hey people, anyone out there, no, you all vanished, left me here with my guitar, three chords and the truth.
its a beautiful day at mission control, weathers amazing, like a summers day, birds chirp, the traffic is thin, people smile, i wander through babylon, pick up some mail, buy supplies, have a coffee with an guy i have'nt seen for ages, we talk books and i tell him to read the lucifer principle, in fact i suggest he reads my copy asap to get some background on what's going down, some people are not ready for the truth but i reckon based upon my intellectual powers and strong intuition that this guy can. so then i mail my letter to Von Donaldson, my guitar player in Berlin, it's the second letter, short and sweet.
there's a few people commenting in the newspapers about the foiled terrorist plot, mostly its downplayed, a dude from england comments upon the fact it is not a war of civilizations, it is just a small bunch of evil extreemists that want to be listened to. right lets have a cup of tea and discuss the problem, oh it's israel, no problem we hate that place to.
the real issue as i have stated is one of time displacement, half the earth have embraced technology, sex, art and the intrests of freedom of individuals over the state and religion, the other half haven't and refuse to. call it what you want but there is no escape that this is a war of civilizations, i don't say one is better than the other but i like sexually aggressive women, i have a great intrest in technology and i like the fact i can refuse to believe in whatever i want without some one hurling rocks at me.

A response from John Birmingham to Mark Steynes article in the australian.

John Birmingham: Righteous lefties lose out on the laughs
Where, John Birmingham wants to know, is the Mark Steyn of the Left, a talented polemicist able to rake down John Howard and Abu Bakar Bashir with a single, well-aimed witticism?
August 10, 2006

WHEREIN lay the greatness of Rome? In a thousand marble palaces, long fallen to ruin? In the crackling commercial energy of the Forum? Or in the ruthless elan of an elite military with the fashion chops to match a wicked iron short sword with a really spanking pleated leather skirt and lace-up sandals?

Well, in all those things, but also in its jokes. Joseph Addison, an English poet and diplomat of the early 18th century, thought satires and invectives "were an essential part of (the) Roman triumph". An informal check on hubris, just like the slaves who rode with Rome's victorious generals, whispering in their ears: "Remember that you are mortal."

In Addison's view it was folly for an eminent person to think of escaping censure, "and a weakness to be affected by it".

Reproach being concomitant to greatness, the magnificently big-wigged poet set up his own small journal, The Spectator, to have a go at the issues and eminences of the day.

Three hundred years on, humour retains the power to subvert all manner of self-regard and frozen orthodoxies. It's possible to overstate the case, of course. The piano-playing American humorist Tom Lehrer loved to point to "the satirical Berlin cabarets of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent (World War II)".

But as The Australian's opinion-page cartoonist Bill Leak discovered earlier this year, a well-turned gag can reverberate right up to the top of the political food chain.

Until recently, the modern incarnation of The Spectator was graced with the reproaches and invective of Mark Steyn, inventor of the comedy subgenre "acerbic drollery", and Canada's third most successful export, after maple syrup and dangerously fatty but delicious bacon. Self-described as a one-man global content provider, he files for magazines and newspapers, including this one, throughout the English-speaking world and is at present in Australia for a sell-out speaking tour.

Less generously named as Dangerous Idiot of the Week by Britain's New Statesman, Steyn is a very modern phenomenon, a weapons-grade conservative with a functioning sense of humour that can go from gentle mockery to violent rhetorical demolition with a quick tap of the accelerator, a sort of P.J. O'Rourke without the drugs or sports cars.

He writes beautifully about pop culture, and music in particular, but since Mohammed Atta laid claim to his 72 yummy virgins, or possibly yummy raisins, and brought down the twin towers, Steyn has been writing about jihad "24/7". As he explained to the ABC's Michael Duffy during a late-evening chat about jazz lyricists this week: "I'd much rather live in a world where I could write about Dorothy Fields and Cole Porter. But if you value the world that you live in and you see that it's under threat, then you've got to do what you can in the way you can to make a shot at saving it."

It's odd, at first, to think of someone, anyone, turning global jihad to comic effect, especially someone who cares enough to be obsessed by it. But the original Spectator's founding publisher would recognise the efficacy of Steyn's personal jihad, to poke fun at anyone who interferes with the long, grim task of seeing off fascist Islam.

The specific details might vex old Addison, but not the intent, which is to strengthen one's case via reason, rather than by appeal to superstition or by simple diktat imposed by force, the modus operandi of the Taliban, for instance when their religious enforcers cum fashion police flogged young girls for wearing white socks or nail polish.

Such medieval rigidity of thought is almost self-satirising, if your tastes run to the sort of black humour that would make the creators of Little Britain blanch. But it is the rigidities of thought within our midst that call forth Steyn's sharpest and often funniest barbs, the doublethink of the anti-war Left, which remains silent on the atrocities of mass murderers such as the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, unless it is to equate them with the atrocities of imagined mass murderers such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

For a long time there has been a dreadful predictability of thinking on the Left, a lack of originality that means a thousand monkeys hammering away at a thousand typewriters could very quickly produce a whole issue of Green Left Weekly without even stopping for an expensive banana. The reflexive anti-Americanism is probably a Vietnam War era relic, but what's new, and nearly as debilitating, is the lack of any sense of proportion or humour. It is possible to make a case in favour of prosecuting the war against al-Qa'ida and its franchises while arguing that Bush and his cohorts have comprehensively bungled the conflict from day one.

Ostensibly progressive political satirists should have a vast arsenal to draw on. But where is the Steyn of the Left, a talented polemicist able to rake down John Howard as well as Abu Bakar Bashir with a single joke?

Perhaps Howard was right when he said that political correctness has had a chilling effect on debate, but not at all in the way he thought.

At the heart of much humour lies a finely calibrated cruelty, such as Steyn's reflections on the Muslim youth riots in France last year. "What is the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back on your Zimmer frame across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement."

It is open to Steyn to make such quips because he is unconstrained by PC edicts about respecting the elderly or, even more absurdly, the rioters and their grievances. A left-wing writer, bound up in the silken skeins of myriad interests he must not offend, has no such freedom. A pity, really. Because there are so many aspects of the conflict that flared into life on September 11, 2001, that are in desperate need of a good piss-taking.