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

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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!

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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.