and stuffed into the stomach with blueberries, onions, and edible grasses that the moose had eaten on his own. The stomach was roasted over the coals until it swelled and pressure cooked the contents into a nutritious feast for the three couples.

Blue Duck gathered his hunters around him and devised a plan; they would sneak up on the camp and attack the group when they started to eat the wrongfully acquired feast. They would kill the men and try to capture the women; if the women fought too hard, they would kill them as well. They would then eat the feast and pack the meat back to their own camp. It was a momentous decision, the men were reluctant to resort to murder and theft, but their stomachs had been empty for a week and they had not known a woman for months.

Blue Duck had five men to attack three men and three women in a camp that was celebrating. It was almost dark by the time they had crawled close enough to hear the Ice People laughing and talking. They crawled to within several caribou strides, just after dark. The stomach had the entrance and exit sections tied in a knot and it was under extreme pressure from the steam and heat locked inside. One of the men split the top with his flint knife and the delicious aroma made the Ice people cheer and laugh, while the Muskeg men felt their senses sharpened by the scent of food; until, they were even more determined to commit murder and mayhem.

The Ice People let their meal cool for a few minutes, while they waited with their wooden spoons ready to dig into the stomach.

Blue Duck had his right index finger in the air to remind his men to wait for his signal, before beginning the attack.

Just as the Ice People closed around the stomach to eat, Blue Duck and his men attacked with a fierce savagery. The Ice men were each killed with multiple wounds from the spears. An older woman managed to jump on the back of one of the attackers and mortally wound him through the neck with a knife, before a spear entered her rib cage from the side and pierce both her lungs. A second woman was hit in the mouth with the butt end of a spear and fell backwards in an unconscious state. The men fell on the meal and had turns breeding the woman like a pack of ravenous wolves. It was an hour or two later, before Blue Duck noticed a woman was missing. He tried to get his men to leave, but once a leader encourages his men to break the cultural laws, the men begin to lose respect for that man’s leadership and authority; besides, their bellies were distended after eating like animals and they were exhausted after having their way repeatedly with the woman, who now appeared to be lifeless. They wanted to sleep and leave in the morning, and there was nothing Blue Duck could do to get them moving.

Blue Duck realized it was hopeless and drifted off to sleep. Just before morning, a well disciplined group of hunters, led by Bear Killer, son of Tiger Paw, descended on Blue Duck and his men and within seconds, three more of the Muskeg men were dead, Blue Duck and another were wounded, but still alive.

They brought the wounded men back to Tiger Paw’s camp and tied them to a tree. Tiger Paw raged inside, but he didn’t show emotion to his people or to these criminals. He used his serrated flint knife, with an edge as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, but far more durable, to cut the fur clothing from the two men, exposing their nakedness.

Blue Duck was screaming threats and insults, but his efforts were wasted, for the Ice People noticed the silhouette tattoo of a right hand on Blue Duck’s chest. It was a well known symbol of a chief’s hand, designating his choice for leadership; it was a black tattoo done with ashes.

This was big medicine for the Ice People; it could mean war, the Muskeg tribe was a large tribe with oversized people, who were often starving.

The Whale People of Europe

The Whale People followed the shore line and passed camps on shore with people who waved to them, but yellow Hair pushed on wanting to find a new hunting and fishing ground. The shoreline no longer allowed them to head north, they had been paddling west for several days when the storm clouds finally unleashed a fury on the Whale People. The waves were higher than the boats were long. Yellow Hair yelled to the other leaders to paddle to the peak of the waves at an angle and to paddle down at a high rate of speed to keep the waves from cresting and breaking over the top of them and burying them under a wall of water.

It was hopeless, the canoe captains couldn’t hear him over the noise of the storm; hopefully, his captains would follow his lead and survive the storm. He saw one of the canoes trapped in the trough, when a huge wave many times as high as a man buried them and drove them to the bottom of the salt water.

The storm raged for three days and at the end, the Whale People were so exhausted they collapsed in the hulls of their canoes and let the storm have its way with them. Yellow Hair awoke on the fourth morning and looked out to see only one other canoe floating near-by. The temperature was mild, nearly seventy degrees, Yellow Hair had never felt such a mild temperature, on the shore, there was a forest of huge trees he had never seen before. He thought he might be in the Spirit World. He called out to the other boat, three men, including his youngest son, sat up and waved. There was also a woman in that canoe with a suckling child. There were three men and an adolescent girl in his canoe. Yellow Hair made a motion with is hand towards shore and the two canoes landed on a sandy shore; although, they were a hundred and fifty miles from the present coast of Virginia, they were the first Europeans to reach the East Coast of North America.

That night at low tide, they walked far out on a sand bar to look for the tell-tale yellow flickering of campfires in the distance: for the first time in their lives, they realized they were utterly alone in the world, like the beginning of time and being born by Olalla, they were alone in the world.

The Ice People of Asia

Tiger Paw knew this was a crucial and defining moment in the leadership of his tribe. His son and his raiding party had been correct in their method of revenge on this Chief’s son and his raiding party and now Blue Duck was screaming for mercy. Tiger Paw yelled for a wooden gag to be placed in each of the captive’s mouths and tied behind their heads with a leather thong. He skinned the tattoo from the chest of Blue Duck and tied it with a thong to the neck of the other captive.

Tiger Paw then ordered his son to take half the tribe and circle the North end of the glacier and head south through the Yukon and into British Columbia. They were loaded and starting their migration within the hour. It was a big gamble; Tiger Paw had no idea whether the two glaciers maintained a corridor of land between them, he just had a fairly good hunch that there was a corridor of good hunting between the glaciers.

They had to leave this country or be annihilated by the Muskeg People. There were only enough canoes for half the tribe. He might be sending his son and half his tribe to their doom, but he knew the coast line couldn’t support people traveling by land; therefore, there was no choice, he had to send half his people inland. He told his son to follow the Western Glacier and he would meet him at the southern end of the ice, in the area that was to become Seattle; Tiger Paw would take half the tribe by boat and they will join up at the end of the ice.

He turned to Blue Duck and emasculated him, so that his father would know he would never reproduce in the spirit world and certainly not on this earth ever again. He waited until Blue Duck had accepted his fate and was no longer struggling, he then cut his throat and ordered the rest of his people into their canoes. He let Blue Duck’s warrior go with his hands tied behind him and the tattoo still tied to his neck.

Tiger Paw and the rest of the Ice people left Beringia forever.

Tiger Paw and his did meet each other in the Puget Sound area, but Tiger Paw had no idea it would take twelve years for his son to make the trip. Tiger Paw’s son had gray hair and Tiger Paw was now little more than an ancient old man, but for the survivors it was a great reunion and a chance for marriages and procreation.

Eventually, nearly five hundred years later, the descendants of Tiger Paw and Yellow Hair would meet in the area that was to become Omaha, Nebraska. The names of Tiger Paw and Yellow Hair had been forgotten, but traces of their DNA are still present in many Americans. The same qualities that drove these chiefs to succeed against all odds and care for their people were carried down through the eons and it is still in the blood of tens of millions of their descendants, now walking the earth in North America.

Epilogue: This story is of course fiction; however it is based in fact, since we now know that there were land bridges that connected Europe and Asia to North America. Cultural and technologic traits as well as DNA evidence record the presence of DNA tracings of ancient Europeans among our indigenous native people of North America. This is significant, because the DNA evidence illustrates, that in spite of superficial cultural differences and phenotypical variation, people are much more closely related than anyone’s wildest imagination ever dreamed.

It is the author’s dream, that as new DNA science is discovered, people will have a softening of preconceived ideas of racial differences and a greater harmony can be achieved through knowledge and science, rather than relying on ignorance and cultural division.

Although the events in this article are based on supposition by the author, a man who has experience living on a sharp divide between survival and death, at least more than most people, it is easy to combine human nature with a harsh environment and find these behaviors close to the surface, even with our superior cultural attitudes.

The envious wailings of the OWS people who bemoan their pitiful existence and hide their selfish pleadings behind the cloak of Marxism and a dubious desire for an end to corruption; yet, their cries for equality seem to be hypocritical at best as they perpetuate and promote a code of lawlessness. Yes, under the guise of fairness and equality, greed begets more greed and the veneers of advanced culture become laughable with their pretensions of enlightenment.

This article, the preface of a novel, is not meant to belittle prehistoric man, but rather to illustrate that our advancements are mainly technological and we who consider ourselves so highly evolved culturally, are not that far removed from seeking shelter in caves and tents made of hides.

These people are modern in the sense that a baby from their culture could be raised in a twenty-first century family and no one would know the difference, but switching adults would be nearly impossible because of the cultural differences.

The extent of the land bridge between Europe and North America will be argued for decades, but the new DNA evidence suggests that if it was not complete, the exposed land masses permitted human migration with short trips by boat.

Barack Obama said this about Muammar Gaddafi’s death:

For four decades, the Qaddafi regime ruled the Libyan people with an iron fist. Basic human rights were denied. Innocent civilians were detained, beaten and killed. And Libya’s wealth was squandered. The enormous potential of the Libyan people was held back, and terror was used as a political weapon.

The path to Gaddafi’s end has been a very strange one.

Gaddafi seized power in Libya in 1969 and has ruled Libya with an iron fist.

Dissent has been ruthlessly crushed and the media remains under strict government control.

Libya has a law forbidding group activity based on a political ideology opposed to Col Gaddafi’s revolution.

The regime has imprisoned hundreds of people for violating the law and sentenced some to death, Human Rights Watch says.

Torture and disappearances have also been reported.

Ronald Regan twice struck at Libya in 1986.

Soon after the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 it was believed that the Gaddafi regime was behind it. The US and the EU imposed sanctions on Libya to force it to turn over those responsible for the bombing.

The EU and UN Security Council ended their arms embargo in 2004 when Libya handed over the two suspects in bombing.

Libya also agreed to compensation for the victims of the Lockerbie bombing.

US sanctions were lifted in return for a series of Libyan concessions.

“In the last two months,” the White House said, “the government of Libya has removed virtually all elements of its declared nuclear weapons program, signed the IAEA Additional Protocol, joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, destroyed all of its declared unfilled chemical munitions, secured its chemical agent pending destruction under international supervision, submitted a declaration of its chemical agents to the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, eliminated its Scud-C missile force, and undertaken to modify its Scud-B missiles.”

In 2008 Libya paid $1.5 billion into a US fund aimed at compensating the victims of Pan Am 103 and the 1986 disco bombing.

Since the 80′s, Libya has been awarding the “Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights.” The award, accompanied by a sum of $250,000, has been awarded to Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez among others.

The UN elected Libya to the Human Rights Council in 2010, to the UN Security Council in 2009 and made Libya President of the General Assembly in 2009.

Human Rights Watch declared that although slow, Libya was making progress on Human Rights in 2009.

In 2009 Barack Obama became the first US President to shake hands with Muammar Gadaffi.

Gaddafi referred to Obama as “our son.”

Gaddafi had complied with everything demanded of him. So why did Barack Obama choose to intervene and remove Gaddafi?

The obvious first answer is oil.

Superimposed over this motive is a creatively contrived policy.

The Tuesday-evening meeting at the White House at which the president decided to move on Libya was “extremely contentious,” according to a report in Josh Rogin’s excellent blog, The Cable.

Power and a few others took the position that the United States couldn’t stay on the sidelines as Moammar Khadafy murdered his own people and snuffed out the people-power revolt in the Middle East in its infancy.

They were opposed by Power’s own boss, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Powers created something R2P.

According to Rogin, the governing doctrine that helped Obama to make his decision to act was not an appeal to the national interest, but rather to a recent concept promulgated at the United Nations called “responsibility to protect,” or R2P.

R2P is an effort to create a new international moral standard to prevent violence against civilians.

In her career as a genocide expert, Power was an indefatigable proponent of R2P, and now on the National Security Council has been “trying to figure out how the administration could implement R2P and what doing so would require of the White House going forward.” Hillary is her ally in this effort, it appears.

Gaddafi was not simply murdering his own people- he was suppressing a rebellion.

Nor was any of this a threat to our national interest.

Obama’s actions were and are to reshape the region- but it is highly likely that it won’t be for the better. But there is an election coming and Obama needs to keep killing people to prop up his chances.

There is one concrete lesson from this Libyan misadventure- if Barack Obama wants to shake your hand- run.