I am not a very Holiday oriented person.  I mark them passing, but they are, for me, essentially extensions of the weekend.  Days with less work, and a little more peacful, with a reduction in the amount of phone calls and emails.  Of course, I go through the motions for the family, as it is important to have these touchstones.

This year, though, I find myself truly happy to see the passing of the year, and the dawn of a new one.

2007 was, personally and professionally, a simply horrible year.  Maybe not the worst of my life, but certainly not the best.

It began, in earnest, when on Jan 2, I found out that a friend and mentor had passed away.  As January progressed, we discovered at work that making the transition to a new software platform for the business would be slightly more painfaul than the two weeks of chaos we had been promised… It was more like three or four months.

Things went that way through the summer, until late this fall, we found that my brother had a serious medical problem, that might have been cancerous as well.

As the year ended, my Brother is fine, and mending, but my friend and mentor is still gone, and his legacy is fading fast.  It looks like issues at work have bottomed out, and may start to improve, though I am finding that there are other opportunities out there.

2008 will have it’s own issues and problems.  It started last night, with the Fireworks “computer error” at the space needle (Y2K08), and near the end we will have another Presidential election to live through.

But, it’s another chance to try to get things right.  Good luck to everyone for a better year!

I had hope that Benazir Bhutto would prove to be a moderating influence on Pakistan, and would come to some kind of power sharing agreement with President Musharraf, to combat the Islamic Fundamentalists in the nation, and provide a beacon of hope to the Muslim world.  Sadly, that will never come to pass.  I had considered what, exactly, to say on this, and found a link from LGF to a piece by Pamela Bone in the Australian that said it all:

Bhutto was murdered because to her enemies she was Westernised, a traitor to her culture and an American stooge. She was murdered because she had vowed to bring secularism and democracy to Pakistan. She was murdered because she was all these things, and a woman.

“I know I am a symbol of what the so-called jihadists, Taliban and al-Qa’ida, most fear,” she wrote in her autobiography, Daughter of the East. “I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan.”

Yes, fear is the right word. The fear of women, of women’s freedom, and most of all, of women’s sexuality, runs through Islamism. It is a large part of Islamist hatred of the West. “The issue of women is not marginal,” writes the Dutch scholar Ian Buruma. “It lies at the heart of Islamic occidentalism (anti-Westernism).”

Al-Qa’ida has made it perfectly clear that its aim is an Islamic caliphate, first in all nominally Muslim countries and ultimately in the whole world. The jihadis would, if they could, impose the same rampant misogyny on women worldwide as was, and still is to a large extent, imposed on the women of Afghanistan.

Could the murder of Bhutto be enough to wake up Western women to the fact that the war being waged by the Islamists is very much about them? Could the modern Left be persuaded that the people who killed Bhutto are the ones we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places across the world? Can we, in our niceness, stop telling ourselves they are justified in their hatred of us?

It’s a great piece, and I recommend reading the whole thing.  The one mistake she makes is:

They can’t win. No one, apart from extremists like themselves, wants the kind of society they envisage. But they could, if the West fails in its determination, win enough to make life very unpleasant for millions of women for a generation or more.

They most certainly CAN win, for several generations, over a great swath of the globe.  It doesn’t matter what people want, if they aren’t going to stand up and fight.

The West as a whole has already failed to confront this evil.  Only the United States is standing against the tide today, despite the best effirts of the Democrat Party, and the American left in general, who are doing their best to beak our will as well. 

It is curious that the very people that claim to support Womens Rights, and Gay Rights, also support the very people that want to kill all the Gays, and make all women slaves.