Mosquito Rodeo

National Debt

2011-11-15T04:34:00.000-06:00

I hate to say it...but our country is now doomed. It will probably be a long, slow, slide...but there is absolutely nobody on the political front (except possibly Herman Cain, but even he is suspect) who can help us. I just went to the Constitution Party's website, and it finally made sense to me. I had written them off as racists or whatever before, and maybe they even are. But whatever warts they have, their fidelity to the constitution deserves a listen. Don't you think?

http://www.constitutionparty.com/party_platform.php

"Red State" part II

2011-10-23T21:05:00.000-05:00

Okay, I have no idea what this movie is about. It has a vaguely left-wing tilt and makes no real sense. It takes a swipe at the right wing cartoon when it can, but it's obviouly inept and can make no possible difference to anybody, except to me who am dumb enough to have spent a buck in the Red Machine based on the picture that represented it, which made me believe that it might be something like "Red Dawn". I was wrong. Do NOT rent this POS unless you're a lefty POS who has a "Bush Lied People Died" bumpersticker on your Volvo.

Movie: "Red State"

2011-10-23T20:58:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I made a MAJOR mistake (I think, so far) in renting "Red State". I'm about 5 minutes in. So far, they've made fun of abortion protestors and right-wing people in general, with no corresponding ridicule of the drum-circle set. More to come as I watch...except that I'm now subject to a bunch of guys talking about the women they want to sleep with. It's pretty ugly, even by guy standards.

Attitude Adjustment

2011-10-08T09:39:00.000-05:00

Okay, I started out undecided about the GOP primary. I've known since before the 2008 election that ANYBODY would be preferable to Obama, and nothing that's happened since then has caused me to change my mind. On the contrary, many things--particularly that abortion of a health law (pun intended)--have deepened my antipathy to President Obama into something that approaches hatred.

Romney seemed like more of the same, though less offensive and in-your-face than Obama. I could hold my nose and vote for him. Bachmann is simply too socially conservative for my liking. I like her stance on abortion, but that's one of the few areas where I would be considered a social conservative, and that seems to be most of what she's about. In addition, her negatives in the polls are very high, and I'm not sure she's electable in the general. WRT electability, the same sort of holds true for Ron Paul. I like his hard money ideas, his general attitude toward economics (let's face it....faux Keynesianism got us where we are today, and given the political environment true Keynesian economics isn't possible). I even like his stance on the wars we're in. We gave it our best shot, and nobody can say we didn't try to help the people of Iraq and Afghanistan stabilize and recover after removing abusive leaders. Time to let them sink or swim on their own, I'd say. But he's just got such high negatives in the polls. I don't understand why, really, but it's the reality we have to deal with. I liked Rick Perry more than those two simply because he seems plain-spoken. He's another big-government guy though, and not big about securing borders and liberalizing LEGAL entry into the US...and he's got a bit of foot-in-mouth disease. Not great on many fronts, but I could vote for him, maybe even without holding my nose too hard.

Up until that point, I had not really looked at Herman Cain. This guy I really like. I don't give a fig about his lack of experience in elected office. People with lifetimes in elected office got us where we are, which is where we're trying to escape from. He DOES have political experience, though, and anyone who disputes that just doesn't know what CEOs do. He's much more in line with my own fiscal conservatism, and practically speaking he would finally remove the race issue so we could focus on actual issues in the general. And I think he'd mop Obama up in a landslide approaching what Reagan did to Mondale in 1984.

Then this morning, I got my first look at Gary Johnson. I'm absolutely BOWLED OVER.

http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/129298/

Here's a guy who promises to propose a balanced budget to congress his first year. He promises to veto any budget that is out of balance. As he freely admits, congress can override the veto and likely will. But then the disaster that is overtaking us is squarely on them, and it will force their voting record to reflect that. He acknowledges that the drug war is lost, and advocates legalizing marijuana. While acknowledging that the problems with drug use and abuse won't magically go away, he wants to treat it as more of a public health issue than a legal issue.

In short, Johnson's seems to be a reality-based campaign. It's not hard, then, to see why the media has worked so hard to keep him out of the debates in favor of candidates that polled lower than he did. A guy like this will finish the job that their own shoddy reporting has done halfway already....blowing up their carefully constructed world. I don't know what his politics are as far as foreign policy, and I'll be interested to see. He CANNOT be worse than Obama, though. He doesn't seem the type to bow to foreign leaders, gratuitously and/or accidentally insult the Brits and other allies, force the Dalai Lama to take the back door at the White House and so forth. I don't know his views on energy policy, either....but assuming it is closer to "drill baby drill" than financing losing solar companies, 1,000,000 electric cars on the roads in a couple of years and other unicorns-crapping-skittles nonsense then I'll be putting a Johnson sign in my yard postehaste.

It would be nice if Cain kept his current momentum. He'd beat Obama, and he'd be a good president. But if somehow Johnson could catch fire...he would destroy Obama also, but would represent the real "transformative change" this country needed 4 years ago and needs much worse today. And if that makes me a racist the same as I apparently was in 2008 when I felt McCain, while definitely flawed (I preferred Thompson), would be a better president, then I guess I'm a racist. But the definition of that world must have certainly changed since Obama came on the scene. I used to think it meant that you hated people of a color different from your own simply because their color is different from your own. Now apparently it's a synonym for "sane".

A Godly Man

2011-09-29T21:34:00.000-05:00

A Godly man has been convicted of the "crime" of being Christian in Iran and refusing to renounce his "apostasy" and recite the shahadah:

http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2011/09/well-done-president-obama.html#anchor

He will most likely be executed, probably in a quite barbaric and creative way. Just go to the link and read his statement, and then compare it to whatever random segment of an Islamic cleric's bellowings you can find easily on the internet. Who is the man of virtue and who is the screaming nutcase caveman? It's easy to tell.

I echo the sentiments of the blogger. Obama has for the most part been an unmitigated disaster for the United States. But two things I will commend President Obama for: 1) He has shown extreme prejudice in hunting down the Islamic nutballs that want us dead, and done so in a very similar fashion to what I personally would have done, and 2) He issues here an incredibly clear condemnation of Iran (and really, Islam) for its extreme religious intolerance.

Good show, Mr. President. No way on this Earth will you EVER get my vote...but you have managed to marginally reduce my antipathy toward you. It is rather telling, though, that the very things you have done that make the most sense are the very same things that are turning off your base (e.g. lefty moonbats). I do sympathize with anybody who has the impossible job of trying to placate the Daily Kos Krowd while still maintaining any kind of connection to reality. It's gotta be tough.

Minnesota Political Scene

2011-08-14T21:16:00.000-05:00

This post is being delivered about 30 years after many of the events described transpired. Other events, however, were recent, and therefore are relevant. Just thought I'd deliver the heads-up so I can't be sued for irrelevant bloggership or something.

I was once a "progressive". "Progressive" means embracing "progress", am I right? And who but a knuckle-dragger wants to delay that? And that's their main weapon. Whatever feels good or sounds good is the way to go. That's why Churchill or whoever did the quote about whoever is 20 and isn't a progressive has no heart and whoever is 30 and is a progressive has no brain. Most of us get that by nature, but Churchill (a great American, even if he wasn't American) put it in a form ready-fit for the masses to understand deeply and at their level.

I grew up in a town bisected by railroad tracks. Most of the "action" happened north of the tracks and the south side suffered from a not-so-well-deserved reputation of being "the wrong side of the tracks". But whichever side you grew up on, the mothers of the children knew who you were and where you belonged. I once crossed the tracks to visit a friend against the expressed wishes of my mother. I arrived home about 1/2 hour later, and was promptly grounded for the rest of the day for crossing the tracks. These ladies were not only mean, but they meant what they said.

And that is the point of this post. The federal government could do well if it only would do what it said and mean what it said. The tea party movement, for all its flaws, is a movement that says "dammit, spend less and mean it and do it". Lots of ink has been spilled on how insane they are and how stupid they are. But I have seen an echo of all our mothers back in Breckenridge, MN circa 1978 in what they have said. Don't spend more than you have. If you do, don't come crying to me, because I will publicly shame you if I have to. I don't want to...I'm proud of you in the whole, but if you do something stupid I will do what I have to.

We have let our political scene get turned upside-down. The farmers in Breckenridge now are hooked on federal subsidies. Instead of being the cornerstone of freedom and free enterprise, they are now waiting for their next check from the federal government for leaving certain tracts of land fallow in the spirit of CRP (look it up, but we all know it's crap). It takes a lawyer to navigate all the legal gobbldygook to even BECOME a farmer or other small business today. Lots of the people who I most admired back in Breckenridge circa 1978, who contributed the most to the community and who added the most "glue" to that town would be considered to worst kind of enemy of the public today. Because they did the necessary when it became necessary. They added a little bit more fertilizer here and there when the federal government today wouldn't allow it, but they with their generations of acquired knowledge felt it was necessary. They did what had to happen to meet their payroll and get the crop in that would support it. Screw the feds.

The same with my folks. They brought my sister and me up to be decent, God-fearing people. We would, at that time, have been absolutely horrified at the nanny-state regulations that are in place today. Not once, from the time I can remember until I was 18, did I ever see a person outside of an official race wear a bike helmet. This morning I saw a child of about 8 wearing one for a ride down the street. Safe? Yes. Stupid beyond belief? Also yes. My folks brought us down into the basement for actual threatening events such as possible tornadoes. They didn't sweat the small stuff. The one time I did sustain a real injury from riding a bike was when I broke my arm when I was 14. NOT my head. No helmet would have helped me then. And in 18 years of growing up in that helmetless town, I don't recall a head injury to anybody. In a town of 4000 or so people. Plus the neighboring town of 8000 or so people. But some bureaucrat somewhere thought it would be a good idea, so now I have to watch children ride down the street with expensive, non-necessary helmets on their heads instead of the smiles God gave them that I remember so well on my own face. Thanks, government.

For my own part, I'm NEVER going to require my child to wear a helmet or anything else the government (fed, state, local or otherwise) says they need to. I'm going to spend my money and effort making sure that she gets the education she should, the common sense she should, and the other things she needs to live a productive, normal life. Government has left the rails of common sense, and is the enemy of people who want to get things done. Screw them. My daughter will have no part of it, nor will I any longer.

Open Letter to Any Chinese People of Good Will

2011-08-08T16:49:00.000-05:00

You've watched quite a spectacle play itself out over the last weeks and months, yes? The tea party (of which I am not a member but which I support in many particulars), sporting what, 17 house members and no senators, prevailed (mostly) against a president and senate aligned against them. Not bad.

But have you, as a citizen of our largest creditor nation, really listened to the message of this movement? Have you stopped to examine carefully our overall fiscal position? Have you examined the past actions and general moral climate of both major political parties that run our country? I'm a proud American...but I'm not proud of our political parties or political culture. The tea party movement is like a breath of fresh air to those of us Americans who have looked on with you in disbelief as our once-frugal-and-responsible country has run up $trillion-plus yearly deficits the last few years (by the exact same people, including our current president, who pretended to be aghast at the several-hundred-billion yearly run up immorally by our last president).

I don't understand your country, and you probably don't understand mine, especially lately. I think we both should just take a step back and look at what's going on. Why do you continue to buy our debt? That's what I really don't understand. You have the cash to buy gold, which is a much safer bet. Or silver, or platinum, or palladium, or copper or almost any mineral that will hold its value far better than the US Dollar. I know you want to prop up your number one export market...but trust me, you won't be able to export to us for much longer.

So if you indeed are a Chinese person of goodwill...please cut us off. Don't buy another treasury or any other debt instrument of the United States government, including even dollars. Give our politicians the medicine they so badly deserve. In the long run, your people and mine will be able to develop a much healthier economic relationship that will benefit us both. Right now our relationship is very unhealthy and cannot get better with the people we have in charge until they learn a real lesson in economics. Your country is the only one, in my estimation, that is in any kind of position to teach that lesson peacefully, particularly if you could arrange a concerted action with Japan in this vein. I know your two countries have bad blood from the past, but the United States is a huge trading partner for you both and our usefulness to either of you will continue to dwindle until painful economic action is taken.

I suspect, but don't know, that such an action would cause far more pain on our side than on yours right now. That may not be the case for much longer...because I fear that if you take such an action later our political leaders will be even more desperate. And a careful study of our country's history will show that when we get desperate about something, the guns come out and we go to war. It doesn't pay to wait too long, if there's a chance things can be done peacefully sooner. I know you guys have nukes. We have a LOT of them, and a bunch of them are already aimed at your cities...and unlike yours, ours are the latest stuff and not many of them will fail or miss. I'm sure many of yours won't fail or miss, either. So both sides lose if we let it come to that.

So neuter these dogs while they are still puppies. You have the perfect cover with the recent S&P downgrade of our debt. Simply declare that you'll hold the debt you currently have, won't be buying any new American debt until our budget is balanced and then only to roll over old debt, and that you will not issue new debt purchases until half of our obscene debt is gone. It would be a favor to our country and a long-term favor to both our countries, though it would cause pain for both of us short-term. I've tried to think of a better way to force the issue on the clowns in Washington DC, and come up empty.

Worst case? You lose your investment in us. If you keep going the way you have, that investment will only get bigger and the prospects of being repaid will NOT get better. Consider it.

Sigh

2007-04-16T20:59:00.000-05:00

Funny that just a few days ago I posted on this blog for the first time in a year. My topic was the right to bear arms, and today as everybody in the world knows by now, the worst mass shooting in the history of the US happened at Virginia Tech.

I stand by my assessment of gun rights, and point to the Virginia Tech situation as a perfect illustration of why people should pack heat whenever possible.

I was watching CNN this evening and the anchors were batting around the tired old saws about how guns should be less accessible, and that would prevent this sort of thing. I call bullshit on that. First of all, their main insinuation (not quite an "I told you so" claim) was how liberal gun laws are in Virginia. They didn't mention that the attack, from beginning to end, happened in a gun-free zone. Guess somebody forgot to tell the shooter about that rule, huh?

Of all the thousands of people within a couple of blocks of the attacks, all it might have taken is for one instructor, one student, one fercripesake JANITOR to have brought a gun with them
to work or school, and a lot of those people would not have had to die.

Of course I know I'm wailing in the dark here. There is absolutely no way that this kind of straight thinking will catch on with Universities. It's not "nuanced" or "intellectual" enough to point out the obvious answer.

I know one thing, though. Minnesota is a concealed-carry state (finally), and some businesses post signs banning weapons from their premises. I know that I am going to start thinking twice about going into a place where I know that nobody who is law-abiding is carrying a weapon while scofflaws may be packing and probably are at least some of the time. I don't carry a weapon (yet), but I like the idea that the regular joe next to me in line at the convenience store might me. Just in case some yahoo barges in with a gun and starts shooting the place up...we would at least have a chance of making it out alive.

Sigh. My thoughts and prayers are with those poor people's families tonight as they begin a lifetime of hurting that just didn't have to be that way.

Gun Control

2007-04-12T22:33:00.000-05:00

Penn & Teller, two of the most upstanding, dignified gentlemen you would ever care to meet, call bullshit on gun control. Literally. My favorite line, by Penn: "You can't stop insane people from doing insane things by passing insane laws. That would be insane!" Honorable mention: "Here's a woman who gives new meaning to the term 'gun rack'"

I used to be in favor of gun control. I have NO IDEA what I was thinking. I now believe that EVERYBODY should be required to pack heat EVERYWHERE they go, and gun training should be just as much a part of high-school age instruction as driver training. Think about it. If you know for a certainty that there is a 99% chance that a person you are thinking about mugging, raping, or otherwise hurting is packing a .45 (or even a .22 for that matter) and knows how to use it with AT LEAST a minimum degree of competence, how does that impact your decision on whether or not to follow through on your thought?

How about these mass murders where somebody just snaps and starts shooting people in a crowd? If the whole crowd has guns, that wouldn't last so long.

Somebody in the show made another good point: every single major incident (Columbine, etc) where guns killed a lot of people, it was in a "gun free zone". Feh. There should be no such thing.

Shadow Government

2007-04-05T20:52:00.000-05:00

The blogosphere is abuzz about Nancy Pelosi's visits to Israel, Syria and others in the Middle East. Now, I haven't been writing political material for awhile now, and my views have begun to moderate quite a bit. However, I'm still a war supporter for AT LEAST the next few years, and Pelosi is as much of a moonbat as ever she was.

So now she's decided that since she doesn't agree with the president's foreign policy, it's her responsibility to set up an alternative foreign policy:
Pelosi was met at the Riyadh airport by officials including Abdul-Rahman al-Zamel, the head of the Saudi-American friendship committee at the Shura Council. He described the speaker's visit as a "breakthrough" and praised the inclusion of the first Muslim member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, in her delegation.
Pelosi wore a lavender pantsuit instead of the long black robe, called an abaya, that women, Saudi and non-Saudi, have to wear in the kingdom.

Oh, yeah, the oil ticks and despots LOVE her ideas. So do the terrorists:

One terror leader, Khaled Al-Batch, a militant and spokesman for Islamic Jihad, expressed hope Pelosi would continue winning elections, explaining the House speaker's Damascus visit demonstrated she understands the Middle East.

Pelosi's visit was opposed by President Bush, who called Syria a "state sponsor of terror."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria Wednesday – in which she called for dialogue with Damascus – was "brave" and "very appreciated" and could bring about "important changes" to America's foreign policy, including talks with "Middle East resistance groups," according to members of Palestinian terror organizations whose top leaders live in Syria.
"Nancy Pelosi understands the area (Middle East) well, more than Bush and Dr. (Condoleezza) Rice," said Al-Batch, speaking to WND from Gaza. "If the Democrats want to make negotiations with Syria, Hamas, and Hizbullah, this means the Democratic Party understands well what happens in this area and I think Pelosi will succeed. ... I hope she wins the next elections."

Islamic Jihad has carried out scores of shootings and rocket attacks, and, together with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing in Israel the past two years.

Ramadan Shallah, overall chief of Islamic Jihad, lives in Syria, as does Hamas chieftain Khaled Mashaal. Israel has accused the Syrian-based Hamas and Islamic Jihad leadership of ordering militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to carry out terror attacks.

Al-Batch expressed hope Pelosi and the Democratic Party will pressure Bush to create dialogue with Syria and Middle East "resistance movements" and prompt an American withdrawal from Iraq.

And there's your proof that the terrorists have no more knowledge of how our country works (or how it's supposed to work) than Nancy Pelosi apparently does. See, the constitution says the executive branch has primary (indeed, almost total) control of the nation's foreign policy. The only exception I'm aware of is that it is the senate's job to ratify or reject treaties that the president or his duly appointed representatives (SecState et al) negotiate with other governments. The house? Nada. Zip. Zilch. They are a domestic organ ONLY, with nothing meaningful to say about foreign policy. Nancy, I'm talking to you.

Clinton's woeful handling of the Khobar towers bombing, the Cole bombing, and several other incidents probably caused the Republicans in control of the house to want to step in and show him how it should be done, but they didn't. No matter how much they hated doing nothing in the face of aggression like that, they for the most part let it lie. Know why? Because it WASN'T THEIR JOB. Just like it's not the job of the House now to try to step in and undermine what the president is trying to do.

When Pelosi or one of her friends win the presidency (shiver) in 2008 or whenever, that would be the time to start changing the foreign policy of the United States. Until then, they should keep their damned noses out of places where they don't belong.

It used to be an old saw that our differences stop at the country's shore. Most people up until just recently treated it more or less as a rule of thumb. I guess Pelosi and her fellow meddlers and cheerleaders never heard that one. Now if things go to hell because of their contributions to international diplomacy, they will gleefully point at Bush and scream about what a mess he's made.

Sigh.

Interesting

2006-04-27T00:56:00.000-05:00

Yeah. Let's do this.

Hey, Ben.

2006-01-28T22:23:00.000-06:00

Friend of yours?

News Flash

2005-12-10T13:16:00.000-06:00

Some people are so stupid.

'New Mammal'

2005-12-06T06:38:00.000-06:00

Over on the BBC website there's a story of the discovery of a previously undescribed mammal species (NOT a new mammal; sorry, creationists! Maybe next time.)

THIS is why they don't let Marines be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

2005-12-04T06:23:00.000-06:00

Heh heh. General Peter Pace became the first US Marine in the 230 year history of the Corps to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The post of top general in the US military had traditionally been rotated amongst the Army, Navy and Air Force.

This may help explain why. Here's a quote from a video clip of a recent press conference:

General Pace: "It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it."

Rumsfeld: "But I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it."

General Pace: "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it."

You can promote him all you want, Rummy, he's still a Marine.

My Thoughts EXACTLY

2005-11-20T19:30:00.000-06:00

LGF points to Krauthammer's comments on "Intelligent Design" and says "me too". I point to Charles and say "me too". I've felt this way about Creationism and "Intelligent Design" since I was about 10.

Over the years I've gone through several phases in how I think about God and His creation, but I've never been able to see what all the conflict is about. Science is about the How, the What, and the When. Religion is about the Who and the Why. There is no logical intersection that I've ever been able to detect. The main difference I see between the religionists and the non-religionists is that the non-religionists are more likely to answer the "Who" and "Why" with "Nobody" and "No Reason", or maybe "who cares?" while the religionists have more specific ideas about those answers and their importance.

Non-religionists tend, like most debators try at times, to caricature their opponents using Pat Robertson and friends and smear that over the rest of us. Pat and friends tend to want to drag the Who and the Why into the observable universe and bend the meaning of science.

Pat Robertson and his ilk should try to understand that when they spout this nonsense, they hurt not only their own cause, but that of all conservatives including the ones that try to leave religion mostly out of it (except as a set of guiding moral principles, of course).

This also hurts the Left, but in a more subtle way. Do Kos, Atrios, and the rest of those guys even realize how stupid they look when their main argument is "well, you're a conservative, and look at Pat Robertson, he's a conservative too. He's a moron." My only response to this can be "why, yes. Yes, Pat Robertson is indeed a fine example of what I would call an extremely unintelligent man. Your point?" Can you say "straw man"?

If I pointed to a guy like Kos and said "see, Ben, your fellow inhabitant of the liberal side of the political spectrum is a moron. Therefore, your entire political view is shite and you probably are too," he'd absolutely skewer me, and rightly so. He'd also probably do it in a way that only he understood how clever and witty it was, but by now you're probably used to that.

I even have family and friends who cling tightly to literal Creationism, and they tend to look at me blankly when I try to get them to point out exactly where the conflict even is, too. I love them and want to give them every benefit of every doubt, but COME ON.

Apparently this disease afflicts both sides of the equation in roughly equal proportions.

Anti-Revisionism

2005-11-14T11:44:00.000-06:00

Many who are now repeating the mantra "Bush Lied" have, shall we say, taken liberty with history. Here's an outline that matches my recollections and thoughts much more closely than things you hear in the news and so forth today, like "we knew Saddam had no weapons", or "Baghdad was no threat to anyone".

Mind you, I'm not arguing that mistakes haven't been made, especially in postwar planning. They clearly were...and I'm still waiting for an example of a war that was ever fought by anybody where huge mistakes WEREN'T made. But the silly things people are saying now make my jaw drop.

As per my earlier post, it's like NOBODY seems to know what google is or how to use it, or that it's recording their words for playback when they change their story. I don't argue that people can't change their minds about things, but they sure can't say they believed something in 2001 or 2003 when they clearly did not by their own writing or spoken words at the time.

Bush Lied

2005-11-14T09:54:00.000-06:00

...but of course so did everyone else (Kennedy, Clinton, http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2005/11/hardly_seems_fa.htmlGore, et al), so let's not let facts get in the way, m'kay?

Honestly, these people should google themselves once in awhile for a look in the mirror. Of all people, you'd think Gore would understand the internet, since he created it and all.

Last of the Light Brigade

2005-11-12T06:45:00.000-06:00

Veterans Day, or Armistice Day as it was formerly known, or Rememberance Day as it's called up here in Canada, is over now. There are bills currently in front of the US Congress to provide funding for service persons who have faced combat in Iraq. So far, all of them have been voted down in the current cost cutting atmosphere. A hallmark of the GWB administration is that it doesn't mind spending money it doesn't have, as long as the money goes to billionaires who vote for Bush. If you're a basic line grunt, you're pretty much screwed.

As much as I loathe and despise the chickenhawk bastards who started this war, they really aren't unusual in abandoning the troops that created their success. Aside from Harry S Truman, who signed the GI Bill after WWII, it's been pretty common for governments throughout history to stick it to the soldiers who provided the only honor and dignity with which the politicians draped themselves. Jerry Pournelle asked, "if we can afford a trailer and payments to people whose only justification is that they were in the path of a hurricane, why cannot we afford benefits for those who put themselves in harm's way at the call of their country?" Rudyard Kipling put the sentiment to verse.

There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four !

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighen the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.

"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made - "
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy

A Tale of Two Daughters

2005-11-11T00:38:00.000-06:00

Well, three daughters, really, but then we wouldn't have the allusion to the Dickensian twist to the story.

Anyway, for those of you in the US or France, whose Mainstream Media have declined to provide coverages of the events, there are many suburbs of Paris (and Belgium and Denmark, but that will be next month) that are in reality ghettoes of the children and grandchildren of Islamic immigrants from North Africa who have never fit into European society. These communities hit 50% unemployment and survive on socialist welfare payments and the dregs of organized crime. In a situation that has declined over the last several decades the police power of the state has evaporated, until the point was reached where police refused to enter the immigrant ghettoes, and law was not enforced.

For the last week, there have been race riots raging around Paris. Massive gangs of Islamic immigrants have been laying waste to churches and automobiles, and anything they perceive as European. The French press, politically correct and swinging liberal socialist, refer to the mobsters as "youth." No mention of the fact that they are Muslim is allowed, as that might be criticized as racist. Which brings us to our story.

On Friday, November 4th, the mob of rioting Arabs stopped a bus that had the misfortune of being routed through an area taken over by the rioters, and they threw molotov cocktails through the windows of the bus. The majority of passengers fled the bus, save for the bus driver and one disabled female passenger. The "youths" then entered the bus, and poured gasoline over the disabled woman, and set her alight. The bus driver, in an action worthy of the Croix du Guerre, carried the woman off the bus and put out the fire. Now for the fun part.

French channel 3 carried an interview with the two daughters of the woman, who expressed admiration for the bus driver and horror that their mother had been put through this by the Muslim terrorists. Well. Can't have that sort of racist reportage in France, now can we.

The next day, on French channel 2, a correction went out in the form of an interview with the womans daugher, now a Muslim woman by the name of Fadella, who told the world that the noble Islamic freedom fighters had in fact pulled her mother out of the burning bus.

The story is on Islamisation médiatique d'une victime des racailles (+ nouveau clip bonus), with clips to the news videos, with of course the wonderful translation of Babelfish here.

So, for those of you who've been wondering what Dan Rather has been up to since his retirement, there you are.

Happy Birthday USMC

2005-11-10T23:51:00.000-06:00

Well, today is the 230th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps, of which two battalions were formed in 1776 to fight the British in the Revolutionary War. We have mentions at Voice of America, Leatherneck Magazine, (which has reprints of Commandant Hagee's birthday message, along with a copy of Commandant Lejeune's birthday message of 1921,) the official USMC Birthday Ball web page, which doesn't seem to be loading at the moment, and a nice summary in the Marine Heritage section of USMC-press on the first birthday ball.

I met General Robert Barrow, when he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, back at the birthday ball for Marine Barracks, Bermuda, in 1982. He's a tall man, 6'4" or 6'5", and spoke with a deep southern accent. I'd heard he was from Louisiana. He made sure to shake hands with every Marine there that night, and I wish I could find the picture of us together to put up here.

Canceled Iraq Reconstruction Projects

2005-11-09T22:04:00.000-06:00

Political Promises

2005-11-07T11:48:00.000-06:00

I thought I had heard them all. Guess not.

The Abandoned Areas of Europe

2005-11-07T04:52:00.000-06:00

From Paul Belien, at the Brussels Journal;

As Irwin Stelzer pointed out last July when discussing the British reaction to the London bombings: In a war, use the army, rather than police. The latter, however, is unlikely to happen. If the politicians bring in the army they are acknowledging what the policemen, the fire fighters and the ambulance drivers know but what the political and media establishment wants to hide from the people: that there is civil war brewing and that Europe is in for a long period of armed conflict.

Hmpf. A military friend just pointed out that France's army is one quarter Musselmans, second or third generation Algerian, who like the pay and the uniform but are already pretty shitty at following orders. French law doesn't allow them to be disciplined, as that would be racist. I can't imagine a twenty year veteran top sergeant (who enlisted at a time when a French soldier could be beaten to death if he were stupid enough to lip off to a top sergeant) would be happy with the current state of his army. I guess now I know why the French sent so few troops to Iraq for PGW1. Now they can't trust their own army to protect them in a civil war...

This is What Peace Looks Like

2005-11-06T21:19:00.000-06:00

Right here. (hat tip LGF)

When we start seeing more gestures like this and less of the steady stream of hatred out of the usual Palestinian and Arab media organs, I will most definitely be ready to support my government leaning on Israel to make more concessions.

Thing is, I have a strong feeling that if this was a more common attitude among Palestinians, there would be far fewer boys being used as tools by the terror gangs to attack Israel and far less need to shoot a boy with a gun that may or may not be real. There would be no need to pressure Israel to ease checkpoints, carry out fewer raids and so on because Israel would recognize that strong-arm tactics are no longer necessary for their survival.

Israel-haters should try, just once, to understand what Israel has been up against. Look at a map showing the size and positioning of Israel versus the size of the surrounding Arab world that is sworn to its destruction for no real reason other than that it is Jewish. Read something other than Democratic Underground, Daily Kos or the Yellow Times. Read the firsthand reports that are all over the web. Find out what the Palis are doing that is provoking those Israeli responses they so detest. Advocate for a "right of return" of Jewish refugees to their former homes in Arab countries with the same vigor you use in advocating that right for the Palestinians in Israel. The Palis weren't the only ones displaced when Israel was created, you know.

I hope that if I'm ever unlucky enough to be in a similar position, that I would exhibit as much true class as this Pali family is showing.

Does THAT make me a racist too?

Holy Crap.

2005-11-04T20:42:00.000-06:00

The San Fran freakin' Cisco PD comes out against a handgun ban. Put another way, the main law enforcement organ of the heart of communist West Nevada has broken ranks with the lemming knee-jerk do-whatever-is-perceived-to-be-liberal crowd and sided with the NR freakin' A.

I think the four horsemen of the apocalyse must be swinging up into their saddle about now, and the fat lady is running through her warmups. This is something I never, ever, EVER thought I would see. Good sense out of anybody official in a major metropolitan area in California.

Quagmire

2005-11-03T19:44:00.000-06:00

Anybody else been paying attention to the rapidly-developing debacle that is Paris over the last week?

I think it's time for the Chirac administration to step back, take a deep breath, and be honest with itself about whether its ill-considered occupation of France has been worth it. They've suppressed the rightful expression of the French people long enough! How can they expect a downtrodden people to simply accept the hegemony of such an arrogant administration?

The best thing the imperialist colonial "French" government can do at this point is to admit they've made a mistake and immediately begin a strategic withdrawal from France, and let the French people decide what's best for themselves. They don't need these "elected" "leaders" to tell them how best to govern themselves.

Speak truth to power! Power to the People! Flower Power! All those other stupid Leftist slogans!

Why we need to bomb Iran

2005-11-01T11:11:00.000-06:00

I got yer "religion of peace" right here.

UPDATE: It seems that the picures linked above were from a staged photo shoot. I think. English must be someone's second language. Whatever the case, stuff like this goes on in Iran, it's just not often that we get the pictures. I should have known.

Grim Milestone

2005-10-25T20:43:00.000-05:00

The
Media
Need
To
Get
New
Material.

The antiwar left seem mystified that they haven't been able to "wake people up" and energize a large movement to make the war politically impossible. It seems beyond their comprehension that perhaps us pro-war folk have already thought things through, perhaps more in depth than they ever thought to go themselves.

And perhaps we've weighed the probable consequences of continuing on a path of doing little or nothing to stop the crazy madness that has been sweeping the middle east the last couple of decades against the consequences of taking comparatively swift, decisive action. Perhaps we find the latter the low-risk avenue at the moment.

Perhaps we've got enough sense of historical perspective to realize that we haven't come close to losing as many of our finest young people throughout this entire war in two countries as we did many times on a single battlefield in most wars before this one.

Perhaps we look with pride at those purple fingers that the Left finds so amusing/offensive.

Perhaps we're well aware that we can't take down every dictator in the world, but look with pride on the fact that unlike our ever-so-sophisticated counterparts in Europe, we've gone ahead and bodyslammed two, scared one into giving up his arms program and made the rest of the flock very nervous and much more careful.

All that, and the cost is less than a single battle for a single valley or river in France or Germany 60 years ago. Maybe the antiwar people should take a hard look at the product they're trying to sell. Compared to the alternative that we're seeing played out right now as elections happen and terrorists are visibly beaten back militarily and politically, it's not a very good deal to someone who has their eyes open to the other factors involved.

Do I ever reconsider my stance? You bet. Almost every day, I reevaluate whether I should still support this thing. Matters like war demand no less of concerned citizens. But I've never really seen a compelling reason to consider turning around since the first day I sat and watched a tank roll out of Kuwait and into Iraq. After that, the costs of quitting have outweighed the costs of seeing it through by miles.

The fact that we're winning this thing is as plain as the nose on your face. Open your eyes and look. The "milestone" just isn't as grim as it could be if we did nothing. Besides, it's a fake milestone anyway.

Yes, that's right. We have blogs now to point out how full of crap the media's "facts" are. No way will this war end up like Vietnam. The flower-power crowd will have to get a new playbook if they want a chance to see the US lose this one.

The UN, at it again...

2005-10-24T03:50:00.000-05:00

The UN investigation of the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri came out a few days ago, but then something *really* interesting followed it...

The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.

What is interesting here is how this came to light; the UN released the digital form of the report, and MS-Word document, complete with the "track editing change" feature.

Mr Annan had pledged repeatedly through his chief spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, that he would not change a word of the report by Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor. But computer tracking showed that the final edit began at about 11.38am on Thursday — a minute after Herr Mehlis began a meeting with Mr Annan to present his report. The names of Maher al-Assad, General Shawkat and the others were apparently removed at 11.55am, after the meeting ended.

Whose names were removed? The brother and brother in law of Syrian President Bashir Assad, along with the senior members of his cabinet, and General Jamal al-Sayyed, the former head of the General Security Department in Lebanon.

Those darn free spending fiscally irresponsible Democrats....

2005-10-21T03:55:00.000-05:00

Time to Donate to the GOP!

2005-10-20T03:34:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like Tom DeLay is finally going off to break big ones into little ones, and apparently he's the type of sore loser who isn't going to tell anyone in the RNC where the money is if he has to spend the next twenty years as the prison prom date for some low-life Hell's Angel. So all of you neo-Jacobins have to go out and donate more money to get your career white collar criminals re-elected to office so that they can go about ruining America in all the ways they complained about the Democrats doing for the last forty years. So print some up and mail it in!

Ennui

2005-10-13T13:37:00.000-05:00

Hmmm. I suspect Gerard has grown a bit jaded by the environmentalists' rhetoric. I share his feelings, for the most part.

Just Because

2005-10-09T22:37:00.000-05:00

Reminds me of the public pool back home when I was growing up, it does. Not sure why.

Islam's Body Count (since 9/11/2001)

2005-10-09T13:46:00.000-05:00

No, really, it's a religion of peace. Trust me. Keep in mind, that doesn't count the many, many thousands that the Jihad has taken in the decades and centuries before 9/11. It's been going on for as long as Islam.

You know, if people were doing this sort of thing this often and this effectively in the name of a religion I called my own, there is no way on earth I would stay in the fold of that religion. I'd rather be an atheist.

I've mentioned before that I once dated a Muslim when I was in high school. She was a very sweet person, intensely intelligent, and incredibly ambitious. Also very pretty. She was one of the first people I thought of on Sept. 11, 2001 after the second plane hit and I knew it was terrorism. People can condemn me all they want for rushing to the judgement that it was Islamic terrorism, but you know what? I was spot on in that case, insane conspiracy theories about Bush or the Mossad notwithstanding. This girl is the main reason I didn't immediately call for the full deportation of all Muslims from the US and the razing of all mosques, like some that are even more excitable than me. If a life in Islam can produce a young woman like her, it can't be all bad, my reasoning went.

Thanks to a google search on my part and an email exchange a year or two ago, I know that, unsurprisingly, she's now working in a university, and, much more surprisingly to me, like the rest of the blinkered academy she can't seem to see why people have begun to view people who hold to her religion with some suspicion. She virtually ignores the blood that people are spilling in her name and castigates those who wonder if she--or especially her male relatives--might be dangerous after all. If anyone can read the information at the link above and not understand why most people might question why "moderate" Muslims aren't raising loud and frequent objections to what these savages are doing in their name without prodding from some talk show host or newspaper reporter, then I don't know how to have a conversation with them. A cold, hard list like that should at least make clear why people might be worried to all but the most obtuse.

CAIR, the group that's supposed to help smooth over these kinds of things, has had several top executives indicted and convicted on terrorism-related charges. They're clearly on the other side in most cases. The Muslim Student Association has been infiltrated several times and recordings of what they really say in their meetings are freely available on the internet. They're basically recruiting for the other side. Pointing these things out will get you called a "racist", never mind that it's all very true, very pertinent, and Islam is not a "race" so much as it seems to be a mental disorder waiting to happen to anybody who opens their mind wide enough for their brain to fall out.

These alphabet-soup Muslim groups claim to have been spreading the message that these maniacs don't represent them, but you know what? I have been looking, and I have not seen one billboard condemning any act of Islamic terrorism anywhere I've went in 4 years. Not one. I've seen many, many billboards bearing anti-Bush (or other Republican figures) messages. Not one against the people who we have documented evidence are slaughtering thousands a year, including their own people. Whenever you do see or hear a Muslim condemn these murderers, it's universally followed by "but" or "however" and then a laundry list of real or imagined sins of America, the Bush administration, it's foreign policy, etc. Bleah. I can't take anymore.

Too many cases have cropped up of American Muslims saying and doing things that a couple of decades ago would have been considered treason by 90% of the population. Now they get a pass due to the vile and disgusting disease call Political Correctness that seems to have infected the Academy and has now spread to a large portion of the population at large.

I'm sorry, but that girl's influence on my opinions about Islam is weakening with each innocent person (including Muslims themselves) that die at the hands of freaks proclaiming that they are doing it in the name of Islam while these "moderates" allow the chirping crickets to voice their only objections.

If this continues, it will be a very, very ugly time to be a Muslim in the West, and particularly in the US and Australia, where the PC madness hasn't gotten as deep a hold on people as it seems to have gotten in Europe, Canada and elsewhere.

I'll close my little screed with 2 predictions: over 20 people and maybe many more will die this week due to the deliberate actions of some maniac(s) quoting from the Islamic scripture and claiming they are killing those people in the name of Islam. Nobody will be killed this week by some maniac(s) quoting from the Christian scripture and claiming they are killing in the name of Christ.

Which prediction do you think will be more accurate at the end of the week?

UPDATE: More reason to suspect American Muslims.

New Project

2005-10-05T23:47:00.000-05:00

I've begun another blog, which you can find here. I don't know if it will cut into my writing on this blog, but I haven't had the political bug much lately, as you can tell.

I was a huge booster of Bush, but that was only because the alternative scared the hell out of me. Bush was an average candidate at best in retrospect, and I'm beginning to think below average. I'm still glad he was president during and after 9/11 because I don't see any Democrats in the presidential field that would have invaded Afghanistan, and if any Democrat was in power, not only would Saddam Hussein still be in power but there would be zero chance of him ever leaving power so long as the Dems were running things. I honestly believe this was the only way. Witness how much Clinton did to get Hussein out. Lob a few missiles at him and forget about it. Same for Bin Laden. At least now Bin Laden is hiding.

But now the Repubs have had control of all branches of government for long enough to make a difference in spending and other issues, and they've proven to be as bad or worse than the Dems at managing our pocketbook. Some of them have put forward a social conservative agenda, but haven't addressed the abortion issue in any meaningful way, which is the only socially-conservative position I have any strong feelings about.

My political apathy is growing, and I just can't get excited about it lately. That might change, but until it does I'm not likely to be an every-day (or even every-week) poster.

The new site is a much more personal endeavor, and you're welcome to stop by. It's quite literally a family site, so I'll tolerate less there in the way of snide remarks, cussing and so forth than I would here.

I'm also going to take more care in posting there than I have here...it's a little scary to actually apply yourself. I've just been knocking posts off the cuff here with little or no editing or rewriting, so it's no big deal if the finished product sucks. After all, no real effort was put into it. There, if it sucks, it was closer to the best I could do, and it's not a good feeling when you lay an egg in that situation. Add in the fact that it will usually be more of a storytelling style and the idea of actually trying to build a more substantial readership, and it's a different style from anything I've tried before. Could be fun. Could suck. Stop on by and find out.

Delay Indicted

2005-09-28T12:01:00.000-05:00

I have to say I've become less entranced with Delay every time I read about him. Now this.

I can hear the left-wing screeching from here. Hold on to your hats, ladies, it's gonna get really ugly.

I bet a dollar this will be used by left-wing screwballs to call for Bush's impeachment within the hour (never mind that Bush apparently has nothing to do with it).

Ah, isn't campain finance reform WONDERFUL? They should ditch any and all campaign finance laws except to require full transparency. All political donors named individually by amount, and all ads show prominently who paid for it. If people know who the messenger is, they can make their own adjustments as to how much credence to give it.

Very, Very Cool

2005-09-28T11:48:00.000-05:00

I always wondered when this would happen.

Mark Steyn Loves Our Fat Stupid American Asses

2005-09-25T05:29:00.000-05:00

Our flag waving friend has an admirerer who remembers him well...

Revenge of the Nerds

2005-09-23T11:52:00.000-05:00

I have to say that this is the sort of thing I would have had a lot of fun doing in college. Heck, I'd have fun doing it today. Pretty sad, when you think about it...but I wouldn't trade those days for anything....as long as they're in the past, that is. You can only live on Ramen noodles, pizza and coke for so long before you have to move on to actual adulthood, I guess.

Global Warming on Mars

2005-09-21T10:01:00.000-05:00

If we had just signed off on Kyoto and destroyed our economy, this wouldn't be a problem, right?

A New Pop Culture Phrase is Born

2005-09-21T09:45:00.000-05:00

And a General has earned his stripes.

I hope every reporter who repeatedly peppers a public official with variations of the same question, over and over, is met with the reply:

"You're stuck on stupid. I'm not going to answer that question."

As an aside, Honore's words and the way he says them are extremely politically incorrect, which is why I love the man, but more than that, he gives me confidence that Rita won't catch anybody off-guard. He's a man with a plan.

Weird Stuff

2005-09-16T22:49:00.000-05:00

Somthing's going on. I don't like the looks of this AT ALL.

Lots of Lying

2005-09-14T14:22:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, I was watching news with my folks, and we were treated to a tearful tirade by a guy in New Orleans claiming to be angry with the federal government for not coming to their aid sooner. Nothing wrong with that in principle. I'd probably be frustrated too, until I realized that it was the New Orleans mayor who didn't organize anything and the Louisiana governor who blocked the aid that I should be mad at.

But okay, the guy was mad. And he wailed and gnashed his teeth and trotted out a sob story about how his buddy's mom was waiting to be rescued and eventually died.

The bastard was lying.

But at least he's a pretty good actor. Hollywood might be interested in his performance. I thought it was a little over the top as I was watching, and I for damned sure won't buy it now.

Moral Question

2005-09-12T11:24:00.000-05:00

The "racism" silliness emanating from the Left regarding the New Orleans tragedy is pretty dumb. Are there racists? Yes, of course. Are they happy so many blacks are dead or in trouble? Undoubtedly some of them are. Do most of the donations to the cause of helping these people have stamped on them "for aid to white people only"? I doubt it, but I guess I can't say for sure. Is there a giant conspiracy among state, local and federal authorities to withhold aid? Heh. Moonbat. They can't seem to even find their own heads with both hands and a map.

So I would direct a question to the left, because I had no idea it was so easy to be a racist. I thought you had to hate people of other races because they were of the race they were, and I don't hate anybody for that reason that I can think of. However, I DID really love a lot of the music of White Lion in the 80s. So my question is this: am I damned to the special corner of hell reserved for those labeled "racist"? I mean, the implied racism is pretty evident in a band that uses "white" in its title, right?

Because though it's probably considered pretty unhip by many musical types, I really did dig "Wait", "Sweet Little Lovin'", "When the Children Cry", etc.

Just askin', is all.

First Hand Reports

2005-09-10T04:13:00.000-05:00

A friend sent me this link to a first hand report of people trying to survive New Orleans.

Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those
families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going
to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us"
had an ominous tone to it.

Not all stories out of New Orleans are bad. Some authorities were willing to help people. If the people were willing to play ball, as it were.

"[The authorities] said to them, 'Well, show us what you've got' – doing signs for them to lift their T-shirts up. The girls said no, and [the rescuers] said 'well fine,' and motored off down the road in their motorboat. That's the sort of help we had from the authorities," he said.

I'm still trying to find the link to the video footage of the police looting a Wal-Mart someone had shown me, but the Times-Picayune mentions it here...

"The police got all the best stuff. They're crookeder than us," one man said. Most officers, though, simply stood by powerless against the tide of law breakers.

I remember seeing an A&E story on "American Justice" about the New Orleans police force, and an interview with a convenience store clerk who reported a robbery to the police, but couldn't describe the robbers as one of them was the partner of the responding officer. The show concluded with the death sentence of an NOPD officer who had a woman, a mother of three, executed for filing a complaint because she had witnessed him pistol whipping someone. He was only caught because the FBI had wiretapped his phones in an investigation of his drug racketeering.

Deep Thoughts

2005-09-05T22:28:00.000-05:00

Seriously. Think about some of this stuff, but don't start reading unless you have some time. This essay DESERVES your time, whether you're a fascist warmonger like me or a pinko fruitcake like Ben.

Pinko fruitcake Ben here, providing a link to the War Nerd's latest essay. Unlike Whittle, I'd put GWB firmly in the "pink" tribe for his steadfast refusal to recognize that Iraqis aren't going to be middle class white Republicans just to make GWB look good. GWB's entire administration is based upon Whittle's pink motto, "EVERYBODY IS SPECIAL." From opening the floodgates of illegal immigration to the NO CHILD GETS AHEAD laws GWB is as pink as pink can be.

Loss and Sorrow

2005-09-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

I know it's trivial compared to what's been going on in New Orleans, but everybody else is covering that to death, and I've got a smaller, more personal pain that I'm bearing today and I need to write it out, if only for myself.

I had a wonderful dog. He was a giant of a beast, but gentle as a summer rain unless someone threatened one of his people. He loved stuffed toys, rawhide, being brushed and he LOVED it when I would clean the crud out of his ears with q-tips. He loved walking with me, and we explored the world together for over 7 years. He was one of the best friends I ever had, and for sure the best dog I ever knew.

This morning my friend went to wherever our beloved pets go when they die. He had reached the point where he couldn't make it down the deck steps to pee. He was doing well last spring, but it's been a pretty steep slide over the summer, and this morning we called the vet out to help him go easily.

He's now laying in his freshly-dug grave (with two of his stuffed animals), and I'm only waiting for his "mom" to get home so we can bury him together. She has come to love him, and he her, almost as much as me. It was a pleasure to know such a fine animal, and I have a hard time picturing myself ever finding a better companion.

But I won't quit trying. I've done this before. There's life after Bo. It just doesn't feel like it right now...but I still have one dog, and when her time comes, there'll be another. There always will be, because I'm cursed with a love of dogs...a curse I'm happy to bear even now during the worst part.

Bo: I'll miss you friend. I hope we'll meet again, and if we do, it will be a happy day indeed. Until then, I'll remember the good times and ignore the times you shook your head and splattered the wall with slobber. Slobber cleans off. Instead, I'll remember the time you discovered the rabbit in the back yard and almost killed yourself chasing him. I'll remember the time you bounded over a 4-foot fence from a sitting position when you spotted a squirrel and decided it needed to die. I'll remember the time you got your foreleg stuck in the fence gate and I had to leap oever it to rescue you before you broke it. I'll remember the first time I watched a 150 pound monster running toward me from ground level. I'll remember the times you jumped in to catch a fish I was trying to land. I'll remember the time I took you to the Renaissance Festival and you drew a bigger crowd than the jugglers, played with a hundred kids and ate until even you couldn't eat any more. I'll remember a hundred other times that you made me laugh and cry. I'll keep you in my heart and wherever I go, you'll be right there beside me.

Love you, monsterdog.

UPDATE: It would be nice if this story were actually true. That would be a GLORIOUS day.

Virus vs. Weeds

2005-08-26T16:08:00.000-05:00

Some people compare terrorism to a virus. It's not a bad comparison, but for awhile now I've been thinking of both the Iraq "insurgency" (read: murdering and raping whenever they can) and the similar problem of proliferating terrorism in terms of a problem I've been having that's far more mundane, but in essence sets me a task comparable to that of the free world in eradicating terrorism.

You see, I moved into a new house recently. It's a great house in most of the particulars, including the grounds. The one major problem that has become the object of my own personal jihad is the thistle, cockleburr and other assorted noxious, #*)(*#$&@)(*&!!! pests of the flora variety.

I started out by going around and pulling the things out by the roots. They were 6+ feet tall when we closed, across the entire yard. I suspect the dirt they used around the foundations when filling in was contaminated with thistle seed, but whatever the case the stuff was thick. Sort of like Iraq and its environs before the invasion. Lots of bad guys from wall to wall, and they pretty much had the run of the place. Oh, sure, Europe and others tut-tutted, but they weren't going to be bothered with cleaning it up. Wasn't their problem. My neighbors called the city, too, but nothing got done really.

Then I (the marines) came in. I had my weapons, like gloves (body armor), muscle (tanks) and roundup (munitions). I first went across the entire yard and pulled out the major bad boys until there was more grass than thistle (invaded and kicked the Baathists out of power). Then I've continued to pick and/or roundup every thistle I see on a near-daily basis (grind down the insurgency).

I (the marines) can't quit, though. If I (the marines) quit now and pack it in, there are still a few shoots (baathists) that can multiply and grow out of control. However, if I (the marines) keep at it long enough, there will be a point where there are no shoots (terrorists) left to keep surprising me (the marines).

Of course, even if you eradicate weeds (terrorists) entirely from your yard and the area around it (Iraq and surrounding area), it can blow back in on the wind. All it needs is fertile ground (non-hostile environment), water (money), time, and the will to live and grow. But if you keep at it long enough to fully eradicate the problem, any recurrence from the vagaries of the wind tends to be minor and is fairly easily controlled if you stay on it and don't give it a chance to develop a root system.

Yeah. I like that. I'm a ~~terrorist~~ weed killer.

Why You Shouldn't Trust MSM

2005-08-26T11:18:00.000-05:00

At least without checking the blogs first.

I especially like Arthur's link to the perfect example of why reporters and newspaper editors are such lying, two-faced skunk-weasels:

Colonel Thomas Spoehr is annoyed with New York Times reporter Michael Moss, for what I think is a good reason.

Spoehr is the director of materiel for the Army staff. He had a good news story to tell Moss, which Moss converted into a bad news story.

Here is the story as Spoehr tells it:

Last year, senior leaders of the Army became aware of technological developments which make it possible to improve the "Interceptor" body armor worn by our troops.

Only read the rest if you're a lefty moonbat or you don't have health issues that will be negatively affected by high blood pressure. The military has done some bad things in its time, but it also has a lot of nasty tricks played on it by the media.

It makes me categorically disbelieve ANY of the nasty things the media has said about it in the past. As of right now, I refuse to believe, hollywood notwithstanding, that there were widespread incidents of "destroying the village to save it", rapes, murders, etc. in Vietnam. The only major incident I know of personally that has been verified by somebody other than a dork sitting in the air conditioning of a hotel is My Lai. As far as I'm concerned, until somebody other than a media type, or somebody depending on media types for their info can show me different, the rest of the media's storyline on Vietnam is a load of crap, and all of it put together is not worth the info I got once from a man who was a sniper there. Horse's mouth is the only way to go when you can get it. And that's a large part of what blogs are about.

UPDATE: And another one from the "Paper of Record". There's no depth too low for the NYT, apparently. Are they trying to patent the Dowdification process or something?

A Can of Worms That Needs Opening

2005-08-25T11:53:00.000-05:00

Get a load of the guy the Turks found:

The Turkish interrogators in Istanbul's high-security prison wanted to be polite; they wanted to show respect for Islam. They offered their prisoner, an Islamist named Luai Sakra, 31, a chance to pray during a pause in questioning.

They'd done the same thing with earlier suspects. The move was supposed to establish trust.

But this prisoner reacted a bit differently. "I don't pray," Sakra answered politely, "and I like alcohol." When the baffled officials didn't want to believe him, he elaborated: "Especially whiskey and wine."

It wasn't the only surprise the Syrian-born suspect presented to investigators. Turkish anti-terror officials held the suspected al-Qaida member for four days. Just after his arrest two weeks ago, Sakra admitted to planning strikes against Israeli cruise ships; he hoarded 750 kilograms of explosives for the purpose. When some of those explosives went up in flames in his Antalya apartment, he fled.

What Sakra told officials during his interrogation suggests a deep jihadist career. The Syrian, who knows weapons as well as he knows his whiskey and wine, has obviously played a far more important role in the terrorist underground than officials first suspected. According to his own testimony, he knew about the London bombings before they happened, and supported the pilots on 9/11.

They say many of the biggest terrorists are the ones you don't hear much about. My antennae are twitching with this one.

Top Causes of Military Fatalities in Iraq

2005-08-24T09:32:00.000-05:00

Another Reason Why They Hate Us

2005-08-24T08:40:00.000-05:00

We hold them accountable for their actions.

An interesting article on the minds of suicide bombers... a quote from Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a psychiatrist who works in a British prison;

For example, a Muslim rapist I know wanted to become a suicide bomber, having become convinced that the West was rotten to the core, deficient in moral worth, because it took the word of a mere woman against his.

A Valid Criticism

2005-08-23T13:43:00.000-05:00

Here's a good post by a Saudi criticizing Bush (and Blair and friends). It's the first such post I've seen of its type that had me nodding my head in agreement at times. I don't buy the tired old "Bush lied about WMD" bit (see other posts in this blog) but here's a part that's right on the mark:

Let me see if I've got this right. You see, I live in a country where everything is based on the Koran, it's ruled more by Imams and Religious Policemen than by the nominal "King"; to see what that means in practice, just keep on reading this blog to find out. To the south is Yemen, where the standard fashion accessory is the AK47, and it makes the Wild West look like the Regency Tea Rooms in Bath, England. To the east is a collection of minor Sheikdoms that are relatively liberal, but too small to have any influence. Further east we've got Pakistan that is only prevented from becoming an Islamic Republic by the will-power of its lonely President, and Afghanistan, say no more. To the north-east we've got Iran, with a new super-conservative-Muslim President who's going to make his own nuclear weapon, which he'll no doubt call "Allah's Bomb".

And now, Messrs B, B and B, you're going to allow the previously-secular Iraq, our northern neighbour, to turn into yet another Islamic Republic paradise. And where will they get their inspiration from? From the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, of course. They'll feed off us, and we'll feed off them, in a never-ending competition to be the nastiest, most repressive, most intolerant, and most stupid theocracy in the entire world.

Yes.

Yesterday I wrote a note to the state department letting my displeasure at their performance in this Iraq constitution matter be known in terms pungent enough that I had to tone down the draft before sending so it had some chance of not being dismissed as a crank. I suggest anyone who reads this do the same.

UPDATE: forgot link.

Angry Woman

2005-08-23T11:01:00.000-05:00

Juan Cole is a moron, not to put too fine a point on it. He hates the country that protects him, his "intellectual" arguments lack intellect, and I have no idea how our university system ever got so messed up as to offer tenure to a guy like this. When I was an undergrad, most of my fellow students could frame a better argument.

Well, he messed up. Bad. You'll see. You may have heard of the murder of Steven Vincent in Iraq. He was one of the select few anti-idiotarian journalists covering events there; one of the few with guts enough to get out of his hotel and go around talking to Iraqis and reporting what's actually going on.

This was unacceptable to Cole, who went on the attack in a manner of which high-school gossip columnist Maureen Dowd would be most proud:

Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man's honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.

Vincent's wife responds with claws unsheathed:

Mr. Cole -
(I refuse to call you professor, because that would ennoble you. And please change the name of your blog to "Uninformed Comment", because that is precisely what the above paragraph is.)

I would like to refute this shameful post against a dead man who can no longer defend himself against your scurrilous accusations, a dead man who also happened to be my husband. Steven Vincent and I were together for 23 years, married for 13 of them, and I think I know him a wee bit better than you do.

...

Yes, Steven was aggressive in criticizing what he saw around him and did not like. It's called courage, and it happens to be a tradition in the history of this country. Without this tradition there would have been no Revolutionary War, no Civil War, no civil rights movement, no a lot of things that America can be proud of. He had made many friends in Iraq, and was afraid for them if the religious fundamentalists were given the country to run under shari'a. You may dismiss that as naive, simplistic, foolish, but I say to you, as you sit safely in your ivory tower in Michigan with nothing threatening your comfy, tenured existence, that you should be ashamed at the depths to which you have sunk by libeling Steven and Nour. They were on the front lines, risking all, in an attempt to call attention to the growing storm threatening to overwhelm a fragile and fledgling experiment in democracy, trying to get the world to see that all was not right in Iraq. And for their efforts, Steven is dead and Nour is recuperating with three bullet wound in her back. Yes, that's right - the "honorable" men who abducted them, after binding them, holding them captive and beating them, set them free, told them to run - and then shot them both in the back. I've seen the autopsy report.

Oh, dear lord, READ IT ALL. I've rarely seen a bigger hole ripped in a self-satisfied, sanctimonious and odious academic. A delicious sight to behold. My deepest sympathies, as well as my profound respect, go to Mrs. Lisa Ramaci-Vincent, who is clearly a lady to contend with even as she grieves.

It's a Real Thing, People

2005-08-22T10:24:00.000-05:00

Unreal. I became captivated with the idea of a space elevator years ago when I read Red Mars (and green and blue afterwards). It never fails when I mention this idea to people...they laugh at me and claim I'm making it up.

It's real, people:

Rockets are getting us nowhere fast. Since the dawn of the space age, the way we get into space hasn't changed: we spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a rocket whose fundamental operating principle is a controlled chemical explosion. We need something better, and that something is a space elevator—a superstrong, lightweight cable stretching 100 000 kilometers from Earth's surface to a counterweight in space. Roomy elevator cars powered by electricity would speed along the cable. For a fraction of the cost, risk, and complexity of today's rocket boosters, people and cargo would be whisked into space in relative comfort and safety.

Read the article. This is a bonafide idea that actual people are working on...current rocket technology should be confined to weapons systems and space demolition. I've begun to believe that a REAL oil shock, like $200 per barrel, might finally get people's heads out of their rears and thinking about things like this, and better batteries, and how to convert solar energy to hydrogen better and so forth.

It's time to take the next step as a species and figure out how we're going to sustain the kind of life we want. Oil won't do that forever, and the environmentalists aren't helping anybody or anything with their current insanity. Ideas like this need to be thought through and, when we get it figured out, exploited to their fullest potential. The best is yet to come.

Movie Studio Recession

2005-08-20T20:33:00.000-05:00

Well, "recession" is probably overstating the case, but they're cutting back on the advertising:

In a surprising role reversal, Hollywood is about to deliver bad news to the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and, to a lesser extent, other big-city dailies around the country. Every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in those papers because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, “older and elitist” compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.

Wait, it gets worse: I’ve learned that at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.

This news couldn’t occur at a worse time for the LAT and NYT, which both receive the lion’s share of those very showy $100,000-plus full-page after full-page movie display ads. At Spring Street, editor Dean Baquet just moved into the power office on Monday, and publisher Jeff Johnson only took over his hot seat on June 1. In Times Square, culture editor Sam Sifton has barely put his stamp on the section since assuming the post in May. Now comes a body blow to their beefed-up cultural coverage.

Okay, my circuits are overloading with instantly-appearing ideas about why this might be.

First, the LAT and NYT suck. I'm sure there's a few head-in-the-sand die-hard liberals who love their coverage. They have a 0% slice of the conservative pie except for bloggers who love to slice and dice their editorials and point out how their editorials often directly contradict their news sections. For God's sake, the NYT has Maureen Dowd and Paul freakin' Krugman as their flagship columnists.

Next, have you seen a theater marquis in the last couple of years? It looks like a cross between the TV rerun lineup I used to watch when I got home from grade school and the lineup I got to watch on Saturday mornings. Bewitched, Scooby Doo (2 times!), Starsky & Hutch, Dukes of Hazzard, Brady Bunch (again twice!) and the list rolls on. You know it's only a matter of time before Jessica Simpson will star in I Dream of Jeanie. With that kind of lineup, old DVDs of cheesy Sci-Fi and Horror flicks a la Mystery Science Theater start looking really like a really competitive option for my entertainment dollar. Where's the new When Harry Met Sally? What happened to the glory days of movies that you hadn't already seen before they wrote the script?

I'm not surprised that an industry whose cartoons far surpass their regular product is having trouble coming up with ad money. Not at all.

UPDATE: Oh, holy crap, I just checked on a hunch. Jessica will be getting a call if she hasn't already, most likely.

Gas Lines in China

2005-08-18T09:19:00.000-05:00

GatewayPundit has the details with photos.

I guess there's a little trouble in the workers' paradise. Though, one of the commenters draws a historical comparison that I hadn't really considered and that bears careful watching:

If I recall history correctly, one of Japan's main motivations for its aggression that promulgated WWII in the Pacific was grabbing oil and gas fields to meet the needs of its energy-starved nation. Today we have China's booming economy leading to energy demands that it cannot meet. Add the concept that one way to quell internal unrest is to foster patriotism by channeling your country's emotions and energy against some perceived foreign threat, as Iran did against "The Great Satan" to counter dissatisfaction with the mullahs, and you have an increasingly toxic situation on the mainland. There have been recent stories about China's dramatic military build-up, some of which apparently caught U.S. China-watchers by surprise. It makes you wonder what they're up to.

Just a cautionary thought. Not a very pleasant one, though.

Wow. How do you suppose the antiwar crowd would react if it wasn't just Over There? Bombers over Honolulu? Or LA? That prospect sort of makes the Iraq thing look like an insignificant skirmish.

Okay, Which Way Is It?

2005-08-17T20:15:00.000-05:00

If the earlier reports were right about that Brazilian that got shot dead on the London Underground shortly after the bombings, then I'm glad he's dead. If this report is correct, then I hope whatever cop(s) shot him are convicted and spend the rest of their lives with huge, violent gay guys that they personally put in the clink.

It's hard to know which version is the correct one. I don't put a lot of faith in British news organizations of course, especially when they get a whiff of something that they might be able to twist into racism, but there seems to be a very clear-cut difference between the two versions of this story. I'd like to see the footage they're talking about, hear the police response, and judge for myself.

I really don't trust ANY media to do my thinking for me anymore. I wish they'd stop trying to "frame the issue" and just give me the goddamn facts already.

Soldier's Riposte

2005-08-17T11:07:00.000-05:00

A U.S. soldier enlightens Matt Lauer:

LAUER: Don't get me wrong, I think you're probably telling the truth, but there might be a lot of people at home wondering how that might be possible with the conditions you're facing and with the insurgent attacks you're facing... What would you say to people who doubt that morale could be that high?

CAPTAIN SHERMAN POWELL: Well sir, I'd tell you, if I got my news from the newspapers I'd be pretty depressed as well.

This is a theme I keep seeing over and over and over again, over the last couple of YEARS. The only reason I know anything AT ALL about afghanistan other than the occasional bomb exploding or helicopter being shot down is because of Chrenkoff with his wonderful Afghanistan series and those like him.

The blogosphere, or at least the Right side of it, is alive with reports of great things happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. You don't read or hear boo about any of that in the MSM. And yet I overheard a couple of people I don't even know the other day talking about how well it's going in Iraq (one of them apparently had a relative or friend serving there) and why don't they see or hear any of the great things in the news that they hear regularly from the horse's mouth?

The media managed to lose for us the only war we've ever really lost ("the war is now unwinnable"). That worked well when the media wanted us to lose and there weren't inconvenient things like cell phones and blogs to muddy the waters and spoil their plans. This time around, it's not going to their plan, and I get the feeling they don't like it or know what to do about it.

I was screaming for war in the case of Afghanistan. Lefty straw-men about 9/11 and WMD aside, I was foursquare behind war against the old Iraq regime on other grounds (though I still haven't ruled out a Hussein connection with either 9/11 OR WMD, preferring to let history tell its own tale). As far as I'm concerned, withdrawal is not an option until the job is done, and then it becomes job one. NOT BEFORE. Or the 1800+ brave men that have died in that conflict sacrificed everything for nothing.

One other note: these jihadis know the smell of things like fear and defeat. If they smell it on us, you'd better not get any ideas about just pulling up stakes in Iraq and our troops coming home to live happily ever after. There will be a short time of regrouping and resupplying, and then the bombs will start in earnest, only this time they will blow up grandma while she's waiting for a bus in Phoenix, or little Billy and all his classmates riding a schoolbus in Dubuque, or Linda and a two hundred others as she's riding the commuter train from Washington to New York.

Our defenses against this kind of thing are mostly a joke, given the PC atmosphere that prevails right now (that'll change with the first bombs and the Muslims that aren't slaughtered by "vigilantes" will be rounded up and detained or deported, but the first bombs will succeed). The ONLY thing that has prevented that sort of thing so far is that there is a perfectly good place in their own backyard to go and blow themselves up.

Take away that, and they'll be coming here sooner or later. Unless we thrash them, and they are seen by the world to be thrashed and are either dead or know themselves to be thrashed. That's our hope, and we're winning. No turning back now.

What the Hell?

2005-08-15T16:04:00.000-05:00

Wow.

250 MPG

2005-08-13T23:48:00.000-05:00

On balance, I'm not sure whether this report gives such great news as far as environmentalists are concerned. I don't know enough about the relative efficiencies of electric generation of our mostly-coal-fired power plants and internal combustion engines like we use in our cars (including hybrids). But I know one thing: we don't get coal from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other terror-supporting nations. We have plenty of that here, and I'm guessing the coal industry would appreciate the business much more than the parasitic oil ticks that have battened on to us.

As soon as I can afford it (about a year or two, if the plan works out), I'm going to get one of those hybrids and figure out how this guy rigged his car to be able to plug it in, and then I'm going to religiously plug it in EVERY SINGLE night. It's time for each of us to do WHATEVER we can to stop shipping our hard-earned cash to the middle east. Maybe we'll suddenly see a drop in the seemingly endless amount of financial support on the part of religious and political zealots for those who are killing our troops. Plus, I'm guessing it would be a net gain on my pocketbook. I can get behind that as well.

Tears

2005-08-13T23:20:00.000-05:00

If you aren't already aware, selected official recordings of the police/fire dispatcher and field units on the moring of 9/11 has been released. I just finished listening to them, and I have tears on my cheeks.

In the chain of events that followed 9/11, the news media put an almost immediate and voluntary blackout on the audio and video recordings of that horrible morning. That's the only way they could smoke-screen the public while putting their full effort behind pressuring our leaders not to respond except to send grief counsellors to the victims' families and wonder loudly and frequently why they hate us.

Many have argued (without evidence) that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. They may or may not be right. It's immaterial. In at least one important and undeniable respect, Iraq had EVERYTHING to do with 9/11...9/11 showed us what happens when we ignore our enemies and their threats. We ignored Bin Laden and the towers fell, almost bringing our whole economy with them. We had been ignoring Hussein's repeated threats and aggression against the enforcers of the no-fly zones in Iraq. What could they have done if they had had, as every intelligence agency in the world was on record as believing, weapons that could not only destroy a couple of buildings but an entire portion of the city? Millions dead in Manhatten alone.

But my beef right now is with the media. How come we never see even a fleeting glimpse of footage from that morning on the news? Why do I have to go to the internet when I want to be reminded of why it's necessary that we sacrifice our young men and women in places like Afghanistan?

9/11 changed the way I look at the world. I was already moving from liberal to conservative...9/11 just accelerated that process for me. But I was NEVER a foreign policy hawk...quite the opposite. That was because I had no idea that people could want to do such harm to innocent people. Note that in the case of 9/11, it's not that they were aiming for Bush or the pentagon and missed. I would almost even understand the attack against the Pentagon if it weren't for all the innocent people who died on the plane. But those cowards couldn't attack the people they most wanted dead, so they simply killed whoever they could. Like janitors, and waiters, and businessmen, and keyboard jockeys not unlike myself whose vicious crime against Islam was that they showed up for work on time that morning.

And I'm REALLY tired of hearing from people like Bill Maher how "brave" these whackos were/are. They're cowards. They believe the only SURE way to paradise is to kill themselves for their twisted cause. They couldn't live good lives and love people and help people and do the hard work it takes to be the kind of person God would admit into his Presence. No, it's far easier just to learn how to fly a plane, force your way into a cockpit and kill yourself in a completely pain-free way.

They were cowards. Suicide bombers in Iraq, Israel and elsewhere are cowards in exactly the same way. And they won't win in the long run, but they'll cause others a lot of pain and grief before their "cause" is shown to be stupid and they are defeated by men of real courage and honor.

And for that I hate them as I hate no other person living or dead. On the very small chance that I should die in a terrorist attack, I pray to God He gives me a chance to make at least one of them suffer for his cowardice before I die. It's the only way I can conceive of enjoying hurting or killing another human.

I hate them for making me feel that way, too. I always had thought I was better than that. I guess I'm not after all.

Progress in the Middle East

2005-08-11T08:44:00.000-05:00

Usually when you hear news from Palestine/Israel, it's bus bombings or threats of them by Hamas. You occasionally hear Israel making claims that this or that Arab country is scheming against them, which of course they are. There's the odd incursion by Israel into Lebanese or Syrian airspace and once in awhile there's even a Jewish terrorist who does something stupid.

But you don't really hear things like this:

Palestinians abandoned a quest to build the world’s longest sandwich on Wednesday after health officials told them their 750-metre construction risked rotting in the West Bank summer sun.

Hundreds of volunteers spread a 750-metre bun on tables along a dusty roadside in the West Bank city of Jenin, long a hotspot of Israeli-Palestinian violence. But the attempt was called off for health reasons before volunteers got a chance to add 180 kg of mortadella meat, 350 kg of tomatoes and 250 kg of green peppers.

You know August is a slow news month when you get stories like this from the Middle East. And it's DEFINITELY a sign of progress when something goes wrong for the Palestinians and you hear a Pali say something like "There must be a conspiracy against us by other competitors" instead of "It was the Jeeeewwwwwwwwwssssssss!!!!"

Open Wide and Say "Ah..."

2005-07-26T22:41:00.000-05:00

The next time you visit the website of Microsoft Corp. to download some software, be prepared to let the world's biggest software company have a look inside your computer.

Bill Gates takes one more step on the road to becoming the next James Bond villain. The above quote is from the story Bill Gates Will Be Frisking You over at our friends at The Globe and Mail. Apparently receiving an update to the Windows operating system will now allow Microsoft to examine your computer for a legitimate copy of Windows... as well as what other software you're using and what data you're sending to peripherals such as your printer.

Linux, anyone?

When We Were Safe

2005-07-25T09:27:00.000-05:00

The Saudi Bomb

2005-07-23T07:39:00.000-05:00

Amir Mir over at Asia Times Online has a concise yet in depth summation of Middle East Islamist footsies in regards to the proliferation and exchange of nuclear weapons information, technology and materials.

Friday Joke

2005-07-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

Well, *I* think it's funny.

Is a Tar Baby metaphor politically incorrect?

2005-07-21T04:13:00.000-05:00

Quite a bit is starting to stick to Bush. He's not Teflon Ronny, ya know. He only won re-election because the Democratic Party chose to run an admitted traitor who abandoned the people he served with in combat because it was popular with hippies to do so at the time; at the time of election the US had men and women in harm's way. I'd like to think of that as the deciding factor, rather than that the American people were satisfied with GWB's first four years.

Ah, but the second term, that's what we're in now. The crows are coming home to roost, and Bush's second term is starting to look a lot like Nixon's second term. GWB told a *lot* of lies to get to the boxed in inescapable no-win scenario he's led us into, and the Liberal Main Stream Media (those guys who took down Clinton for the GOP) is just starting to clue in that there just *might* be a story in all that.

The real story is that GWB and his administration are extremely competent and can do anything they want. Unfortunately what they want are a list of self contradictory and mutually exclusive goals, eg:

Stop Islamist Terrorist Attacks by destroying the enemies of the Islamists and turning over formerly secularist Arab nations to them.
Win over the Muslim world by turning the US State Department into Likud's sock puppet.
Prevent domestic terrorism by increasing Islamist immigration to the US, as this will make them like us.
Defeat the armies of muslim nations with a payroll-cutting minimalist military, then insist that this marginal force be used for occupation of conquered muslim nations.
Declare victory prior to counter insurgency phase of war.
Not listen to any "defeatists" in the Pentagon who mention counter insurgency war.
Remove all political control and stability in occupied regions, to be replaced with democratic elections, so that there will be no counter insurgency.
Tell the counter insurgents that there is no counter insurgency, then pay them off, but only when they kill US troops, to discourage such behavior.
Give the counter insurgency at least six months notice of attacks on their strongholds so that their leaders can move their headquarters with minimal disruption of their CI activities.
Blame counter insurgency on a foreigner with Al Qaeda connections but no real connection to any counter insurgent forces.
Quickly forget any previous comments about Weapons of Mass Destruction or Saddam Hussein's connection to the 9-11 atrocity.
Ignore the fact that the Blueprint to Victory removes a contained Saddam Hussein and replaces him with an Islamist nuclear super state reaching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Himalayas.

Of course that's just the PGW2 stuff that's been pissing me off. I'm also angered by the Bush Administration's goal of turning America into a corporate feudalist state with no middle class, just a plutocracy and a mass of cheap immigrant labor, be it from Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia or even Europe 200 years ago.

Spaghetti on the Wall

2005-07-20T11:37:00.000-05:00

Absolutely none of it has stuck to Bush, but not for lack of trying. In the last election the American voters proved it wouldn't work, but they're still trying.

Amazing how many of these fake things people have floated in the last few years. They make quite a list when you line them all up like that.

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism

2005-07-17T07:15:00.000-05:00

Just ran across this article in American Conservative magazine. Here's the abstract:

Last month, Scott McConnell caught up with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is beginning to receive wide notice. Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration’s current strategy. Below are excerpts from a conversation with the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American.

And here's the article, The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Summer Reading Book List

2005-07-14T23:40:00.000-05:00

I haven't had much time to either read or write of late, but I ran across a rather interesting list of recommended books on Jerry Pournelle's web site. Note that Dr. Pournelle has been described as somewhat to the political right of Ghengis Khan, so you're not likely to see any citations of Chomsky, Derrida, Sontag or Dworkin. Still, there are quite a few books here that I'm going to try to make time to read on my summer "vacation." Here are just a handful, I made a sub-list of those that most interested me, alphabetized them, so here are the "B's" with comments by JEP:

Banks, Robert B. Towing Icebergs, Falling Dominoes, and Other Adventures in Applied Mathematics (Princeton University Press). If you've ever wondered what use mathematics is, this book applies fairly simple calculus to a variety of interesting themes. Might it be practical to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to the Los Angeles harbor as a freshwater supply? And so forth. Not light reading, perhaps, but I found it a good change of pace.

Banning, Lance. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Cornell University Press, ISBN 0-8014-3152-2). This is quite the best political biography of Madison you will ever see, and a wonderful analysis of Madison as both framer and one of the authors of The Federalist . There is today all too little attention paid to the relations between the national government and the states, and more 's the pity.

Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence, Harper Collins. If you don't read another book this year read this. It will take you a month or so. It's worth the time. Given the rather spotty — I am tempted to say miserable — state of our school system we are in danger of losing the continuity of western civilization. This book, by itself, can help change that: It goes through the history of ideas and puts them in context. It's highly readable as well as thought provoking, and I can literally say I wish every U.S. citizen would read this book.

Bobbit, Philip. The Shield of Achilles (Knopf). This is a highly readable treatise on military history and the modern industrial state, and Bobbit does a very good job of showing some important but often overlooked relationships between military technology and forms of government. This book, along with the previously recommended intellectual history From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, are pretty good midlevel guides to understanding the modern age. I am often asked to recommend some books for general education; my advice is to start with Fletcher Pratt's The Battles That Changed History, which is a lot more than the title suggests; then read Bobbit and Barzun. Barzun alone is one of the best bibliographic resources you'll ever find. No set of three books will comprise anything like an education in Western history, of course; but those three do a pretty darned good job of showing what there is to learn.

Boot, Max. The Savage Wars of Peace (BASIC Books). This is a history of American involvement in "small wars" as the Marines like to term them; the number of such operations may be a surprise to those educated in today's schools. Boot has given us a good history of these wars, and drawn some of the lessons we ought to have learned from them. It looks likely that the United States may find itself involved in more than one "peacekeeping operation": Boot's title indicates just how bloody some of those small wars can be. It's good to be prepared for what it will take to suppress a series of international nuisances.

Bowden, Mark. Black Hawk Down is a well told story of a shameful incident in which US troops were sent on the wrong mission with the wrong intelligence by political leaders with the wrong idea and politicians who denied them the right equipment for the missions they were given. It's a compelling story of heroism and betrayal. Bowden is a lot kinder to the President and Secretary of Defense than I would be.

Bradley, Ian and Ronald Meek. Matrices and Society: Matrix Algebra and Its Applications in the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press, 1987). Yes, I know I've recommended it before; but it's worth reading again, and I just did.

Others from my shortlist of his shortlist include:

Clancy, Tom and General Fred Franks, Jr. (Ret). Into the Storm - A Study in Command
Derbyshire, John. Prime Obsession
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The White Company
Drews, Robert. The End Of The Bronze Age
Everitt, Anthony. Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician (Random House).
Fenton, James. An Introduction to English Poetry (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Fenton, James. The Strength of Poetry (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002; ISBN 0-374-52848-9)
Friedman, David. Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life Harper Business, 1996
Guillemin, Jeanne. Anthrax (University of California Press).
Hanson, Victor Davis. Carnage and Culture. Hanson is the author of The Western Way of War
Helms, Richard. A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA (Random House, 2003; ISBN 037550012X
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order.
Johnson, Paul. ART: A New History (HarperCollins, 2003; ISBN 0060530758
Johnson, Paul. Napoleon, one of the Penguin biography series.
Kagan, Donald. The Origins of War and The Preservation of Peace (Doubleday, 1995).
Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong
McCarthy, Wil. Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms (Basic Books, 2003; ISBN 046504428X
Murray, Charles and Richard J. Herrnstein. The Bell Curve: The Reshaping of American Life by Differences in Intelligence
Pipes, Richard. Property and Freedom, Knopf 1999.
Powers, Tim. Declare (Wm. Morrow, 2001) is the ultimate conspiracy novel.
Powers, Thomas. Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda (New York Times Review Books, 2002; ISBN 1590170237)
Pratt, Fletcher. The Battles that Changed History (1956)
Pryce-Jones, David. The Closed Circle
Sheffield, Charles and Jerry Pournelle. Higher Education (Tor Books, Jupiter imprint, 1997; ISBN 0-812-53890-0).
Stern, Sol. Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice (Encounter Books, 2003; ISBN 1893554074
Stine, G. Harry. Halfway to Anywhere.
Taubman, Philip. Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage (Simon & Schuster, 2003; 0684856999)
Walsh, Bill. Lapsing Into A Comma, "A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print - and How to Avoid Them". Contemporary Books, 2000.

UPDATE 18 July 2005: The Edge has published their own summer reading list.

London

2005-07-08T12:20:00.000-05:00

I'm still on sabbatical while I get my new digs in order. I've got a few (many, actually) thoughts about what happened in London, yesterday, but Wretchard sums it up quite nicely:

The Al Qaeda have characterized the attack on London as 'punishment' for Britain's temerity to resist the inevitability of Islam. It is the kind of punishment these self-ordained masters of the universe are accustomed to meting out against harem women and insolent slaves. A few administered licks, and no doubt the cowardly kuffar will crawl back to his place. The tragedy is that Al Qaeda's perception is perfectly correct when applied to the Left, for whom no position is too supine, no degradation too shameful to endure; but incorrect for the vast majority of humans, in whom the instinct for self-preservation has not yet been extinguished. It will result in history's greatest case of mistaken identity; the mismatch that should never have happened. The enemy is even now dying at our feet, where we should kick him and kick him again.

And one more time for luck.

I spoke to an old friend last night...actually a guy a little older than me who I sort of idolized as a kid. He was career military and just recently got out to work for (I believe) some sort of defense contractor. He was in during the first Gulf War and up until this year. He said we're killing those scum by the thousands in the desert over there, many of them behind the scenes where the ninny newsrats don't dare go to cover it. I hope to God he's right about that.

Faster, please.

Explanation

2005-06-22T12:55:00.000-05:00

I've not been posting much, because I'm in the middle of a huge move in my life. I'm moving to small-town Minnesota after landing a job with a firm that provides software for agriculture. I was going to take a job at an ag genetics firm, but I'm not sure they'll be around long.

It's a good move for me, and the rest of my life looks just fine from here.

I'll be back to regular (sort of) posting in July, when I'm fully moved.

New Pet Ideas

2005-06-22T09:53:00.000-05:00

I wonder how much lions eat? I want one.

I Was Right Again

2005-06-15T04:21:00.000-05:00

Well, mostly right. Everyone, including the judge in his final ruling, predicted that the loser of the case would appeal. I predicted that the loser would be Dino Rossi and the Republicans, and that the appeal would have zero hope of success due to the political nature of the state and circuit appellate courts and the fact that Judge Bridges made no observable errors and higher courts are loathe to overturn findings of fact. Rossi and the GOP made the same assessment and are declining to appeal. I voted for Gregoire but wouldn't have minded having Rossi in Olympia. He seems like a good guy and he put on one hell of a fight for such a dark horse candidate.

Oddly enough Michelle Malkin, who has been on this case from day one, has neglected to comment.

Another Data Point

2005-06-15T03:55:00.000-05:00

Our good friends over at Gene Expression are having a discussion on a topic we've recently touched, the problems of what a polygamous society does with all those young men who can't find wives. In Saudi Arabia they're promised 72 virgins (and some young boys, shhh) if they kill themselves while murdering Americans in office buildings, or Iraqis applying for work so they don't starve.

Here's an illustration of what happens when the problem hits America.

Dan Is My Crotch Buddy

2005-06-06T01:48:00.000-05:00

Here's a bit of sound advice from the Scrotal Safety Commission.

Enlist one of your friends as a "Crotch-Buddy". Have him concern himself with the safety of your scrotum. Remind him publicly that he is your "Crotch-Buddy". Remind him in front of girls.

Republicans to Stop Whining Soon

2005-06-04T00:22:00.000-05:00

Here it is June and the gubernatorial election for Washington State is about to be finally, decisively declared on Monday. Then the loser will appeal.

Our story so far: four and a half years ago Al Gore won the popular vote in the electoral race to become President of the United States of America. He probably won enough votes in the state of Florida to give him the Electoral College victory he needed to become President, but in a display of his intellect and will to win he conceded the victory to his opponent before a statistically relevant sample of the vote was counted. The Secretary of State for Florida, Republican Katherine Harris, declined to count "contested" votes from blacks and Jews, throwing the Presidency of the United States to George W. Bush, coincidentally the brother of Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Despite having voted for Gore I have no problem with any of this. I do truly believe the venal ratfuckers in Florida were doing God's will in keeping Al "concession speech" Gore out of the White House on September 11th, 2001. What would his first move have been on September 12th, apologize to Al Qaeda and offer Osama binLaden a cabinet position? George W. Bush may be an amoral retarded chimp but at least he knew we needed to kill a bunch of people. (He got one of the countries wrong, but 50% really isn't all that bad for him.)

So here we are, in June of 2005, and we have another closely contested election, this time in my home state of Washington. Washington is a heavily Democrat state, and the early predictions were that 3 time State Attorney General Christine Gregoire would easily defeat any Republican bothering to get registered as a candidate. The GOP had other plans, and they weren't going to allow a left wing feminazi like Christine Gregoire to waltz in to office without a fight. After all, as Attorney General she had led a radical liberal agenda in attacking mainstream family values like tobacco companies and big businesses that defrauded consumers.

So the GOP polished up an Issaquah insurance salesman who had served a term in the state senate who then suprisingly proceded to run an excellent campaign. Dino Rossi was virtually unknown before the election, but his charisma and pro-business platform played well with voters while the GOP spread the rumor that Gregoire was in reality Hillary Clinton, here to force Washington State dairy farmers into gay marriages.

Rossi and the GOP did a great job of mobilizing their voters, and pulled even with Gregoire in the last two weeks of the election. Then, on election day, Rossi won in the closest gubernatorial race in US history. Which of course triggered a statutorally mandated recount of the vote which narrowed the count further, to a mere 42 vote majority, which allowed for the Democrats to ask for a hand recount, which gave the Governorship to Christine Gregoire by 129 votes. Just as in Florida, the Secretary of State for Washington was a Republican, but unlike Kathy Harris no one questioned Sam Reed's ethics or integrity.

The hand count being final, Rossi and the GOP (who had earlier spent advertising money urging Gregoire to concede their 42 vote majority) filed suit, arguing that many people had voted who were not permitted to do so. While this is provably true, there really isn't any way of saying *who* they voted *for*. The GOP lawyers are arguing that the judge should take away the number of illicit votes away from heavily Democrat King County in the proportion that it voted for Gregoire. Dem lawyers are pointing out that there were voting irregularities in Republican voting counties, and that Republicans are cooking the books. The judge himself noted this in his findings of fact, in which he pointed out that the Dems had hired a University of Washington statistician to do a study of the issue while the GOP had hired a UW statistician to analyse the GOP provided numbers. One of the hurdles the GOP had to clear in this case was convincing the judge that their statistical analysis convincingly proved the necessity of staging another election, or of reducing votes cast for the Democratic candidate; having two statisticians use the same methodology and get two different answers didn't sway him in their favor.

My guess is that on Monday, the judge will let the final election results stand, and Christine Gregoire will remain Governor of Washington. It would be unprecedented in US history to order another election vote (as the GOP is requesting) and unlikely to stand, as it would have to withstand Democratic Party appeals to the liberal Washington State Supreme Court, and if passing that, the liberal 9th circuit federal court. This means that the GOP will appeal the decision, but their grounds will probably be spurious. Judge John Bridges doesn't seem to have made any reversible errors, and appeals courts don't like to overrule findings of fact. That and the GOP case is primarily sour grapes.

Overclocking the Human Brain

2005-06-03T01:25:00.000-05:00

The long circulated article _Natural History of Askenazi Intelligence_ by Greg Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending appears to have found a home. It will be published in the Journal of Biosocial Science

The subject matter (inheritable genetic factors of intelligence) is highly controversial. Perhaps I should say that taking any but the majority opinion on the matter has ended academic careers in the past. The American Association of Anthropologists (always heedful of its past position as the "handmaiden of colonialism" as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown described it) has bent over backwards to condemn any discussion that contradicts its declared position that all perceived differences in the abilities of any groups of people are entirely social constructs. The fact that Hardy and Harpending, both anthropologists at the University of Utah, and Cochran, a physicist specializing in human genetics could find a publisher was enough to warrant a story in the Economist.

THE idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution. He helped popularise the idea that some diseases not previously thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which ruffled many scientific feathers when it was first suggested. And more controversially still, he has suggested that homosexuality is caused by an infection.

Even he, however, might tremble at the thought of what he is about to do. Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, he is publishing, in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science, a paper which not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in question are Ashkenazi Jews. The process is natural selection.

Discussion is of course going on over at Gene Expression.

ADDENDUM: 4 June, Henry Harpending has provided a .pdf formatted file of the article, Natural History of Askenazi Intelligence. There has been a lot of blogging over the last few days about the topic, but as with the publication of The Bell Curve no one seems to have read the paper they're criticizing.

Picture = 1,000 Words

2005-05-29T02:53:00.000-05:00

Nuke the mullahs.

a cogent point on slashdot

2005-05-27T13:56:00.000-05:00

just saw this on slashdot.

Oregon Woman Sues Yahoo for $3 Million
Posted by Zonk on Friday May 27, @10:14AM
from the a-little-to-much-hoo dept.
bigtallmofo writes "After notifying Yahoo that two member profiles about her were not authorized, Cecilia Barnes of Oregon is suing Yahoo for $3 million for failing to take down the profiles in a timely manner. The profiles allegedly set up by her ex-boyfriend contained nude photos of her along with her email address and work phone number. (Note: The member profiles have since been taken down by Yahoo)."
by geomon
I think that portal-based adult groups will probably go "bye-bye" if they are viewed as a financial risk to the hosting site. Yahoo puts all of this webspace up without asking questions about the veracity of the information and then doesn't have the resources to properly police it. I'm sure MSN will drop theirs as well if this case goes against Yahoo.

I'm sure that this woman is not the first person who has had an x-boyfriend/husband/lover post nude pictures of them on the net.
Yeah, usenet is much more effective (Score:5, Funny)
by Colin Smith
If he'd posted them there, they would still be circulating. See, a distributed, redundant architecture protects you from a single point of failure.
Re:Adult Groups a Liability Risk (Score:2)
by bagel2ooo
So why doesn't she sue her ex-boyfriend whom posted this information without her consent? Yahoo the site is just a tool, it would seem the person who posted those pictures should be the one to be sued not the tool which was misused.
Re:Adult Groups a Liability Risk (Score:5, Funny)
by Y2
He doesn't have three million dollars.

Speaking of New World Archaeology...

2005-05-26T01:34:00.000-05:00

Just ran across this article on Dierneke's blog, another genetic study guessing the time and number of persons to initially colonize the Western hemisphere. I'll read it when I wake up tomorrow... *g* (Yes, I'm using this blog to write notes to myself. Buy milk.)

Minnesota Vikings of 1362

2005-05-26T01:12:00.000-05:00

A new development in the century old Kensington Stone mystery... Olaf Ohman found the stone in 1898 while digging in a field. The stone was covered with Norse runes, and scholars, skeptics, students and idiots have been debating whether the thing is genuine or not. The inscriptions are at least two centuries old, which places them before Olaf Ohman, but it doesn't place them in the fourteenth century. The research in the linked story above purports to do so.

New world archaeology is an interest of mine, and there are no traces of Viking encroachment on North America beyond a few notes from Lief Erickson and the remains of an encampment in Newfoundland, and then the Kensington Stone in Minnesota. I'd love to hear a story about Vikings traveling across the medieval American prairies, and I've always believed our ancestors were every bit as ingenious as people in modern civilizations, but I'm afraid the skeptics are still holding the day on this one.

Bush is NOT Hitler!

2005-05-23T22:46:00.000-05:00

I keep seeing these idiotic left wing imbeciles comparing Bush to Hitler when there really isn't any comparison between the two.

Hitler didn't disassemble his army before attacking Poland.

Fighting the Previous War

2005-05-22T19:55:00.000-05:00

Every time the US goes into combat someone raises the (occasionally correct) criticism that our military had prepared to fight the previous war. Nimitz inherited a WWI fleet of battleships at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, MacArthur took his intricately detailed WWIII/Armageddon plans into Inchon Bay and Westmoreland and McNamara walked into the jungles of Southeast Asia cloaked in the aura of American Invincibility.

Rumsfeld isn't guilty of this particular fault. No, he ignored all previous wars in favor of a Return of the Jedi style plan in which a small contingent of Pentagon lawyers would defeat the Iraqi Imperium in forty five minutes and then the middle east would hold celebratory parades for Dubya over the next several years. (Our current strategery is based on the premise that this was successful.)

But as I was watching CNN/Al Jazeera's coverage of the fighting I suddenly realized *their* problem: they were covering the Vietnam War.

You can go two ways with war reporting. You can be patriotic and let the trumpets blare their call of right and might as Shakespeare did in Henry V, as Ernie Pyle did in the Pacific and Ed Murrow atop the flaming rooftops of London. Your alternative (and this is pretty damn manichaen, there isn't a whole lot of gray area here) is to decry the cause of war, and to focus on the death and horror of warfare, and to blame the political leaders who had brought you to this deplorable state. There's a lot of this in history because reporters are self indulgent narcissistic whiners whose entire field of employment is predicated on the assumption (no matter how poorly founded) that they are not only correct in every detail but that they are the Word of God. And when facts prove differently they're still right, because they're reporting those facts now. They even assume that they've always held their current opinion, even when a cursory glimpse at last week's newspaper proves otherwise. Reporters are like Guy Pearce in Memento, detectives with brain damage who are incapable of remembering anything they have done in the past beyond the last few minutes.

The American Press Corps is reporting the Vietnam War.

They were collectively conked in the noggin in 1974, and while vaguely functional they believe they are in an America where there are no personal consequences for drug abuse or sexual promiscuity, being held responsible for ones own actions is "repression" by the Man, and that while there are causes worth dying for the survival of your nation cannot ever be one of them, leaving the unstated corrolary that America and Western civilization aren't worth living for.

I suspect part of this comes with the territory. You have to be skeptical to be a reporter (Dan Rather being the exception testing the rule.) You can't take things on faith. It's just natural that the overwhelming majority of reporters are atheists. As they live and work in their own community they project outward and assume that all of America are the cynical, radically secular assholes that comprise the world they know.

I read an anecdote of a small group of journalists and editors dining at a sidewalk café in New York City talking about how horrible it would be to have Bush elected to a second term in office, and their waiter mentioned that he was voting for Bush. Tina Brown allegedly said "how can we convince people like this that they're wrong?" Easy. Give them rich parents, pay for them to have a four year university education, and provide a well paid and prestigious sinecure, and make damn sure they grow up understanding the overwhelming importance of being fashionable.

Reporters are lazy. Writing is agonizing work, but only if you're not looking out the window at the street cleaners or hot dog vendors making minimum wage or below. Anyone too lazy to work for a living is going to become a reporter. Sure there have been investigative journalists who have performed actual physical research into subjects they write about, but then their ten thousand brethren just cut and paste their findings into their own articles. As a group they go for the easy layup every time, and they like to wait until everyone else is off the court so no one ever sees the four failed attempts leading up to their basket.

Marine Colonel Bob Chase gives us a taste of what battlefield reporage is like. He mentions being interviewed by both Al Jazeera and NBC, but both seem to be taking the same stance on the war; Americans are babykillers. You can sense his growing impatience as he describes an American victory while the American reporter keeps asking him about the catastrophic losses incurred by his troops. Both he and his readers know that the only bit the American public will see are his angry reactions to having been asked for the hundredth time about catastrophic losses. That the losses were not catastrophic will never be reported.

It's just a knee jerk reaction we have as Americans. Death is tragic. This is a corollary of the American Dream, where every boy could grow up to be a millionaire, or be President. Reporters know that if they can highlight a single death then that will be the most important item on the newscast that night, clearly placing them above the journalists reporting the budget fiasco or the decline in American education. So if death is tragic, then who is the villain in the tragedy? Doesn't matter, blame the insurgents or the Pentagon; the important thing to remember is that the reporter is the hero.

Combine the bizarre attitude of the intellectual elite of our nation that the only way of proving one's integrity is by slitting one's own throat with the despicable evolution of the sound bite, and then couple this with the hallucination that Americans are draft dodging hippies cheering on their Marxist mentors in the nations op-ed columns and we have the journalism piled upon us today. It really doesn't do a good job of serving either the left or the right, (the most common charge against it,) it only serves itself.

Colonel Bob Chase on Operation Matador

2005-05-21T13:24:00.000-05:00

Little Green Footballs has a story from one of their readers with a friend fighting in Iraq, Marine Colonel Bob Chase, who just finished fighting in Operation Matador along the Iraqi/Syrian border.

You can tell from Col. Chase's comments that he knows which parts of his interview are going to make the evening news and which parts aren't.

Personal note:

The original battle plan had called for Iraqi Army units to be involved, but reality set in. While official reports say that there *are* Iraqi Army units, they aren't trained or fit for combat. It's still all American forces doing the fighting. As long as we keep picking small jobs there are enough troops to get the job done. There just isn't anyone to replace them, and they can't ever come home, not as long as the Bush Doctrine is in effect.

A Pentagon Trial Balloon

2005-05-20T20:54:00.000-05:00

US Generals are beginning to publicly express doubts as to the future success of the War in Iraq. This may be because they can add and subtract. Rumsfeld still thinks this war can be won with expensive gadgets bought from Republican campaign contributors. If he doesn't change his mind and soon, we're going to lose Iraq. Remember the old "dominoe theory" that conservative type thinkers thought would apply to SE Asia during Vietnam? If Iraq goes Islamist then Mubarak goes down and so does Musharef and his 10 to 20 nukes, not to mention a half dozen or so other piddly ass countries we couldn't care less about but will probably contribute a half million or so to the general massacre total.

But hey, Rummy *has* changed his mind before. The first stab at taking Baghdad didn't have any ground troops at all; he sent in Apache helicopters to take out the Iraqi Republican Guard. The Pentagon had bought into the Boeing/Northrup concept that all you needed was the spotter helicopter locating targets and your AH-64 Apache popping up out of the tree cover to lay waste to entire tank regiments.

One burning squadron of AH-64s later someone pointed out that Iraq has no trees.

And that Rummy didn't buy any of the spotter helos.

Day Two: The US Army says f*ckit and pounds the crap out of anything that moves. Artillery and tank manouvers shred Iraqi tanks, which for some reason are dug into bunkers, sacrificing mobility but sparing the world the sight of untrained formations playing bumpercar. So see? There is hope.

Except for the fact that Rummy cut us down to a 480,000 man Army and GW Bush put us into a 2.5 million man war. Generals in the Pentagon *do* know how to count. They're carefully and anonymously letting the rest of the US know that.

Dan Rather Wins Peabody Award for Libel

2005-05-20T13:29:00.000-05:00

Dan Rather and Mary Mapes have been given the prestigious Peabody Award, presumably for Fiction. The Zombie of Hunter S. Thompson is to make a suprise appearance and feast on their juicy brains.

Not Entirely Out of Africa

2005-05-19T16:29:00.000-05:00

Dienekes has an early lead on an article by Vinayak Eswarana, Henry Harpending and Alan R. Rogers called Genomics refutes an exclusively African origin of humans. This will be published in the Journal of Human Evolution. There is a web page for the JHE, but all it does is tell you how to order the damn thing. These journals cost hundreds of dollars a year, usually for one to two issues. I just read them at the local University library.

Harpending is probably most famous amongst non anthropologists for being tag team partner with Greg Cochran, leading proponent of the "gay germ" theory. I am a fan.

Here Harpending, Eswarana and Rogers have staked out a middle ground on the previously virgin soil between the multiregionalists and the "Out of Africa" crowd of anthropologists. Both groups have hard data backing their positions coupled with weak arguments for ignoring their opponents arguments. E,H&R seem to have come up with a theory that appears to account for data from both camps, the genetic loci arguments of the Africa crowd and the morphology arguments of the multiregionalists. Dierneke has a review of the article, as well as the abstract. I'll have to sneak up to the Bennet Library at SFU when the JHE next comes out and read this one. Here's Dierneke's take on the article;

The Eswaran et al. model does not postulate any particular process of migration, but rather the spread of a modern "gene complex" which emerged in Africa. This complex, consisting of a few co-adapted genes conferred a selective advantage, and gradually spread via gene flow from its original source. According to the authors, this model explains the contradictory stories of different genetic loci: some loci were part of the selective sweep that originated in Africa, and hence show a pattern of radiation from Africa, whereas other loci show no such pattern and represent the persistence of much older genomic ancestry.

Cookie Advice

2005-05-19T12:32:00.000-05:00

Gerard offers us some tidbits of wisdom:

Do not, I repeat, consume boutique chocolate chip cookies. Pass by these scented and seductive venues of the Fifth Horseman. Deny them your essence.

Instead, know that small batch, hand and homemade chocolate chip cookies are the only chocolate chip cookies that exist in the realm of the Sacred and the Holy. Indeed, if Nestles, dairy farms and refrigeration had existed at the time of the Last Supper the entire menu of Holy Communion would be different today.

Good advice. As a person who has trouble with alcohol, I can tell you it would be nice if communion was milk and tollhouse cookies. And then maybe a little nap...but it ain't all sweetness and light:

This dictatorial method of getting all the cookies only served me well for a few years. It fell apart on the day it came to my attention that my "little" brother had at last grown large enough to kick my ass when it came to taking more than my share of cookies.

On that day I was also foolish enough to kick back in an effort to retain my rightful share of all the cookies. A small war broke out in the kitchen which caused my mother to come in from the laundry room, break us up, take all the cookies away and cast both my brother and I into the slough of despond by uttering the phrase no child ever, ever wishes to hear from his mother: "Wait till your father gets home."

Sigh.

A Hanson-esque Essay

2005-05-19T10:46:00.000-05:00

After a hiatus, Bill does it again. My favorite bit:

Is humiliation the same as torture? It is not -- that's why the words are spelled differently. To get to the heart of the difference, assume you were a prisoner at Abu Graib, and your interrogator started to remove your fingers one by one with bolt cutters. How long would it take you to beg to be posed with women’s panties on your head? Yeah, I thought so.

My thoughts EXACTLY. He hits so many perfect notes in this thing it's like a symphony orchestra. Read it all (if you have the time). It should be required reading for all morons who are getting ready to go out and march for tyranny, viciousness and oppression against freedom and decency, protected by those they protest.

Feeling a Draft?

2005-05-19T00:14:00.000-05:00

The US Army has been having troubles with manpower ever since the start of the Iraq war. Despite continually lying through his teeth that we have sufficient manpower to do the job in Iraq, Rumsfeld and the DoD began calling up the IRR, the Irregular Ready Reserve, but only in a few technical cases, what they call the 3 M's, Medical, Military Police and Military Intelligence.

And now *cough* Infantry.

We didn't have a large enough army to do this war. I Told You So, and so did everyone else who ever wore a uniform. The neo-cons are willing to spend 200 billion dollars a year on military spending for Iraq, but only if the money goes to hi-tech arms manufacturors, not soldiers who don't contribute millions of dollars to re-election campaigns. After screwing over the doughboys and dogfaces all this time the neo-cons have the gall to act suprised when enlistment and re-enlistment rates drop.

I'm not worried so much about the current conflict, no matter how idiotically managed it may be. The danger lies in the fact that GWB and company are ignoring the *real* dangers our nation faces in the insane rule of Kim Jong Il and the impending collapse of Musharef's government in Pakistan (leaving 10 to 20 tactical nukes in the hands of the upcoming Islamist government) and the fact that we won't have a working army left by the time these events occur.

Moving On

2005-05-18T23:10:00.000-05:00

Well, I've been on pins and needles all day today. That would be because it was the last material hurdle of selling my house: the dreaded FHA inspection the buyer had to have done for their financing. Turns out I've maintained my house better than I thought...we passed with flying colors. You can go to any mls database search and find it at MLS #3030831...I'm rather pleased with the pictures my agent came up with. It catches the colors pretty nicely.

The colors...ah, yes. You see, one night my then-fiance and I were sitting watching "Fools Rush In". If you've seen it, then you'll remember the scene where Matthew Perry's character comes home to find that his new wife and in-laws (all Mexican) have redecorated his house in wild Mexican colors. As soon as I saw that, it was all over but the crying. All that was necessary was to put a little different twist on the colors to make them more northern and our decor was born.

Our first realtor told us we should consider repainting the entire interior of the house in more neutral colors. Phbbbbbbbt. You're fired, lady. The next realtor loved it, and said it just needed the right buyer. My kind of lady.

So who buys the house? A couple where the man is caucasion-American and the woman is Hispanic...EXACTLY like the movie. They say we have "Mexican spirit". Heh. They have a little girl about 6. I think it was her that decided they would be buying the house. Very fun. I like the idea that a nice family will take over the place instead of the vulture-like investors that have been snapping up all the decent houses in our neighborhood.

Anyway, that clears the deck for us to complete buying our dream house and moving upstate at the end of June. I'll post pics at some point, once I take some and figure out how to host them for free. I never, ever thought I'd live in a house like the one we'll be closing on July 1. It will be a grand day.

The American dream is alive and well, people.

More Iowahawk...

2005-05-18T19:09:00.000-05:00

Not having the same taste for rotting fish soaked in lye that characterizes many Minnesotans like Dan, I skipped around a bit on Iowahawk's web site and found something a bit more to my own taste.

"I initially showed that the so-called 'scientific method,' so treasured by the self-appointed high priests of science, was nothing but a bizarre ritual of the industrialist phallocracy," said Grok. "From there, it was a short intellectual leap to disprove the reality of the periodic tables, gravity and algebra."

Media Bias is Getting Serious

2005-05-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

And it's starting to hit close to home.

Them's Fightin' Words

2005-05-17T13:11:00.000-05:00

Derb just made himself a target.

Election Day

2005-05-17T07:45:00.000-05:00

It's election day here in beautiful British Columbia, where Canadian citizens can show up at the last minute, register to vote and then cast their uninformed ballot for the most anglic sounding candidate for their four block wide riding. I'm in North Vancouver, of course, and my vicious libel may only pertain to the fascist octogenarians I will be dealing with as Voting Clerk in North Vancouver/Lonsdale.

This election is only for the British Columbia legislature, not the Federal Parliament.

The incumbents are the BC Liberal Party, who are the neo-conservatives. They have slashed taxes for the rich, then cut education and health care after promising not to do so. They spent five million dollars to remove 40 people from the welfare roles. They have a 71 - 2 majority, but that's about to change.

Their major challengers are the New Democratic Party, or the Socialists. They had the previous government majority, raised taxes, increased government spending, took very public bribes and made very stupid mistakes (spending tens of millions of dollars on a fleet of "fast ferries" that couldn't float) and went from a 39 seat majority to only 2 MLAs. But the Libs did such an evil job in their turn the public looks to be giving the NDP another shot.

Anyway I'm going to be running the polling station for my riding from 0730 until whenever we get the votes counted tonight, hopefully nine pm, maybe ten or later. If I'm still conscious I'll let you know how things went.

How Soon We Forget

2005-05-16T14:38:00.000-05:00

Remember when Palestinian Muslim swine took over the Church of the Nativity and descrated it in the foulest terms while stealing everything they could from it?

I guess that means we can go out and kill, loot, riot and wipe our asses with Korans now, huh? Oh, that's right, that sort of behavior is only excusable when it's the Muslims doing it while using our Leftist media's false reports as a pretext. Gah.

Quick Quiz from Colby Cosh

2005-05-16T13:15:00.000-05:00

Colby Cosh has an amusing little quiz on his webpage today.

Quiz time--who said it?

I think [The Passion of the Christ] was a pretty fine movie, and darned if it didn’t get people talking about religion again, a subject that some are trying to close off from the public square, a pet peeve of mine. Though the Judeo-Christian worldview has served us well for more than two hundred years and underpins the finest society in the history of the world, there are those fighting hard to throw it all on the scrap heap and replace it with radical secularism, a worldview that has brought us Nazism, Communism and some of the greatest horrors of all time.

a) George H.W. Bush;
b) Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX);
c) Mike Nelson, the lovable human face of cult comedy series Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

I'd been downloading episodes from alt.binaries.multimedia.mst3k on a whim this weekend and had googled the above interview with Mike Nelson, then coincidentally read the Colby Cosh post off of a link from Gene Expression, a physical anthropology website. I'm putting it here just to let Dan know that he's not alone up there in the tundra of Southern Saskatchewan, as Mike Nelson also decries the complete and total lack of merit in his hometown Minneapolis Star and Tribune, which he calls the "Star and Sickle."

See, Dan? There are two of you.

DAN ADDS: I knew there was something I liked about that guy/show.