Israeli aid not kosher

Sri Lanka rejected Israeli army's offer to help with the tsunami disaster.

"a government offer to send a team of doctors for an Israeli field hospital was declined by Sri Lankan authorities.

A 150-member Israeli military delegation had been just hours from taking off in an air force plane when the mission was scrapped unexpectedly. Israel ultimately sent a plane with 80 tons of medical supplies, food and emergency equipment to the disaster-stricken country. "

Astounding.

The tsunami killed seventy seven thousand people in Sri Lankan. I have no idea how many people are at risk of dieing from injuries or illness but obviously that Sri Lankan leaders regard it essential that they remain untreated rather than expose them to medical treatment from an Israeli hand.

Put another way, the Sri Lankan leaders are saying that they'd have that a certain number of their citizens die rather than allow their lives to be saved by an Israeli.

Giant squid 'taking over world'

Cue the soundtrack for a really cheesy black and white sci fi/horror flick. Giant squid 'taking over world' :

GIANT squid are taking over the world, well at least the oceans, and they are getting bigger.

According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass.
That means they take up more space on the planet than us. "

Gee, they say this like it is a bad thing.

postscript:

I'm really giving away my age when I feel I must specify "Black and White" to correctly set the atmosphere.

hee hee, Nick Coleman just walked into a buzzsaw!

This isn't going to be pretty. Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker is gazing with morbid fascination at Nick Coleman, who fated himself to be pulled into the blogosphere’s gearbox.

"Oh Boy! Just when you thought the legacy media might have wised-up in the wake Dan Rather's career crash, along comes Nick Coleman, the worst columnist at the Worst Major Daily Newspaper in America. [This would be the Minneapolis St Paul [Red] Star Tribune--johnh ] The old adage is that when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging. Instead, Nick has rented a metaphorical backhoe. Coleman is about to gain fame well beyond his home market, and I don't think he is going to enjoy the experience.

Evidently, Nick has been wounded deeply by the ridicule he has endured at the hands of fellow Minnesotans John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, who comprise two of the three principals of Powerline, just named the first-ever 'Blog of the Year' by Time Magazine. As result, he attempts to hit back with inuendo about the size of the sexual organs of his antagonists.

Gee, does that ever win an argument? Guys with delicate egos shouldn’t go there.

Today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune publishes a column by Coleman that is so scurrilous in its innuendo, so devoid of fact and logic, and so downright stupid that it took my breath away. How on earth does material of this quality get by an editor? Are they all on vacation? "

In the previous couple of centuries, a wise adage told the powerful to “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Those who purchased such quantities of ink became accustomed to unchallengeable status. But, as Hugh
Hewitt and others have been pointing out, we live in new times. Bloggers buy pixels by the googleplex, and they don't have to wait 24 hours before firing the next round.

Lifson winds up his post with this gem:

Others have speculated that Nick Coleman is "insane" or is having a "meltdown." I have no clinical insight to offer, but I do see an analogy to a well-known practice of some of those bent on extinguishing their own lives. Certain people with access to a gun lack the guts to pull the trigger and blow their own brains out. So instead, they pull their gun on a police officer and threaten to kill him. The practice is known as "suicide by cop." I think Coleman has invented "career suicide by blogger."

This.ought.to.be.good

Stingy Americans

Demure Thoughts busted that jackass who called the U.S. stingy. I wish I had thought to say this:

"Swedish shithead Jan something or another was whining this morning about wealthy nations like the USA not doing their part. I find it amusing we are the stingy ones yet the UN has no problem allowing all that Oil for Food Money to not pay for FOOD! We are so stingy in fact I think we should just kick the UN out of NY and sell the property to Donald Trump. Call in all those municipal parking tickets and other crap those diplomats manage to screw the American tax payers out of and give THAT money to disaster relief.

I think I have found my winner for the 2004 Cocksucker of the Year Award, The United Nations."

Gee, she right! It was those deliberately useless cocksuckers criminals at the UN who embezzled Iraqi children’s food-money! Where was this sanctimonious eurodip then? Stuffing his pockets?

update:

Bruce Bartlett added:

The claim of stinginess, however, comes from a different calculation—foreign aid as a share of national income. In 2003, U.S. foreign aid came to just 0.34 percent, well below the world leading Dutch at 2.44 percent. Other big contributors are Ireland (1.83 percent), Norway (1.49 percent), and Switzerland (1.09 percent). The U.S. would have to triple foreign aid just to reach the lowest of these contributors.

The first thing one notices when looking at the big foreign aid contributors is that they all spend very little on national defense. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2002, The Netherlands spent just 1.6 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. Norway spent 2.1 percent, Switzerland spent 1.1 percent, and Ireland spent a piddling 0.7 percent. By contrast, the U.S. spent 3.4 percent—and this was before the Iraq war. It’s easy to be generous with foreign aid when another country is essentially providing your defense for free.

Another thing one notices is that the foreign aid data are only for “official” (i.e., government) aid. The data are sketchy, but by all accounts Americans are far more generous in terms of charitable contributions than the citizens of any other country. A 1991 study found the United Kingdom to have the second largest percentage of private charitable giving. But in 2003, charitable giving amounted to 8.6 billion pounds or 0.8 percent of GDP in the U.K., according to the Charities Aid Foundation, compared to $241 billion or 2.2 percent of GDP in the U.S., according to the American Association of Fundraising Counsel.

Excellent points, Bruce.

Rumsfeld: 'You Go to War with the Senate You Have'

Scott Ott strikes again with his post'You Go to War with the Senate You Have'. Here he is manufacturing a fake quote from Rumsfeld:

"You go to war with the Senate you have. It's not the Senate you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Meanwhile, President George Bush said he will not request additional funding in order to "up armor" Mr. Rumsfeld.

"I give Secretary Rumsfeld what he requests," said Mr. Bush. "He has expressed no fear of the insurgents in the Senate. It looks like he has all the steel he needs."

Bush Nominates Limbaugh, Coulter as Judges

Scott Ott reported:

In an effort to reach out to Democrats and heal partisan wounds, President George Bush today announced he would nominate radio host Rush Limbaugh and author Ann Coulter as judges on the federal circuit courts of appeal.

"I'm pleased to nominate Mr. Limbaugh, a disabled American, and Miss Coulter, a woman American, to the federal bench," said Mr. Bush. "I expect bipartisan support in the Senate for these nominees since we all share a commitment to diversity on the courts."

Sen. Arlen Specter, who will chair the Senate judiciary committee, said, "I'm impressed with the president's magnanimous gesture of reconciliation with our friends on the other side of the aisle. As judiciary chairman, I will personally guarantee that these nominees will move on a fast-track."

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, said he had not heard of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter before, "but I understand that they're celebrities," he said, "and we Democrats have always had a warm relationship with the entertainment industry."

Ahhh..., let the healing begin!

Scott Ott is, of course, the proprietor of the parody site, Scrappleface. The confirmation hearings would have made greate TV, however.

underlying causes of the European left's anti-American bias

Davids Medienkritik blog had a post examining the reflexive German anti-Americanism:

"Unfortunately, the vast majority of the European left is reluctant to question the UN's many flaws and failings. This is particularly true in the German media. The ongoing bribery scandal surrounding the UN's oil-for-food program has received very sparse coverage. This stands in stark contrast to coverage of American efforts in Iraq, where every American misstep, both real and perceived, is reported in great detail. Any form of progress in Iraq, such as the opening of schools and hospitals, has been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.

But what are the underlying causes of this widespread bias? It is important to understand that the European left has always feared American power and sought to contain and control it. The United Nations is one of the few bodies with which Europeans can hope to influence and restrain the United States. This also explains why the Angry Left is so angry about the US not joining Kyoto and the ICC. By rejecting these agreements, the US has denied Europe two further means of checking American power and economic growth."

John Kerry, presumably, would have made nice by joining the ICC. Kerry voted against the Kyoto treaty so I cannot snipe at him about this.

The Millennium War

this is a multipart series by Austin Bay and it sure looks good.

The first installment

here's a taste:

Defeatists and cynics will argue it's too late for the United States to wage the Millennium War on ideological grounds. This ignores the fact that this war is ideological in its deepest origins.

Media joke

I found this one on Brain Terminal:

Dan Rather and Peter Jennings, along with a U.S. Marine assigned to protect them, were hiking through the Iraqi desert one day when they were captured by terrorists. They were tied up, led to a village, and brought before the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq.

Zarqawi said, "I am familiar with your western custom of granting the condemned a last wish; so, before we kill and dismember you, do you have any last requests?"

Dan Rather said, "Well, I'm a Texan; so I'd like one last bowlful of hot spicy chili." Zarqawi nodded to an underling who left and returned with the chili. Rather ate it all and said, "Now I can die content."

Peter Jennings said, "I am Canadian, so I'd like to hear the song 'O Canada' one last time." Zarqawi nodded to a terrorist who had studied the Western world and knew the music. He returned with some rag-tag musicians and played the anthem. Jennings sighed and declared he could now die peacefully.

Zarqawi turned and said, "And now, Mr. U.S. Marine, what is your final wish?"

"Kick me in the ass," said the Marine.

"What?" asked Zarqawi. "Will you mock us in your last hour?"

"No, I'm not kidding. I want you to kick me in the ass," insisted the Marine. So the leader shoved him into the open, and kicked him in the ass.

The Marine went sprawling, but rolled to his knees, pulled out a 9mm pistol hidden in his cammies, and shot Zarqawi dead.

In the resulting confusion, he leapt to his knapsack, pulled out his M4 carbine, and sprayed the remaining terrorists with gunfire. In a flash, they were either dead or fleeing for their lives.

As the Marine was untying Rather and Jennings, they asked him, "Why didn't you just shoot them? Why did you ask them to kick you in the ass?"

"What," replied the Marine, "and have you assholes call me the aggressor?"

Democrats vs our military

John Podhoretz analyzes new poll released by the Military Times:

That poll of 1,423 active members of the military indicates that the armed forces of the United States are passionate supporters of the Coalition's efforts in Iraq.

Support for the war inside the military stands at 60 percent, 25 percent higher than the latest Gallup measurement of the American people as a whole.

When it comes to President Bush's handling of the war effort, the results are even more lopsided. Only 42 percent of Americans approve, according to ABC News. In the military, Bush garners 63 percent support.

In other words, support for Bush's Iraq policy is an astounding half again as big in the active military as in the American body politic.

And, in the words of the Army Times report on the poll, "Support for the war is even greater among those who have served longest in the combat zone: Two-thirds of combat vets say the war is worth fighting."

It seems that the people who are actually putting their lives on the line believe in what they are doing — and that those who have spent the most time in harm's way are the most passionate of all.

Job satisfaction in the military, the poll found, is a breathtaking 87 percent, and only a quarter of those polled say they want out.

Note, too, that the active military is angrier at Congress than at the Pentagon. ... Quoting from the Military Times again: "60 percent blame Congress for the shortage of body armor in the combat zone."

That result suggests a greater degree of sophistication on these matters than most Americans — and most pundits — possess. Military personnel know that equipment problems in Iraq are the result of Congress' decisions throughout the '90s to slash the military budget, which had a parlous impact on "combat readiness."

"But what is not heartening is this sobering fact: We can locate the decline in support for the war effort almost entirely inside the Democratic Party.

By a margin of 80-19, Democrats now say they oppose the decision to go to war. The margin among Republicans is exactly the reverse: 80 percent of GOPers support the war, while 19 percent disapprove.

This is not only a partisan divide. It's a cultural divide. As the year 2004 ends, the rank and file of the Democratic Party has turned decisively and profoundly against the military effort in Iraq.

I would add that the Democrats have turned against our military long ago. The Democrats primary interest in our military is as a target of spending cuts, social engineering (inserting Gays into the military and females into combat) and prestige military actions—provided they don’t directly benefit any identifiable U.S. interest (e.g., Bosnia, Kosovo and UN “peacekeeping”).

And there is reason to believe it won't be long before they turn on the military as well. Throughout the year, Democratic politicians have been trying to split the difference with the military saying they support the troops while opposing the war. But that kind of sophistry won't stand.

But was there any dolt who actually bought both halves of that straddle? Michael Moore sat at a place of honor at the Democratic National convention. Who put him there? Karl Rove?

Everyone knew that John Kerry double-crossed his comrades, who were still in Vietnam—on his return from Vietnam. Everyone knew that John Kerry contributed to our loss of the Vietnam War by siding with our wartime enemies and actively undermining that war’s political support. Everyone knew that John Kerry had attempted to prevent Reagan from removing the communist regime in Nicaragua. Everyone also knew that John Kerry took the Soviets side when Reagan sought to balance the Soviet deployment of SS20s to Eastern Europe with Perishing and Cruise Missiles.

If anyone wanted to deliberately sabotage our war effort in Iraq then all the evidence about John Kerry indicated that electing him president would be the right way to go about doing it.

Knowing John Kerry’s history, knowing that a Kerry Presidency would increase the risks of failure in Iraq to a virtual certainty, the Democrats nominated him anyway. Cognizant of his history and the likely consequences of a Kerry Presidency, the Democrats nominated John Kerry—a well-known turncoat who sided with our wartime enemies—to be a wartime president.
So exactly who didn't understand perfectly well what the Democrats really believed?

The military wants to fight this war. Democrats don't. How long before Democrats decide that our men and women in uniform are just extensions of the president and party they detest a bunch of warmongering, bloodthirsty and stupid imperialists?"

Yup, Podhoretz emphases the obvious again. After all, the first step to losing a war is to make damn sure our military isn’t allowed to win it. (One of the lessons learned by the leftists when they sabotaged the Vietnam War.) The conflict between the Democrat’s agenda and our military’s couldn’t be more irreconcilable.

This data also reveals the covert and unacknowledged defacto alliance between the Leftists and the al Qaeda death squads stalking our military in Iraq. The division of labor is obvious: the al Qaeda death squads generate a small trickle of causalities and the leftists and Democrats deliberately endeavor to undermine the war’s political support by ranting and exaggerating the significance of our loses.

The Democrats’ political problem—which they are still trying to solve—is how to force the U.S. to lose the Iraq War while avoiding political blame for engineering our loss.

Our military is the Democrat’s “third rail”. They don’t dare attack our military; or at least they know they cannot be seen to be attacking our military. So far the Democrat’s strategy has been to out-source physical assaults on our military to their al Qaeda death squad allies while patiently waiting for the trickle of American causalities to undermine the U.S.’ political will.

Democratic Party bottom-feeders — like the odd and unpleasant people who inhabit the comments sections on Web sites like dailykos.com and democraticunderground.com — have already long since started spewing their bile at our soldiers, sailors and Marines.

Soon, however, the bottom feeders may rise to the surface, just as they did during the Vietnam War. These will be underground opinions no longer.

I can hardly wait for the Democrats to forget that they must conceal their agenda.

postscript:

The bold emphasis in Podhoretz’s article is mine.

Hat tip to lucianne

Update:

QandO sees this the same way.

Now you say, "oh that won't happen. We, as a nation, learned our lesson
with Vietnam."

OK, if you say so. But I still find it to be an intellectual challenge to hold the contradictory position of loving the warrior and hating the war. In my opinion, it would be tantamount to saying that you supported the Japanese soldier (as he and his comrades raped and leveled Nanking) but hated the war his government started.

How does one justify in their mind hating the killing and destruction of what they consider to be an unjust or unnecessary war yet claim to support unconditionally the instruments of that killing and destruction?

=========

Here a prime example of a Democratic surrender monkey attempting to make lemonade from the high levels of support within our military for the our war in Iraq:

Of course, totally ignoring the fact that they almost surely have to publicly support the [Global War on Terror] it is amazing how many do not.

Yeah, and most of the soldiers who don’t support the war in Iraq are probably Democrats who figured the military should just be a reliable way to get a federal paycheck. Since these Democrats think our military is a jobs program they probably also think that they shouldn’t be subjected to any physical risk just because they took the money.

Great minds think alike!

I was delighted to find an article by Victor Davis Hanson, a regulator contributor to the National Review Online, titled Leave Rumsfeld Be, which essentially makes the same points I made in my post The Rumsfeld apologia. In short, Hanson’s point was the same as mine: Rumsfeld is not the blame for our difficulties.

Out of sheer vanity I’m going to compare his article with my post. The following table shows Hanson most important points.

[OK, for some unknown reason, the table I created appears down below. I will debug this. For now just scroll down and I will get this nonsense fixed. Why this table is positioned where it is is a puzzle, nothing in the html justifies this]

What Hanson said:	What I said:
The Washington Post recently warned that doctors are urging [everyone] to get their flu shots before the “scarce” vaccine is thrown out. But how is such a surfeit possible when our national media scared us to death just a few months ago with the specter of a national flu epidemic, corporate malfeasance, and Bush laxity? That perfect storm of incompetence and skullduggery purportedly combined to leave us vulnerable to mass viral attack. So how can the Post now characterize something as “scarce” that is soon to be discarded for a want of takers? Was there too much or too little vaccine? The answer, of course, is the usual media-inspired flight from reason that overwhelms this country at various times — hype playing on our fears and groupthink to create a sudden story when there really is none. And now with the renewed attack on Donald Rumsfeld we are back to more of the flu-shot hysteria that has been so common in this war. Remember the pseudo-crises of the past four years — the quagmire in week three in Afghanistan or the sandstorm bog-down in Iraq?	Brilliant point. I for the record, I didn’t even think of pointing this phenomena. Hanson reminds us that the current media feeding frenzy is more about disfunctionality and unreliability internal to the media’s than about any real problems. To Hanson’s list of Media Feeding Frenzy Misfires (MFFM) I will add: (1) Baghdad Museum looting MFFM: 6,000 years of history lost. Reality: a few shards lost. (2) That the Kurd’s would secede and form Kurdistan MFFM. Reality they didn’t. (3) MFFM: That the assault on Iraq would cause a massive flood of refugees. Reality: our precision weapons were so precise and targeting so good that Baghdad residents didn’t bother to leave home; another first. (4) the Arab Street will erupt MFFM. Reality: the Arab Street, the Rip Van Winkle of geopolitics, remains asleep to this day.
according to reports, the unit in question had 784 of its 804 vehicles up-armored. Humvees are transportation and support assets that traditionally have never been so protected.	I want to add that FoxNEWS reported that, at the time the soldier asked that question, that all of the unit’s vehicles were in the process of being up-armored and the 20 or so Humvees that weren’t yet up-armored were in the shop being up-armored as that soldier asked that question of Rumsfeld. One hundred percent of that unit’s Humvees were up-armored within 24 hours of that soldier’s question being asked.
Would that World War II Sherman tanks after three years in the field had enough armor to stop a single Panzerfaust: At war's end German teenagers with cheap proto-RPGs were still incinerating Americans in their “Ronson Lighters.” Second, being unprepared in war is, tragically, nothing new. It now seems near criminal that Americans fought in North Africa with medium Stuart tanks, whose 37-millimeter cannons (“pea-shooters” or “squirrel guns”) and thin skins ensured the deaths of hundreds of GIs. Climbing into Devastator torpedo bombers was tantamount to a death sentence in 1942; when fully armed and flown into a headwind, these airborne relics were lucky to make 100 knots — not quite as bad as sending fabric Brewster Buffaloes up against Zeros. Yet FDR and George Marshall, both responsible for U.S. military preparedness, had plenty of time to see what Japan and Germany were doing in the late 1930s. Under the present logic of retrospective perfection, both had years to ensure our boys adequate planes and tanks — and thus should have resigned when the death toll of tankers and pilots soared. Even by 1945 both the Germans and the Russians still had better armor than the Americans. In the first months of Korea, our early squadrons of F-80s were no match for superior Mig-15s. Early-model M-16 rifles jammed with tragic frequency in Vietnam. The point is not to excuse the military naiveté and ill-preparedness that unnecessarily take lives, but to accept that the onslaught of war is sometimes unforeseen and its unfolding course persistently unpredictable. Ask the Israelis about the opening days of the Yom Kippur War, when their armor was devastated by hand-held Soviet-made anti-tank guns and their vaunted American-supplied air force almost neutralized by SAMs — laxity on the part of then perhaps the world's best military a mere six years after a previous run-in with Soviet-armed Arab enemies.	Historical commentary: the Russian RPG was modeled on a WW II German anti-tank weapon, the Panzerfaust. The German word Panzerfaust literally means tank fist. While I’m not the best person to translate German, I believe that a free translation of Panzerfaust would be something like Tank Puncher. In any case, the Russians recognized the merits of the Panzerfaust and created a Russianized version of the Panzerfaust, the Rocket Propelled Grenade (i.e., the RPG) in 1962. In my post I barely alluded to how perfectly inferior the WW II U.S. Sherman tank was. It was so undergunned that it could only kill German Panzers by targeting the thinner armor located on the Panzer’s aft end. Underarmored such that Panzer tanks routinely scored first round kills. The U.S. won armor battles by drowning the Germans with superior numbers of inferior tanks. The U.S. cannot blame her wretched designed tanks on wartime haste. The 1958 vintage M60 was cobbled together from two earlier tank designs. Of course scavenging inferior old designs to design the M60 yielded an yet another inferior tank. The U.S. depended to the M60 for 20 years until the Abrams M1 began being fielded in the 1980s. The U.S. voluntarily tolerated god-awful tanks for over 40 years!
the demand for Rumsfeld's scalp is also predicated on supposedly too few troops in the theater. But here too the picture is far more complicated. Vietnam was no more secure with 530,000 American soldiers in 1968 than it was with 24,000 in 1972. How troops are used, rather than their sheer numbers, is the key to the proper force deployment — explaining why Alexander the Great could take a Persian empire of 2 million square miles with an army less than 50,000, while earlier Xerxes with 500,000 on land and sea could not subdue tiny Greece, one-fortieth of Persia's size.	Here Hanson make another excellent point that I didn’t even consider making.
if the argument can be made that Rumsfeld was responsible for either disbanding the Iraqi army or the April stand-down from Fallujah — the latter being the worst American military decision since Mogadishu — then he deserves our blame. But so far, from what we know, the near-fatal decision to pull-back from Fallujah was made from either above Rumsfeld (e.g., the election-eve White House) or below him (Paul Bremmer and the Iraqi provisional government).	I also made the point that what I regarded as the biggest errors of the war were disbanding the military and firing all of the Baathists from government. Hanson partly agrees with me on.
In truth, the real troop problem transcends Iraq. Our shortages are caused by a military that was slashed after the Cold War and still hasn't properly recouped to meet the global demands of the war against Islamic fascism — resulting in rotation nightmares, National Guard emergencies, and stop-order controversies.	I had pointed out that today’s troop shortages were caused by Clinton’s “reinventing government” military cuts. Hanson makes an additional point—one I didn’t make—that the military’s Cold War configuration that depends on the National Guard for any major war needs to be redesigned for today’s war on Islamofascists.
[Rumsfeld] has carefully allotted troops in Iraq because he has few to spare elsewhere — and all for reasons beyond his control. If Senator Lott or kindred pundits first show us exactly where the money is to come from to enlarge the military (tax hikes, cuts in new Medicare entitlements, or budgetary freezes?), and, second, that Mr. Rumsfeld opposes expanding our defense budget — “No, President Bush, I don't need any more money, since the Clinton formula was about right for our present responsibilities” — then he should be held responsible. So far that has not happened.	I made a similar point that budgetary constraints make it difficult to reverse the Clinton military cuts. I wonder if reversing these cuts will cost us more than the cuts save us?
have we forgotten what Mr. Rumsfeld did right? Not just plenty, but plenty of things that almost anyone else would not have done. Does anyone think the now-defunct Crusader artillery platform would have saved lives in Iraq or helped to lower our profile in the streets of Baghdad? How did it happen that our forces in Iraq are the first army in our history to wear practicable body armor? And why are over 95 percent of our wounded suddenly surviving — at miraculous rates that far exceeded even those in the first Gulf War? If the secretary of Defense is to be blamed for renegade roguery at Abu Ghraib or delays in up-arming Humvees, is he to be praised for the system of getting a mangled Marine to Walter Reed in 36 hours? And who pushed to re-deploy thousands of troops out of Europe, and to re-station others in Korea? Or were we to keep ossified bases in perpetuity in the logic of the Cold War while triangulating allies grew ever-more appeasing to our enemies and more gnarly to us, their complacent protectors? The blame with this war falls not with Donald Rumsfeld. We are more often the problem — our mercurial mood swings and demands for instant perfection devoid of historical perspective about the tragic nature of god-awful war. Our military has waged two brilliant campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been an even more inspired postwar success in Afghanistan where elections were held in a country deemed a hopeless Dark-Age relic. A thousand brave Americans gave their lives in combat to ensure that the most wicked nation in the Middle East might soon be the best, and the odds are that those remarkable dead, not the columnists in New York, will be proven right — no thanks to post-facto harping from thousands of American academics and insiders in chorus with that continent of appeasement Europe. [..] Donald Rumsfeld is no Les Aspin or William Cohen, but a rare sort of secretary of the caliber of George Marshall. … we will regret it immediately if we drive this proud and honest-speaking visionary out of office, even as his hard work and insight are bringing us ever closer to victory.

the end

promising the impossible to the ignorant

wretchard of the Belmont Club exists to remind me of how damn good my competition is. Wretchard’s post, A Haunting We Will Go, rambles around, poking holes into the Green’s religious conviction that Kyoto is achievable.

wretchard examines the vast gulf between the plausible and Kyoto and concludes that the only reason why politicians can sell Kyoto to the public is widespread scientific ignorance on the public’s part. Only a bottomless scientific illiteracy—the mathematical equivalent would be something like the inability to do long division—prevented the Kyoto treaty from being laughed out of court in the first place.

Check out wretchard's post, it's a good read, as usual.

The Diplomad’s parable: “Ratman of the Far Abroad”

It was well understood by the mid-90s—when Clinton, under the influence of an irresistible Republican force reformed our welfare system—that welfare handouts enervated otherwise functional adults. Put another way, the welfare system biggest crime wasn’t the waste of money, it was the waste of people.

Providing too much for too long reduces perfectly functional adults into dysfunctional, enfeebled and useless citizens. The same is true of nations as well: take the nations of "Old Europe", please.

NATO is the free world’s free lunch: a defense pact of wealthy nations where only one of the wealthy nations—the U.S.—always seems to pickup the tab. An article from the American Enterprise Institute’s characterized the ineffectivity of European defense spending:

NATO's new members in central and eastern Europe spend reasonably heavily on defense, but mostly on antiquated force structures and Soviet-era equipment. Much of Europe's defense spending goes to keeping large numbers of semi-skilled soldiers under arms, rather than providing modern equipment or high-tech training. Europe has also ceased most advanced defense research. Although the E.U.'s economy is almost as big as America's, E.U. nations received only 11 percent of all high-tech patents in 2000 (about half of them in the U.K.); over 56 percent went to the United States.

"Collectively, Europe spends a little more than half as much as the U.S. does on defense. If they had even half the capacity, that would be pretty good," states Radek Sikorski, head of AEI's New Atlantic Initiative and a former Polish deputy defense minister. "But instead, Europe has maybe 10 percent of America's capacity."

During the cold war, Europe became accustomed to the U.S. taxpayers providing the majority of Europe’s defense. A wealthy continent liberated from the burdens of military expenditure is also liberated to a large degree from reality. Like so many stay at home, deadbeat 35-year-old adult children, they cannot meaningfully contribute to any action worth calling a military conflict yet they feel entitled to carp and complain about how the adults run the household. They sanctimoniously profess to being offended by the work necessary to run a household, they play around with pretending to run their section of their household yet always end up sponging off the head of the house.

Instead of doing the adult work of being militarily self-sufficient the Europeans created economically crippled welfare states that have only vestigial armed forces. In effect, America is subsidizing the swollen welfare states of Western Europe by providing the Europe’s defense and asking for nothing in return.

This freedom from adult responsibility freed the Euro-weenies to preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody will expect them to do anything—because they can’t. The EU can't even prevent genocide and concentration camps in Europe. Slobodan Milosevic was such a trivial pipsqueak that even Clinton could handle him; which he eventually did after several years of Europe's best efforts accomplished nothing.

Many women know perfectly well how to change their car’s oil, but they generally refuse to on the very reasonable basis that they can get a man to do it. Likewise, Europe is reluctant to dirty her hands with the manly concerns of statehood—such as the necessary applications of war and violence, which no nation state can avoid if it is to endure—since she can depend on the U.S. to do these things for her.

Europe has become the world's first metrosexual superpower: effete, effeminate, irresolute, codependent, irrelevant and annoying.

By now you’re probably wondering what all of this has to do the Diplomad’s parable. The preceding material was my way of setting up the background—a stage, so to speak—where the Diplomad’s parable can be played out in context of Europe’s limp and unwilling defense her own interests.

The Diplomad, an American diplomat, has been stationed in various third world countries during his career. Evidently he is currently stationed in some unspecified third world country.

Now getting back to the Diplomad’s story: he tells a delightful parable that involving large rats in his garden, the “ratman”, his wife, and the local European diplomat, whom he refers to as the eurodip.

Hmmm… Eurodip. I like that word! Ok, must remain focused…We’ll save Eurodip for a future post.

Now go read the Diplomad’s parable: the Ratman of the Far Abroad



Postscript:

People familiar with Mark Steyn’s work will notice his fingerprints on the wittier material; he’s too good not to steal from.

"indigenous culture" defined

Occasionally I encounter a post that explains the true definition of certain PC-speak shibboleths. For example, a free translation of the word “wetlands” is swamp. Much of leftist argot and PC doublespeak is intended to reverse the meaning of certain understandings.

Another example is the word abortion. Originally a medical term for the phenomena of a early termination of a pregnancy by natural causes ("spontaneous abortion" or miscarriage, which ends 1 in 5 of all pregnancies, usually within the first 13 weeks). This medical term was hijacked to provide an emotionally non-judgmental word for the practice of deliberate homicide--initiated by the mother—and inflicted on a her unborn baby.

Now our covert VRWC apparatchik mole, member of the State Department's Republican Underground reports on the actual meaning of the phrase indigenous culture:

Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large "indigenous" populations, I can freely state that the region's "indigenous" cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago; "indigenous" culture today means rural poverty. As the saying goes, "I was born at night, but not last night," so even I understand, therefore, that calling to protect "indigenous culture" really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It's a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.

When I hear these calls, I think, "We don't protect rural poverty in the USA. Western man no longer lives in caves or trees, terrorized by solar eclipses and at the mercy of an unforgiving environment. Why should these people? Why should humans live little better than animals in disease-infested jungles, or exposed on wind-swept plains?" I am struck, for example, by how much effort "pro-indigenous activists," often themselves urban upper-class types or foreigners, expend on "land reform." Instead of working to develop an economy where land ownership does not determine whether one lives or dies, the activists seek to chain the "indigenous" to, at best, a brutal life of scratching out a living on postage stamp-size plots of land. Often land reform involves "giving" the rural poor these plots but without the right to sell or use them to secure loans from banks. The poverty and hopelessness increase.

The foreign activists are particularly loathsome; they invent and distort history, introducing distinctly 20th and 21st century concepts into the study of pre-Colombian cultures and their remnants. Worse, these activists seek to manipulate poor people for their own political agenda, and often get them killed in pursuit of "liberation theology" or some other fashionable cliche. They overwhelm and corrupt legitimate "indigenous" activists with money, trips, attention, and promises of fame. In exchange, the once-legitimate local activist becomes a servant of Americas Watch, Amnesty International, etc, required to produce ever more dire stories and accusations. Or they merely make up a leader for the "indigenous"; the most famous being Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu Tum -- virtually unknown inside Guatemala (having lived most of her life abroad); a creation of European Marxists; a tool of Guatemala's Communist URNG insurgency; a pro-Castro hater of the USA; an author of a major hoax; and, as you would expect in such cases, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now Diplomad’s post was purported about the antiglobalization movement but the part that I liked best was the revelation about the actual meaning of the phrase indigenous culture.

Thank you Diplomad. I learned something.

The other part of Diplomad’s post, which I haven’t quoted, pertains to the antiglobalization movement and how its malignant activists justify their themselves in the name of protecting indigenous culture; which as the Diplomad says, means perpetuating rural poverty, to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five.

As Glen says, read the entire thing.

Update:

I thought about the Diplomad's post for a few minutes and it occured to me that prosperity can only happen when the “natural” state of man is transcended.

Put another way, the normal state of mankind is poverty and has been so since modern man evolved some 50,000+ years ago. Yes, yes, the elites were able to acquire an “above average” standard of living but they always acquired wealth by simply stealing a little from all of the serfs, commoner or whatever the underdogs were called that that particular culture.

Recently, a couple hundred years ago, western European culture (mostly the part located in the U.S.) achieved a breakthrough whereby the average man could exist in some state superior to poverty. In western cultures the common man was able to escape poverty—and this was the true innovation—through other means than stealing their wealth from everybody else.


Our improved culture (i.e., improved over indigenous cultures) enabled peoples to become wealthy. Today the poorest American can purchase medical treatment that a king’s ransom could acquire 300 years ago.

Of course the indigenous cultures didn’t enjoy any such upgrade in lifestyle. They enjoyed the same lifestyle that mankind had enjoyed for the last 50,000+ years: poverty.

This is known as the gap between rich and poor nations that antiglobalization activists complain about.

This gets this little conversation to the point where I usually confound all but the most doltish leftists. After explaining the preceding, I usually say something like “the solution to the rich-poor nation gap is obvious. We must reduce ourselves to stone-age poverty. We become a nation of goat herders and that unsightly rich-poor nation gap will disappear!”

The Media you wish you had

As usual, Cox and Forkum capture my sentiments exactly

The Media you wish you had

Michael Lind on Republican ascendency

Michael Lind has a perceptive postmortem on the 2004 elections:

"The American right has managed to unite the centre with the right in a majority coalition. But it has not converted the centre to the right. Indeed, in this election, as in 2000, Bush downplayed his hardline conservatism and campaigned on the basis of widely shared American values. The Republicans have successfully reached out to red-state America - while the Democrats have turned their backs on it."

It's worth a read.

Hat tip to Real Clear Politics

Time and Again

Cox and Folkum's hat tip to George W Bush for being named Time Magazine's Person of the Year for a rare second time.

Time and Again

Notice the cute little "peace" sign on the jackass' tie.

Democrats assault Iraq war’s political support

Jan Triana posted the following comment on my post regarding Rumsfeld’s up-armored Humvee flap.

Personally I think Rumsfield has done an exemplery job. People just don't get it. They look at a bit and don't have a clue of the whole picture.

Au contraire, Jan, I’m convinced that the complainers understand these factors well enough. In my view anybody who spent a little time would have sufficient hand on this material and wouldn't be complaining they way they are.

I fully believe that these complaints are not genuine complaints but instead just a means to attack Bush. Put another way, Modern Democrats never seem to give a damn about the military unless they are trying to cut it. What they actually want to do make the war so unpopular that Bush is forced to withdraw from Iraq.

If successful at tanking this war the Democrats will try to destroy Bush by claiming he "lost the war"; a war that they actively and deliberately undermined the political support for.

This is why the Democrats pretended to be so excited about “autopen-gate”. They really don’t give a damn about the military; they just want to destroy this war and Bush. Their transparent, feigned outrage over autopen-signed condolence letters is nothing but a naked attack on this war’s political support.

Can anyone stomach their pious platitudes over autopen-signed condolence letters to families of the solders that they have nothing but contempt for in the first place?

Ann Coulter snickered at their crocodile tears:

Since the attack of 9-11, we've won two wars, liberated millions of people from monstrous regimes, presided over one election in Afghanistan and are about to see elections in Iraq and among the Palestinian people. Focusing like a laser beam on the big picture, liberals are upset that, during this period, the secretary of defense used an autopen.

No, it’s not that there isn’t gnat that’s too small for these Democratic surrender monkeys to choke on. Nobody who ran a presidential candidate that sided with our enemy during a time of war to be a wartime president could give a damn about our troops anyway. It’s all about attacking this war’s political support.

These flaps over up-armored Humvees and the autopen-signed condolence letters are merely the ammunition leftists are using against our own troops.

A Marine's Father put's Rumsfeld's autopen into perspective

Power Line posted an email they received from the father of a Marine in Iraq:

"If [our son] had been killed, we would have been first informed by a visit - in dress blues - from a condolence team typically consisting of two Marines and one Navy Chaplain. We know many families who've received that knock on the door. No letter is required. No words are required. A simple peek thru the view hole in the door and the sight of dress blue blouses, white covers and white gloves tells you all you ever need to know. A letter of condolence from the SecDef is, honestly, not even worth opening. Families are much more interested in hearing from the men who served with their son and from their families."

[...]

By the way, we know families of fallen Marines who've been flown to sites where President Bush was speaking. He met with them privately after his event, never any press coverage, and the families have said that - after being given an agenda for their time with the President and being told that he's on a very tight schedule - Mr. Bush talked to every family member as long as they wanted to talk, never hurried anyone, cried with family, hugged everyone and they all felt like he had nothing else to do for the rest of the day but bring comfort to them. For that, George W. Bush has my eternal respect and gratitude. And there was NEVER one word of publicity surrounding any of these meetings with families. (I have pictures to dissuade doubters.)

Food for thought.

It's interesting to see who in the blogosphere is the most upset at this "scandal". The folks who are the most incontinent are the same ones who were livid at Bush for defending our nation’s interest in the first place. Of course it is their opposition to defending America’s interests that energizes this flock of parrots to squawk in unison about the alleged “insult” to our fallen warriors.

These crocodile-tear criers would have you believe that they care so much for our military men that they could never risk them by using our military to defend our nation’s interests. Bull. They couldn’t care less about our military provided it isn’t being funded or protecting America.

I know that our soldiers and Marines do not appreciate these leftists pretending to pause from their pursuit of undermining the war—which they’re fighting—to carp about Rumsfeld’s autopen. Indeed, they know that this carping is just a continuation of leftist backstabbing, that the leftists are using our fallen warriors to camouflage leftist attacks on the war itself.

Attacks on the war are attacks on America's pursuit of her interests; which means these attacks are indirectly targeting America herself. Our warriors surely resent being used by our enemies much more than Rumsfeld's autopen.




Hat tip to lucianne

Update:

Of course Ann Coulter more than upstages my best efforts with her take on the autopen scandal. I guess that's why she there and I'm here.

Since the attack of 9-11, we've won two wars, liberated millions of people from monstrous regimes, presided over one election in Afghanistan and are about to see elections in Iraq and among the Palestinian people. Focusing like a laser beam on the big picture, liberals are upset that, during this period, the secretary of defense used an autopen.

[...]

On the bright side, this is the first war America has been in where the number of casualties is small enough that it would even be theoretically possible for a Defense secretary to sign each condolence letter personally.

[...]

And if the best liberals are going to give me to argue about this week is Autopen-gate, then ... I shall sleep well knowing that the secretary of defense has made so few mistakes for the past four years that liberals are reduced to carping about his autopen...

(Sigh) You can see how much better the competition can be.

Update2:

Scott Ott zings the leftists with his post: Rumsfeld Failed to Lick Stamps on GI Death Letters

The USS Clueless departs the Grey Havens and sails and into the West

After what seemed the longest time, I finally discovered the reason why Steven Den Beste quit blogging. He’s ill with a currently incurable degenerative disease.

Steve is one of my main inspirations to begin blogging.

I discovered the blogosphere in the early fall of 2002. I was living in Manila and saw Andrew Sullivan debating Christopher Hitchens on C-SPAN. (Yes, you can see C-SPAN in the Philippines if you subscribe to the right cable TV package.) During this debate C-SPAN occasionally showed the URL for Sullivan’s blog. I assumed the URL was to a conventional website. I had never heard of a blog before.

Anyway, later I had just begun poking around on Sullivan’s site—I still didn’t understand that his site was a blog or what the idea of a blog was—when I noticed that Sullivan was frequently referring to things he called blogs.

Not having any idea what he was talking about I did what I usually do when I need to learn about something: I googled it.

Of course googling the word “blog” yielded something like several million hits; not something I anticipated. By trial and error I eventually worked out the notions of blogs and blogosphere and so on. Starting from Sullivan’s blog I followed links to other blogs and quickly established a huge list of “favorite” bookmarked sites.

Of course, not all favorites are equal. One of early—and lasting—favorite sites was USS Clueless, which was run by Steven Den Beste. I was completely impressed with Steve’s essay style, his command of subject matter and his Jacksonian outlook.

The run up to the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq was winding up during Autumn of 2002. Discovering the blogosphere at this time means I walked into it when discussions were at a fever pitch. Arguments, debates and food-fights over this impending war, the weasels, the UN, Bush, Saddam, Turkey were everywhere. I could feel the blogosphere’s power hum.

I was hooked. I discovered more information about the impending war, faster, via the blogosphere than I ever could have before. Events ignored by the MSM, say, for example, some of the weasels' antics, were analyzed, parsed, and discussed and generally beaten into the ground by the blogs. I basically lost most of my interest in trying to learn anything from the news media; by the time I watched the news I had already seen most of their stories, in more detail, from several sources, in the blogosphere.

Steven Den Beste's commentary and analysis was as good as anybody's and better than most. I believe that was better informed on the Iraq war—on several levels—because of Steven.

Time passed. I returned to the U.S. and I continued to enjoy reading Steve’s essays. Then, in August 2004, Steve announced that he didn’t want to post any longer. The reason he offered was that he was fed up with the nitpicking emails and he just decided to stop the emails by stopping posting.

I didn’t appreciate why emails were getting to him down but it was his blog and it's a free country. Steven stopped blogging and that was that.

Occasionally there was a Den Beste sighting in various places on the Internet, in all cases it was a comment posted on another blog. I kept hoping that after a long rest he might get bored and—what the hell—start blogging again. Then Steve posted a comment that explained why he stopped and why he wasn’t coming back:

You can forget it. It's not going to happen. I've been suffering for years from a genetically-caused degenerative disease. For the last year or so, the only way I was able to continue posting was by taking increasing doses of very powerful stimulants. (Understand that they were palliative; there's no cure or treatment for the underlying disease, and no one knows what causes it. The only reason it's known to be genetic is because it is found in family lines. In my case it was my father's family.)

Those prescription drugs have serious side effects which I put up with in order to be able to keep writing for the site. But as that year went on, my enjoyment in writing for the site drained away.

Well that reset my understanding of what was going on with Steve.

There’s literally nothing left to say except: All the best Steve. Continue taking care of your self, you will be in my thoughts.

Postscript:

The title of this post was inspired by rumpy doppelganger's comment on the thread where Steve explained why he quit political blogging.

Hat tip to Glen

History Channel's "documentary is a turkey!

I just watched a “documentary” on the history channel. This is one of the features of the History Channel’s “Conspiracy?” series.

Anyway, this particular show's main point was that the U.S. employed ex-Nazis to spy on the Soviets after WWII. The show explained that we did it because we had almost no intelligence assets in the Soviet Union and the Nazis did. OK. Sound's prudent to me.

Then, in the documentary, I saw various sanctimonious twits professing to be scandalized by the U.S. exploiting war criminals during our post-WWII struggles with the Soviets. I watched in disbelieve as these nitwits intoned how using war criminals “stained” the U.S. in some way.

Please. These folks interviewed for this documentary must have popcorn instead of brains. This documentary's producers also evidently were educated beyond their intelligence: they let these stupid comments go unchallenged.

Since the producers of this documentary evidently cannot process simple tasks like unraveling string, emptying the urine from their boots before stepping into them or noticing the obvious mitigating factors that might make it profitable for the U.S. to employ war criminals then I guess I’ll have to do it for them.

First, I must puncture their the critics’ annoying sanctimoniousness. Every single nitwit—they all happen to be 100% Democrats whenever their party was specified, naturally—all were upset that the U.S. hired spies who were ex-Nazis. One nitwit emitted clouds of pious platitudes regarding that we hired people that worked for the government that some of our soldiers died fighting so as to spy on a country that many people—at least in the years immediately following WW II—expected to be fighting in the near future: the USSR. This, in her words, "made a mockery" out of our soldier's deaths.

Now I hope that it doesn’t come as a shock to anybody’s nervous system but the one purpose of intelligence—among other things—is to ensure that we lose the fewest number of soldiers before and during hostilities. For example, the successful attack on Pearl Harbor was a symptom of a thing called in some quarters an intelligence failure. We were hiring ex-Nazis because we needed intelligence on Stalin actions in eastern Europe.

Second, Not one of these same critics care even one whit that during the war both the U.S. and Britain allied with Stalin, who much more heinous than any of these small fry war criminals. I believe they revel their sympathies when acquiesce to working with Stalin to protect ourselves—an coincidently, help Stalin in his death struggle with Hitler—and simultaneously freaking out over hiring ex-Nazis in pursuit of defending ourselves against Stalin. This is the equilivent of swallowing something bigger than your head whole (i.e., the U.S. allying with Stalin) while proceding to choke on a gant (e.g., these Nazi generals were hired).

Third, these same critics complained that the U.S. was hiring war criminals and people with human rights problems. Of course the USSR’s human rights violations were well documented before WWII but this didn’t cause any of these critics to complain about the U.S. allying herself with Stalin for the purpose of winning a war against Hitler.

Oh by the way, one of the reasons why we don’t have any human intelligence sources within al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization prior to 9/11 is because the Deutch rules, forced on the CIA by Democratic Senator Torricelli prohibited the CIA from hiring spies that had “human rights problems”. Of course this rule is dysfunctional because it means that we can never recruit a spy from within terrorist organizations because there is nobody inside terrorist organizations except terrorists.

Listen closely to today’s Democratic complainers and—sometimes—you will hear echoes of the same complainers, that we hired certain members of the old Iraqi regime because they’re useful to us.

Isn’t it nice to know that some things never change?

Fourth, these critics were upset we hired the ex-members of an defeated government tin pursuit of defending ourselves against a hostile government that was still undefeated. SO? The ex-members of a defeated government are in no position to attack us! The USSR is!

Militant recruiters out in open in Tehran

Washington Times: Militant recruiters out in open in Tehran :

The 300 men filling out forms in the offices of an Iranian aid group were offered three choices: Train for suicide attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq, for suicide attacks against Israelis or to assassinate British author Salman Rushdie.

OK, it was already clear that Iran is a covert belligerent in Iraq. This sort of thing has happened before. In the Korean War we were fighting Chinese “volunteers”. China figured that calling her soldiers “volunteers” would protect her from being an official belligerent.

She figured right. We fought a war in Korea with China there was never any consequences for her actions. By consequences, I’m thinking of taking the war into China. Increasing the price would have made an example out of China and set the expectations of what would happen in the future if China were to miscalculate in the future.

Unfortunately, we didn’t make China pay a price for making war with us in Korea. This mistake also set the Chinese expectations that they could get away with the similar antics in Vietnam—and we proved them right.

Between 1965 and 1968, China provided massive support for North Vietnam. Among other things, China sent engineering troops to repair and expand the North Vietnamese railway system so that American bombing would not disable it. The Chinese troops also freed North Vietnamese regulars to journey into Laos and keep supplies moving down the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The U.S. was aware of the Chinese presence in North Vietnam. Inexplicably, the U.S. didn’t even protest or acknowledge Chinese involvement; we just ignored it.

Our passivity—negligence, actually—to covert war making has established the defacto rules: there will be no consequences for sending forces to fight Americans provided the belligerent merely pretends that its fighters are “volunteers”.

This is the time to change the rules, and George W Bush is just the man to do it.

We will need to remove the criminal regime in Tehran anyway; they will never voluntarily abandon their nuclear arms program. We may as well kill two birds with one stone by using Iran’s covert belligerency as a casus belli. We can both eradicate Iran’s WMD program and establish the precedent that sending “volunteers” to fight our troops is as much an act of war as sending your army to do it.

Never Forget!

We’re interrupting this blog’s regular programming of political commentary to highlight Bill Sidwell’s gracious contribution to a benefit intended to assist the family of a cancer victim.

My discussion group—we call ourselves Tampa Townhall discussion group—meets at our local Lone Star Steakhouse restaurant for our monthly meetings. This restaurant’s management knows how to contact me because I am the one who reserves the restaurant’s meeting room for each month’s meetings.

A few weeks ago I received a call from a manager at this restaurant. She informed me that one of her colleagues had been struck down by cancer and that the Lone Star restaurants in the Tampa-St-Petersburg area were conducting a fundraiser to benefit the family of the deceased on December 16th. All tips received during the dinner hours would be donated to the deceased’s family. Also, she informed me, an auction benifiting the deceased's family would be conducted at 7PM. The manager was asking that I pass the word to my group and let them know about the fund raiser, its purpose and so on.

Marybeth—another organizer—and myself alerted our group.

One of our members, Bill Sidwell, is an artist and contributed his mosaic, named Never Forget!, to the auction. Here are images of his mosaic:

Bill's Mosaic Never Forget!




The rear view

Due to a conflict, Bill couldn’t make it to Lone Star on the 16th and asked me to deliver his artwork. Bill and I chatted about this mosaic and the techniques he used to create it.

While I’m no artist I am a geek and was quite impressed with Bill’s craftsmanship and attention to detail. Bill has not only demonstrated artistic ability but also a deep understanding of his materials and craftsmanship.

I wrote the following material to help the auctioneer present Bill’s mosaic to the bidders:

This next item is a mosaic. Mosaics are an ancient art form. The earliest mosaics date from three to four thousand years BC and were found in Mesopotamia.

This mosaic—which is named “Never Forget!”—is of an American flag rippling in the breeze. This mosaic is Bill Sidwell’s personal September 11th memorial to the attack that killed more Americans than Pearl Harbor. Created by Bill shortly after 9/11, this mosaic has been widely displayed but has never been offered for sale. Bill Sidwell is now donating this mosaic to this good cause.

The supporting surface that the mosaic’s tiles are fixed to is a whitewood board that has been cut into long sections. Alternating sections were then reversed and all sections were glued back together—similarly to a butcher block cutting board—to form a supporting surface that is highly resistant to warping.

The tiles used in this mosaic are colored bathroom tiles. Bill shaped the tiles using a table saw, a bandsaw, nippers and a sander. During construction, Bill cuts away the tile’s rounded edges so that all of the mosaic’s facets will be flat. Bill also sands the tile’s reverse side so that all of the mosaic’s facets will be level when bonded to the supporting surface. The tiles are bonded to their supporting surface using a cement that will retain its flexibility without becoming brittle. This mosaic is framed with maple-stained whitewood. The artwork’s name and the artist’s signature is on the back.

Creating this mosaic took about two weeks.

Bill Sidwell is a semi-retired mosaic artist who was born, raised and educated in Florida. Bill not only creates mosaics but also teaches this fascinating and ancient art.

Bill’s mosaics have been shown at juried art shows throughout Florida. A juried art show is an art show that only exhibits works accepted by a jury of accomplished artists. This jury ensures that only noteworthy art is presented.

Bill’s work hangs in Paris, Brussels, London, Berlin and Singapore, as well as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas. Bill is honored to participate in tonight’s good cause.

If placed for sale at an art show, this mosaic would be priced at $200.

One of the hard to explain things about our culture is that—to ourselves—Bill’s fusion of artistry and craftsmanship—including his understanding of the underlying material’s characteristics—is considered noteworthy; it shouldn’t be so. We accept the technologist’s obliviousness to the esthetic and the artist’s estrangement from the technology that modern civilization depends on as normal; we shouldn’t. This phenomenon would be inexplicable to the ancient Greeks.

The root word for technology is derived from the ancient Greek word for art, techne. The ancient Greeks didn’t distinguish between artistry and manufacturing; a skilled artisan was assumed to be both an artist and a craftsman. They would be puzzled at today's engineers who routinely create functional—but ugly—designs and would be contemptuous of an artist who's beautiful art was no better constructed than a mud-brick shanty town.

Although Bill’s mastery of his craft is necessary to achieve these results his expertise is not the primary factor determining the outcome. The primary factor is his attitude and approach to his work. Bill has both the artistic ability to see what “looks good” and has the understanding of the underlying methods and materials needed to arrive at good results. The ancient Greeks would have considered Bill a technologist.

Postscript:

People familiar with Robert Pirsig’s rather unusual book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, know how very little I contributed to the last paragraphs in this post.

Bill Sidwell can be reached at:

+1 (813) 997 1307 or

+1 (813) 782 1433 or

JSidwell@TampaBay.RR.com

Update:

Corrected Bill's email address

Update2:

Here is a photograph of Never Forget! being displayed on auction night.

It's a little hard to see, but the black thing above the mosaic is a placard explaining the background and other details about this artwork.


Update3:


Well I’m pleased to announce that Pam Hill, one of our members—and one of my friends—at the Tampa Townhall Discussion group, was the winning bidder for Bill Sidwell’s mosaic, Never Forget! Congratulations Pam!

Pam said that she knew that she had to get this work of art for her daughter’s birthday as soon as she saw it.

Pam with her daughter, Heather, holding their prize.

Pam’s daughter, Heather Hill-Thompson, is a registered nurse in the University Community Hospital’s ICU. Heather graduated cum laude from the University of Pittsburg. Heather attained this academic distinction in spite of her full academic load, being very active in Air Force ROTC for four years and holding down a part time job. [wow!]

Patriotism evidently runs in Pam’s family. Not only is her daughter a proud, patriotic American but her daughter’s paternal grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Pam’s father was a Chief Security Officer for the 6th Naval District during WWII. Heather's father served in Navy and her uncle was in the Air Force.

Heather will display Bill Sidwell’s mosaic memorializing the September 11th terror attacks on this country on a wall where she displays other items celebrating our country and her love of it. This wall already displays a beautiful painting of the American flag that she inherited from her grandmother, a photo of herself in the cockpit of a T-37 training jet, which she flew during her Air Force field training in the summer of 1994, a framed copy of 'High Flight', and a photo of Ronald Reagan in his cowboy hat (he was her hero).

Bill Sidwell’s Never Forget! will be in good company.

I will give Pam the last word:

I told Heather that night that it will be something that will pass from generation to generation in her family. It is truly a family treasure now!

He Coulda Put Spice In Bush's Cabinet

I've had my head down for a few days, holidays being what they are. When I wasn't agonizing over presents for my easily irritated sister I was working on some rather long posts that I hope to publish soon. I haven't even taken time to read all of the junk I usually waste my time reading, watch the new, and so on.

In spite of my preoccupation I still did manage hear to that one of Bush’s cabinet nominees had to be withdrawn from consideration. The nominal reason, which I picked up via overhearing the news was that a particular cabinet nominee—I didn’t pick up exactly who it was—had a “nanny problem”.

“Oh well.” I recall thinking. “We dodged another bullet.” While I wished they’d detected this problem before he was nominated I did feel somewhat appreciative that this particular political hand grenade was safely detonated before he got close enough to wound Bush with the shrapnel.

Then I learned from Carlson's article, He Coulda Put Spice In Bush's Cabinet who this hand grenade was— Bernie Kerik, Bush's nominee for secretary of homeland security—and, how you say, what a colorful private life Bernie had.

This delightful article by Peter Carlson is so witty that, I swear, Mark Steyn could have written it. In this article Carlson morns his loss—that is, his loss of the great stories that Kerik would have been the butt of. Reading his article, you sort of sense that the only part of his article that was serious wasn’t tongue-in-cheek Carlson’s grieving for all of those articles that would have written themselves had only Kerik made it to the cabinet.

Read Carlson’s article, I know you need a laugh.

MoveOn.org having delusions of adequacy

Eli Pariser, head of MoveOn's political action MoveOn.org, threw down the gauntlet before the DNC. Spinning his tin-foil bennie's propeller at max RPMs, he wrote:

For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base," ... "But we can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers."

[...]

"Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." [Emphasis mine—johnh]

Oh Please... oh please... Just do it... Morbid visions of Democratic immolation dancing in my head: Ralph Nader in 2008! Howard Dean for DNC Chairman! Michael Moore in 2008!

Whew! I gotta stop this; it's making my heart beat too fast. These aren't just morbid fantasies, they're salacious GOP porn.

MoveOn is making this blowing-out-the-Democrats-at-the-elections thing too easy. Can you picture what the outcome on Nov 3, 2004 would have looked like if Howard Dean was on the ticket? It would have been a McGovern-style whupping—not a 51%-48% squeaker.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the Democrats have way too many adults who aren’t about to voluntarily hand the keys over to their moonbat subtribe. They may be Democrats but—unlike the MujahaDean jihadists—they’re neither insane nor suicidal.

But what if the Deanie-weenies win the power struggle? What if this mutiny by the lunatics on this mental-hospital ship succeeds? Well, boys and girls, your cue to begin watching the show is when the lunatics seize control of the helm; this is going to be one of the ugliest political train wrecks in our lifetime.

I have high hopes that MoveOn will make the Democrats current disaster a complete, cataclysmic catastrophe.

Film at 11.

Hat tip to Drudge

Update:

The title of the Cranky Neocon's post speaks for itself: Monster turns on Master. BUWAHHAHAHAHA!


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An Iraqi's bus trip through contested territory

Keep hearing about our setbacks in Iraq from the MSM? How about hearing an account from an Iraqi who has to deal with the security risks personally for a change?

Iraqi blogger Mohammed describes a tense bus ride through "Indian country". The outcome? He observes that the span of terrorist influence is diminishing. He notes that the Iraqi National Guardsmen show a professionalism and politeness he'd never observed before.

Now compare Mohammed's confidence that we're winning this thing with the MSM's quagmire spin. What you're seeing is the MSM further destroying its remaining credibility. The damage isn’t happening right now but will happen after we win and everybody realizes that the MSM’s reporting simply didn’t reflect our mounting successes.

Note to MSM: You wait. The only audience you will retain after this is over are those who need your fables to reinforce their “America is losing” fantasies.

Leftist 2004 election fraud BS

Jackie D sent me a link to a post on Wayne Madsen’s extremely lame site. This site is a dilly, event by moonbat standards. The entire premise of this post is another “Bush/Rove stole the 2004 too” rant. What they claim is that a programmer, a certain Clint Curtis, issued a notarized affidavit that stated:

…while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.

They don’t have anything and if they did the Democrats would already pursuing this in court.

How do I know? I’m sooooo glad you asked! Because the Democrats have never hesitated to try to win in court what they couldn’t win at the ballot box. If they thought they had even a remote chance of stealing the election we would be in court now.

Ask your self this question: if the Democrats had anybody who would testify under oath that he wrote software that would steal votes would they be screaming about the fraud to CBS/NBC/ABC/CNN/et al? Or would they just sit quietly and while Wayne Madsen and other crusaders bitched about the stolen elections on moonbat websites?

No the Terry McAuliffe wouldn’t remain quite! Would Terry McAuliffe, the same guy who went to Fahrenheit 911 and pronounced it factual just shrug his shoulders if he was presented with hard data of voter fraud and say something like “Well, maybe will kick up a fuss next time”? NO! He would raise hell today if he though he had something!

And that is the major indicator that Wayne Madsen and all of the other moonbats who are screaming about “stolen elections are LYING!. They don’t have anything and if they did we would be hearing about it from Terry McAuliffe. They DON’T have anything!

To assume the reverse means that Terry McAuliffe, who deliberately supported a draft dodger for U.S. President (Clinton), would deliberately not pursue genuine voting irregularities.

To assume the reverse mean that Terry McAuliffe, who deliberately supported for U.S. President, a traitor who turned on the U.S. in a time of war (Kerry) would deliberately not pursue genuine voting irregularities.

Now getting back to this Clint Curtis, who allegedly did a notarized affidavit that states he wrote software that stole votes. Deliberately signing a false affidavit is perjury. I challenge the Democrats to just shut up and sue. I DARE YOU.



A little googling helped me find this nutjob site. This site featured an account of what exactly Clinton Curtis claims to have happened:

In a sworn affidavit (pdf file) Monday, a former programmer for a NASA contractor said that he developed a vote-rigging prototype at the request of a then-Florida state representative who is now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

[…]
While working for Yang Enterprises in Florida, the 46-year-old programmer says he was instructed by then-Republican state representative Tom Feeney to “develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in the election and be undetectable.”

[…]
The programmer, Clinton Curtis, said that he was told the program needed to be “touch-screen capable, the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment, [and that] the programming was to remain hidden even if the source code was inspected.”

Curtis asserts that he told Feeney it would be nearly impossible to write a code to change the voting results if anyone were able to view the source code.

“However,” he added, “if the code were compiled before anyone was allowed to review it then any vote fraud would remain invisible to detection.”

OK. Now let me make a statement about Curtis’ claims. I am also a software engineer and I am competent to challenge any bogus statements. Curtis made a statement that it would be almost impossible to hide “extra features”, such as vote stealing, in the source code without the purpose of this code being obvious. He is correct.

He then went on to say, “if the code were compiled before anyone was allowed to review it then any vote fraud would remain invisible to detection.” There are two ways to understand this statement and competent software engineers, skilled in the art, understand both interpretations are wrong.

The first ways is something like that the original source code is unreadable or something after compiling. This is so false that I doubt he intended to say this.

The other way to understand this is Curtis is suggesting that a different program, on with the “extra features” is compiled and that program is loaded into the voting machines then it would be undetectable. This is also false. This premise is false because:

The complied code can be disassembled. Disassembly is the process of examining machine code (the raw bits that the voting machine was programmed with) and generating the voting machines program’s assembly code.

Now admittedly the programming machine was not programmed machine code so the program generated by reverse assembly is different than the high level language program that was originally used to program the voting machine. This is an inconvenience to understanding the voting machine’s program, not a show stopper.

The complied code in the voting machines can be electrically compared—bit for bit—with another complied program. This means that you can prove that the code running the voting machines was generated by the source code. Just compile the source code that Diebold claims is running the voting machines and compare the compiled machine code with the machine code found in the voting machines. If it matches—bit for bit—then it is was derived from that source code. If not then you might—but not necessarily—have something that looks interesting.

Punchline: if the code in the voting machines doesn’t match the source code then you can easily prove it. If it does match the source code then visual inspection of the code by competent software engineers, who are skilled in the art, will be able to determent that the code has not vulnerabilities.

OK, now that I’ve driven a stake though “the voting machines stole the election” myth, I work on Wayne Madsen’s extremely lame site. What a piece of work! I’ve around and this is one of the most toxic and deliberately dumbest sites I’ve looked at.

First of all, I took one look at Wayne Madsen’s site. His site is a cesspool of leftist BS.

Item one: This site has a link to Air America. Airhead America is the leftist nutbar radio network founded by Al Franken and Al Gore. I think it still has a station that broadcasts it program.

Item Two: This site has a link to Eminem the “vote or die” idotarian rap “artist”.

Item Three: notice the spinning “Peace Sign” java applet. It’s so 1996 that it hurts. Doesn’t Madsen have a interior decorator or something to save him from such esthetic disasters? I don’t know which is more pathetic: having a peace sign on your site or the making it spin. Can you say “what a clueless loser”? I knew you could.

Item four: Can you believe that this rube actually has a power-fist salute?
(It’s located next to the whirling peace sign) I can’t believe that anybody
could be so deliberately retro! I mean, is he just feigning that it is 1968 or
is he just stupid? Sheesh, what a rube. And I though the DU web site was dumb.

Item Five: notice the “European left” link with the red star that is located about several links down in the left column? (no pun intended)

These indicators show that Wayne Madsen is a raving lefty. Here is a sample of his post’s titles:

• Iraq : the body found was not Margaret Hassan
• The Inevitable Triumph of Progressive Thought
• The Long March...and the Million Worker March
• 9th-16th of November - International Week against the Apartheid Wall
• Marchers demand Iraq withdrawal
• Is the Annexation of Canada part of Bush’s Military Agenda?
• Bush the butcher not welcome in Ottawa
• Eating Ballots Forbidden in Canada (Research Article)

I’m not going to comment of these posts (so little time, so much stupidity) but I cannot let this one pass:

BAGHDAD, The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report.”Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah,” 35-year-old trader from Fallujah Abu Hammad told IPS. ”They used everything -- tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground.”

Yup, if stupidity had mass this web site would implode into a black hole.

Encyclopedia Brown and The Case of the Misbegotten Memos

There I was, goofing off by writing a long post when I should have been working, when I encountered yet another distraction to blog about.

I should be taking ritalin.

Anyway, I discovered Encyclopedia Brown is still in business as a PI. In this story, which according to documentation in Dan Rather's possession, was first published in 1963, Encyclopedia Brown quickly solves a case regarding forged Air National Guard memos in a few minutes; which is a lot longer than the blogosphere took to solve the same case in real life.

Although reading Encyclopedia Brown jogged some old memories, I don't recall Sally Kimball being this sultrily.

Read about The Case of the Misbegotten Memos.

Turgid prose alert in effect.

Milkchaser on the four traditions

Milkchaser posted a lengthy comment on my “Jacksonians, transnationalists, Red States and Blue States” post.

Most of the Jacksonian attributes you describe are typical of the ethnic values belonging to British-American, Scots-Irish Americans and Scandinavian Americans. These ethnic traditions, which have traditionally dominated American culture and politics, emphasize self-reliance, shared ethical values, emotional reticence and conformity (among other things that I don't recall).

We do well when we consider that the attributes that seem natural and right to us are not, in fact, the absolute, god-given, one-and-only approach to life. True, America has been wildly successful as a nation and this is no doubt due, in part, to the British-American ethnic values that dominate our culture. But this does not imply that our dominant culture is always best. Hence, we can and should adopt ways from other cultures. The "melting pot" tends to homogenize all constituent cultures, but it also produces a blend distinct from any one culture.

For example, British-American emphasis on conformity has had the unfortunate effect of allowing gays to be treated as second-class citizens. In our stifled past, boys who kiss boys were made to hide their passions because it was deemed offensive to the hetero majority. This seems a bit cruel to me.

On the other hand, we may as a society decide that a free society will truly tolerate all people as they are and not force them to conform. We may decide that the American principle of liberty trumps the dominant culture, notwithstanding the positive effect that culture contributes overall. Thus we decide to tolerate tasteful public expressions of gay love. However, an important part of this public tolerance implies that we also recognize the innate revulsion such expressions evoke, in most hetero people. I contend that such revulsion is also legitimate, and not bigoted, although, it would be wrong if it led to bigotry. People feel what they feel. Live and let live.

A similar argument could be made for tempering the ethic that values self-reliance with policies that protect those who cannot fend for themselves, because it strengthens the social fabric.

Where the multi-culturists go off the rail, IMO, is when they use multiculturalism as a means of attacking the dominant culture. This is classic leftism: promoting a victim mentality, the Hegemon vs. the rest of us, the oppressor vs. the oppressed.

The more each of us learns about his ethnic culture, the better equipped he is to act rationally in his own best interest rather than instinctively.

I think that Milkchaser’s commentary can be summarized as something like “America culture isn’t automatically right.”

OK, I accept that. I don’t mean to be an apologist for anything that doesn’t deserve a defense. Each of the traditions I reviewed in my post are a mix—in my view—of desirable and undesirable characteristics.

My feud with Jeffersonianism, Wilsonianism and Hamiltonianism is not that Jacksonianism is perfect but the other three traditions are more dysfunctional than Jacksonianism when dealing with national threats.

The Wilsonians aspiration for transnational organizations is beneficial to the extent that these things actually work OK when law-abiding nations are participating. What the Jacksonians intuitively understand—and the Wilsonians seem to refuse to understand—is that transnational organizations are dysfunctional—and even perverse—when they accept criminal regimes as equal partners.

Wilsonian foolishness is directly responsible for abominations like the UN. The UN is not merely useless, it is a malignant transnational organization that fails in its fundamental purpose. Not only does the UN fail to accomplish its goals but it also protects dictators, terrorist and international criminals.

The Hamiltonians are too busy conducting commerce with our enemies to worry about defending the nation interest. Joe Kennedy was a Nazi sympathizer. Japanese Zeroes were found to have Ford engines at the beginning of WW II. And Loral, during the Clinton administration illegally gives missile technology to China.

And the Jeffersonians are too enamored of diplomacy to understand that diplomacy to a losing tactic when dealing with criminal regimes.

My intent was to help my readers better understand the underlying factors that shape America’s behavior. I didn’t mean to say that everybody perfectly fits into one of the four traditions; I doubt many people do.

I also didn’t mean to say that people are unable to break with whatever tradition they might have been born into. I do believe—however—that the evidence show that most people are very influenced by whatever tradition they might have been born into.

My intention was to give my readers a way of understanding both themselves and their country.