Put your options where?

[parsley]

Read this article. The more interesting ones
appear on a Friday:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/24/goldma
n-harris-idUSL2E8DOE4Y20120224?
type=companyNews

Note intercontinental exchange is listed at the end
of the article. Next, google intercontinental
exchange canada.
And keep your head in the oxygen level where a
long or short stoneboat isn't packed full of horse
manure heading down MF Global Road.

[cottonpicken]

They need to hit someone every once in a while to
contain inflation.

Wont work forever,greater minds say 3-4 years.

[parsley]

A very thought-provoking article I copied from:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291925/wh
y-apologize-afghanistan-andrew-c-mccarthy



We have officially lost our minds.

The New York Times reports that President
Obama has sent a formal letter of apology to
Afghanistan’s ingrate president, Hamid Karzai, for
the burning of Korans at a U.S. military base. The
only upside of the apology is that it appears
(based on the Times account) to be couched as
coming personally from our blindly Islamophilic
president — “I wish to express my deep regret for
the reported incident. . . . I extend to you and the
Afghani people my sincere apologies.” It is not
couched as an apology from the American
people, whose frame of mind will be outrage, not
contrition, as the facts become more widely
known.

The facts are that the Korans were seized at a jail
because jihadists imprisoned there were using
them not for prayer but to communicate
incendiary messages. The soldiers dispatched to
burn refuse from the jail were not the officials who
had seized the books, had no idea they were
burning Korans, and tried desperately to retrieve
the books when the situation was brought to their
attention.

Of course, these facts may not become widely
known, because no one is supposed to mention
the main significance of what has happened here.
First, as usual, Muslims — not al-Qaeda terrorists,
but ordinary, mainstream Muslims — are rioting
and murdering over the burning (indeed, the
inadvertent burning) of a book. Yes, it’s the Koran,
but it’s a book all the same — and one that,
moderate Muslims never tire of telling us, doesn’t
really mean everything it says anyhow.

Muslim leaders and their leftist apologists are also
forever lecturing the United States about
“proportionality” in our war-fighting. Yet when it
comes to Muslim proportionality, Americans are
supposed to shrug meekly and accept the “you
burn books, we kill people” law of the jungle.
Disgustingly, the Times would inure us to this
moral equivalence by rationalizing that “Afghans
are fiercely protective of their Islamic faith.” Well
then, I guess that makes it all right, huh?

Then there’s the second not-to-be-uttered truth:
Defiling the Koran becomes an issue for Muslims
only when it has been done by non-Muslims.
Observe that the unintentional burning would not
have occurred if these “fiercely protective of their
Islamic faith” Afghans had not defiled the Korans
in the first place. They were Muslim prisoners who
annotated the “holy” pages with what a U.S.
military official described as “extremist
inscriptions” in covert messages sent back and
forth, just as the jihadists held at Gitmo have been
known to do (notwithstanding that Muslim
prisoners get their Korans courtesy of the
American taxpayers they construe the book to
justify killing).

Do you know why you are supposed to stay mum
about the intentional Muslim sacrilege but plead to
be forgiven for the accidental American offense?
Because you would otherwise have to observe
that the Koran and other Islamic scriptures
instruct Muslims that they are in a civilizational
jihad against non-Muslims, and that it is therefore
permissible for them to do whatever is necessary
— including scrawl militant graffiti on their holy
book — if it advances the cause. Abdul Sattar
Khawasi — not a member of al-Qaeda but a
member in good standing of the Afghan
government for which our troops are inexplicably
fighting and dying — put it this way: “Americans
are invaders, and jihad against the Americans is
an obligation.”

Because exploiting America’s hyper-sensitivity to
things Islamic advances the jihad, the ostensible
abuse of the Koran by using it for secret
communiqués is to be overlooked. Actionable
abuse occurs only when the book is touched by
the bare hands of, or otherwise maltreated by, an
infidel.

As our great Iraqi ally Ayatollah Ali Sistani
teaches, touching a kafir (“one who does not
believe in Allah and His Oneness”) is to be
avoided, because Islamic scripture categorizes
infidels as equivalent to “urine, feces, semen,
dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors,”
and “the sweat of an animal who persistently eats
filth.” That is what influential clerics — not al-
Qaeda but revered scholars of Islamic law —
inculcate in rank-and-file Muslims.

And they are not making it up. Sistani came upon
this view after decades of dedicated scriptural
study. In fact, to take just one telling example (we
could list many, many others), the “holy” Koran we
non-Muslims are supposed to honor proclaims (in
Sura 9:28), “Truly the pagans are unclean . . . so
let them not . . . approach the sacred mosque.” It
is because of this injunction from Allah that non-
Muslims are barred — not by al-Qaeda but by the
Saudi Arabian government — from entering
Mecca and Medina. Kafirs are deemed unfit to set
their infidel feet on the ground of these ancient
cities. You don’t like that? Too bad — grin and
bear it . . . and, while you’re at it, surge up a few
thousand more American troops to improve life in
Kandahar.

Understand this: Muslims are killing Muslims all
the time. Sunnis attack Shiites, Shiites attack
Sunnis. Ahmadi Muslims are attacked in sundry
Islamic countries. Often, these Muslim-on-Muslim
atrocities involve not only murder but also the
torching of the other sect’s homes and mosques
— necessarily meaning Muslims are burning
Korans, and with far more mens rea than the
American personnel had in Afghanistan. None of
these atrocities incite global Islamic rioting — it is
just Muslim-on-Muslim violence, the numbing
familiarity of which calls for no comment, except
perhaps to mumble that it must have something to
do with how “fiercely protective of their Islamic
faith” Muslims are. (Actually, it has to do with
Muslims’ deeming the perceived heresies of other
Muslims to be apostasy, for which sharia
prescribes the death penalty.)
Also understand this: In sharia societies, non-
Muslim religious articles are confiscated and
destroyed every single day as a matter of policy.
In Saudi Arabia, where sharia is the law of the
land, where Mecca and Medina are closed to non-
Muslims, government guidelines prohibit Jews
and Christians from bringing Bibles, crucifixes,
Stars of David, and similar artifacts emblematic of
their faith into the country. When that prohibition is
violated, the offending items are seized and
burned or otherwise destroyed. Moreover, though
Saudis deny having an official policy that bans
Jews from entering the country at all, reports are
rampant of travelers’ being denied visas either
because they are Jewish or because their
passports bear stamps indicative of prior travel to
Israel.

In spite of this shameful, conscious, systematic
abuse of non-Muslims and their religious articles,
King Abdullah has yet to send a letter of apology
to Obama. All the presidential bowing in the world
will not change this, not when Muslim
supremacism is the irreducible core of
mainstream Islam — not al-Qaeda Islam,
mainstream Islam. And where is Mr. Karzai’s
apology over the Afghan soldier who just killed
two Americans? That is only the latest incident in
a largely unreported epidemic: our “allies” turning
their weapons on their Western trainers.

On second thought, who cares if Karzai
apologizes? Our troops do not belong in
Afghanistan. They have given more than enough,
way more. So has our country.

If our government believes the Taliban and other
factions are our enemies, allied with al-Qaeda to
kill Americans, then we should unleash our
military to destroy them. This should not be an
endless counterinsurgency experiment that
prioritizes the protection of Afghan civilians and
the construction of Afghan civil society; it should
be a war that our vast might enables us to win
rapidly and decisively.

But our government has repeatedly professed that
the Taliban are not our enemies. If that is true, we
lack not only the will but the cause for waging war.
We should leave — now. It is immoral to keep our
young men and women there as sitting ducks in a
place where the people hate Americans but we
are not trying to vanquish them. We routed al-
Qaeda years ago. We don’t need to defeat the
Taliban or waste time negotiating with them,
Karzai, the warlords, and the rest. Let them have
their Korans and work it out for themselves with
the compassion that has been such a Religion of
Peace hallmark for the last 14 centuries.

That, however, cannot be the end of it. If,
according to the president, we need to apologize
to Muslims because we must accept that they
have such an innate, extraordinary ardor for their
religion that barbaric reactions to trivial slights are
inevitable, then they should not be invited to enter
a civilized country. At the very least, our
immigration laws should exclude entry from
Muslim-majority countries unless and until those
countries expressly repeal repressive sharia laws
(e.g., the death penalty for apostates) and adopt
American standards of non-discrimination against,
tolerance of, and protection for religious
minorities.

If you really want to promote freedom in Islamic
countries, an immigration policy based on civil-
rights reciprocity would be a lot more effective,
and a lot less expensive, than dispatching tens of
thousands of troops to build sharia “democracies.”
It would also protect Americans from people
whose countries and cultures have not prepared
them for the obligations of citizenship in a free
society.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the
National Review Institute, is the author, most
recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the
Left Sabotage America