Alex Nunez details a sudden outbreak of MSM introspection:

Three years’ worth of negative stories from Iraq, filed without even a cursory attempt to show balance, have finally come back to haunt the MSM. The media people see this, and that’s why they’re trying to address the matter now by talking about the “perception” of bias on their part. That they’re talking about it at all shows just how worried they are.

The narcissists in the elite media are coming to realize, finally, that the average American no longer sees them as credible providers of information, and they can’t handle it. After all, what good are their monolithic soapboxes if people simply tune out what they’re saying from them?

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Hat tip to PJM.

Captured along with three other Italians working in Iraq as private security guards, then murdered by terrorists in April of 2004, Fabrizio Quattrocchi ruined the video his executioners were recording. Instead of allowing himself to be put to death cowering like a sheep, Quattrocchi pulled the hood from his face, faced the video camera, and said defiantly: Adesso (or ora) vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano! [Now I will show you how an Italian dies!].

He was shot in the back of the neck, but Al Jazeera never broadcast the video, claiming hypocritically that it was “too gruesome.” His fellow hostages were liberated by US forces.

Fabrizio Quattrocchi behaved in reality the way we only expect to see human beings today behave on stage, in plays like Lion in Winter:

Richard: He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.

Geoffrey: Why, you chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.

Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

On March 20, 2006, Fabrizio Quattrochi was awarded posthumously the Medaglia d’Oro al Valor Civile [Gold Medal for Valor by a Civilian] by the Italian Govenment.
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Hat tip to Winds of Change via Pajamas Media.

Wearing the red beret is SOBR (Special Forces of the Ministry of the Interior) commander, Colonel Dmitry Vasilyevich Pavlichenko, arrested and accused November 2000 of “being the organiser and head of a criminal body engaged in the abduction and physical elimination of people.”

Over ten thousand demonstrators answered opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich’s call to participate in a Saturday protest rally against the Lukashenko regime’s March 19th electoral fraud. The rally was timed also to commemorate the Independence Day of the first Belarussian Republic of 1918. Faced with police blocking access to the main square in Minsk, the demonstrators moved their rally to a nearby park.

Over the last few days, hundreds of arrests were made, including not only the protesters camped in tents in October Square, but also journalists, Pavel Mazejka (the press spokesman for opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich), and today rival opposition leader Alexander Kozulin.

Kozulin had called for demonstrators to march on Okrestino prison to demand the release of political prisoners. The march had begun, when Colonel Pavlichenko’s Interior Ministry Special Forces units confronted the marchers, fired tear gas and stun grenades, and then proceeded to charge the protesters, swinging truncheons. photos

Casualties are not yet known. A number of people were hospitalized. At least one, Siarhey Atroshchanka, sustained a serious head injury.

GREG GUTFELD‘s 29 AMAZING REASONS WHY AMERICA SUCKS!

1. If only our culture was as inferior as those of other countries, we could fly planes into their buildings.

2. We naively export globes with America on it, showing terrorists exactly where we live.

3. As long as we allow him to eat so many pies, Michael Moore will continue to hate crass consumption.

4. Not executing homosexuals or adulturers makes us a laughing stock in Islamic countries.

5. If we truly were a corrupt corporate pawn, we would have gotten oil for blood.

6. Our Christian leaders aren’t as intolerant as their Islamic counterparts, making stateside ridicule of religion seem cowardly.

7. Immigrants don’t believe we are racist. (Still, the least the maid could do is wear the Che Guevara shirt we bought her for Christmas.)

8. The relentless stress of tenure is causing scholars across the nation to crack under pressure.

9. Decent standards of living make it hard for young reporters to do those “My night as a homeless person” features.

10. Churchgoers continue to attend mass despite the added folk guitar.

11. We only “rule” over fifty states, making us appear as underachievers to the rest of the world.

12. Venezuela is just sitting there.

13. Americans are too generous. We let the French come here and wait our tables.

14. Winning the Cold War means George Clooney can tell us how meaningless the Cold War was.

15. Replacing a dictator with a democracy doesn’t sit well with my yoga instructor.

16. We need to reduce elections, so we can feel guilty about not voting less frequently.

17. By watching Fox News, you hurt Walter Cronkite’s feelings and exacerbate Norman Mailer’s dementia.

18. No large-scale rioting occured after the New Orleans disaster. There’s clearly not enough factional violence to undermine this whole melting pot thing.

19. Our constitution is simply too lenient and doesn’t allow for beheadings.

20. Abu Ghraib proves our military is totally okay with encouraging gay lifestyles.

21. Our army shows up early to everything, which is awkward.

22. Uniformly applied “right turn on red” traffic rule perpetuates a racist worldview instead a society that’s a beautiful cultural mosaic. Worse, faster traffic flow puts off the day when we all must return to sheep-drawn carriages.

23. Bereft activist Cindy Sheehan’s tears available for intravenous injection only to the very rich.

24. Alternative medicine relegated to crackpot status instead of funded by the state. This allows socialists like Deepak Chopra to rip off old ladies using free market principles.

25. Unending series of medical and pharmaceutical breakthroughs by private research undermines population control.

26. The death penalty raises the price of art created by recently deceased inmates, burdening hipsters like Johnny Depp.

27. We will probably solve global warming before anybody else, then use the solution to make more money.

28. Native Americans getting rich off casinos instead of staying dirt-poor does nothing to prove how bad colonialism was.

29. Democracy still an untested theory! 230 years not nearly long enough trial period to truly know if it’s safe for general use.

THAT’S ALL FOR NOW, FANS!

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Hat tip to FrancoAlemán.

In Belarus, people of all ages were beaten and arrested by police for demonstrating against tyranny. In France, rioters burned automobiles, looted shops, and mugged fellow demonstrators in the midst of demonstrations demanding secure jobs at somebody else’s expense.

Some people struggle for freedom; others passionately desire its opposite.

Harmee Sooden, Jim Loney, Norman Kember

The “Christian Peacemakers,” held captive since last November, rescued yesterday by Coalition forces, have declined to provide information on their captors, reports the Telegraph.

The three peace activists freed by an SAS-led coalition force after being held hostage in Iraq for four months refused to co-operate fully with an intelligence unit sent to debrief them, a security source claimed yesterday.

The claim has infuriated those searching for other hostages.

Neither the men nor the Canadian group that sent them to Iraq have thanked the people who saved them in any of their public statements.

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The moonbats were apparently actually kidnapped by criminals, hoping to obtain a ransom, rather than by politically motivated insurgents.

It emerged that about 50 soldiers, led by the SAS, including men from 1 Bn the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, as well as American and Canadian special forces, entered the kidnap building at dawn.

A deal had been struck with a man detained the previous night who was one of the leaders of the kidnappers. He was allowed a telephone call to warn his henchmen to leave the kidnap house. When the troops moved in and found the prisoners alive, they also let him go as promised.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have to try this at home. It’s my duty to the cause of Science.

link

Reuters

The tent camp in October Square in Minsk was stormed by police at 3:30 A.M. local time last night. The remaining protestors, estimated as around 460 people, whose numbers had been systematically reduced by the covert arrest of individual protestors for days, were forced onto buses and carried away. One of the protestors detained was opposition leader Valancina Palevikova.

Former Polish ambassador Mariusz Maszkiewicz was badly beaten.

Twenty two independent journalists have also been arrested.

New York Times

Some of the arrested were lined up and forced to stand facing a wall all night.

The European Union has announced sanctions against Belarus.

In the course of discussing the likeliness of an attack on US soil involving WMD in years to come, J.R. Dunn proposes reliance in emergencies on ordinary people, as the Swiss already do, but recognizes that the direction of intellectual fashion opposes such a policy.

One of the few heartening things about 9/11 was watching people appear from all across the country to aid and assist the city of New York. Firemen, policemen, and ordinary people got into their cars and drove sometimes thousands of miles, simply to lend a hand. That is the response we’d be looking to harness. There is nothing more American than this, and the fact that no effort has been made to take advantage of it is difficult to fathom. Consider what the Katrina farce would have been like with such an organization in place. (A 4th-Generation Warfare enthusiast would call this a “network-centric solution”, by the way; which is fine.)

Of course, it won’t happen. It is straightforward, it’s workable, and it utilizes the American traditions of competence, community, and initiative. But it’s also against the spirit of the age, the rebirth of Big Government, the drift toward centralization and bureaucracy. In this paradigm, the U.S. citizenry is viewed not as a resource, as a reservoir of talent, ability, and good will, but as part of the problem, to be cajoled, hoodwinked, and manipulated into doing what the bureaucrats think is necessary. The results can be seen in Louisiana.

For the foreseeable future, we’ll be stuck with organizations that respond to disasters by sending truckloads of ice from one end of the country to the other. Perhaps at some point such an idea will be considered, after the monster bureaucracies have fumbled the ball another four or five times.

J.R. Dunn concludes pessimistically a must-read, and highly intelligent, article at the American Thinker:

The first point to understand concerning future Jihadi plans for the U.S. is that the Bush Doctrine is dead, insofar as it involves preemption of terrorist threats. It will remain in formal effect for the balance of Bush’s second term, and may be activated in a campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. But when George W. Bush leaves office, it will be a dead letter. Politics no longer ends at the water’s edge, and relentless attacks by the political opposition, along with unbridled media criticism, have rendered the concept radioactive. No candidate of either party will dare lay claim to it after the current administration leaves office.

The second point is that most of the defensive programs put into place following 9/11 are also under threat. Many of them, including the Patriot Act, telecommunications surveillance, and the domestic nuclear-detection program, will be abandoned by a new administration, and the rest will be emasculated.

That is all the opening that the Jihadis will need.

It’s necessary to point out — it never seems to arise in public debate – that the U.S. has been safe for the past five years solely because of active security efforts. There is no other reason — not laziness on the part of the Jihadis, not the bravery of New York Times reporters, not the guardianship of the UN. American efforts have been successful both overseas in disrupting Jihadi plans at the source (it’s difficult to put a bomb together when you’re being chased by a Predator drone) and here in the United States. Some of the stories — the Lackawanna, Portland, and Lodi cells, “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, and the Republican convention bombers, are known to the public, and some of us have seen things that strongly suggest that others have been picked up in secret. Jihadi groups in the U.S. have either been broken up, forced underground, or have fled the country completely.

Yet at the same time, every security program introduced during the period was greeted with protest in the media, in Congress, and among the intelligentsia….

John Fund doesn’t get the Yale Alumni Magazine, which seems a pity. If John had looked into the latest issue today, he would have discovered that admitting young Rahmatullah as a special student is just the tip of the iceberg (excuse me! sand dune) in Yale’s latter day pilgrimage in the direction of Mecca.

The Alumni Mag reports that Yale these days has a student belly dancing society (founded 2003) with 30 members. O tempora, o mores!

(I was hoping the web-site offered a DVD, but no such luck.)