Judicious Asininity

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Mon Jan 31, 2005

TWA 800

Smells more like another Al Qaeda success than a Boeing design flaw

Last April I read a Victor Hanson article that listed TWA 800 amongst other terror attacks. Since the official explanation was that TWA 800 was brought down by a fuel tank explosion, I queried the inclusion of TWA 800 in such a list. Mr. Hanson replied saying "We do not know exactly what caused the mysterious and spontaneous explosion of flight 800 and therefore I was remiss at this time to include it among the other confirmed accounts of terrorist murdering, for which I stand corrected." I've been skeptical of the official line and
Jim Miller links to a Frontpage interview with Peter Lance that makes me even more skeptical.

Which is more likely? 1) After logging millions of hours in the air without incident a 747 is blown out of the sky by a spontaneous fuel tank explosion, or 2) After repeated attempts to blow up a passenger aircraft, one of which nearly brought down a 747, Al Qaeda succeeds. Peter Lance makes a good case for option 2.

The puzzling thing is why the Bush administration has been reluctant to pursue leads that would put the Clinton administration in the dock for 9/11. But the problem is that the very agencies that would need to do the leg-work are hopelessly compromised and riddled with officials whose primary operating mode is CYA. The 9/11 Commission itself suffers from the same problems, as Lance notes. For me, the presence of Jamie Gorelick on the Commission proved that was a CYA operation.

Iraqi bravery

The women showed it during the election

The election coverage showed women lining up to vote in large numbers, despite the terrorist threats. Cori Dawber of Ranting Profs in her critique of the NYT coverage notes and quotes a fascinating insight into how they solved the problem of searching women voters;

By the way, there's something in this article that doesn't speak to warning but that really speaks to the bravery and commitment of Iraqi women, and that I've seen reported nowhere else:

Every soldier on election duty heard intelligence warnings that insurgents would try to slip bomb-laden suicide vests into polling places beneath the long gowns of an Iraqi woman or of a man in woman's clothing. That presented a particular difficulty in a society where it is not acceptable for a man to search a woman, and there were hardly enough women in the Iraqi Interior Ministry to spend a day at every polling site conducting body searches.

But American officers devised a solution. They agreed on a plan with Iraqi security forces, who were the visible presence inside each polling place, that one of the first women to arrive at larger polling places would be searched, and that woman would in turn be asked to search 10 others. One of those 10 would then search 10 others before voting, and so on in a daisy chain.
That is simply staggering. Remember that in all but one case, when the suicide bombers went, it was the people patting them down they took with them. This procedure, creative though it was, essentially meant a mass deputization of the Iraqi female population. With all the talk of the Iraqi security services showing up in ski masks, these women were called upon to protect the polling places on the spot, in front of their neighbors, with no way to hide their identities, and in a position that was undeniably on the front lines. And apparently a good many of them did it.

That is commitment to democracy. And it should embarrass every American who skips an election from this point on.

Hey, Mr. Mineta, maybe that's how you can solve the airport security mess - let the passengers do the searching. On second thoughts, maybe not such a great idea.

John Kerry, Ted Kennedy?

What's the difference?

None. Can they give credit where credit is due? Not if W is the man. Kennedy would leave the Iraqi people as soon and as deceptively as he left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown. Kerry would bail even sooner, judging by his performance this evening on the news circuits, such as would have him.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi people celebrate their first free election since Saddam did an Adolf and took control. Will either Massachusetts' Senators celebrate with them? Don't hold your breath.

Thu Jan 27, 2005

More Global Warming scaremongering from the Left

But bloggers have their number - 1750

The Diplomad tears apart the latest scaremongering from the International Climate Change Taskforce with able assistance from Tim Worstall at Tech Central. Particularly on point is their critique of the arbitrary starting point of 1750 AD chosen by the task force as their baseline. The task force report says:

"On the basis of an extensive review of the relevant scientific literature, we propose a long-term objective of preventing average global surface temperature from rising by more than 2°C (3.6°F) above its pre-industrial level (taken as the level in 1750, when carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations first began to rise appreciably as a result of human activities).

Worstall's response is devastating:

Allow me to translate that for you. We have decided to take an arbitrary number, 2 °C, set the baseline at the bottom of the Little Ice Age, immediately after the Maunder Minimum, mix in every scare story we can think of to scare the fecal matter out of you rubes and if you don't listen carefully to us important people we'll hold our breaths until we turn blue. (We might also note that no one, no one at all, thinks that human influence on the climate started in 1750 AD. Try 8,000 BC with the invention of agriculture.)

Meanwhile, Tim Blair cites a report that man's influence on the climate started even before the invention of agriculture. The Australian Aboriginals, starting 50,000 years ago, burnt out Australia. In the process, they converted Australia's ecology to one that depends on frequent bush fires.

If this International Climate Change Taskforce wants a baseline they should use the Last Glacial Maximum. That was about 21,000 years ago when the global ice extent was at its greatest. Those were not good times for Gaia, as this overview of climate change over recent geological time notes:

The Last Glacial Maximum was much more arid than present almost everywhere, with desert and semi-desert occupying huge areas of the continents and forests shrunk back into refugia. But in fact, the greatest global aridity (rather than ice extent) may have been reached slightly after the Last Glacial Maximum, somewhere during the interval 19,000-17,000 years ago (17,000-15,000 14C years ago).

Of course, reviewing the recent past history of the Earth's climate as it struggles out of yet another ice age makes a complete mockery of the task force's statement that:

While no amount of climate change is safe and many communities, such as those in Arctic regions and low-lying island states, are already experiencing adverse impacts, scientific evidence suggests that there is a threshold of temperature increase above which the extent and magnitude of the impacts of climate change increase sharply. No one can say with certainty what that threshold is, but it is important that we make an educated judgment at this time based on the best available science.

(My bold) The Earth has suffered nothing but climate change for most of its history. The climate has never been stable or safe. In reality, it has been an unending cycle of ice ages followed by brief interglacial warming periods. It has changed suddenly, too, within those cycles. Kyoto won't make a jot of difference to that cycle.

Mon Jan 24, 2005

Unanswered Questions from 2004

There are still many loose threads hanging out there that the MSM is ignoring

Here are a few of them...

Bergergate? Has Sandy Berger been hung, drawn and quartered yet? Figuratively speaking, of course. The good news is that the criminal probe of the Berger case is in front of a federal grand jury.

John Kerry's military records? If he's even thinking about running again, he needs to release them, in full. Of course, doing so may well doom his chances. But, as Macbeth was fond of saying, "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well, It were done quickly".

Darfur? Arab Muslim militia are still going about their business; i.e. killing black people. They've wiped out 100,000 people, or more, and displaced ten times that number. But the world seems blind to the ongoing genocide.

The Plame Game? Still waiting for resolution. This one has expanded to cover the issue of the confidentiality of journalists' sources, as this editorial notes. In my view, journalists have so abused the "privilege" they have lost any right to keep their sources confidential. In 2004 we saw administration opponents inside the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon, leaking damaging memos to the press. Sometimes, the memos seemed designed to be leaked. The leakers intent, aided and abetted by friendly journalists, was to stop Bush winning a second term. Some of the leaks also damaged national security but that didn't stop the MSM. Rathergate proved, once and for all, that journalists were not out to inform the public, but rather, to achieve a partisan objective.

Afghanistan? Well, it is good news that the MSM can't find any bad news to report from there, so I suppose that's a blessing. That's how we are going to measure our victories -- by MSM silence.

The net seems to be closing on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

The bigger fish are getting caught

History will record that the battle for Fallujah was the critical battle in the war against terrorism in post-Saddam Iraq. US ad Iraqi forces killed or captured thousands of terrorists and forced the rest to flee to other cities. That left them more exposed and easier to catch and it forced them to risk everything in their campaign to disrupt the coming elections. Yes, they've made headlines in anti-American rags, such as the NYT and WPO, with each car bomb but they are also running out of resources faster than they can be replenished.

Fox News reports that:

Sami Mohammed Ali Said al-Jaaf, also known as Abu Omar al-Kurdi, was arrested during a Jan. 15 raid in Baghdad, a government statement said Monday. Two other militants linked to Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror group also were arrested, authorities announced Monday.

Al-Jaaf was "the most lethal of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's lieutenants," the statement said.
...
Al-Jaaf was responsible for 32 car bombing attacks that killed hundreds of Iraqis, the statement said. Al-Jaaf "confessed to building approximately 75 percent of the car bombs used in attacks in Baghdad since March 2003," said Thaer al-Naqib, spokesman for interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Good news indeed.

Sun Jan 23, 2005

The latest winter storm has passed

Where is global warming when we need it?

I had an 8 mile training run scheduled for 7:30am Saturday morning. When I got up it was snowing. It had snowed all night and the roads weren't plowed or salted. So it took a while to get to the starting point. About twenty of the more foolhardy members of our running group showed up. The asphalt trail we run on wasn't plowed so we ran through 4 to 6 inches of snow. It snowed the whole way and beards, moustaches, eyebrows and eyelashes were soon iced up. The trail wasn't slick but traction was poor. We figured 6 miles of that was equivalent to 8 on a dry trail. That's the third weekend in a row where I've run in a blizzard.

It's been a challenging winter in NE Ohio and we've gotten off easy. Places like Duluth, Minnesota hit 40 below. Further south, places like Raleigh had to cope with unexpected winter storms. Betsy wasn't too happy about it:

Having spent seven hours in my car to drive my normal 20-minute route, I was less than receptive to northern snobbery about southern drivers.

Weather records get broken simply by the passage of time. The more time passes the greater the probability that a new record will be set for something, somewhere. Breathless media reporting tries to turn such events into trends and rabid environmentalists, such as Al Gore, will cherry-pick temperature records to show that the world is getting warmer at a catastrophic rate.

One thing is for sure; whatever warming that has occurred in the last century has been slight and hasn't stopped new records being set for lowest temperature ever at various lucky locations around the globe.

Thu Jan 20, 2005

Bush doesn't have a clear mandate?

Despite winning the electoral college vote and the popular vote?

According to the WPO:

President Bush will begin his second term in office without a clear mandate to lead the nation, with strong disapproval of his policies in Iraq and with the public both hopeful and dubious about his leadership on the issues that will dominate his agenda, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

By the WPO's standards, only the likes of Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, assorted Soviet dictators, and Saddam Hussein, who regularly accumulated 99% of the vote, had clear mandates. Surely that's not what they meant. One hopes not.

We hear no such talk when a Democrat wins. When Clinton won in 1990, we didn't see the WPO claiming that he lacked a clear mandate, despite his only winning 43% of the popular vote. The WPO's double-standard slip is showing.

Wed Jan 19, 2005

Democratic Hypocrisy on Election Fraud

Count every vote, they chant

The Democrats have been trying to make the case that George Bush stole Ohio. The reality is that any voting problems experienced in Ohio -- insufficient equipment and staff to cope with demand -- happened at a few precincts in heavily Democratic counties. Bush's margin was so large that it was insurmountable.

But Kerry's margins in other key states was much smaller than Bush's margin in Ohio. Take Wisconsin, which Kerry won by 11,813 votes (.03% of the vote). Jim Miller points out that voting laws in Wisconsin are so lax that 10,000 votes in Milwaukee alone cannot be verified. But, in the best Democrat tradition, they have been counted. Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush gives us some insights into how the Democrats increased their vote. He links to this post that records, in part:

I talked to the Racine County GOP Chairman, Lou D'Abbraccio, who is waiting on voter records from the Racine City Clerk and expects them by the end of the month. His intent is to compare them to death, real estate, and felon lists.

Of most concern for Mr. D'Abbraccio is thirty vanloads of voters brought in by liberal activists. Most of these voters had no ID or utility bills and it was the liberal activists themselves who vouched for them as residents -- as allowed by law -- allowing them to vote. At one point things got so ugly regarding challenges that the Attorney General had to intervene. It seems the people who vouched for the ID-less were refusing to sign a particular form swearing these voters were residents. The AG told them it was required and if they were found lying it was a federal offense. They refused to sign, the vans stopped coming, but hundreds had gotten through.

How much space did the media devote to the problems in Milwaukee? Just about zip. How much to alleged problems in Ohio? Tons. Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., and Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones lunatic challenges to the Ohio electors got more press than any of the blatant examples of election fraud by Democrats.

In her acceptance speech, new Governor Christine Gregoire (D) said:

Across the state, Republicans and Democrats dedicated themselves to protecting the integrity of our election system. They sat at the same table for days, counting ballots. And each time a ballot was counted, Democrat and Republican observers reached an agreement. That single gesture of bipartisan cooperation, repeated millions of times across the state, is a small symbol of our state's larger desire to be united. We showed that fundamentally, Washington will not allow itself to be divided by region or party or politics.

We worked together to ensure that votes were counted, problems revealed, mistakes fixed.

We proved that Washington is not Florida. And now, we will move forward.

But the mistakes weren't fixed; if they had been she would not now be Governor. In an open letter to the NYT, Jim Miller writes:

We now know, thanks to investigations by the Republican party, the BIAW, a building trades association, and individual bloggers, particularly Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics, that some counties in Washington state followed the Times' advice. For example, King County, which includes the Democratic stronghold of Seattle, counted votes from dead people, from felons, and from hundreds of provisional voters without checking. All in all, King County counted nearly 2,000 more votes than voters.

The Democrats would have more credibility if they changed their chant to "Count every legal vote". But that would cost them many close elections.

Sun Jan 16, 2005

This a taste of what's to come from Islamists in the US

Adherents of the ROP seem to be a tad sensitive to criticism

Powerline Blog reports on the brutal murder of a family of Coptic Christians, apparently motivated by the father's participation in a chat room where he criticised Islam.

If this turns out to be a case of Muslims "defending" their faith in such violent fashion, it won't be the first example in the US. As Mark Steyn points out:

We were encouraged after Afghanistan to see al-Qaida as less of a hierarchical structure and more of a loose franchise operation. But it seems doubtful that these days it's anything at all -- except perhaps a meaningless media shorthand for a network of diffused autonomous Islamist groups operating from Central America to the Balkans to Southeast Asia, not to mention gazillions of British, Canadian and European Muslims who graduated from the Afghan terror camps and either returned home to await instructions or sallied forth to join the jihad in Chechnya, Gaza and Bali, plus various disaffected individuals who just got the Islamist fever, like the July 4th shooter at Los Angeles Airport and, indeed, the Washington sniper duo, the younger of whom liked to draw pictures of planes crashing into skyscrapers, etc.

My bold, link via Betsy's Page.

Random murders or skirmishes in a war?

Seymour Hersh reports more US secrets

He claims the US is identifying potential military targets inside Iran

Instapundit hopes the report is true. Reynolds notes that:

On the other hand, the source is somewhat dubious.

Hersh is not only dubious, but, if his claims are correct, a traitor.

Sat Jan 15, 2005

The Fund to Legalize DDT

Help save millions of lives - give generously

Do you think this would ever fly?

On the one hand, we have unproven allegations, dating from the 1960's, that DDT weakened the shells of the eggs laid by birds of prey. The scientific evidence supporting these allegations is ambiguous at best but mostly negative.

On the other hand, we have clear scientific evidence that the judicious use of DDT prevents malaria and that millions of human beings across the tropical world have died from malaria or suffered horribly from its effects because DDT has been banned across most of the globe.

It both propositions are true, does it not then follow that we can help our fellow man by supporting the wide-spread use of DDT to fight malaria?

Steve Milloy has far more on this issue, as does Greenie Watch.

The MSM has a new News agency

It's called Terrorism Press

Cori Dauber at Ranting Profs points out that Terrorist videos of their exploits is being fed directly to Western News agencies and passed on to the American public:

But it's hard to see a clearer example of spreading the terrorists' message then downloading it lock, stock and barrel from their own web sites. The terrorists are now providing footage to the networks the same way AP and Reuters do: they just have better stuff and they provide it free. But when the networks use this footage, giving the terrorists a distribution system for their message better than any they could hope to achieve on their own, they also tell them, night after night that there's a market for their product.

If AP or Reuters couldn't sell a certain type of story, they'd stop producing that footage.

Now, I don't think that if the networks stopped using this footage, that convoy attacks would stop. But I do think that terrorists should not be given the message that they have a ready market, an American market, for images of American soldiers being maimed and killed.

And the American public should stop and think about precisely what it is they're watching, where it is that it's coming from, and whether they want the networks to continue behaving as if there's no stigma in using this material.

There is a clear difference, in my mind, in using this footage to illustrate a point about the media strategies of the terrorists -- look, they're taping what they're doing, or look, they have web sites -- and using the footage as replacement for the footage the networks would have filmed had they been there. And that's what has begun to happen, and that's what I have a problem with.

The US military has videos (via Tigerhawk) of attacks on terrorist targets. You can find them on the web but you have to hunt around for them. The blogosphere is giving us the US side of the war, not the MSM.

But let's do a fast rewind from WW4 back to WW2. It's the Battle of the Bulge. Nazi film crews have shot thousands of feet of film showing American dead, wrecked American convoys, and the hulks of burned-out American tanks complete with charred corpses. The MSM of the day buys that footage and it appears in the news reel footage in every movie theater across America. Meanwhile, any good news fron the American side is never shown. Could that have happened back then? If it had we'd all be speaking German or Japanese (assuming they let us live).

But that is almost exactly what is happening now. The MSM has become the propaganda arm of radical Islam. One hopes that it is unwitting but one suspects not. They want the US to lose.

Wed Jan 12, 2005

Greenies vs the Tsunami

Guess who wins by an order of magnitude or two

Greenie Watch points out that Environmentalists, spurred on by the crackpot theories of the late Rachel Carson of Silent Spring fame, have caused DDT to be banned almost across the board. Yet DDT remains the single most effective measure to combat Malaria, a disease that has killed tens of millions in Africa and Asia. The Tsunami killed upwards of 150,000 people in one catastrophic day. Malaria kills millions and disables even more for want of DDT. Those lily white activists who campaigned so hard to ban DDT should acknowledge that their very success condemned millions of poor dark-skinned people to death.

It's long past time to de-demonize DDT.

Tue Jan 11, 2005

More Iraqi successes the MSM is ignoring

US Military success counts for nothing in the MSM

Betsy's Page points to a Michael Ledeen piece that reveals the success that was achieved in Fallujah. Besides killing a thousand terrorists from across the Islamic world, the US military captured another thousand. That is yielding important intelligence about the insurgency and the roles of Syria and Iran in sustaining it.

Yasseen had been a colonel in Saddam's Army, so he was a fighter of some importance. He told Alhurra that two other former Iraqi military officers belonging to his group were sent "to Iran in April or May, where they met a number of Iranian intelligence officials." He said they also met with Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and were provided with money, weapons, "and, as far as I know, even car bombs" for Jaish Muhammad.

Yasseen also said he was told by Saddam himself, after the liberation of Iraq in the spring of 2003, to cross into Syria and meet with a Syrian intelligence officer to ask for money and weapons.

That sort of information is very valuable when you need to exert pressure on terrorist sponsoring states like Syria and Iran. Look to it being put to good use, post Powell and post the Iraqi elections.

Meanwhile, back in Mosul, the US Military has captured three of the top four leaders of an Al Qaeda linked terrorist group operating in Mosul:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2005 -- Multinational Forces detained a key leader of the al Qaeda-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terrorist network in Mosul in late December, officials in Baghdad announced today.

Following a thorough investigation, the individual detained was positively identified as Abdul Aziz Sadun Ahmed Hamduni, aka Abu Ahmed.

Abu Ahmed, who was captured Dec. 22, served as a deputy to the emir of Mosul, Abu Talha, and assumed command of terrorist operations in Mosul in Abu Talha's absence, officials said. Abu Ahmed admitted to receiving money and weapons from Abu Talha as well as coordinating and conducting terrorist attacks in Mosul.

"The capture of Abu Ahmed and the subsequent capture of Abu Marwan on 23 December show significant progress in the inevitable destruction of the Abu Talha-led Al Qaeda Zarqawi terrorist network in Mosul," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Erwin F. "Erv" Lessel III, deputy operations director for Multinational Force Iraq.

Security forces in Iraq have previously announced the capture of Abu Marwan, also a senior-level terrorist in the Talha organization. Security forces also recently captured another senior Talha member whose name cannot be released due to operational security.

"Currently, security forces in Iraq have three of Abu Talha's four most senior leaders in custody," Lessel said.

The capture of these key members has led to additional captures throughout the Mosul-based AQ-AMZ network. Officials said more than 20 percent of Talha's key members have been captured in the past few weeks.

Abu Ahmed's capture removed one of Abu Talha's most valuable officers from the Mosul-based network. Abu Ahmed remains in detention and is providing information regarding the Talha network.

The only way any of these bad guys will make headlines in the MSM is if some anti-US "human rights" group thinks they might have been treated a little harshly. Then it will be Abu Ghraib all over again.

The MSM take great delight in splashing each car bombing on the front page and no delight in the capture of any of the perpetrators or organizers. It almost makes one wonder if the MSM is rooting for the U.S. Military to lose. Maybe that's why so many MSM talking heads and columnists bring up Vietnam analogies. They want to return to those glorious days when South Vietnam was thrown to the Communist wolves.

Mon Jan 10, 2005

A hit, a very palpable hit, in Iraq

But the MSM won't tell you much about it after reporting the bad news

Remember all those news reports over the weekend about how 14 innocent Iraqis were killed when the US military dropped a 500lb bomb on the wrong house? Turns out that the bomb got its target. Ranting Profs is on the case. In a story about the resignation of electoral officials in Ambar province, the WPO buries this gem:

Meanwhile, in a village near the northern city of Mosul, where the U.S. military reported that it had mistakenly dropped a 500-pound bomb on the wrong target Saturday, residents said the Americans actually hit the correct house, killing an insurgent who they said had killed Iraqi security forces.

[...]

Salem Jasem Jubori, who lives close to the house that was destroyed, said the head of the household was a middle-age man who "used to kill and cut" his victims, primarily Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, in front of villagers.

"He was ferocious, very fierce and wild," Jubori said.

Good riddance, I'd say, although it's a pity about the women and children.

Let Ranting Profs know if you see MSM reports updating the story with the information that the US military got a very bad guy in the process.

Perhaps the other bad guys might take notice that while the US military won't torture you, it will still drop bombs on your house and wipe out you and your family. That message was worth sending.

Sat Jan 08, 2005

The torture debacle

It could be the death of us

Heather MacDonald gets to the bottom of the torture debate. The situation is worse than you could possibly believe. Here's an example of how bad it's gotten:

So what were these cruel and degrading practices? For one, providing a detainee an incentive for cooperation—such as a cigarette or, especially favored in Cuba, a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich or a Twinkie unless specifically approved by the secretary of defense. In other words, if an interrogator had learned that Usama bin Ladin’s accountant loved Cadbury chocolate, and intended to enter the interrogation booth armed with a Dairy Milk Wafer to extract the name of a Saudi financier, he needed to “specifically determine that military necessity requires” the use of the Dairy Milk Wafer and send an alert to Secretary Rumsfeld that chocolate was to be deployed against an al-Qaida operative.

She kids you not. Read the whole think and weep for how wimpy we have become in the face of evil. Better one terrorist get his Twinkie than a thousand Americans die.

Fri Jan 07, 2005

Victor David Hanson understands the reality of this world

So does the average American but not the elites

His essay The Disenchanted American - Are we growing world-weary? explains what the world would have been like without American resolve over the last fifteen years:

Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well — the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear. Americans know all that — and yet they grasp that their own vigilance and military sacrifices have earned them spite rather than gratitude. And they are ever so slowly learning not much to care anymore.

Unfortunately, not all Americans are as wise as Hanson and the average American. Our major media outlets are as anti-American as any sophisticated European intellectual. If they can twist the news to reflect badly on the President and the country he leads, they will do so. We saw this in the immediate aftermath of the Tsunami, where the President, a man of great compassion, was pilloried for not reacting instantaneously, as if he had an action plan on the shelf to deal with an Indian Ocean tsunami. We see it every day in the way they media reports the bad news and only the bad news from Iraq. Since there really isn't much bad news coming out of Afghanistan, we never hear about it. Bush won a great victory there so pretend it never happened.

The minority party in this country, the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Zell Miller, would rather fight the President than support the war effort. They even leak top secret military information to their media allies if they think they can score a point.

Academia seems to have joined the other side. Our military can't recruit at Ivy League Schools but supporters of the Palestinian branch of Islamic terrorism get a free pass. LGF reports a typical example from Duke University.

Washington is full of leakers, leaking everything they can that might damage the war effort. One reflects on how far our elites have fallen since the dangerous days of WW2 when secrecy was preserved at all costs. The Atom bomb was developed in complete secrecy. The breaking of German and Japanese codes remained a secret until well after the war. Not today.

Then we have the various "humanitarian" organizations and their allies who are so concerned about the rights of captured terrorists. So what if they flout the Geneva conventions? So what if they deliberately target civilians? So what if they booby-trap bodies? So what if they fly jets into skyscrapers? So what, if America's soldiers will die because our military and intelligence services have to treat terrorists gently? Worse, we, the American people and our leaders, let our enemies get away with that crap.

Bush should be on national television saying that we will accord terrorists the protections of the Geneva conventions if and only if their Sheiks and Imams become signatories to the conventions, and the terrorists abide by them. Failing that, all terrorists will be treated as unlawful combatants, interrogated for any information they might provide, and then disposed of as the local commander sees fit. Of course, if the terrorists abide by the Geneva conventions they lose their most powerful weapon - terrorism.

Thu Jan 06, 2005

Saddam vs the Tsunami

Saddam was worse

Tsunami - People Killed (or missing,
presumed dead) (based on this CNN report)
Sri Lanka: 60,000
Indonesia: 95,000
Thailand: 9,000
India: 16,000
Rest of world: 1,000

Saddam (Estimate of deaths under his rule)
Both sides in the Iran/Iraq war 1,500,000
Kurds (Anfal) 110,000
Shia (after Gulf war) 60,000
Other Iraqis: 50,000
Rest of world: 2,000

US funds allocated to clean up after the disaster
Tsunami Relief Funds $350,000,000
Post-Saddam Iraq $87,000,000,000
Of course, Saddam is out-classed by National Socialist Adolf Hitler, Communist Josef Stalin, Communist Mao Tse-Tung and Communist Pol Pot. Natural disasters inflict terrible suffering at random. But tyrants have taken a far greater toll in the last century. We can't do much to stop the natural disasters. The Socialists and Communists and other assorted fascists and leftists don't want us to stop the tyrants, either.

Wed Jan 05, 2005

Will Harry Reid, the Senate Minority Leader follow Trent Lott's example

He should be walking the same plank for blatant racism

Eugene Volokh analyses Reid's comments on Thomas's opinions and tears Reid apart. Here's the genesis:

Many people criticized Sen. Reid's claim, but it was hard to evaluate it partly because the Senator gave no examples. It turns out that on a December 26 CNN program, Reid did give an example:

HENRY: Let's take a look at what you said. When you were asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether or not you could support Justice Thomas to be chief justice you said quote, "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written."

Could you name one of those opinions that you think is poorly written?

REID: Oh sure, that's easy to do. You take the Hillside Diary case. In that case you had a [dissent] written by Scalia and a [dissent] written by Thomas. There — it's like looking at an 8th grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard.

Reid can't know many 8th graders who write like this:

I join Parts I and III of the Court's opinion and respectfully dissent from Part II, which holds that §144 of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, 7 U. S. C. §7254, "does not clearly express an intent to insulate California's pricing and pooling laws from a Commerce Clause challenge." Ante, at 6-7. Although I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in its statutory analysis, I nevertheless would affirm its judgment on this claim because "[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application," Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison, 520 U. S. 564, 610 (1997) (Thomas, J., dissenting), and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute.

I read Thomas' opinions in the Michigan affirmative action case. I thought they were superb.

Reid has made a blatantly racist comment when he compares the work of Thomas (black) to Scalia (swarthy) as 8th grader to Harvard graduate. Worse, the example he cites proves that Reid knows not of what he talks. I guess that's par for the course in the Senate. Are the Republicans are too lily-livered to make Reid walk Lott's plank?

Tue Jan 04, 2005

A harrowing account of surviving the Tsunami

A letter in Belmont Club's secondary site gives a compelling account of survival

Read it here. Here's a taste:

At that moment I saw large amounts of water coming again and, no longer calm, I screamed 'Run!' Lal was still engrossed in his mobile and I screamed 'Forget the mobile'Run!' But when I looked ahead I could see water cascading over the track as far as the eye could see. 'Hang on' I shouted and stopped to grip the rail in both hands. Lal was doing the same about 5 metres to my left. I watched the water swiftly rise up my arms, and let the bag go, with some regret, as it had all my valuables in it, but I wasn't going to jeopardise my safety for the sake of a bag. I looked across at Lal, but he had gone, and then I went.

A wall of water picked me up and flung me backwards into the edge of the jungle. I was rolled about underwater like a rag doll. You read about kittens going round in washing machines and that is what it felt like. I then broke surface and saw the jungle moving past at 30-40 mph. It was dense with a lot of trees and other vegetation. I stupidly tried to grab a palm frond but I was going far too fast and couldn't hold on.

Then I was sucked under and I swam desperately towards where I thought the surface was, but I was still being rolled around and buffed: I went through a tree or something that stripped my watch off my wrist. Holding my breath was now becoming a real issue and I let it out slowly to ease the longing to breathe, but then I saw light and did break the surface and took a gulp of air.

As a kid I nearly drowned when I was swept away in a river current. My father hauled me out after my little life had flashed before my eyes and I'd lost consciousness. Tens of thousands of people experienced that horror a thousandfold and could not be rescued. Many of the survivors have lost everything but their lives and still face dire threats from disease and starvation.

Give, but give wisely. Anything remotely connected to the UN is to be avoided. To see why, visit The Diplomad.

Sun Jan 02, 2005

No token Cabinet secretaries

Mostly

Ron Paige, 72, will be leaving the Bush Administration after working to pass and implement "No Child Left Behind". He stood up to the NEA, which makes him a hero in my books. The Clarion Ledger of Mississippi looks at his legacy:

Gayle Fallon, head of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said Paige was considered a revolutionary in 1994 when he took over the city's troubled, 90-percent minority school system.

"He was not satisfied with the status quo," Fallon said. "His view was 'Stop making excuses. Those kids can learn.' "

His reforms brought national attention — and attention from Bush, who wanted to make education a priority after his 2000 election.

The nation's largest teacher's union, the National Education Association, took aim at Paige's goals, although it endorsed his nomination as education secretary. The NEA, which represents 2.7 million teachers, had said it would file suit to amend or kill the No Child Left Behind law, saying schools couldn't be forced to pay for its extensive testing, tutoring and transfer requirements.

An exasperated Paige reacted by calling the NEA "a terrorist organization," embarrassing the administration. He later apologized to teachers, but not to the union.

"He's not used to cutthroat politics," Fallon said.

Paige said he's happy to leave the very public life he's led in Washington and is looking forward to building a "retirement dream house" in Houston.

After four years in Washington, he deserves his retirement.

If we look at Bush's minority appoinments we see that they were mostly based on merit. Paige was a good choice. The exception was that futile gesture of bi-partisanship, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. He's ineffective. Why isn't he going?

Middle East challenges of 2005

The list is daunting

Iran is the top challenge for 2005. The regime has a long history of supporting terrorism across the Middle East. Just listing the attacks that involved Iran, directly or indirectly, is sobering. From a US perspective, these are some of the highlights (from [Freemanlist] AMERICAN VICTIMS OF ARAB TERRORISM):

April 18, 1983, Beirut, Lebanon. A truck-bomb detonated by a remote control exploded in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 employees, including the CIA's Middle East director, and wounding 120. Hizballah, with financial backing from Iran, was responsible for the attack.

October 23, 1983, Beirut, Lebanon. A truck loaded with a bomb crashed into the lobby of the U.S. Marines headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 soldiers and wounding 81. The attack was carried out by Hizballah with the help of Syrian intelligence and financed by Iran. April 12, 1984, Torrejon, Spain. Hizballah bombed a restaurant near an U.S. Air Force base in Torrejon, Spain, killing 18 servicemen and wounding 83 people.

September 20, 1984, Beirut, Lebanon. A suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in East Beirut killed 23 people and injured 21. The American and British ambassadors were slightly injured in the attack, attributed to the Iranian backed Hizballah group.

June 25, 1996, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A fuel truck carrying a bomb exploded outside the U.S. military's Khobar Towers housing facility in Dhahran, killing 19 U.S. military personnel and wounding 515 persons, including 240 U.S. personnel. Several groups claimed responsibility for the attack. In June 2001, a U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, identified Saudi Hizballah as the party responsible for the attack. The court indicated that the members of the organization, banned from Saudi Arabia, "frequently met and were trained in Lebanon, Syria, or Iran" with Libyan help.

More recently, Iran has involved itself in post-Saddam Iraq doing all it can to undermine the transformation of a Baathist (i.e. Islamo-Fascist) regime into a fre country. At home, the Iranian regime is barbaric and repressive. Publicly hanging a young women from a crane is just one example of the horrors the Iranian people suffer under the Mullahs' harsh rule.

But the Mullahs have greater ambitions for evil. The are actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program and may only be a few short months away from obtaining them. The regime has already said what it would like to do with those weapons. In 2002, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's former president said that on the day the Muslim world gets nuclear weapons the Israeli question will be settled forever "since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world."

So, President Bush's biggest problem is how to stop Iran going nuclear. The problem is that the world go even more bananas than it did over Iraq if the President acts unilaterally, or is seen to let Israel act unilaterally. Here's hoping the rest of the world goes bananas.

Syria continues to support terrorist activity in Iraq. It still occupies Lebanon and allows terrorist organizations to operate with impunity inside Syria and Lebanon. The good news is that Syria is now surrounded and susceptible to extreme pressure from the US from its base in Iraq. Perhaps Assad jnr. will soon have his own Ghaddafi moment.

Iraq remains a problem. However, retaking Fallujah marked a turning point. There will be more terrorist attacks before the elections, but the elections will create an Iraqi government with legitimacy and an urgent need to crush the remnants of the insurgency.

Saudia Arabia is now dealing with the consequences of supporting Islamic terrorism while trying to keep the US on side. I think that terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia will continue, but not to the level where the Saudis will be forced to accept US military assistance.

The Palestinian war against Israel will likely peter out. The security wall, the death of the chief instigator of violence, and Israeli tactics and vigilance will see to that. But it won't be all peace and light under Abbas. I don't really see that much progress can be made until the Palestinians turn their minds from destroying Israel to more productive activities, such as building a civil society. That could take decades.

One of the major problems is the role of the Middle Eastern media in inciting hatred of Jews and Americans across the Middle East. Little Green Footballs has frequently documented the pernicious programming that misinforms Muslim public opinion. The organ reaping meme is the latest variation. Since there is no such thing as a free press in the Middle East outside of Israel and Iraq, it would seem that our diplomats should be monitoring such bile and chatting with the relevant authorities about how such lies endangers good relations with the US. In the case of Egypt, those good relations are worth about $2 billion in aid each year.

Lest we forget, out erstwhile European allies, with the partial exception of Britain and Italy, are not yet provng helpful. Perhaps 2005 will help Europeans finally understand that Radical Islam is at war with the West, including Europe. Read more »

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