Stress Defined
"STRESS: The confusion created when one's mind overrides the body's basic desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk who desperately deserves it." -- unattributed
# Oleg Volk at Live Journal - Why carry? - a poem about why it's important to travel armed, even in our relatively safe country. [smith2004]
# Google Moon is a map of the moon with the same interface as Google Maps. It has bookmarks on the locations of the Apollo landings. Zoom in all the way to see what the moon is made of. Hehe. [clairefiles]
# The Conch Republic - "We seceded where others have failed." For $200 you can get your very own unofficial passport. For more money, you can get a diplomatic passport. Hehe. [jomama]
# Ron Paul in The U.S. House of Representatives via LewRockwell.com - Suicide Terrorism - Dr. Paul informs the House about Robert Pape's Dying To Win. U.S. presence in Iraq makes future terrorist attacks in America more likely. [smith2004]
... Pape has collected a database of every suicide terrorist attack between 1980 and 2004, all 462 of them. His conclusions are enlightening and crucial to our understanding the true motivation behind the attacks against Western nations by Islamic terrorists. After his exhaustive study, Pape comes to some very important conclusions.
Religious beliefs are less important than supposed. For instance, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group, are the world's leader in suicide terrorism. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attack. None have come from Iran or the Sudan. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraq never had a suicide terrorist attack in all of its history. Between 1995 and 2004, the al Qaeda years, two-thirds of all attacks came from countries where the U.S. had troops stationed. Iraq's suicide missions today are carried out by Iraqi Sunnis and Saudis. Recall, 15 of the 19 participants in the 9/11 attacks were Saudis.
The clincher is this: the strongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland."