Sky News:

British Paratroopers have filmed themselves fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and posted it on the internet.

The video – set to an Eminem track – features fierce firefights, a helicopter dropping supplies and a soldier firing a rocket launcher.

It starts with an expletive-filled warning to “Terry Taliban” which concludes with the lines, “So do one Terry, you’ve plenty to fear, we run this town, the Paras are here”.

The video, which has become a hit on YouTube, was made by members of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (Wikipedia), whose motto Utrinque Paratus means “Ready For Anything.” The troopers involved in the video returned home to Britain last month after a six month tour Afghanistan.

The rap song is Eminem‘s Lose Yourself.

3:34 min. video

With Google and Yahoo playing ball with the Communist regime in China, Microsoft (of all companies) is talking about possible non-cooperation.

A senior executive for Microsoft has said the firm could pull out of non-democratic countries such as China.

Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for the computer giant, said concerns over the repressive regime might force it to reconsider its business in China.

“Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in Athens.

“We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.”

“We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It’s a moving target.”

BBC

Daniel Gross performs a little back-of-the-envelope analysis of just how much liberal big government adds to the cost of living in New York City.

Personally, I think his estimate is far too conservative. The housing differential is much, much higher than 14%.

A 2002 study by Michael H. Schill, then a professor at New York University Law School, concluded that a host of factors—regulations, zoning, unions, the building code—made the cost of building a home one-third higher in New York City than in 21 other cities. Nationwide, housing and shelter eat up 42 percent of a typical consumer’s disposable income. For a buyer to acquire New York housing that’s equivalent in quality to the same type elsewhere, he would have to use 56 percent of his disposable income. The New York dollar loses 14 cents: 86 cents.

An annual study by the city of Washington, D.C., compares tax burdens in large cities. A hypothetical family of four living on $150,000 in New York would pay the nation’s highest combination of sales, auto, income, and property taxes: about $22,635, or 15.1 percent of income. By comparison, the national median is $14,219, or 9.5 percent. That’s another $8,416 extra per year here, or another 5.6 cents. Our dollar is down to 80.4 cents.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says overall prices here are 9.9 percent higher than the rest of the country. Remove the premium New Yorkers pay for housing and the currency is debased another 4.4 cents, to 76 cents.

But you can buy a dishwasher at 3:00 AM! And there’s home delivery Vietnamese!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

John Kass, writing from Chicago, pays due homage to John Kerry’s unique personal contribution to this Fall’s electoral contest.

“Is Kerry getting paid by the Republicans?” asked the young, cat-hating liberal who helps me with the column. “Did [White House strategist] Karl Rove pay him or what?”

What would you pay a guy to slice off his party’s feet in the last week of a campaign that is the Democrats’ to lose?..

Kerry’s ridiculous elitism, burbling out of him as if he lives, as I suspect, entirely on a diet of lentils and club soda, is what the Republicans needed. It’s a big chunk of wood floating just above Republican hands in deep water.

Read the whole thing.

Back in April, Victor Davis Hansen published an editorial titled Eye of the Beholder which really puts the MSM’s reporting on the level of disaster in Iraq into perspective. With the Fall election approaching, I think more potential voters need to read it.

War-torn Iraq has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California perhaps now 35 million. The former is a violent and impoverished landscape, the latter said to be paradise on Earth. But how you envision either place to some degree depends on the eye of the beholder and is predicated on what the daily media appear to make of each.

As a fifth-generation Californian, I deeply love this state, but still imagine what the reaction would be if the world awoke each morning to be told that once again there were six more murders, 27 rapes, 38 arsons, 180 robberies, and 360 instances of assault in California — yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day. I wonder if the headlines would scream about “Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered again this month!”

How about a monthly media dose of “600 women raped in February alone!” Or try, “Over 600 violent robberies and assaults in March, with no end in sight!” Those do not even make up all of the state’s yearly 200,000 violent acts that law enforcement knows about.

Iraq’s judicial system seems a mess. On the eve of the war, Saddam let out 100,000 inmates from his vast prison archipelago. He himself still sits in the dock months after his trial began. But imagine an Iraq with a penal system like California’s with 170,000 criminals — an inmate population larger than those of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Singapore combined.

Just to house such a shadow population costs our state nearly $7 billion a year — or about the same price of keeping 40,000 Army personnel per year in Iraq. What would be the image of our Golden State if we were reminded each morning, “Another $20 million spent today on housing our criminals”?

Some of California’s most recent prison scandals would be easy to sensationalize: “Guards watch as inmates are raped!” Or “Correction officer accused of having sex with underaged detainee!” And apropos of Saddam’s sluggish trial, remember that our home state multiple murderer, Tookie Williams, was finally executed in December 2005 — 26 years after he was originally sentenced.

Much is made of the inability to patrol Iraq’s borders with Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. But California has only a single border with a foreign nation, not six. Yet over 3 million foreigners who snuck in illegally now live in our state. Worse, there are about 15,000 convicted alien felons incarcerated in our penal system, costing about $500 million a year. Imagine the potential tabloid headlines: “Illegal aliens in state comprise population larger than San Francisco!” or “Drugs, criminals, and smugglers given free pass into California!”

Every year, over 4,000 Californians die in car crashes — nearly twice the number of Americans lost so far in three years of combat operations in Iraq. In some sense, then, our badly maintained roads, and often poorly trained and sometimes intoxicated drivers, are even more lethal than Improvised Explosive Devices. Perhaps tomorrow’s headline might scream out at us: “300 Californians to perish this month on state highways! Hundreds more will be maimed and crippled!”

In 2001, California had 32 days of power outages, despite paying nearly the highest rates for electricity in the United States. Before complaining about the smoke in Baghdad rising from private generators, think back to the run on generators in California when they were contemplated as a future part of every household’s line of defense.

We’re told that Iraq’s finances are a mess. Yet until recently, so were California’s. Two years ago, Governor Schwarzenegger inherited a $38 billion annual budget shortfall. That could have made for strong morning newscast teasers: “Another $100 million borrowed today — $3 billion more in red ink to pile up by month’s end!”

So is California comparable to Iraq? Hardly. Yet it could easily be sketched by a reporter intent on doing so as a bank rupt, crime-ridden den with murderous highways, tens of thousands of inmates, with wide-open borders.

I myself recently returned home to California, without incident, from a visit to Iraq’s notorious Sunni Triangle. While I was gone, a drug-addicted criminal with a long list of convictions broke into our kitchen at 4 a.m., was surprised by my wife and daughter, and fled with our credit cards, cash, keys, and cell phones.

Sometimes I wonder who really was safer that week.

US District Judge James Munley yesterday issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region city of Hazleton’s pair of anti-Illegal Immigration ordinances:

Illegal Immigration Relief Act

Ordinance 2006-13

Jurist, University of Pittsburgh School of Law summary

But, even so, Hazleton’s ordinance is driving people and businesses away from what would otherwise be rapidly turning into a mining ghost town.

On Wednesday, a tough, first-of-its-kind law targeting illegal immigrants was to take effect in this small hillside city in northeastern Pennsylvania. A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the measure for at least two weeks, but the evidence suggests many Hispanics _ illegal or otherwise _ have already left.

That, in turn, has hobbled the city’s Hispanic business district, where some shops have closed and others are struggling to stay open.

“Before, it was a nice place,” said Soto, 27, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic a decade ago. “Now, we have a war against us. I am legal but I feel the pressure also.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier posting.

And conservative talk radio was alive today (I was out running errands a lot) with the wives of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq, seething with indignation at Kerry’s slur. Sean Hannity compared Kerry’s “I botched a joke aimed at Bush” explanation to his explanation that “it was somebody else’s medals he threw away,” and to Kerry’s “I don’t own an SUV. The family has it.”

It’s true. Kerry has built up an impressive record of obvious and shameless lies, brazenly advanced whenever he finds himself in trouble. How anyone can choose to believe Kerry over his fellow Swift Boat Veterans about his service in Vietnam is beyond me.

Hat tip to LGF.

N.Z. Bear puts his finger on just why Kerry got into so much trouble for what was just a passing remark.

Why are some folks being so sensitive about Kerry’s remarks — and why are they right to be so?

The key phrase we’re looking for here is “never again”. If people like Kerry — and indeed Kerry himself — had not been responsible for destroying the morale and reputation of the American military after Vietnam, we wouldn’t have to be sensitive to jokes like his failed one. But they did, and we do, because we absolutely cannot allow what happened to the soldiers of that era to begin happening to those of ours.

And the source here matters. If John McCain had made Kerry’s remarks, we’d be astounded, but McCain’s history would argue in his favor and we’d grant him the benefit of the doubt. But Kerry’s history does the opposite: his past exploits and efforts to drag the reputation of American soldiers through the mud are absolutely relevant and mean he doesn’t get to pretend that nobody could ever think he’d say something denigrating about the military. If you’ve never been known to raise your hand in anger towards a woman, you can crack a joke about beating your wife and get away with it (even if you shouldn’t). But if you’ve got a history of beating your wife, you don’t get to make jokes about beating your wife without bringing the full weight of society’s suspicion and opprobrium down on you.

Josh Manchester, at TCS Daily,

Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing — with wave lengths, just as sound and light have. An evil place can, so to speak, broadcast vibrations of evil.
— Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game

What is the most dangerous game of Connell’s short story? It’s the hunting of men by other men for sport. Connell might be surprised today to learn that it’s not fiction.

There are hundreds of websites featuring dozens of professionally produced videos of violence against US forces in Iraq. Dubbed with loud monotonal music for an extra creepy effect, at the point of the attack, the filmers usually erupt into cries of “Allahu akbar!”

The US might film its own missions for forensic or debriefing purposes sure, but that is a far cry from reveling in them. So what might motivate someone to be so twisted as to film and celebrate death?

One answer: recruitment.

A recent story in The Australian detailed the means that terrorist groups use to bait and attract new adherents:

Young Western-born Muslims recruited in universities, mosques and on the internet are increasingly being turned to jihad by terrorist networks, which train them in Islamic countries to support and conduct attacks on their homelands . . .

. . . “They are looking for them in mosques … in the youth centres … on the web … relying on social acquaintances and also family ties and universities,” Dr Ganor told a conference hosted by the institute in the resort city of Herzliya yesterday.

He said terror organisations used psychological strategies to win the hearts of “specific” young Muslims through either indirect recruitment platforms such as the internet, and direct ones such as combing radical mosques and prayer halls.

Read the whole thing.

Postings will be a bit lighter than usual for the next two weeks, as we are packing in preparation for a move from the Bay area of California to Loudoun County, Virginia. I will share more details of our schedule later.

I’ve never actually lived south of the Mason-Dixon line before. I grew up in Pennsylvania, attended college and resided for many years in Connecticut. It will be nice to move to a red state for a change.