Stop With The Ice Cubes, or Die.

[Overpaid Slacker]

A piece in London’s Sunday Telegraph traces the bizarre contours of Islamic extremism. Amid Baghdad’s 122-degree temperatures, Sunni fundamentalists have declared a war on ice.

Because the Prophet Mohammed had no ice cubes, neither should today’s Iraqis, Sunni totalitarians declared as they threatened ice merchants with death. Al-Dora ice dealer Akram al-Zidawi, 19, shrugged off these warnings.

“Two weeks ago he came back home saying he had been threatened by terrorists,” al-Zidawi’s brother, Gassan, told the Telegraph. “My mother begged him to quit the job, but he laughed. He thought it was impossible they would kill him. But they came back two days later and shot him dead, along with three other ice sellers nearby.”

Falafel dealers also have enraged Islamists.

“They came telling us, ‘You have 14 days to end this job.’ I asked them what was the problem,’’ Abu Zeinab, 32, said on June 3 as he permanently shuttered his al-Dora stand.

“I said I was just feeding the people, but they said there were no falafels in Mohammed the Prophet’s time, so we shouldn’t have them either. I felt like telling them there were no Kalashnikovs in Mohammed’s time either, but I wanted to keep my life.’’

[fastpat]

That concerns Americans, how, exactly? The Hussein government kept these things from happening, want to guess how?

[Overpaid Slacker]

Did someone fart in here?

[widebody911]

Originally posted by Overpaid Slacker
Amid Baghdad’s 122-degree temperatures, Sunni fundamentalists have declared a war on ice.

Remind me again why it's so important for the American taxpayers to spend $1B+ per week to prop up their theocracy?

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Overpaid Slacker
Did someone fart in here?

Every dog smells his own.

[techweenie]

Originally posted by widebody911
Remind me again why it's so important for the American taxpayers to spend $1B+ per week to prop up their theocracy?

Saddam tried to kill the president's daddy. Oh, and there's some oil there. Oh, and it seemed like a good idea back in 1999.

And isn't it more like $4B a week?

[Moses]

Originally posted by fastpat
That concerns Americans, how, exactly? The Hussein government kept these things from happening, want to guess how?

Originally posted by Widebody911
Remind me again why it's so important for the American taxpayers to spend $1B+ per week to prop up their theocracy?

At this point the best we could do is get Saddam a quick aquittal, send him a nice Hallmark apology card and maybe a box of chocolates. We replaced Saddam with " The Iraqi Islamic Revolutionary Council". How nice! And it only cost a trillion dollars and a few thousand lives!

[techweenie]

Originally posted by Moses
At this point the best we could do is get Saddam a quick aquittal, send him a nice Hallmark apology card and maybe a box of chocolates. We replaced Saddam with " The Iraqi Islamic Revolutionary Council". How nice! And it only cost a trillion dollars and a few thousand lives!

Saddam: irritating but stable. Intimidating to neighbor states. Tyrannical but contained. Internecine killings at a minimum.

New Iraqi government (so far): unstable. Vulnerable to neighbor states. Not yet in control, but will impose some aspects of Sharia law. Internecine killings rampant.

On the bright side: they are 7,000 miles away.

[masraum]

[Laneco]

The Prophet did not have ice cubes - so if you have ice cubes you are bad and deserve to die.

Okay.

The Prophet also did not have shoulder mounted rocket launchers, hand grenades or improvised explosive devices or jet planes fuel of fuel....

Hmmm.

angela

[Overpaid Slacker]

Well, we've exhausted paste's wit. I was referring to your being simultaneously insubstantial and noxious. The witless rejoinder, and moreso the compulsion to make one, implies an intellectual bluntness to metaphor.

Thom - perhaps you need reminding of the difference between a theocracy and a democracy. It is a distinction with a difference. Can a democracy be also a theocracy? Sure. Under, however, Islam... NFW.

If stability is what Tech wants, an all Islam world would be pretty darned stable. And I'd put "minimal" (where did pseuostatistic that come from? I guess it'd mean "acceptably few") internecine killings on the opposite side of the scale from "wholesale slaughter of minority groups", "rape rooms", "torture chambers", "use of BioChem weapons against adversaries" and "funding international terrorism".

Is it really about $? Not to me. If effective tax rates are down, I'm not sure I'd bytch. That dough that we're paying anyway would go to more bridges to nowhere, NEH grants (more art from feces, anyone?) enforcing the no-fly zone, etc. It's not like you'd have your pro-rata share of the $ back in your pocket. If this results in fewer government entitlement programs and less porkfat in the budget, then I'm all for it.

Really, I just liked Abu's comment...

JP

[techweenie]

JP: stability on a regional scale is not a bad thing. Infidel troops are unwelcome, but infidel tourist dollars will eventually be irresistible.

And the tax rate doesn't tell the story. every penny of the Iraq war is borrowed from Japan, China, Eurpoean countries... etc. And effectively, the debt service on this borrowing falls on your children and their children.

http://havenworks.com/us/debt/

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Overpaid Slacker
Well, we've exhausted paste's wit. I was referring to your being simultaneously insubstantial and noxious. The witless rejoinder, and moreso the compulsion to make one, implies an intellectual bluntness to metaphor.

What I really like about you is that you're a collossal boor, and I can use you as an illustration of the condition of boorishness. It almost exceeds your bombast, but not quite.

[kang]

Originally posted by techweenie
Saddam tried to kill the president's daddy. Oh, and there's some oil there. Oh, and it seemed like a good idea back in 1999.

And isn't it more like $4B a week?

Plus, we needed to create a terrorist training ground.

[nostatic]

all your ice cubes are belong to us

[Moses]

Probably not the whole story.

Even in Iran you can buy liquor. It will be delivered by a boy on a bicycle. The prophet might not approve, but the local Mullah does, because he has been paid to look the other way.

Just guessing, but I'll bet there is some local Mullah trying to get a piece of the local ice cube market. In the Islamic world, it's best to grease the palm of the Mullah before undertaking any business venture.

[tobster1911]

Bush Hates Ice, T or cubes he hates them all

[Purrybonker]

Originally posted by fastpat
What I really like about you is that you're a collossal boor, and I can use you as an illustration of the condition of boorishness. It almost exceeds your bombast, but not quite.

Aw, come on; he's darn funny and he can spin together words and make syntax dance almost as well as his hero, William F. I haven't heard from him (or Buckley, for that matter) in some time, but he appears to have sharpened his game in my absence.

At the same time it is pitiful and a bit tiresome that he presents himself as an intellectual whilst offering up an anecdote from the lunatic fringe as substantive fuel for the rightist outrage. Offering up the anecdote was OK - like telling a racist or off-color joke, but using jokes or stories to form or defend policy is best left to George and company.

But his fart remark was darn funny - at least once he explained it to us. Oh if only we had the wit to catch JP's brilliance without him having to stoop to explaining each and every nuance to us...