Milbrook, UK

Auto Express has been playing with Google Earth and has found ten of the most covert manufacturers’ test tracks.

Travis Patriquin, an Army Captain serving in Iraq, who was killed last Wednesday by the same IED which killed Marine Corps Major Megan McClung, previously prepared a Powerpoint presentation outlining a different strategy for success from that currently being employed.

His “”How to Win in Al Anbar” is reported by ABC News to have achieved a large informal circulation.

Patriquin killed.

PJM reports:

Broadcasting from a secret location in Syria, Al-Qaeda and its allies now have their own 24-hour television station, Pajamas Media has learned.

Known as Al-Zawraa, Arabic for “first channel,” the station broadcasts enemy propaganda and rebroadcasts of Western anti-war material, including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. It is not connected with Al-Jazeera.

Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is delighted by al-Zawraa. A U.S. military intelligence officer told Pajamas Media that the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Masri, “has long-term and big plans for this thing.” Previous attempts by al-Qaeda to set up media propaganda outlets have been limited to satellite radio and the Internet. Al-Zawraa, however, is seemingly well financed and striving for a broader appeal….

The programming originates from Syria, where its main backer, Mishaan al-Jabouri, a well-known Sunni Baathist agitator and former Iraqi parliamentarian, recently fled to escape an Iraqi arrest warrant for suspected corruption and embezzlement. He initially set the station up in Tikrit, Iraq, but in early November its studio was raided by authorities and closed down for incitement.

Al-Jabouri, who in Damascus during the final years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, is widely believed to have forged close ties with Saddam’s intelligence services. More recently, he has been linked to al-Qaeda.

The speed with which al-Zawraa was able to resume its transmissions from Syria and Nilesat after the raid on the Tikrit station is unusual, according to Sennitt. Moreover, the reach of al-Zawraa’s broadcasts indicates that the station is attempting to influence viewers far beyond Iraq.

Government officials tell Pajamas Media that they are trying to remove al-Zawraa from the airwaves. Jim Turner, deputy director of Defense Press Operations, told Pajamas Media in an e-mail that this is the State Department’s decision because “they are the department of the US Government that would interact with another country on such an issue.”

In turn, a State Department official told Pajamas Media, “We are strongly supporting the Iraqi efforts to work with the Egyptians to get this off the air.” The State Department’s comment seems designed to avoid diplomatic fallout, since Egypt’s control of Nilesat would allow it to stop al-Zawraa’s signal.

Turning off al Zawaraa without Egypt’s help would be nearly impossible. Jamming its signal may prove difficult since the physical location of the signal’s feed would need to be located and, according to Sennitt, it could be anywhere. “All that’s needed is a dish pointing at the satellite, and a transmitter on the correct uplink frequency. The satellite will carry whatever signal it receives.”

Wouldn’t the unexpected arrival of a cruise missile work very nicely at turning it off?

The comedian does a brief monologue on Fox News.

2:39 video

Hat tip to Tom Delay.

Those who were relieved when incoming democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi, under pressure, reconsidered her first choice for House Intelligence Committee chairman, and refrained from appointed Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings, who was previously removed from the federal bench for corruption, are worrying again.

Canada Free Press reports:

Law enforcement and intelligence experts are scratching their heads in disbelief upon discovering that the next House Intelligence Committee Chairman doesn’t possess even a basic understanding of terrorism or terrorist groups. In fact, he’s never heard of Hezbollah.

Representative Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), who was Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi’s second choice to head the sensitive and vital committee, did not know what Hezbollah was and incorrectly described Al-Qaeda as being Shiite rather than Sunni.

Rep. Reyes appeared disoriented when a reporter asked him basic questions about the Islamic groups that are the principal targets of America’s intelligence agencies, including Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and others.

“Al-Qa’eda is what — Sunni or Shia?” Jeff Stein, the Congressional Quarterly magazine’s national security editor, asked Mr Reyes. “Al-Qaeda, they have both,” replied Reyes.

“You’re talking about predominately?”Predominantly — probably Shiite,” said the puzzled Democrat from Texas.

As Mr. Stein noted in his CQ column, “He couldn’t have been more wrong. Al-Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an Al-Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.”

He also asked Reyes about the terrorist group Hezbollah. “Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah…” he said, laughing. “Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“This is no laughing matter. Where was this man when Israel and Hezbollah battled for almost two weeks?” asked a former intelligence officer and now New York City detective.

“We went from an impeached judge to a man ignorant of the basic facts regarding terrorist groups. What kind of oversight will that be?” he added.

Some NCO’s discuss their own experiences with ROE in Iraq. Food for thought.

Scenario: You’re a gunner on an M2 .50 caliber machine gun mounted atop a M1114 Up-Armored HMMWV. You are the last vehicle and you are pulling rear security. A vehicle in the distance is swerving through traffic on a mission from God and closing on your convoy quickly. You wave your arms to get the driver’s attention to no avail. You yell obscenities at the crazy Iraqi while drawing down on the vehicle with your large caliber, fully automatic, machine gun. Hell, you even throw your water bottle hoping to get the hood on a bounce. Nothing. You notice a male driver who appears to be gripping the wheel a little too tight and who has beads of sweat forming on his brow. You realize that this could be trouble. But… to complicate the matter, there is a woman (presumably his wife) and 4 children in the car as well. The vehicle is fast approaching… and you have a mere second to react. Your buddy’s, nay, family’s lives are on the line behind you. They trust you to make the right decision. What do you do?

Option 1: Warning shots. Sure. Can work. Collateral damage becomes an issue, and high ranking military personnel HATE such paperwork.

Option 2: Wait it out. This choice is putting the lives of a “civilian” before the lives of your military “family.” I wholeheartedly disagree with this choice, but it keeps you out of Leavenworth.

Option 3: Stop the vehicle by any means necessary. Shoot ‘em up and ensure the safety of your family who depends on you.

Some naughty little middle school kid (a lot like me) in Joliet, in the conspicuously hoplophophic state of Illinois, brought a pellet-gun (a species of non-terribly-hazardous airgun) to school. Young Ryan Morgan (and an associate) learned of the presence of the contraband, and went and retrieved it from its cached location and turned it in to the authorities.

The same pettyfogging and nincompoop authorities gave Ryan the local Pavel Morozhov Award for Political Correctness, expelling him from school for a year on the basis of the school’s “zero tolerance” policy on the theory that he was technically “in possession” of the pellet gun.

Warner Todd Huston is shocked and appalled by the injustice, but I think there is a good lesson in all of this for young Ryan.
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A few years back, when I still lived in Newtown, Connecticut, that Northern Fairfield County community was subjected to a wave of terror in which hormonally-incited teenage males were shooting little holes in some windows with the same dreadful and awe-inspiring pellet guns.

The local forces of social uplift demanded condign action against the wielders of allegedly lethal instruments of destruction, and a new wave of legislation was in the works when I lodged a demurral in the local paper, pointing out that CO2-powered pellet guns were considerably less than lethal to life forms larger than squirrels. Someone prominent in the League of Women Vipers attempted to argue that airguns were dangerous to life. So, I issued a challenge, offering to provide a typical .22 caliber, CO2-cannister-powered airgun, and to stand at 25 feet (7.62 meters) facing my adversary, and allow her to shoot me anywhere she liked, provided I could wear eye protection.

If I died from my injuries, I would leave $500 to the charity of her choice. If I survived, she would be obliged to donate an equivalent sum to the National Rifle Association.

Curiously enough, the lady declined the wager.

WorldNetDaily publishes things I quote myself. Imagine my embarassment at running into today’s column direct from the fever swamps.

Jim Rutz, who seems to be not only a whackjob, but a snake-oil-selling evangelist and author of a number of The-End-of-the-World-Is-Right-Around-The-Corner books, thinks that soy beans make you queer.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

I eat edamame all the time at sushi restaurants myself without observable effect.

WorldNetDaily, please clean up your act, and get rid of these kinds of clowns.

Try the game Left Behind.

Godless heathens in San Francisco don’t like this one.

Dutch Insurance Commercial with Oriental setting.

video

Apparently, Centraal Beheer’s commercials are famous for their humor.

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page thinks the outgoing 109th Congress managed to do a few things right in its closing session.

One of the items the Journal mentioned gave me pause. Apparently, Congress opened 8.3 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling. The thought came to mind: It was closed? When? By what specific legislation? And following what debate? I have no idea. But everywhere one looks in today’s America, whatever it may be, it’s currently illegal, forbidden, verboten. And the opportunity to do anything will require special legislation.

It’s been a long time, I expect, since somebody took a cigarette, asked for permission to light up, and received the once-common reply: “It’s a free country.”

Mark Bauerlein, in Chronicle of Higher Education, sounds a lot like David Horowitz, describing the academic left’s policy of apartheid concerning conservative ideas, thinkers, and scholars.

Just as an example, he compares the status of Hayek with Foucault:

Decades ago a thinker who’d witnessed oppression firsthand embarked upon a multibook investigation into the operations of society and power. Mingling philosophical analysis and historical observation, he produced an interpretation of modern life that traced its origins to the Enlightenment and came down to a fundamental opposition: the diverse energies of individuals versus the regulatory acts of the state and its rationalizing experts. Those latter were social scientists, a caste of 18th- and 19th-century theorists whose extension of scientific method to social relations, the thinker concluded, produced some of the great catastrophes of modern times.

Here’s the rub: I don’t mean Michel Foucault. The description fits him, but it also fits someone less hallowed in academe today: Friedrich A. von Hayek, the economist and social philosopher. Before and after World War II, Hayek battled the cardinal policy sin of the time, central planning and the socialist regimes that embraced it. He remains a key figure in conservative thought, an authority on free enterprise, individual liberty, and centralized power.

And yet, while Foucault and Hayek deal with similar topics, and while Hayek’s defense of free markets (for which he won the Nobel prize in economics in 1974) influenced global politics far more than Foucault’s analyses of social institutions like psychiatry and prisons, the two thinkers enjoy contrary standing in the liberal-arts curriculum. Hayek’s work in economics has a fair presence in that field, and his social writings reach libertarians in the business school, but in the humanities and most of the social sciences he doesn’t even exist. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, a week didn’t pass without Foucault igniting discussion, but I can’t remember hearing Hayek’s name.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Deck the Halls

1:28 video

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal noted the human costs of General Pinochet’s suppression of leftist revolution in Chile.

The official death toll of the Pinochet dictatorship is some 3,197. An estimated 2,796 of those died in the first two weeks of fighting between the army and the Allende-armed militias.

In the course of 17 years of military rule, the Chilean military extra-judicially eliminated permanently a total of 401 revolutionists, i.e., 401 persons actively engaged in a violent conspiracy against the political rights, private property, personal freedom, and prosperity of 16 million Chileans.

It was obviously the successful elimination of precisely this leadership cadre which prevented the capture of the government in Chile by Communism. Germany should have been so lucky that an aristocratic general staged a coup when Hitler became chancellor and began dismantling the Weimar Constitution, subdued the revolutionary Brownshirts and Blackshirts, and restored democracy, along with freedom, prosperity, and the rule of law, at so small a cost.

The International Left, and its sympathisers in the media and the Entertainment Industry, have waged an incessant and continuing public relations campaign against General Pinochet and his military regime, attempting to portray them in the most sinister of lights, but the Left’s hypocrisy is patent.

Allende would unquestionably have followed the model and example of Fidel Castro, who has killed far more people and driven many more political opponents into exile than the Chilean military. And there exists the important difference that Castro’s victims were innocent, and Pinochet’s were guilty. There is also the second important difference that Pinochet undertook a coup against a rising dictatorship in order to restore democracy and law, while Castro’s coup replaced a more benign dictatorship with a far more vicious and lawless one. The Left which defends Castro is in no position whatsoever to criticize Pinochet.

In the current age of political correctness, legislatures eagerly swoon and concede any current compensation for ancient injuries demanded by favored victim groups.

The most ludicrous cases can be found in the Eastern United States, where handfuls of ordinary people claiming minute traces of Indian blood from centuries-ago-vanished tribes, vanquished in wars of the 17th century, are now vigorously lobbying for recognition as “tribes.”

The most spectacular confidence job occurred in Connecticut, in reference to the Pequots, the local tribe defeated in a war they started with English colonists in the 1630s. Surviving Pequots were absorbed centuries ago into the emancipated African-American population of layabouts, laborers, and local drunks. The Colony of Connecticut settled Pequot land claims in the 18th century conceding to some Pequots a small reservation of 989 swampy and remote acres. That reservation was reduced by land sales to 213 acres by the mid-19th century. By the 20th century, one elderly woman (possibly very remotely connected to Rhode Island’s one-time Narragansett tribe) resided in a humble, ordinary house on the so-called Indian reservation.

Then along came the rise of leftism in the ‘60s, and with it activist lawyers like Tom Tureen. In 1973, Tureen persuaded Skip Hayworth, the woman’s grandson, an itinerant welder, to move onto the “reservation,” and lay claim to an additional 800 acres of neighboring suburban houses on the basis of Indian Nonintercourse Act of 1790 which required that every sale of tribal land be approved by federal treaty.

A lot of Connecticut suburbanites found their homes’ titles clouded, and howled for government intervention. The Great White Father in Washington should have declared war on Connecticut’s insurgent wannabe redskins, and sent some cavalry to drive them off the reservation, back to the ordinary suburbs where they belonged, but instead Congress hurriedly surrendered in 1983 to the imaginary Pequots. Without bothering even to verify genealogical claims, Congress granted tribal recognition and a nine hundred thousand dollar settlement.

The “Pequots”’ lawyers then demanded tribal exemptions from state regulatory oversight, which included gambling exemptions. And, voilá , in 1992 Foxwood Casino opened, growing in a few years to a facility featuring 24 restaurants, three hotels, 17 shops, a golf course, a state-of-the-art Pequot museum, and producing profits of more than $1 billion per year.

This same kind of nonsense is spreading to Virginia, and the Washington Post is lending a helping hand. Today, we are bringing back to life the dead Mattaponi Indian language.

Just wait until the activist leftwing lawyers show up, and start lodging land claims against suburban residents of a couple of dozen counties lying between Hampton Roads and the Potomac in search of a deal for compensation and gambling rights.
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Ever wonder about Native American Indians history? It is a fascinating and multi-faceted story unable to be told in one sitting. Some of the beautiful things they made include American Indian jewelry and tools.

The leftwing journalism side of the Wall Street Journal has a sob story today about the poor Army running out of money under the strain of expenses of combat operations in Iraq.

Would you just look at these examples?

It may seem hard to believe that a country which allocated $168 billion to the Army this year—more than twice the 2000 budget—can’t cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two pillars of the Army, personnel and equipment—both built to wage high-tech, firepower-intensive wars—are under enormous stress:

The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle—helmets, rifles, body armor—has more than tripled to $25,000 from $7,000 in 1999.

The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.

Those M4 carbines cost $1382 a piece! And before adding another $8800 worth of sights! Let’s drop those ugly suckers, and buy some nice new Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifles in the stainless steel synthetic stock configuration. We can get them retail for $600 a pop, and I bet if we buy a few hundred thousand we can probably get some kind of discount. These rifles shoot the same identical cartridge, and even come with useable sights.

True, they won’t each and every one have nearly nine thousand dollars worth of high-tech infrared shoot-them-in-the-dark sighting equipment, but we could probably get by well enough just purchasing that level of technology for a small number of snipers. Nobody had any of that kind of equipment in WWII and we still won.

If Ruger is not able to supply every Ranch Rifle we need tomorrow, we can just temporarily rough it with the same AK-47s we must have captured by the box car load from the Iraq Army, and which you can pick up cheap in any souk or bazaar in the Middle East. AK-47s are notoriously rugged and reliable.

$225,000 Humvees? It seems impossible to suppose that a large portion of the US Army could get by for basic vehicular transportation on lesser SUVs. How about some nice Ford Expeditions @$27,042 – $38,702. We can pull out all the stops, but the Eddie Bauer model with Convenience Package and power lift gate, add a terrific stereo and soup up the air conditioning, and still come out way ahead.

Looking at that picture of the contemporary soldier, tricked out with every high tech gee gaw anybody can think of. The thought inevitably comes to mind that we are not fighting technically advanced adversaries from Outer Space, or the German Army. We don’t have to achieve the absolute state of the art to be technically far ahead of our Islamic enemies. This conflict features us against people from the Middle Ages with guns. Kalashnikovs, RPGs, IEDs hooked up to washing machine timers are as high-tech as they get.

When you think about what the US Army is spending, we could probably just take out Mafia contracts on all our jihadi and insurgent adversaries on an individual basis, and still come out ahead.

And there is another obvious, and more realistic, alternative: just take all counter-insurgency operations away the Army (with its bloated and over-luxurious TO&E), and turn them over to the Marine Corps.

Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune breaks with ordinary journalistic convention by doing some actual investigation, and finds that the Minneapolis Imams currently trying to shakedown US Airways for a cash settlement in compensation for their removal from a flight last month have some pretty sinister affiliations.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the imams’ legal representative, is an organization that “we know has ties to terrorism,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in 2003. And the Muslim American Society, which is also supporting the imams? It’s the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Chicago Tribune, which called it “the world’s most influential Islamic fundamentalist group.”

How about Omar Shahin, the imams’ spokesman and also president of the North American Imams Federation? He is a native of Jordan, who says he became a U.S. citizen in 2003. From 2000 to 2003, Shahin served as president of Islamic Center of Tucson (ICT), that city’s largest mosque.

The ICT is well known. The mosque has “an extensive history of terror links,” according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who testified about terrorist financing before the Senate Banking Committee in July 2005.

The Washington Post described these links in a 2002 article. “Tucson was one of the first points of contact in the United States for the jihadist group that evolved into al Qaeda,” the Post reported. And the ICT? It held “basically the first cell of al Qaeda in the United States; that is where it all started,” said Rita Katz, a terrorism expert quoted by the Post.

ICT members have included high-profile terrorists. Wael Hamza Jelaidan, the mosque’s leader in the mid-1980s, was identified by the U.S. government as a ” ‘co-founder’ of al Qaeda and its logistics chief,” the Post reported.

Another former member, Wadi Hage, served as Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary after leaving Arizona, the Post said, attributing it to government sources. Hage established a bin Laden support network in Arizona and “this network is still in place,” Emerson wrote in his book “Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.,” citing a 2002 Senate Intelligence Committee Report. In 2001, Hage was convicted of plotting the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The best-known terrorist with apparent (according to the Post and Emerson) connections to the ICT is Hani Hanjour, who piloted the plane that flew into the Pentagon on 9/11. Hanjour took aviation lessons in Tucson in the late 1990s.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier reports

General Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, liberator of the Republic of Chile, died today of a heart attack in Santiago at the age of 91, eluding finally the vindictive efforts at persecution of the cowardly hound pack of the international left.

Most sensible people would regard the personal project of the British big game hunter hero of Geoffrey Household’s famous 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the stalking and assassination of Adolph Hitler, as a commendable effort to save the lives and liberty of millions from the depraved ambitions of a tyrant.

What Captain Thorndike (played by Walter Pidgeon in the 1941 film version by Fritz Lang, retitled as Man Hunt) tried to do fictionally for the European world of 1939, Augusto Pinochet really did in cold reality for the population of Chile in 1973.

The Communist Salvador Allende managed to gain power in 1970 by a plurality of 36.2 percent in a three-way election.

Immediately upon taking office, Allende began instituting La vía chilena al socialismo (“the Chilean Path to Socialism”), featuring the nationalization of all large industry, government takeover of the health care system and education, land seizure and redistribution of all property of more than eighty hectares (197 acres) of irrigated land. The Allende government defaulted on all foreign debt, and instituted a freeze on prices along with a government-dictated raise of all salaries.

Naturally, even basic commodities disappeared from supermarket shelves, and the necessities of life became only available via the black market. In 1971, Allende established diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba, and invited Fidel Castro for a month-long visit in which Castro participated actively in the government of Chile.

Hyperinflation (508%) and food shortages ensued. Allende proceeded to rule while disregarding the courts. Attempts at restriction of freedom of speech, and unauthorized seizures of farms and private busineses became commonplace.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, led by General Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, intervened to restore the rule of law. Defeated, and facing arrest and trial, Allende committed suicide with the same AK-47 Kalashnikov given to him as a gift by Fidel Castro.

General Pinochet ruled extra-constitutionally for 17 years, in the course of which a few thousand radical leftist extremists, bent upon violence and upon assaults upon the basic liberties and property rights of the people of the Republic of Chile, and guilty of revolutionary conspiracy and assassination attempts, were prophylactically eliminated by the security forces of the Republic.

Suppose Captain Thorndike had been able to shoot Hitler before the outbreak of WWII? Suppose he, and perhaps some big game hunter associates, had also eliminated Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann and another few thousand key Nazi lieutenants, in time to prevent the full establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany, saving thereby millions of innocent lives? Should Thorndike have subsequently been prosecuted by one European Union Jack-in-Office judiciar after another?

In 1980, General Pinochet promulgated a new constitution promising a return to civilian rule in 1990. In 1988, he sought the approval of a plebiscite for another 8 year term as president. Failing to win that vote, he proceeded to conduct a democratic election, and stepped down voluntarily on March 11, 1990 to an elected successor. He left power, having restored both freedom and prosperity to Chile.

Mr. Allende’s role model, Fidel Castro, seized power in 1959 and continues to rule tyrannically over a starving and impoverished population nearly 50 years later. Castro has executed many thousands of people, but curiously enough, not one single European Union judicial official has ever chosen to indict or prosecute him.

The general’s reputation, and personal freedom, were the objects during the later years of his life to an endless succession of manipulative and propagandistic attempts at judicial vengeance by the international left. With his death, he has moved beyond their reach to take his rightful place, along with Bolivar and O’Higgins, among the heroes and liberators of Latin American.

Viva Pinochet!

1:27 video

Nazi Germany’s DORA Gun

Built to destroy the French Maginot Line fortifications, this monstrous 800 mm railroad gun was completed too late to be used in the campaign against France (in which the Maginot Line was bypassed anyway). It was finally used at Sebastopol where it fired 48 7-ton shells over 13 days, demolishing Soviet forts with great thoroughness.

80cm ‘Gustav’ in Action

Wikipedia

Hat tip to Ellie.

Scientific fact threatening primitive superstition poses a hazard to remote indigenous tribes, proclaims this Sunday’s Times, in this weekly front-page sob story.

At issue is whether scientists who need DNA from aboriginal populations to fashion a window on the past are underselling the risks to present-day donors. Geographic origin stories told by DNA can clash with long-held beliefs, threatening a world view some indigenous leaders see as vital to preserving their culture.

They argue that genetic ancestry information could also jeopardize land rights and other benefits that are based on the notion that their people have lived in a place since the beginning of time.

Liberal egalitarianism rates not only naked savagery as equal to modern civilization, it also considers primitive cultures’ self-deluding myths as privileged from the challenge of fact.

Jules Crittenden urges those chickendoves to enlist in time for the surrender and withdrawal.

The pressure for cut-and-walk is on. The moment of defeat is at hand!

Back when the war started, there were some highly principled peaceniks who decided to go to Iraq to shield the innocent Iraqi people from the onslaught of American imperialist war criminals. This effort, unfortunately, did not persist long enough for any of them to hear a shot fired. They left in indignant frustration when they realized Saddam Hussein was placing them in military installations.

This was too bad. I supported what they were doing. I thought if Sean Penn could save the lives of innocent Iraqis by bravely taking a round, that was good. I could have some respect for the legions of lefties, if they chose to get splattered in furtherance of their beliefs. But they didn’t. It was a great disappointment.

Since then, the anti-war crowd, most of whom didn’t even manage to not shield Iraqis in the first place, have channeled their indignation into demands that anyone who supports this war enlist and go to Iraq. They’ve also been incensed that anyone who didn’t go to a war that they didn’t go to 40 years ago should suggest the United States needs to act in its own self-interest and self-defense. They call these people “chickenhawks.”

Now, American soldiers may be asked to fight a rearguard action, dying for the disengagement the anti-war movement has demanded. Now is the time for everyone who supports this to enlist. Go to Baghdad. Place yourself between the hapless GIs and their attackers. Strap yourselves to the bumpers of Humvees … better yet, jog ahead of the convoy and jump up and down on anything that looks suspicious.

The loud chorus of Kumbaya that precedes any American military unit will alert anti-American terrorists that here are people who want to understand why they hate us. Surely this will cause these heartless killers to pause, and reconsider their ways.

I assume John “Last Man” Kerry and John “Cut-and-Run” Murtha—as doves who actually have heard shots fired in anger and engaged in the American imperialist war crime that was Vietnam, but have since repented—will be leading the Doves’ Crusade. I encourage all peaceniks to climb on board for the Big Lose. When your grandkids say, “What did you do when the United States of America was humiliated?” you don’t want to have to change the subject.

The Chairman of the Senate Comittee on Environment and Public Works issues this report as a challenge to the journalists covering the Global Warming debate.

You’re not dumb enough to have fallen for one of those Nigerian email frauds, are you?

But, then you’re not a former democrat Congressman, married to a current democrat Congresswoman, whose son is dating Chelsea Clinton, either. I guess if you can believe that socialized healthcare will work, believing in free millions from Nigeria is no problem.

The Blotter:

If reports are true that Chelsea Clinton and her boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky are considering marriage, the father of the groom won’t be able to attend the wedding until he is released from prison in November 2008.

Ed Mezvinsky, a former Democratic Congressman from Iowa, is serving a seven-year sentence for fraud after getting caught up in a series of Nigerian e-mail scams.

Initially, Mezvinsky became the victim of “just about every different kind of African-based scam we’ve ever seen,” federal prosecutor Bob Zauzmer told 20/20 for a report to be broadcast this evening.

But then, says Zauzmer, Mezvinsky began to steal from clients and even his own mother-in-law to raise the money to try yet another scheme.

NBC10.com:

Former U.S. Rep. Ed Mezvinsky pleaded guilty to stealing $10.4 million from his friends, family and business associates and even his mother-in-law .

Mezvinsky tearfully expressed remorse before being sentenced Thursday to six years, eight months in prison for defrauding business associates, friends and family.

Federal prosecutors called Mezvinsky, 65, a “con man” who faked mental illness to avoid punishment for bilking friends and business associates. They were seeking a nine to 11-year prison term for the disgraced lawmaker, who pleaded guilty to 31 counts of fraud in September.

Through tears, Mezvinsky told U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell that he still fails to completely understand his actions.

“I went into a spiral that turned into the house of cards that fell,” Mezvinsky said.

Dalzell gave credit to Mezvinsky for accepting responsibility with a guilty plea, but rejected a plea for leniency over Mezvinsky’s alleged mental capacity. He sentenced the former lawmaker to 80 months in prison.

“Whatever impairment Mr. Mezvinsky may have had—and I am dubious in the extreme about that—it simply did not contribute to the … crimes which took place over 12 years,” Dalzell said.

Mezvinsky and his wife, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who also served in Congress, were once high-profile Democrats who hobnobbed with Bill and Hillary Clinton and raised 11 children, some adopted, at their suburban Philadelphia mansion.

Prosecutors said Mezvinsky began soliciting cash for fraudulent schemes in the 1980s, and eventually collected millions for business ventures that never materialized, including an oil deal, a coin trading company and an effort to sell bracelets in Africa.

In the meantime, Mezvinsky fell victim to several Nigerian investment scams and lost much of his borrowed money. He blamed the losses on a bipolar disorder and a bad reaction to anti-malaria drug Lariam.

“I have been in denial for a long period, and now I’m accepting responsibility,” Mezvinsky said.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

J.R. Dunn explains how leftist ideology delegitimizes American military effort and ensures defeat.

It began with Afghanistan, starting only a month after the attacks, and built up from there. Moore, the Dixie Chicks, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney, Durbin, Murtha… The list could go on for page after page, all of them speaking in identical terms, all repeating the same code words – Halliburton, blood for oil, Abu Ghraib – all tearing into their country in a fashion unseen even in the Vietnam era.

And where the trendsetters have led, the public has followed. If the polls can be trusted (a bit of a leap, it’s true) something like over half the American people believe that the War on Terror, far from being a response to an unprovoked and atrocious attack, is a war of aggression fought on behalf on industrial capitalism in the form of George W’s oil buddies.

This is not a natural response. Countries fighting legitimate defensive wars don’t suffer this kind of erosion of public support in the midst of hostilities. Particularly as involves a war that began with an atrocity committed against fellow countrymen, an atrocity that could be (and eventually will be) repeated at any time. Such a reaction should not have occurred.

The reason it happened this time was the result of fifty years of conditioning that any and all American activities overseas, whether diplomatic, commercial, or military, are fundamentally illegitimate. American wars, no matter what their cause or nature, are viewed through the same prism, one created on the left for the purpose of undermining the country’s commitment to the Cold War, but useful in any context. Call it the “Imperial” or “Hegemonist” doctrine. Simply put, it holds that no American war (and little in the way of any interaction on the international level) is ever justified. All such ventures are wars of imperialist aggression, commonly carried out against helpless innocents in defiance of the wishes of the American people (at least the true American people – that is, left-wing Democrats), on behalf of secretive, sinister interest groups…

Unlike most left-wing doctrines, this one is not a European import but fully home-grown. It was incubated in the universities, developing over several decades in response to U.S. efforts against the Soviet Union.

Our fatal flaw involves our national will, our apparent inability to take on any necessary task, however lengthy, dirty or unpromising, and finish it satisfactorily. Our enemies have noted this and target it as a matter of course. Our friends – to perhaps stretch a term – have learned to manipulate it to their advantage.

As we have seen, this is no natural turn of events. There is nothing inevitable or unavoidable about it. It is entirely synthetic, the byproduct of an effort by our intellectual elite to serve an ideology now long dead. Our belief in ourselves as a nation, in our role and mission on the international stage, has been undermined for fifty years and more. There is not a level of society, from day laborer to corporate CEO, who has not been touched by this dogma. Not a single institution (with the professional military perhaps excepted) has been unaffected.

Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, a psychiatrist, diagnoses liberalism as a psychopathology.

The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error. Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.

As is the case in all personality disturbance, defects of this type represent serious failures in development processes… Among their consequences are the liberal mind’s relentless efforts to misrepresent human nature and to deny certain indispensable requirements for human relating. In his efforts to construct a grand collectivist utopia—to live what Jacques Barzun has called “the unconditioned life” in which “everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways”—the radical liberal attempts to actualize in the real world an idealized fiction that will mitigate all hardship and heal all wounds. (Barzun 2000). He acts out this fiction, essentially a Marxist morality play, in various theaters of human relatedness, most often on the world’s economic, social and political stages. But the play repeatedly folds. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, the radical liberal’s attempts to create a brave new socialist world have invariably failed. At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century his attempts continue to fail in the stagnant economies, moral decay and social turmoil now widespread in Europe. An increasingly bankrupt welfare society is putting the U.S. on track for the same fate if liberalism is not cured there. Because the liberal agenda’s principles violate the rules of ordered liberty, his most determined efforts to realize its visionary fantasies must inevitably fall short. Yet, despite all the evidence against it, the modern liberal mind believes his agenda is good social science. It is, in fact, bad science fiction. He persists in this agenda despite its madness.

And John Perazzo identifies one of the most seriously afflicted of our contemporaries:

Every so often, a public figure will speak a sentence that succinctly sums up his or her entire worldview in just a few words, exposing the core belief that is the wellspring of his or her every position on matters of consequence. Consider, for instance, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s recent assertion: “If we [the U.S. military] leave Iraq, then the insurgents will leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave Iraq.”

Castle Argghh!! has a commemorative photo gallery and a casualties report. (Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.)

AP reports that surviving US veterans have gathered for the 65th Anniversary.
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The weather was warm that Sunday in the Eastern United States. Several WWII veterans I used to know told me they remembered being outside fixing the roof or painting the house, when news of the attack came over the radio.

I grew up in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania supplied the largest number of men who served in WWII of any of the 48 states, and Schuylkill County provided the largest number of servicemen of any county in the Commonwealth. All of my grandparents’ sons were in the service. The oldest, Joseph, was in the Navy. My father, William, and his younger brother, Edward, were in the Marine Corps. Their youngest daughter, my aunt Eleanor, also served in the Marine Corps.

Krampus

Reuters reports that efforts are underway to ban Santa’s scary Central European companion Krampus.

As Christmas nears, Austrian children hoping for gifts from Santa Claus will also be watching warily for “Krampus,” his horned and hairy sidekick.

In folklore, Krampus was a devil-like figure who drove away evil spirits during the Christian holiday season.

Traditionally, he appeared alongside Santa around December 6, the feast of St. Nicholas, and the two are still part of festivities in many parts of central Europe.

But these traditions came under the spotlight in Austria this year, after reports last week that Santa—also known as St Nicholas, Father Christmas or Kris Kringle—had been banned from visiting kindergartens in Vienna because he scared some children.

Officials denied the reports, but said from now on only adults the children knew would be able to don Santa’s bushy white beard and red habit to visit the schools.

Now, a prominent Austrian child psychiatrist is arguing for a ban on Krampus, who still roams towns and villages in early December.

Boisterous young men wearing deer horns, masks with battery-powered red eyes, huge fangs, bushy coats of sheep’s fur, and brandishing birchwood rods storm down the streets, confronting spectators gathered to watch the medieval spectacle, which is also staged in parts of nearby Hungary, Croatia and Germany’s Bavaria state.

Anyone who doesn’t dodge or run away fast enough might get swatted—although not hard—with the rod.

“The Krampus image is connected with aggression, and in a world that is anyway full of aggression, we shouldn’t add figures standing for violence… and hell,” child psychiatrist Max Friedrich said.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

The Post gets it right.

Rush Limbaugh has them pegged:

See? See, ladies and gentlemen? Its value is that it’s bipartisan and they’re attempting to achieve consensus like the new castrati. And they’re doing everything they can to unite the American people—in what? Unite the American people in defeat, unite the American people in surrender, the Iraq surrender group, unite the American people in getting out of there. Now, this is not a cut-and-run document, but it does say we’ve gotta get combat troops out of there, and we gotta train the Iraqis, and then we gotta get out of there. This whole thing has somehow evolved into this is just about Iraq, and it’s not about who’s feeding Iraq and keep Iraq alive as an enemy. I have to tell you, well, I’m not stunned. You know, I held out hope for this. I hoped that some of these leaks were wrong, but I know blue ribbon panels—look, I have hope. I hope I get my hearing back.

You know, I have a lot of hope out there, ladies and gentlemen. You know, but I, nevertheless followed my instincts. Baker said, by the way, during this press conference, hey, we talked to the Soviets for 40 years to justify talking to Syria and Iran. Yeah, we talked to the Soviets, we gotta talk to Syria and Iran, which is simplistic nonsense. Did we negotiate with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua? Did we negotiate with Noriega in Panama? To compare Iran and Syria, which are two Third World police states, with a superpower like the Soviet Union, had nukes, tanks, tens of thousands of missiles, two million soldiers in uniform, is mindless. It’s a silly comparison. We didn’t ask the Soviets to help us solve problems in places where we were engaged around the world. I mean, the Soviets marched into Hungary in the 1950s, we didn’t do anything. When Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait, we attacked him.

There’s a difference between dealing with another superpower and dealing with Third World police states. We’re making these nations much bigger than they are. We’re giving them much more status than they deserve. They are not superpowers. We can’t win anywhere we go, and why is that? Because of Iraq. And this report pretty much confirms it. So now we can’t beat Syria, we can’t beat Iran, we can’t beat Iraq, we can’t beat anybody, the left wins. The US military is incapable of achieving victory. It’s immoral in its very existence. I mean, Jimmy Carter, does Baker remember Jimmy Carter talking endlessly with the Iranians, begging them to release our hostages? Does he not remember that? Does Baker not recall that under his stewardship we talked to the Syrians, too, to no avail, we’ve been talking to the Palestinians, to no avail. Talk to the enemy, talk to the animals, Dr. Doolittle. Let’s make a play out of it. You know, I don’t think we needed the Iraq surrender group. There is one man out there who could have gone up, conducted a press conference and answered questions and said the same thing, and that’s Jimmy Carter.

Says Mark Steyn in response to the piffle released today.

Isn’t the main problem with the Iraq Study Group that it’s just majorly lame? Almost anybody could crank out this kind of generalized boilerplate (“We were told by a general/a translator/my taxi driver/my Ukrainian hooker…”), and most of us could do it without a budget of gazillions of dollars and an Annie Leibovitz photo session.

Of course, Syria “should” do this and Iran “should” do that and, if they were Sandra Day O’Connor, I’m sure they would. But they’re not. And the only specific strategic proposal is a linkage between Iraq and a “renewed and sustained commitment” to a “comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace” — which concedes the same ludicrous rationale that the Saudi King Abdullah and all the rest of them make: that one tiny ten-mile sliver of Jews is the reason why millions of Muslims from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Emirates are mired in dictatorships, failed economies and jihadist fever. For the Baker group to endorse this clapped out pan-Arabism is disgusting. An “Arab-Israeli peace”? What does that mean? What exactly is Israel doing to Iraq, or Tunisia, or Qatar, or any other Arabs except those in the “Palestinian territories”? To frame it in those terms is to adopt the pathologies of the enemy. Shame on Baker, Hamilton and all the rest.

As for the insight on page 94 that so impressed Rich, yes, it’s true that the DIA and other analytical agencies don’t have a lot of strength in depth. But why is that? It’s certainly not because the US taxpayer isn’t showering them with dollars. It’s to do with a bureaucratic torpor that has proved almost totally resistant to any attempts to reform it since 9/11. And, while we may well “engage” with Syria and Iran to no effect, and US troops may well put their left foot in and take their right foot out, the one thing you can guarantee won’t be shaken all about is the torpid bureaucracy — of which this stillborn report is yet one more example.

An inspiring 7:37 video of American military & law enforcement personnel training Iraqi police recruits at JIPTC (Jordan International Police Training Centre). These people obviously do not believe that American efforts in Iraq are a “fiasco.”

A man walked into a very high-tech bar. As he sat down on a stool, he noticed that the bartender was a robot. The robot clicked to attention and asked “Sir, what will you have?”

The man thought a moment, then replied, “A martini, please”.

The robot clicked a couple of times and mixed the best martini the man had ever had. The robot then asked, “Sir, what is your IQ?”

The man answered, “Oh, about 164.”

The robot then proceeded to discuss the theory of relativity, inter-steller space travel, the latest medical breakthroughs, etc….....

The man was most impressed. He left the bar, but thought he would try a different tactic. He returned and took a seat. Again, the robot clicked and asked what he would have.

“A martini, please .”

Again it was superb. The robot again asked, “What is your IQ, sir?”

This time the man answered, “Oh, about 100”.

So the robot started discussing NASCAR racing, bass fishing and what to expect the Jets to do this weekend.

The guy had to try it one more time. So he left, returned and took a stool…. Again a martini, and the question, “What is your IQ?”

This time the man drawled out “Uh…..’bout 50.”

The robot clicked, then leaned close and slowly asked, “A-r-e y-o-u-r p-e-o-p-l-e r-e-a-l-l-y g-o-i-n-g t-o n-o-m-i-n-a-t-e H-i-l-l-a-r-y-?”
———————————————
Hat tip to JF.

Your office could use one of these.

3:42 video

It started in Birmingham.

The Birmingham Complaints Choir invited people to collect complaints and to sing them out loud together with fellow complainers. The lyrics were written by the Choir. The music was composed by Mike Hurley.

8:53 video
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The Finns must have more to complain about. Their choir is larger and noticeably more talented.

Helsinki:

Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves concerning the human condition of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundström.

At least, we don’t have all those sauna problems.

8:28 video
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Apparently, similar complaint choirs performed in Hamburg & St. Petersburg, but videos do not seem to be available on the web.
——————————————————————————Hat tip to Neil Gaiman.

InnerGeek has a test.

The Times reported last Friday:

The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study.

The research, by materials scientists from national institutions, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs’ craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids.

Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist.

The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby quarries, heaved up huge ramps and set in place by armies of workers. Some dissenters say that levers or pulleys were used, even though the wheel had not been invented at that time.

Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.

But according to Professor Gilles Hug, of the French National Aerospace Research Agency (Onera), and Professor Michel Barsoum, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the covering of the great Pyramids at Giza consists of two types of stone: one from the quarries and one man-made.

“There’s no way around it. The chemistry is well and truly different,” Professor Hug told Science et Vie magazine. Their study is being published this month in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

Journal of the American Ceramic Society abstract

John Derbyshire has a good rant on the follies of American education in New English Review.

Education is a subject I find hard to contemplate without losing my temper. In the present-day U.S.A., education is basically a series of rent-seeking rackets.

There is the public school racket, in which homeowners and taxpayers fork out stupendous sums of money to feed a socialistic extravaganza in which, when its employees can spare time from administration, “professional development” sabbaticals, and fund-raising for the Democratic Party, boys are pressed to act like girls, and dosed with calming drugs if they refuse so to act; girls are encouraged to act like boys by taking up advanced science, math, and strenuous sports, which few of them have any liking or aptitude for; and boys and girls alike are indoctrinated in the dubious dogmas of “diversity” and political correctness.

There is the teacher-unions racket , in which people who only work half the days of the year are awarded lifetime tenure and lush pensions on the public fisc, subject to dismissal for no offense less grave than serial arson or piracy on the high seas.

There is the federal Department of Education racket, aptly summed up by the teacher-union boss who declared, when the Department was established by Jimmy Carter, that he now belonged to the only labor union to have its very own cabinet officer. The DoE is also much beloved by politicians, who can posture as kiddie- and family-friendly by periodically voting to tip boxcar-loads of taxpayers’ money into this bureaucratic black hole…

Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a vast money-swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class worker bees. American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation. ..

Genes? What are you, some kind of Klansman or Nazi? No, no, no, the kids are little blank slates for teachers, parents, and politicians to work their magic on, These undesirable outcomes—these mysterious test-score gaps, these dropping-outs and delinquencies—arise only because we are chanting the wrong spells!

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Today’s WSJ editorial is justifiably indignant about Senators Jay Rockefeller (D- WV) and Olympia Snowe (RINO -ME) last October sending ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson a letter demanding that Exxon stop supporting groups skeptical of Global Warming or else.

the two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should “end its dangerous support of the [global warming] ‘deniers.’ ” Not only that, the company “should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history.” And in extra penance for being “one of the world’s largest carbon emitters,” Exxon should spend that money on “global remediation efforts.”...

This is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but we didn’t know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media around by the nose, too. Congratulations.

Let’s compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country. We’ll grant that’s a fair intellectual fight. But if the Senators are so afraid that a handful of policy wonks at a single small think-tank are in danger of winning this debate, they must not have much confidence in the merits of their own case.

The Letter

A simple way to tell that Global Warming is an intellectual fraud is the readily observable efforts of its supporters to declare debate closed. Real science does not require its theories to be supported by threats and intimidation. Those who have truth on their side are happy to debate.

Today’s Washington Post opinion section serves up in the guise of analysis pure leftist partisanship from such sources as radical historian Eric Foner.

Foner would really fit in among the radical wing of the Republican Party in 1859, or possibly among the Parisian tricoteuses of the French Revolutionary Terror.

His editorial notes a current near unanimity of academic opinion on just who the good and the bad presidents were, which is hardly surprising in an era in which former 1960s radicals typically monopolize university history departments. The “great” presidents, if you’re a Marxist, are those who most dramatically expanded the powers of the state: Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson.

The worst presidents, from the Bolshie perspective are all the pre-Civil War presidents who failed to make war on the Southern states on behalf of the Negro, all the post-Civil War presidents not keen on continuing to punish the South, the interloping 1920s Republicans, and the diabolical Richard Nixon.

Foner adds President James Knox Polk to his personal worst list. Polk annexed Texas, balanced the federal budget, negotiated a settlement with Britain securing the Oregon Territory, defeated Mexico, and acquired California and the territories of today’s Southwest United States, all in a single term.

Obviously, George W. Bush ought to be flattered at being compared to Mr. Polk.

TCS Daily reports:

In a forthcoming study for the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, senior researcher Ely Karmon raises the alarming prospect of Hezbollah affiliated groups bringing the Lebanese terrorists’ brand of violence to the Americas. While acknowledging that it is too soon to draw clear conclusions about the nature and objectives of these Hezbollah “franchisees,” Karmon nonetheless notes that “successful campaigns of proselytism in the heart of poor indigene Indian tribes and populations by both Shi’a and Sunni preachers and activists” have contributed to the growing attraction of Islamist terrorist groups in Latin America. Karmon also observes that “there is a growing trend of solidarity between leftist, Marxist, anti-global and even rightist elements with the Islamists,” citing inter alia the September 2004 “strategy conference” of anti-globalization groups hosted by Hezbollah in Beirut.

Evidence of this was already available in the Washington Post’s front page coverage of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s September 22 mass rally, which mentioned that among those in attendance was a Lebanese expatriate who had flown in from Venezuela for the event and that “[a]t the mention of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a critic of America, cheers went up.”

As it happens, one month after the demonstration in Beirut, on October 23, Venezuelan police discovered two explosive devices near the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. According to a statement in El Universal from the acting police commissioner of the Baruta district, law enforcement officials arrested a man carrying a “backpack containing one hundred black powder bases, pliers, adhesive tape, glue, and electric conductors” who “admitted that the explosives had been set to detonate within fifteen minutes.” The man arrested was José Miguel Rojas Espinoza, a 26-year-old student at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, a Chávez-founded institution whose website proclaims that it offers a free “practical and on the ground education” contributing to “a more just, united, and sustainable society, world peace, and a new progressive and pluralist civilization.”

Two days after the failed bombing, a web posting by a group calling itself Venezuelan Hezbollah claimed—“in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful”—responsibility for the attack. The bombing was meant to publicize Venezuelan Hezbollah’s existence and its mission to “build an Islamic nation in Venezuela and all the countries of America,” under the guidance of “the ideology of the revolutionary Islam of the Imam Khomeini.”

Praise for Times Past with Rock & Roll

video

Renowned holster manufacturer (Seventrees Ltd.), and supplier of specialized covert arms (Armament Systems Procedures Corporation) for government agencies, Paris Theodore died on November 16 last of multiple sclerosis at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York.

In 1966, he founded Seventrees Ltd. a much-admired company producing holsters designed for convenience and concealment. His holster company led to the design and production of other products, including firearms, intended for the use of covert operatives in extreme situations.

Theodore’s best-known design was the ASP 9mm Parabellum pistol which introduced the “Guttersnipe” sight (beveled channel running down the top of the gun) clear grips (revealing magazine contents) and the forefinger grip (since widely adopted in many semi-automatic pistol designs). The ASP’s motto was “Unseen in the best places!”

He will be missed.

Marketwire

Wall Street Journal

NY Sun

The “Quest For Excellence” ASP Special Edition

ASP 2000 9mm Pistol A Tribute to Paris Theodore

Saudi Lord High Executioner Abdallah Al-Bishi discusses his profession and career.

11:31 video

Note that the announcer quotes my own favorite line of Arabic poetry, from Ahmad ibn al-Hussein al-Muttanabi (915-965):

اÙu201eسÙu0160٠اصدÙu201a اÙu2020باءا Ùu2026Ùu2020 اÙu201eÙu0192تب

The sword is truer in tidings than the books,
On its edge lies the border between gravity and sport.

Hat tip to LGF.

Scrappleface has the right idea about where those troops should go:

Just days before the Iraq Study Group releases its top-secret report, President George Bush today ordered the Pentagon to preemptively redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq to “neutral neighboring countries including Iran and Syria.”

British Automotive journalist Jeremy Clarkson demonstrates the alternative sport of Shooting Cars.

4:32 video

Liberals have produced a study “proving” that sexual abstinence does not prevent pregnancy. It also supposedly proves that contraception is more reliable.

The Telegraph reports:

Sexual abstinence as an effective tool in reducing teenage pregnancy is a complete “myth”, the Government’s advisory body on the issue claimed yesterday.

The Independent Advisory Group on Teenage Pregnancy said that research from the United States showed that contraception was the way to bring down rates.

We’ve all heard of one case in Palestine two thousand years ago in which sexual abstinence apparently failed to work, but it’s difficult to see how researchers in the United States can really use that as an effective basis for arguing that contraception is more reliable than abstinence.

While retired Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes’ Sunday editorial in the Washington Post doesn’t really fulfill its title promise of telling us The Way to Win a Guerrilla War, it does identify precisely how we lose them, by describing how we lost in Vietnam, an experience we are unfortunately repeating at the present time.

While Mao was able to confront his opponent on the Chinese mainland, Ho Chi Minh and Giap had to defeat the French and the Americans without ever being able to threaten their home bases. They expanded on Mao’s concept by using the media and peace activists to convince the American people that we couldn’t win the war. They won not by defeating our armed forces but by breaking our political will.

Joseph D. McNamara reflects in the Wall Street Journal, in connection with those 50 shots fired in the Sean Bell affair, on an increasing dangerous phenomenon in American life: the militarization of our police.

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

There have been a lot of police in my family, and I grew up around the older school police culture and mentality.

When I was a boy, I once complained to my father that his injunctions about standing up to bullies were impractical when one was outnumbered, and he assured me that the man who knows that he is in the right has a natural powerful advantage over those in the wrong, which is usually decisive in and of itself. Moreover, he observed, criminals and bullies are basically all cowards anyway, and are generally scared to face anyone willing to stand up to them.

There are some limits to the theory, of course, but my life experience persuades me that my father was perfectly correct.

When I was a boy, I also commonly heard the Pennsylvania equivalent versions of the Texan “one riot, one Ranger” story. Policemen typically believed, like my father, that moral ascendancy and personal courage counted for a lot more than brute force.

And, in the old days, police were trained to shoot only as the last possible resort, and to take good aim and hit what you were intending. The idea that police officers required “firepower” would have been laughed at by the men I knew back then. “Firepower?” they would have said. “For what?”

I knew men who served as policemen for thirty years, who never fired on another man once, but who had taken many an armed criminal into custody. If it had ever come to shooting, none of them would ever likely have needed more than one shot per man.

About ten years ago, when I was still living in Connecticut, you could already see the Barney Fife-ification of small town police work setting in. In Brookfield, one day, I saw a local cop stop at McDonald’s for a meal. He was armed with a 15-round Beretta pistol, and was carrying an extra five loaded magazines on his belt. Was he anticipating an attack by a Zulu impi? I wondered. It seemed like an awful lot of weight to carry around, considering the fact that no police officer in Brookfield’s history had ever previously needed to fire a shot in anger.

In my own Connecticut town, the chief of police was always junketing off to remote locations for special FBI training. The Board of Selectmen rained on his parade a bit, when they declined to fund his proposed sniper team. But the federal government nonetheless graciously provided him with a large variety of expensive toys, running the gamut from full-auto M-16s to night-vision devices.

One day, I needed to drop by the Newtown police station to pick up the form for my gun permit. I found myself talking to a secretary hidden away in a bank teller’s window behind bulletproof glass. The police station was now locked up, and fortified. You never know, some aggrieved citizen offended over a parking ticket might drop in one day and attack the poor cowering Newtown cops. The FBI, you see, had told our chief that security was important. You can’t just let ordinary citizens walk in on you.

And so it goes. We increasingly have a bunch of self-important paranoids, practicing and posing in the latest and most expensive hi-tech military gear, trained by some kind of totalitarian Gestapo to fill the air with lead at the slightest provocation.

And we see the results in cases like those of Amadou Dialolo or Sean Bell. Incompetence and cowardice increase with precise proportionality to the increase in police play-pretend militarization. We need to fire all those FBI blackshirts who disseminate these crazy and un-American paranoid procedures and philosophies of firearms use. And we need to turn police work back over to sensible human beings. We need to end the War on Drugs, which supplies most of the pretext for current undesirable trends. And we should take away all the semiautos, the .40 calibers, the 9mm Parabellums (especially the Glocks), and give those cops back nice old-fashioned six-shot .38 Special revolvers and billy clubs.

The Times reports a leak from the James Baker-led Iraq Study Group. Predictably, a committtee made up of nearly-all-liberal has-been political hacks and trimmers (and mysteriously Alan Simpson) produced exactly what one would expect: a highly unspecific affirmation of the preferred policy of the chattering class establishment, i.e. withdrawal, cravenly couched so as to affix to the committee as little responsibility for any actual decision or result as possible.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.

At the present time, as I watch one ambitious member after another of our policy establishment hold his finger in the air, conclude that the media and the domestic left has won, that the United States has been beaten by the Avenging Swords of the New Yorker and the Party of God of the Times, and that the time has come to scuttle over to the domestic camp of defeatism and make his personal obeisance in the direction of Michael Moore, I really wonder if it might not be possible to trade our entire corps of policy intellectuals to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for some inferior quality herd of sheep.