India this week blocked access to “more than 15 websites,” including both a number of individual blogs, and (evidently on the basis of some technical confusion) to several major blog host sites, including Blogger.com, Blogspot, Typepad, and Geocities. The South African Clickatell.com was included.

The Government of India claimed in July of 2003 the right to ban websites in the interest of

sovereignty or integrity of India,
security of the state
friendly relations with foreign states and public order
preventing incitement to commissioning of any cognisable offences.

Some 17 individual blogs were originally banned. The Indian Government’s list (image here), according to CNN, included:

Two Hindu political sites:

1. HinduUnity.org
12. Hindu Human Rights

The personal blog of one Indian grad student studying in the US:

17. http://rahulyadav.com -personal web-site of an Indian kid earning an MIS at Indiana University. Blocked for having a few links to Indian political sites.

Seven US Conservative Blogs:

2. The Jawa Report
4. Opinipudit
5. Pirate’s Cove
6. “http://commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com” – previous url, currently a Japanese language blog. Should have been: Common Folk using Common Sense
7. My Vast Rightwing Conspiracy
8. Princess Kimberly – Url works, but ceased publication in March of 2004
9. http://merrimusings.typepad.com – previous non-working url banned. Should have been: Merri Musings
10. Macker’s World

Yahoo’s image search url:

15. http://imagesearch.yahoo.com – should be: http://images.search.yahoo.com/images

Four badly typo’d or defunct sites:

11. Dalitstan – an art site, whose name refers to Salvador Dali.
13. http://nndh.com – does not exist
14. http://bloodroyaltriped.com – does not exist. There is also no “http://bloodroyaltripod.com.”
16. http://imamali8.com – does not exist. Tried http://imamali5.com and http://imamali6.com without success as well.

A pretty motley collection, demonstrating some serious incompetence at the Indian Attorney General’s office. Obviously, any American blog which has criticized Islamic extremism (including this one) is just as worthy of the Indian Government’s ban as those on its current list.

The Indian Government, under criticism, yesterday retreated to the extent of issuing a clarification, stating that its intention was to ban only specific blogs, and not entire hosting sites. But the American Conservative blogs listed above remain banned today.

Rusty Shackleford’s original report.

Martin Rowson, Britain’s answer to Ted Rall, in the Guardian yesterday published the above cartoon, expressing the left’s irrational view of the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah terrorist operating out of Lebanon: Israel, having been attacked, is a knuckleduster-wielding bully for defending her own people. The Hezbollah-sympathising, rocket-harboring civilian population of Southern Lebanon is a helpless child, beaten by Israel who is being egged on by Bush. Hezbollah is an elusive hornet, depicted as too agile for clumsy Israel.

The shamelessly anti-Semitic imagery did cause the Guardian some embarassment, provoking this rather farcical “Who, us?” denial:

That was not the intention, and we are sorry if anyone saw it that way.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports some eye-opening statistics from a study by the National Association of Homebuilders of the distribution of federal tax benefits for homeownership.

Homeowners in a single congressional district in California, the 14th District in Silicon Valley, took more in mortgage interest write-offs than all the residents of six states combined. Homeowners in the 14th — which covers most of San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, plus part of Santa Clara County — claimed $3.2 billion in mortgage interest deductions during the year covered by the study, compared with $2.9 billion by all the residents of Vermont, Wyoming, West Virginia, Alabama and North and South Dakota. The average deduction in the 14th District was $35,000, compared with an average of $9,500 for homeowners nationwide.

— Residents of a single congressional district on Long Island wrote off more in real estate property tax deductions than all the homeowners from seven states combined. Owners in New York’s Third District took $1.25 billion in deductions — more than the $1.2 billion total claimed during the same period in Hawaii, Wyoming, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia and North and South Dakota.

— The average New Jersey homeowner claimed $6,005 in real estate tax write-offs — more than five times the average deduction by residents of Hawaii ($1,126). New Yorkers claimed an average $5,181 in property tax deductions, followed by the residents of New Hampshire ($4,830), Illinois ($4,129) and Vermont ($3,845).

— The average California homeowner wrote off $14,217 in mortgage interest deductions, while the average homeowner in Oklahoma wrote off $5,710. Washington, D.C., homeowners took an average $11,759 in mortgage interest deductions, while the average homeowner in North Carolina got $6,808.

Higher federal deductions mirror the impact of liberal governments. Home prices (and mortgage deductions) are far higher where new development is intensely regulated and curtailed, and liberal states and municipalities impose (naturally) the highest real estate taxes resulting in the largest local tax deductions.

Thus, the cost of bad government in San Francisco, Manhattan, and the District of Columbia is shared with residents of low regulation, low tax red states.

5 minute video of Darth Vader working as supermarket day shift manager. He should have sold those tech stocks sooner.

Pictures of a variety of different bullets striking gelatin, oranges, and other target media.

Victor Davis Hansen thinks the patience of the Western democracies is wearing thin, and that -beyond a certain point- efforts to placate Islam are bound to end and be replaced by a very different approach: old-fashioned total war.

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists — from Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle — don’t understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation — but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war — not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

So in the meantime, let us hope that democracy prevails in Iraq, that our massive aid is actually appreciated by the Middle East, that diplomacy ultimately works with Iran, that Syria quits supporting terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah cease their rocket attacks against Israel — more for all their sakes than ours.

Playing with Google Earth is pretty popular in tech circles. One can snoop into all sorts of earthly matters from heaven’s perspective. Lester Haines at the Register reports on one of Google Earth-ers’ most al-time intriguing finds: a Chinese military installation at Huangyangtan features an astonshingly detailed 900x700m scale model of a very mountainous landscape.

The army of Googlers applied ther obsessive analytic skills and identified the model’s subject location: a disputed region of the China-India border.

The extraordinarily elaborate model was obviously painstakingly produced for some sort of military training. The Google General Staff College theorizes that the purpose may be to familiarize Chinese pilots with the landscape in preparation for some future conflict. Considering just how much trouble and expense the Chinese have gone to with this one, India had better be prepared for a renewal of Chinese pressure for concessions, backed up by military force.

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Hat tip to PJM.

Bill Kristol argued on Fox News that the people of Iran would welcome “the right use of targeted military force.” He added that military force could “trigger changes in Iran,” causing them to embrace regime change. Faiz at American Progress linked the video.

Reuters reports that Human Rights Watch has actually protested Hezbollah’s use of ballbearings to modify its rocket warheads into antipersonnel weapons aimed deliberately at Israeli civilians.

Hezbollah’s attacks in Israel on Sunday and Monday were at best indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas, at worst the deliberate targeting of civilians. Either way, they were serious violations of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

Attacking civilian areas indiscriminately is a serious violation of international humanitarian law and can constitute a war crime…

.. the warheads used suggest a desire to maximize harm to civilians. Some of the rockets launched against Haifa over the past two days contained hundreds of metal ball bearings that are of limited use against military targets but cause great harm to civilians and civilian property. The ball bearings lodge in the body and cause serious harm.

Michael Kraft, posting at the Counterterrorism Blog, adds details of a revolting tactic.

There also have been reports that the metal fragments are sometimes dipped into a pesticide, in order to maximize the damage to the victims and make it more difficult for doctors to effectively treat their patients. However there has been little public reporting in the western media of this tactic, which causes torture to the victims who survive the original blast and additional agony for their families and friends.

Let’s hope Israel gets to apply “a proportionate response” to all those responsible.

The Southern (reporting from Southern Illinois) tells a heartwarming story. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Grayson Gile of Marion, Illinois, while serving in Afghanistan as an officer in the Combined Joint Special Operation Task Force, met an elderly Hazara man who had taken a year, working in secrecy, to hand knot a rug as a personal gesture of thanks for the liberation of Afghanistan to the American President.

While in the country, Gile got to know many of the natives. “We got to have quite a bit of interaction with the people of the host nation, probably more contact than most soldiers. It took time to establish a rapport with them, but once we established trust, we had friendships,” he said.

One of those friendships involved a Kabul rug merchant who pulled Gile aside before he left the country. The merchant told Gile the story of an elderly man, so overwhelmed with gratitude to the United States for its intervention in the conflict that he made a gift for President Bush – a gift that was a year in the making and made, given the conditions of the country, under penalty of death.

Gile was astonished when he saw the hand-knotted rug, a portrait of Bush, filled with Christian and Catholic symbolism. Filling the center of the rug is an incredible likeness of Bush, dressed in religious vestments, standing at a podium decorated with the official seal of the country and flanked by two waving American flags.

Directly above Bush is Jesus with a sacred heart and stigmata carefully knotted into the rug’s pattern. The rug also shows cherubs and, apparently in an homage to both Bush and a fallen Northern Alliance leader, two lions.

“(Ahmed Shah) Masood was often called ‘the Lion of Panjshir.’ As one of the country’s military leaders, he put some very, very heavy licks to the Soviets and then turned around and delivered the same to the Taliban,” Gile said. “He was assassinated two days before 9/11.”

One corner of the rug reads, “President George W. Bush,” while the opposing corner has the words, “Number one champion.”

I can hear the leftists’ teeth grinding even now.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is a half-hour animation based on a 2002 comic book by Mike Mignola (author of Hellboy). Screw-On Head, a robot that can screw his head onto a wide variety of bodies, is a secret agent working for Abraham Lincoln, battling Emperor Zombie, an undead supervillain intent on releasing an ancient demon.

A nerd’s delight, the story is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, and the tradition of Marvel Comics, executed in the manner of Edward Gorey.

Video on Sci Fi Channel web-site.

Air Force Academy cadet uses hidden camera to tape his dancing-fool roommate dancing to hip hop.

video

Today’s youth!

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Hat tip to Tim of Angle.