Crusader War College

Via Glenmore at Rantburg comes this VERY interesting link to a lecture by Michael Crichton that gives much needed perspective. Recommended.

Once again, Mark Steyn hits a homer...

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Wishing all of my visitors the blessings of the season, and a Merry Christmas.

Ted Belman's article on how leftists conflate Judadism with Leftism, dismissing conservative Jews as fellow travellers with the Radical Christian Right("uncle Jakes"), is a good read. For this post, I want to focus on the following cite from Ted's article:

For example, Rosenberg writes that "He [Prager] conveniently ignores the fact that Christian Right support for Israel is largely based on a religious belief that Christ will only return after Jews are all in Israel accepting the divinity of Jesus Christ." That is the lie about Christians that the left spreads to prevent Jews from knowing the truth about Christian support for Israel: that it is rooted overwhelmingly in the beliefs that God promised the return of the Jews to Israel, that Christians are grafted onto the tree of Israel, that God blesses those who bless the Jews, that Israel is a humane democracy and its enemies are bloodthirsty and backward regimes.

As excellent, if brief, summary of my personal beliefs as well. I'd like to add a few extra points as further illumination, based on what I know about the beliefs of Zionist Charismatics and Pentecostals (I hoped to be brief, but alas, this post got away from me in my enthusiasm and concern):

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Via Rantburg comes this article at Frontpage Magazine giving the statement of Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld concerning the intolerance of Islam:

There is no declared Muslim state, which offers full civil rights to members of other religions. Many Christians work in Saudi Arabia, but they are not allowed to practice their religion in public because there is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia. The State Department's report on Religious Freedom points out that the Saudis do “not always respect this right in practice and do not define this right in law.”

Mark Steyn attacks again.

..NOT a race war.

The New South Wales Premier, his ministers and many newspaper headlines all used the term.

However, a more ungainly but nonetheless more accurate description would have been multicultural riots.

For the doctrine of multiculturalism is really to blame.

The tensions that exploded this week were defined into existence by multiculturalist policies and ideas.

It wasn't the youths at Cronulla beach who decided that all Lebanese constitute an ethnic group.

That was done for them by politicians, bureaucrats and academics in the name of constructing ethnic communities.

Which is more important, Lefties?

Hattip Ted Belman via Israpundit.

Via Ted Belman at Israpundit comes the link to Efrat, a pro-life pregnancy support group working in Israel.

Anyone who knows me, whether in real life or on line, knows that I am a vigorous (some say fully confirmed rabid) pro-lifer, contributing when I can, and voting pro-life when possible. I've left tracks on usenet long before the World Wide Web, and have "legacies" that exist to this day that can be directly traced to me. I'm not a one-issue voter, but a pro-abortionist politician won't get on my short-list unless they have a running track record on national security that rivals Reagan and Scoop Jackson.

Although not as rabid for as long, I've come to believe that support of Israel and protection of the Jews is a high priorty, both from a theological as well as from a political and practical standpoint. ANYONE with experience with individuals who shirk responsibility and cast the blame for their actions on others should easily see the same behavior in the Palestinians. One of the big threats to Israel is demographics, and the more little Israelis are born, the better off Israel will be in the long run.

Thus, the discovery of Efrat, a pro-life pregnancy support organization in Israel, produces in me the same sort of enthusiam that I would greet a two-for-the-price-of-one sale on Western Digital hard drives.

Look, this should be a NO-BRAINER, people: how many organizations do you know of where every dollar blows away TWO different problems? AFAIAK, only the Salvation Army has their shit together when it comes to balancing the preaching and helping ministry.

Dig deep people! I sure am, and I'm posting this here, and adding Efrat to the Campus Directory, to remind me in this busy time of year to get my donation out.

Go. Now. Lotsa laughs.

Whatever the playlist--usually heavy metal or hip-hop but sometimes, bizarrely, Barney the Dinosaur's "I Love You" or selections from Sesame Street--the music is pumped at detainees with such brutality to unravel them without laying so much as a feather on their bodies. The mind is another story, and blasting loud music at captives has become part of what has now entered our lexicon as "torture lite." Torture lite is a calculated combination of psychological and physical means of coercion that stop short of causing death and pose little risk that telltale physical marks will be left behind, but that nonetheless can cause extreme psychological trauma. It's designed to deprive the victim of sleep and to cause massive sensory overstimulation, and it has been shown in different situations to be psychologically unbearable.

Okay, that's going WAAAY beyond cruel and unusual!

...will he find faith on the earth?

*sigh* Good question.

I am in a bit of conflict regarding praying for the "Christian" "Peacemakers" hostages:

• Given the post below, there is no doubt that the hostages, and the group that sent them, classify as fools. Thus, one could be justified in praying that justice be done: they have been accusing america of being something they are not, and they, in turn, are being accused of being something they are not. With no regard to prudence or wisdom, they put themselves into a situation that begged for this result.
• On the other hand, there are indications that these people arranged this little sideshow to highlight their cause. I never heard of this organization except via a church member: a liberal professor whose sister is in the organization, and who does not hesitate to use any opportunity to state his politics. (I, in turn, never hesitate to respond in kind to his provocations.)
• On the third hand, they ARE accused of being something they are not, and I sympathise with that, regardless of the fact that these people are the ones throwing false accusations about.

My, my. What to do?

I have DEFINITELY decided to do the following:

• I will NOT GLOAT. That will just jinx the entire situaton, leading God to deliver them JUST to stop me from gloating. On the eternal scale of things, my behaving rightly is worth more to God than correcting these bozos.
• This is NOT a problem. This is an OPPORTUNITY: rest assured, "Christian" "Peacemakers" is definitely seeing this as an OPPORTUNITY, even though the hostages don't feel that way.
• Because these are fools, I will NOT respond in a way that makes me like them. To me, this means evading responsiblity and throwing blame onto someone else for one's own shortcomings.
• Because these are fools, I will respond in such a way as to make sure they don't come away thinking that they are better than they are.

To me, at this moment, the optimal solution is to pray that the hostages are kept safe UNTIL AND DURING THEIR RESCUE BY AMERICAN AND IRAQUI FORCES. It goes without saying that we should also be praying for the safety of the rescuers as well.

My wife one time read me a summary of a top 10 Men's tennis player: His forehand stunk. His backhand was atrocious. His serve middling. Always won games.

I was puzzled until my wife read the rest of the article: the guy was a brilliant stragegist and had great placement. He was able to analyze what the other player didn't like, AND GAVE THAT TO THEM. He was beaten only by players who had NO weaknesses that he could leverage.

This strategy will work in this situation as well. "Christian" "Peacemakers" has kindly told us what they don't want by their demanding that no actions be taken to save their people when they are taken hostage. ERGO, we do what they don't want us to do. This has many advantages:

• It grabs the spotlight away from "Christian" "Peacemakers" and puts it on our terrific armed forces. They'll hate losing it, and they'll hate even more where it goes.
• It has all the delicious POISON that makes the parable of the Good Samaritan such a kicker: The people that "Christian" "Peacemakers" despise the most are the ones that help them when they are in trouble.
• Even if this is a charade to puff the terrorists ("kidnap us, threaten to kill us, and then release us! It'll be great publicity!"), they can't really SAY anything if they are rescued and the guys they dealt with get killed or captured.
• Imagine the sheer torture that "Christian" "Peacemakers" will endure deciding if they have to say "thank you" to their rescuers: If they do, it certainly won't sound sincere. If they don't, both God and man will despise them. Ingratitude never was a sin in Islam, but the last time I looked, it still was in Christianity.

Praying for a successful hostage rescue is the best option at this moment, and one I will follow.

I was reading Proverbs 1 this morning, and thought the following was appropriate, given their recent declaration that it was all America's fault in the first place to liberate Iraq from a bloody tyrant:

20 Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice.
21 At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
22 "How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?
23 Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.
24 Because I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,
25 and because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof,
26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you,
27 when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you.
28 Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me.
29 Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord,
30 would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof,
31 therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices.
32 For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them;
33 but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster."

I have now found the words to describe Christian Peacemakers: They're not any different than Jimmy Bakker's PTL, using the cloak of religion to further personal, worldly ends. NO CREDIT that it is in the service of Leftist pro-Saddamism cloaked as "peacemaking". Thus, I shall pray for the hostages in the SAME WAY I prayed for Jimmy Bakker after he was found out, and let God decide whether to extend His Grace so that these people do not reap what they sow.

The name of Christianity is DRUG IN THE MUD by self-serving assholes like these, posing as Christians. They are more like pharisees, too involved in the support and enforcement of their favored rules to give a REAL DAMN about the people Saddam murdered in his reign. There was no obligation for us to deliver people from such a tyrant, but there WILL be a blessing for us having sacrificed to deliver them.

The only reason why they blame Bush and the United States for the current plight of their people, in light of too many choices made by others (including themselves and the terrorists), is the liberal perchant to throw the blame of their actions onto others to spare themselves. They not only do this, but give hearty support and approval to those who do the same with the understanding that "I scratch your back now, you'll scratch mine later."

Addition: Donald Sensing has a great post dissecting "Christian" "Peacemakers". There is no reason to treat lefties politicizing Christianity any different than THEY treat Fundamentalism. They do not object to the politization of religion in principle, but to OTHERS politicizing religion: when THEY do it, it's just peachy keen and fine.

The link comes via John Rey at "Dissecting Leftism". Apart from the "revelation" that those who supposedly care the most about the poor, downtrodden worker, tip poorly, I found the following comment highly revealing:

Once, years ago, I heard a heard a lecture by a rabbi on dating. He advised that if your date treats a waiter/waitress or a busboy in a condescending and mean manner, that is the way they will treat you after a while – if you were to marry them.

A fellow editor at the American Thinker agrees:

I absolutely agree with Jack’s rabbi that the best way to judge someone’s character is to observe behavior with those who have no power or standing, and to do so in private in the case of celebrities and politicians. I have used this as a guide to friendships for almost my entire life, and it has proven highly reliable.

Mark Alexander speaks for me when he writes about Thanksgiving in the link.

Pilgrim Hall has a montage of how Thanksgiving is celebrated here that I found especially moving. I especially like the image here and the second one here.

Finally, I hope that the pages here and here motivate you as it did me to be extra generous this year. There were Thanksgiving food bags at the store I patronize that were pre-packaged and which could be donated yesterday, and on an impulse, I got two instead of one. I regret not getting four or five now, so I intend to make up the number as soon as I get off work.

I have only one complaint about Thanksgiving...

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If you wondered where all the posts have been in the last few weeks, you probably didn't stop by to see this temporary web page.

Although I suspected initially that my password was too weak, subsequent problems arose after I got an alternate working site and posted the temporary web page while I sorted things out. I'm not ready to voice my suspicions on-line, but I'll just wait and see what else happens.

Check the link for an e-mail from a Frenchman, posted at Rantburg, commenting on the riots in his country. There is no reason to believe it comes from anyone other than an average French Citizen fed up with the antics of his leadership and the "chattering classes" (Upper Middle class, which he calls 'BoBos' (bourgeois-boheme). Worth a read!

I have decided to start a new category: "Working Hypotheses". These will be posts where I will pose possible explanations, theories, and conjectures that I don't feel I have enough evidence, at the moment of posting, to believe their validity or falsehood, but have a suspicion that they might be true if one thinks hard enough about it and finds supporting information.

I invite comments on posts in this category: I will strive to put in this category posts for which I don't have an emotional attachment, and simply want feedback or chip in an idea for someone else to develop.

Paladin of the Empire Banagor hits another home run.

Go. Read. Be enlightened.

While reading the above post at NetWmd (Hattip Andrew via Istrapundit, the following quote caught my eye (emphasis added):

Correspondents say the UK government does not regard Mr Ahmadinejad’s stance on Israel as a new policy but more as a sign of his inexperience and the very local focus of his government.

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Peter Schweizer has out a new book: Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy that tears the mask off of Liberal Hypocrisy. Not that we already know that they do it, but he goes to great lengths to document everything. A tip of the hat goes to Tipper Via Rantburg

While most of what he says is interesting, I found this answer to Kathryn Jean Lopez' question very penetrating:

Lopez: One overarching kinda question: We all have our moments of hypocrisy. That we don't practice what we preach doesn't make what we preach any less valid. People are human, etc. Is there something about your book that is somewhat fundamentally unfair?

Schweizer: Yes, we are all hypocrites and I talk about that in the book. But liberal hypocrisy and conservative hypocrisy are quite different on two accounts. First, you hear about conservative hypocrisy all the time. A pro-family congressman caught in an extramarital affair, a minister caught in the same. This stuff is exposed by the media all the time. The leaders of the liberal-Left get a complete pass on their hypocrisy. Second, and this is even more important, the consequences of liberal hypocrisy are different than for the conservative variety. When conservatives abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they end up hurting themselves and their families. Conservative principles are like guard rails on a winding road. They are irritating but fundamentally good for you. Liberal hypocrisy is the opposite. When the liberal-left abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they actually improve their lives. Their kids end up in better schools, they have more money, and their families are more content. Their ideas are truly that bad.

That makes a fiendish sort of sense: The media can justify THEIR hypcrisy by saying that bad things happening to people is news, but it isn't news when good things happen to people. William Bennett losing millions of dollars on gambling (which his teachings say is wrong) is bad news. Noam Chomsky making millions investing in the stock market (which his teachings say is wrong) is good news.

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three kills.

Well done!

Via .com at Rantburg comes the above article where Stephen Hayes takes on, not as much Wilson himself, as the New York Times and the Washington Post for trying to rehabilitate Wilson's credibility.

The article cited is about a convention of "God-bloggers" being held at Biola University. I thought the following excerpt was significant:

Blogging's popularity is no doubt on a rapid rise, although it hasn't yet taken hold over the vast majority of Internet users.

By the end of 2004, 8 million U.S. adults — 7 percent of adults who use the Internet — reported having created a blog, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The same study estimated that some 32 million Internet users reported reading a blog, which represented more than double the amount from less than a year before. Other studies have estimated the number of blogs at anywhere from 15 million to more than 30 million.

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Via Rantburg comes the original version of the UN Report on the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

ORIGINAL VERSION:

One witness of Syrian origin but resident in Lebanon, who claims to have worked for the Syrian intelligence services in Lebanon, has stated that approximately two weeks after the adoption of Security Council resolution 1559, Maher Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamil Al-Sayyed decided to assassinate Rafik Hariri. He claimed that Sayyed went several times to Syria to plan the crime, meeting once at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus and several times at the Presidential Place and the office of Shawkat. The last meeting was held in the house of Shawkat approximately 7 to 10 days before the assassination and included Mustapha Hamdan. The witness had close contact with high ranked Syrian officers posted in Lebanon.

EDITED VERSION:

One witness of Syrian origin but resident in Lebanon, who claims to have worked for the Syrian intelligence services in Lebanon, has stated that approximately two weeks after the adoption of Security Council resolution 1559, senior Lebanese and Syrian officials decided to assassinate Rafik Hariri. He claimed that a senior Lebanese security official went several times to Syria to plan the crime, meeting once at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus and several times at the Presidential Place and the office of a senior Syrian security official. The last meeting was held in the house of the same senior Syrian security official approximately seven to 10 days before the assassination and included another senior Lebanese security official. The witness had close contact with high ranked Syrian officers posted in Lebanon.

The names were deleted to protect someone's ass.

I came across the following article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution (registration required)

Warming unlikely culprit with hurricanes Hurricanes, global warming link unlikely

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS
Published on: 10/20/05
As I write this, Hurricane Wilma is setting the all-time record low in the Atlantic Basin for barometric pressure, besting 1988's Hurricane Gilbert. Wilma is also the 21st tropical cyclone this season, tying the 1933 record for number of storms. To climatologists, that 1933 record was like Babe Ruth's 714 home runs — something that would never be broken. But 2005 has come along, just as Hank Aaron did. Neither Aaron nor Ruth was juiced. But has the performance of 2005 hurricanes been enhanced by global warming?

Just a year ago, two of my scientific colleagues made headlines by running a computer model showing that, by 2080, hurricanes would increase in maximum wind speed by 6 percent and precipitation rate by 18 percent. In the model, 55 percent of the intensity variation of hurricanes was related to warming sea-surface temperatures.

Rather than use a computer model, I checked the actual relationship between sea temperatures and hurricane intensity in recent decades ­­— a period of global warming. In reality (as opposed to the virtual reality of the computer), only 10 percent of storm-to-storm variation in intensity is related to sea surface temperatures. Ninety percent is due to other factors, such as El Niño, (a warm current of water). Some of these factors are actually less favorable to hurricanes in a warmer world.

Almost all severe hurricanes must experience water of 82 degrees sometime in their life cycle. Oddly enough, there is no relationship between more intense hurricanes and ocean surface temperature once this threshold is reached.

Georgia Tech's Peter Webster, using data back to 1970, released a paper arguing that hurricane severity has increased. Had he looked at reliable hurricane-hunter aircraft data over the Atlantic back to 1945, he would have discovered that the proportion of severe storms was exactly the same in the 1940s and 1950s as it is now.

— Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.

This column is solicited to provide another viewpoint to an AJC editorial published today.

The AJC's editorial had screeched about the Republicans ignoring "mounting scientific evidence" of global warming causing bigger hurricanes, but it appears that the anonymous opinion editor didn't notice that the prediction cited wasn't due until 2080, not 2005. In addition, it appears that my comment about "adding more truth" applied here, in that Mr. Michaels ADDED information that painted an entirely different picture than what the anonymous editor wanted to paint.

The only kudo they deserve is that there WAS a counter-opinion given. However, I don't know if this got published in the print edition of today's AJC.

Via Melanie Phillips comes this quote from Yossi Klein Halevi

Before my journey into Palestinian Islam and Christianity, I took it for granted that you, the occupied, knew far more about Israelis than we could possibly know about you. The occupied, after all, tend by necessity to pay more attention to the ways of the occupier, who in his arrogant blindness, remains obtuse about the life of the occupied all around him.

I no longer believe this is true. My journey into the faiths of my neighbors was part of a much broader attempt among Israelis, begun during the first intifada, to understand your narrative, how the conflict looks through your eyes.

Your society, on the other hand, has made virtually no effort to understand our narrative.

Instead, you have developed what can be called a "culture of denial," that denies the most basic truths of the Jewish story. According to this culture of denial, which is widespread not only among your people but throughout the Arab world, there was no Temple in Jerusalem, no ancient Jewish presence in the land, no Holocaust.

Nowhere is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as popular as in the Arab world, which has also become the international center for Holocaust denial.

The real problem, then, is not terrorism, which is only a symptom for a deeper affront: your assault on my history and identity, your refusal to allow me to define myself, which is a form of intellectual terror.

The whole essay is good, but the bolded portion caught my eye.

Via Orrin at Brothers Judd comes this excerpt:

Top-ranking Americans have told equally top-ranking Indians in recent weeks that the US has plans to invade Iran before Bush’s term ends. In 2002, a year before the US invaded Iraq, high-ranking Americans had similarly shared their definitive vision of a post-Saddam Iraq, making it clear that they would change the regime in Baghdad.

The bulk of the article is about the reason why India voted with the United States in referring Iran's Nuclear Weapons program to the Security Council, but the above paragraph stood out.

Outstanding.

John Ray cites an excerpt from an article by Lawrence Auster , from which I excerpt an excerpt:

To the extent that most whites think about the issue at all, they seem to imagine that acting decently is a sufficient response to being called a racist. But if past experience is any guide, such a passive and uncomplaining attitude on the part of whites, far from clearing them of the racism charge in the eyes of blacks, leaves them looking guiltier than ever. Why else—as blacks see it—would whites not defend themselves against such a damning accusation? Why else—unless whites really are racists—would they not indignantly strike back at people who are saying such terrible things about them? Thus whites' unprecedented outpouring of generosity, far from acquitting them of racism, merely continues the familiar psychodrama of white liberal guilt, in which whites are forever trying through conspicuous demonstrations of compassion and good will to shield themselves from a racism charge against which they appear to have no real defense

.

I was prepared to help as well, but all the charges of racism turned me off. I was prepared to send NOTHING to such wretches. I acceded only with the intervention of my wife and my church: I gave money to a fund that provides home clean-up equipment, reasoning that the recipient would still have to apply elbow grease to take advantage of it. Even then, I continue to refuse to help.

"But they are in need, and Jesus said that those in need were your neighbor, who you should love as yourself!"

Bullshit.

"Well okay, but if they're accusing you of racism, they're your enemy! Shouldn't you pray for your enemies, and do good to them?"

Firstly, a false accusation of racism indeed makes them my enemy, but note that their racist attack happened AFTER the disaster. And Jesus warned us against throwing our pearls before swine, lest they distain our gift, turn, and attack us (Matthew 7:9).

And THIS, exactly, is what the passage above is citing: If any charity is merely taken as proof of an undeserved guilt and evil, then that qualifies the person as an attacking swine that Jesus himself counseled us not to waste our resources upon.

"But what if you were in their situation, in need of help? Shouldn't you do unto others as you would have them do unto you?"

Exxcuuuse me, but I don't indulge in fantasies that my "enemy" blew up levees or ascribe false motives to their uncertain recovery efforts when my own elected officials fucked their signals up to them. And I Certainly WOULD NOT SPIT IN THE FACE OF THOSE HELPING ME, taking the aid they gave me as proof of their inherent evil. And I certainly wouldn't be using scripture as a means of furthering a destructive co-dependency (that's fancy talk for falling for a scam). Either let me fucking starve to death, or let my stomach, and my wife, beat some common sense into my head if I ever get THAT moonbatty. Please?

MILITANT insurgent groups responsible for killing thousands of Iraqi civilians over the past two years are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch charges today.

In a report chronicling the killing of an estimated 15,000 men, women and children by insurgents, the organisation insists that international law applies equally to US-led forces as well as those claiming to resist foreign occupation. “The armed conflict in Iraq is regulated by the 1949 Geneva Conventions and customary international laws,” says the report, Iraq: Insurgent Groups Responsible for War Crimes.

Many insurgent groups are operating in Iraq, from Islamic extremists to members of the ousted Baath party and Sunni Muslim nationalists. Three groups are blamed for most of the worst abuses: al-Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ansar al-Sunna (Supporters of the Sunni) and Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam).

Human Rights Watch has produced numerous reports critical of the US military and the Iraqi Government’s behaviour since the invasion in 2003. Sarah Leah Whitson, who heads the group’s Middle East and Africa division, said it was important that insurgents were also called to account.

TOO GODDAMED LATE, YA FUCKING WHORE!

You had TWO FUCKING YEARS to produce a balanced set of reports, chronicling what BOTH SIDES were doing. Instead, you produced report after report chronicling Allied "sins" of mass detention and college-frat boy hazing incidents at prisons, with barely a comment acknowleding the atrocities of the insurgents.

YOU KNEW FOR TWO DAMNED YEARS that the insurgents were not wearing distinctive insignia, as is called for in the Geneva Conventions.

YOU KNEW FOR TWO LONG YEARS that the insurgents were deliberately targeting civilians, including children, contrary to Geneva Convention requirements.

And NOW, for THE FIRST TIME, you admit that they didn't have a unified command structre, as is called for in the Geneva Conventions.

And I know WHY you mentioned NOTHING of all this in all two car-bomb packed years! Because your criticisms of mass detentions WOULD HAVE COME ACROSS AS THE RAVINGS OF A CLUELESS IDIOT if you had, at ANY time, acknowledged that they were in response to efforts by the soldiers you criticized to STOP THE WAR CRIMES YOU NOW ARE COMING AROUND TO ADMIT HAVE BEEN HAPPENING ALL THIS TIME,

You're a WHORE.

AN INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL WHORE. You sold your moral and intellectual integrity, as well as that of Human Rights Watch, letting yourselves get fucked over by terrorists and their anti-war supporters.

Y'know what I'm going to do to YOU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and all the other "international" "human rights" organizations? I'M GOING TO DO TO YOU WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO THE UNITED STATES FOR THE LAST 35 YEARS.

I'm going to DEMAND COMPLETE PERFECTION IN ALL YOUR REPORTS, PERFECT IMPARTIALITY, PERFECT FAIRNESS, AND PERFECT INFORMATION.

What's that? You're human? You're not perfect, and can't be perfect? GODDAM FUCKASS, NEITHER IS THE UNITED STATES MILITARY, BUT YOU DEMANDED IT OF THEM, SO I'M DEMANDING IT OF YOU.

You know what I'm going to do with your loverly report? The one issued TWO WEEKS before the Iraqui vote on the constitution? A VOTE THAT THEY NEVER HAD FOR DECADES? A report issued belatedly to cover your wrinkly, fat, morally decrepit ass? I'M GONNA NAIL THIS REPORT, WITH IT'S LATE DATE, TO YOUR BACK WITH 2 FOOT LONG MEATHOOKS SO IT CAN'T BE REMOVED WITHOUT RIPPING YOUR COWARDLY RIB CAGE OUT, FOR THE NEXT FOUR DECADES.

It will dog you as I remind everyone who'll listen, when you and your organization issue ANOTHER pontificating report, that YOU LOOKED THE OTHER WAY AND SAID NOTHING WHEN WAR CRIMES WERE HAPPENING, SPEAKING ONLY WHEN IT LOOKED THAT THE SIDE YOU WERE SUPPORTING WAS BEGINNING TO LOSE, AND THE SIDE YOU HATED WAS WINNING. I'll be sure people question your integrity. I'll be sure people question your rigor. I'll be sure people ask, "WHO are YOU protecting by YOUR silence, and who are you trying to SLANDER with your report?"

Oh, and ANOTHER thing. What the shit do you think YOU are doing, Mr. Richard (aka DICKhead) Beeston, with this bit of tortured English?

In a report chronicling the killing of an estimated 15,000 men, women and children by insurgents, the organisation insists that international law applies equally to US-led forces as well as those claiming to resist foreign occupation.

The main subject of your article is the report on war crimes committed by the "insurgents" (so your playbook calls them). It is not only the lead subject, but is remarkable in that it is the FIRST TIME THAT AN ATTEMPT AT CONDEMNING THE INSURGENTS HAS TAKEN MORE THAN A PARAGRAPH BY AN "INTERNATIONAL" "HUMAN RIGHTS" GROUP. This report is the FUCKING EXCEPTION, the SORE THUMB, the LONG MISSING COUNTERBALANCE TO A MOUNTAIN OF REPORTS ISSUED AGAINST THE ALLIED FORCES LIBERATING IRAQ FROM A GENOCIDAL MASS MURDERER. (my bitch is that it, and multiple others like it, SHOULD have been issued AT THE SAME TIME if the figleaf of "impartiality" was to be credibly maintained). As such, because it is the exception, YOU LEAD A COMPARATIVE WITH THE EXCEPTION, NOT THE RULE. You SHOULD HAVE SAID:

In a report chronicling the killing of an estimated 15,000 men, women and children by insurgents, the organisation insists that international law applies equally to those claiming to resist foreign occupation as well as to US-led forces.

Goddamned co-whore: you're writing for a BRITISH paper, and you need me, a YANKEE IN SOUTH GEORGIA, to tell you how to write English properly?

Of course, a Deconstructionist would read TONS of stuff into that improper inversion: He'd say it inadvertently revealed a strong anti-american agenda because you let that agenda get in the way of proper English usage, a continual sore point with the British, who created the language in the first place. It reveals you're a member of a co-conspiracy, operating hand-in-glove with the "human rights" organizations to re-impose tyranny upon the long suffering Iraqui people by raising a false hue-and-cry against their (Geneva Convention mandated) protector, the United States Armed Forces, by mounting up a MASS of reports condemning RELATIVELY MINOR crimes, while whispering, in indistinct and easilly avoidable tones, the far more numerous MURDERS committed by the terrorists that YOU INSIST ON CALLING INSURGENTS.

Among the knowing and the wise, QUALITY trumps QUANTITY. Did you hope that people would COUNT THE NUMBER OF WORDS AND DETERMINE GUILT OR INNOCENCE BASED ON HOW MANY OR HOW FEW ACCUATIONS WERE FLUNG AGAINST THE DIFFERENT PARTIES? Did you REALLY THINK that Abu-Ghraib was a MORE HENIOUS crime than the truck bombing of Iraqui children BECAUSE YOU SAID MORE ABOUT THE FORMER THAN THE LATTER? Or did you hope people would THINK so, knowing that the power of PROPAGANDA is in its repetition? That a lie repeated enough times will be perceived as the truth? Look, I KNOW you know that because, as you ceaselessly remind us, You're MEDIA PROFESSIONALS, and not pajama-clad amateurs. What did you plan to do if the searchlight of truth eventually revealed that the TRAIL OF DECEPTION LEAD TO THE DOORSTEP OF MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WHO KNEW EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE DOING WHEN THEY DID IT?

Oh HELL. What the SHIT am I doing, asking LIBERALS questions about what they'd do if caught, when I ALREADY KNOW what the HELL they'd do if caught? You'd kinda pull yourself together, cast a distainful eye upon the (in your eyes) childish questioner who DARED to point out that you were BUCK NAKED, and in that sneering, condescending tone of voice perfected by Kerry, Kennedy, Clinton et.al, you'd say "But, of COURSE killing a child is WORSE than humiliating a prisoner! How on Earth did you get that impression from our news reports?"

Funny, counting all the column inches written and air time seconds given to either subject, any REASONABLE person would have been led to the conclusion that you didn't hold to THAT obvious moral truth.

What's that? You're pissed at me because I revealed THE SECRET OUT that you were hoping to preserve for yourselves when the heat comes on? Go fuck yourselves, you goddamned co-whores! Freedom of the Press means that NOBODY FORCES YOU to print what you print or say what you say, or how many times to print it or say it. Which, in my book, means that YOU ARE 1,000% RESPONSIBLE for the contents. Your claim of being professionals means you know how to calculate audience response, which means that you are ALSO 1,000% RESPONSIBLE for people's reactions to your reports. Freedom of the Press means that when you get a story right, you get all the credit for people reacting righteously to it, but if you get it wrong, YOU GET ALL THE BLAME FOR PEOPLE ACTING WRONGLY TO IT. Accepting the latter, as well as the former, is what it means to be an ADULT, while demanding you get the former, but NEVER the latter, is the definition of a CHILD BRAT.
Grow the fuck UP!

The link is to an article posted at Kathy Kinsey's On the third hand.

A grant of a license to kill a subset of the human race without review and without due cause is not a right, no matter how restricted the license with regard to perpetrator or victim.

=> Read more!

The above link is to a Rantburg article about Israel taking the gloves off.

I had suspected as much, but only at the very beginning. The means by which he got to this point (including the suffering of the settlers being evicted) made me waver in my convictions as of late. However, my real desire is that the best be done for Israel, not to boast, "I knew this would happen, and I never wavered in my conviction since I first predicted it."

Several observations about this:

• Sharon is setting a precedent for future Israeli PMs to follow: treat post-disengagement Gaza and the West Bank as sovereign nations.
• If Sharon and the IDF keep this up, and intensifies it, then the West Bank expulsions may be a lot easier for the settlers to swallow if they realize their presenece had been holding Israel back in it's response against terrorist acts.
• Taking firm military action against terrorists operating out of Gaza and the West Bank (FINALLY!) can't help but galvanize the Israeli citizenry. The "conservatives" will cheer (a la US Jacksonians), while the "liberals" will intensify their attempts to submarine their own nation (a la US Liberals/MSM). The sharpening of the issue should increase voter turn-out for the next election, giving the next PM (we hope) a firmer mandate than Sharon has right now.
• At the moment, for the Israeli "liberals", the current climate is turning against them as on-the-street Israelis have finally realized that there's nobody with whom their leaders will negotiate a "peace". Indications are not clear, but the Israeli "Jacksonians" will (I hope) vote for a party that will "tough out" wait until there REALLY IS a viable peace partner, rather than pretend that there is one and go through a charade of negotiations, accompanied by one-sided ceasefires and hudnas to demonstrate "good faith": You can't show "good faith" toward someone if you have "no faith" in that person.
• It struck me that unilaterally cutting loose Gaza and (eventually) the West Bank is not any different than what Jordan and Egypt did to create the situation in the first place: they washed their hands of the territories and said it was Israel's problem since the palestinians were (since 1967) suddenly an occupied people of a unique racial group. If it's BAD for Israel to say, "These territories are NOW a sovereign nation, so we're not responsible for them any more.", then why WASN'T it bad for Jordan and Egypt to say "These territories should be a sovereign nation, so we won't be responsble for them any more."?

This is a "Merchant of Venice" moment: "For, as thou urgest justice, be assured thou shalt have justice, more than thou desirest." (Act IV, Scene I). Since the Palestinians wanted sovereignty, they got sovereignty. Yea, more than they desire.

Israpundit has a great post from Dennis Prager about the Left and Hysteria.

If you want to understand the Left, the best place to start is with an understanding of hysteria. Leading leftists either use hysteria as a political tactic or are actually hysterics.

Take almost any subject the Left discusses and you will find hysteria.

Read the article.

Everything goes so much better when one has the problem defined and the right terminology to discuss it.

Via Rantburg comes a disturbing post:

A senior U.S. Marine commander said Monday that insurgents loyal to militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had taken over at least five key western Iraqi towns on the border with Syria and were forcing local residents to flee. In an interview with The Chronicle, Lt. Col. Julian Alford, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment stationed outside the western Iraqi town of al Qaim, said insurgents in the area had been distributing flyers they called "death letters," in which they ordered residents of this western corner of volatile Anbar province to leave -- or face death.

Why would they do that? I posted a comment at the article where I speculate that Saddam's WMD may turn up in one of the towns, with the Jihadis setting them off when the American or Iraqi army shows up to drive them out.

There's a lot of speculation that Saddam shipped his WMD to Syria: a large convoy of trucks leaving Baghdad prior to the war, and which had been tracked as long as the American spy satellite was above the horizon, has never been accounted for. The Bakka valley is cited as one possible location. It is possible that, feeling too much of the heat and not willing to be caught with them, Baby Assad has turned them over to Zarqawi's men, with a promise not to use them on him. After all, Syria is the last Baathist outpost: take it out, and Baathism is as rootless as Nazi-ism.

Taking out a lot of American soldiers with WMD is a mixed bag of plusses and minuses. A plus is that it would be (puffed up to be by our traitorous MSM as) a spectacular coup. It would add fuel to the fire demanding withdrawal from Iraq. It would give Bush, the Pentagon, and our army in Iraq a black eye. Possessing WMD would give the insurgents terrorists in Iraq a higher profile and a cudgel with which to threaten potential voters.

The minuses will also be obvious: if WMD is released, then the question becomes whose WMD was released.

If it was Saddam's, then he DID have WMD, and Bush was right. If Leftists believed in God, they'd be screaming "GOD FORBID!"

But supponse it is NOT Saddam's? Whose is it then? The answer to that question becomes the nation that gets invaded next. Why? Because one of Bush's "War on Terror" nightmare scenarios is the axis-of-evil nation that develops WMD and passes devices to terrorists, who would then slip them into place and detonate them. The reason? Deniability. For all their depravity, terrorist suicide bombers are, as Steven Den Beste has pointed out, the smartest smart weapons on the planet.

Gosh. I HOPE I'm wrong.

But still. I've got a baaaaad feeling about this...

The transition to b2evolution (b2) went more smoothly than I thought it would.

One of the built-in tools in the latest version of b2 is a converter to convert an export/backup of your Moveable Type (MT) site into a set of b2evolution entries. The tool works very well: make sure your b2 user name the same as the name used on your MT blog, then import away! It'll even create the categories on the fly.

The only thing it doesn't do is MT excerpts (text in the third big text box down from the top). Thus, I suggest that you do a test import first, then carefully review the output results and move or remove the excerpts. I never got them to work anyhow, so I used the area to hold clipboard scraps on three drafts, so it wasn't bad.

The only thing better on MT is that the page showing the list of posts one can edit is more compact than b2's. At least, you can filter b2's list, but I do miss the quick overview.

Up until the move to a commercial webhoster, this site (and others) was hosted on a dual Pentium III 1.13 GHZ server sited at my house. This was practical because I was using a dedicated Symmetric DSL line that had a high upload speed as well as a high download speed.

However, due to cost concerns raised by the Wife, plus problems with getting certain types of work-related secure connection packet types through the router, we had to re-subscribe for an ADSL Bell South line. I felt I could have gotten everything to work, but only if I learned more about the firewall that comes with Red Hat 9. I will also miss the fixed IP address assigned to the connection. Thus, the move to the commercial webhoster.

I have utterly NO complaints about my service, and will very likely sign up again as soon as our finances improve (we had several very expensive (+$1000) hits to our finances this year that we KNOW won't happen next year, and I consider it miraculous that the consequences will only be a rather "lean" Christmas by our standards: I want to start the new year off with a clean(er) slate debt-wise.)

It's been about 5 days since I repointed the domain name to the new site, so its time to cut back. I probably won't go back to hosting the site on a house server, since the new webhoster has better throughput and software facilities that would be extra cost items for me to implement, or beyond my capability to implement with little to no trouble.

"What is truth?" said Pilate. John 18:38

This particular phrase, canonized by Pilate, has been celebrated and over-used by cynics and the opportunistic to justify the denial of absolute truth (as if Pilate is an expert in this area). Yet, like everything else biblical, the whole matter changes when put in context:

"What is truth?" said Pilate. After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, "I find no grounds for charging Him..." John 18:38

Unless you are a new-age whacko who believes that objective reality shifts to accomodate themselves, or that reality is a dream in which only you are the "real human", and everyone else is a figment of your imagination with no reality, there IS such a thing as absolute truth: how can you justify accusing another of lying, which is making a statement contrary to the truth? After all, if truth is relative, then they are merely contradicting YOUR truth, and being utterly truthful if what they are saying is true relative to THEIR truth.

When confronted, some shift their tack and argue that people are incapable of grasping ALL truth. This is, of course, patently true: the breadth of reality is so great and vast that only God is capable of comprehending it. "What is Truth?" becomes a statement of man's limits on knowing it.

However, Pilate's sin was not that of ignorance of the truth: After uttering his famous phrase, "he went out to the Jews again and told them, 'I find no grounds for charging Him...'"

It is obvious, once the context is taken into account, that PILATE ANSWERED HIS OWN QUESTION. Sure, he didn't know ALL truth, but he knew ONE truth: "There are no grounds for charging Jesus".

So, what was Pilate's sin? He failed to ACT on the truth THAT HE KNEW.

---

Truths and facts do not, in and of themselves, dictate actions. Reacting to a truth is an outflowing of what one OUGHT to do based on what IS, mediated based on what one BELIEVES one OUGHT to do. To borrow an argument from C.S. Lewis, a sentance that informs us of a truth or fact is a declarative or indicativesentence. A sentence that tells us what we ought to do in response to that truth or fact is an imperative sentence. Lewis points out that you cannot get the imperative out of an indicative. This is true because an indicative implies a set of conditionals about how one OUGHT to behave, which reduces to a question of the specifics of one's moral code. Or lack of one.

(This, by the way, is also true in "real life": "My husband is having a heart attack" is an indicative, stating a fact. How it translates to an imperative, a sequence of thoughts and actions the wife will do, cannot be pulled out of the indicative. In the United States, it will result in a rush to the phone to dial 911. If the wife is a Registered Nurse, or a Medical Doctor, you can expect the response to be more detailed and proactive. Finally, if the guy is an abuser, it will probably result in no action whatsoever. The first two responses are mediated by a belief system put into place by training, with the second being more detailed than the first, but still resting on a belief system founded on the thought in the back of the mind that "My teachers tell me this will work in this situation, and because I believe they wouldn't tell me wrong, I'm going to do what they said to do.")

Pilate's sin was not a failure to recognize truth: he didn't know the whole story, but he knew enough to know that Jesus was innocent. This, of course, is a conclusion based on facts, and if there were new facts, then that conclusion might change. However, until that time, that conclusion WAS truth. Per his job description, he knew what he OUGHT to do. His sin was in not doing what he knew he OUGHT to do. In the end, when he condemned Jesus to death, exonerating himself of the responsibility by a ritual, he was deliberately ignoring the truth he knew. He may not know ALL truth, but humility does not absolve one of the guilt of not following the truth one DID have.

---

Solely for the sake of argument, let's assume that the Leftist meme, "Bush lied, people died", is true. Certainly the last part is true, although I very much doubt the first part, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it is.

"Bush lied, people died" is an invitation and a demand by the utterer for the listener to punish Bush for a lie that caused people to die. I find it interesting that it is usually uttered by someone with an extremely "flexible" moral code (if it exists), to someone with a rigid moral code that the utterer would find too onerous to follow.

However, what if THIS was uttered instead: "Bush lied, 1,800 American soldiers died in 18 months, liberating 15 million people from a dictator who killed 3,000 Iraquis every month, committed genocide, and initiated two wars with his neighbors." It, of course, is not as short and pithy, but it is equally true. It has the advantage of having MORE truth than the short version. If truth is good, then MORE truth is better, right?

However, from the point of view of our Leftist, this is a horrible amplification. Why? Because, although truths cannot be contradictory (one must necessarily be a lie if one believes in the existance of absolute truth), people's moral codes are a set of tests that have priorities. The Leftist sought to trigger only a few of them that would lead to an outcome that he desired (Impeach Bush). By adding more truths, I trigger too many that had higher priorities, leading to a different outcome in the people the Leftist needs to sway (Praise Bush).

Although there are many ways for a Leftist to counterattack, ONE tactic that anti-idiotarians pray that he will use is to try to show that the additional "facts" are not true. This used to be common before the advent of search engines and the Internet, but its utility has gone down because anti-idiotarians, as a rule, will make sure they can back up their "facts" with "evidence". The resulting rout is not pleasant, so the tactic is becoming less and less used by Leftists.

However, the counterattack is simultaneously an admission: You attempted to refute an implied argument by adding facts. THEY are doing the same thing to refute YOUR additional facts. Last time I looked, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The tactic is a valid one for YOU to use, because it is a tactic that THEY are using.

More often, the favored tactic is to DECLARE that the additional facts are "irrelevant". However, "irrelevance" means that a fact would not affect the outcome of a process of moral or legal reasoning. The only way, really, to determine if a fact is relevant is to "toss it in and see if it changes anything." Indeed, the fact that including the above facts into the equation changes the outcome is THE PROOF that the additional facts are relevant. Mathematicians do this all the time, as do Lawyers and research scientists. Obviously, the vast majority of truths and facts will not affect the outcome of a particular chain of reasoning, but that is NOT the same thing as saying that NO addtional truths or facts would affect the outcome of a specific argument based on a specific moral code.

Another tactic is a misuse of "Occam's razor": the additional facts makes the new argument more complicated than the original, so the new one should be discarded because the old one is "simpler". I say a "misuse", because Occam's razor never applies to facts: it applies to EXPLANATIONS. Newtonian Physics was quite simple, elegant, and understandable, but the FACTS of atomic and subatomic behavior dictated the adoption of Quantum Mechanics. Albert Einstein, by the way, never believed that Quantum Mechanics was true, but didn't misuse Occam's razor to advocate an abandonment of it by denying the existance of anomalous atomic behavior. Rather, he worked on finding a simpler explanation that would cover all the facts, knowing that his fellow scientists would use Occam's Razor to discard the more complicated competitor in the face of the simpler and more understandable upstart.

The only tactic left to the Leftist are, predictably, imposed ignorance and poltical correctness.

"Imposed Ignorance" is a denial of the facts by simply not acknowledging the existence of the additional facts. The Leftist will repeat the original meme, not even acknowledging the additions, and hoping that no one would notice or let him get by with the evasion. I won't suggest a specific response to "Imposed Ignorance", because it all depends on how smart, caustic, sarcastic, or humorous the response needs to be in order to convince the AUDIENCE that the Leftist's argument has fallen through: you will never convince a Leftist using "Imposed Ignorance", because its the equivalent of him sticking his fingers into his ears and yelling "La! La! La! You aren't saying anything because I can't hear you!" Remember, A Leftist or a Troll is on the Internet because THEY want to leave something around to convince someone else coming by later to their point of view. That "someone" is THEIR audience. When you respond to them, you must keep that "someone" in mind as YOUR audience. THAT is why Democratic Underground deletes all critical comments, while Rantburg or Little Green Footballs only deletes patently obscene ones. "Imposing Ignorance" is the goal of the Main Stream Media, who justfies itself by saying that, at least, they are not lying about the (selected and careflly framed) facts they are presenting.

The second tactic, "Political Correctness", is what downed Pilate: he thought that giving an oppressed people a choice, a vote, would somehow make the situation all right. Instead, it led to injustice imposed by the Jews present, leading to further injustice imposed on the Jews by later Christians.

The "Political Correctness" tactic is being used full throttle on the Katrina disaster: It's politically incorrect to put the blame on a female Democratic governor or a black mayor. It is cruel and heartless to point out the fact that some people could have gotten away, but didn't and chose to stay and suffered for their choices.

The goal of "Political Correctness" is NOT to answer the additional facts you bring forth: the goal is to MAKE YOU RECANT YOUR STATEMENT OF THOSE FACTS. Their attacks on others are publisized, to INTIMIDATE YOU TO NOT STATE THOSE FACTS IN THE FIRST PLACE. The tactic is as old as all the stripes of totalitarianism, and which started with the first despot who killed the messenger that brought bad news.

Anyone who backs down from facts that they know are true because of intimidation or threats is committing the same sin as Pilate. Their only comfort is that the person or cause they are sacrificing is rarely as important as (I believe) the Creator God of the Universe.

I'll stop right here: if you don't understand the stakes involved, then leave a comment and I'll do my best to elaborate.

Welcome to the new and improved Campus of the Crusader War College!

A few notes on the new set-up:

• I have decided that it was not practical to think that a single software solution would work for the websites that I was setting up for others, AND to use the same software for this blog. The most intuitive software that I've found is phpwcms for general websites, but the commenters at Open Source CMS said it was only good for middle sized websites and not blogs.
• The server is no longer at the Dean of Student's house. We are hosted with Ace Host, using their reseller plan. I hope, when finances improve, to buy a two-year advanced reseller plan.
• I discovered that the terms and conditions for using Moveable Type forbade use on a multi-processor system. Thus, I have moved to b2evolution.
• In my search, I have discovered that CMS software is far more complicated that it needs to be. I had considered writing my own, but I'm too wrapped up finishing two other programming projects at home to maintain a software community. (On the other hand, one thing I've discovered is that I am a good "backplane" programmer: I can set up a software design that others can fill-in and expand on their own. I probably could do this and leave the community maintenance to others.)

Cannot forget. Cannot forgive.

=> Read more!

regarding the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Hattip Steve White via Rantburg

Via American Realpolitik comes this article from Hog On Ice (The original title was "CYA is a Big Job in a Town With as Many Asses as New Orleans") Here's a Jewel of a quote (emphasis mine):

A large number of local citizens refused to evacuate, ensuring that they and their children and pets would die. We’re not supposed to talk about this, because it’s “blaming the victims.” I’m sorry to ask this, but when a person is a victim because of his own irresponsibility or bad judgment, isn’t it an injustice to blame his suffering on someone else?

Yes.

woof.

=> Read more!

And for once, there were women in the Burkas:

A hardline Islamic women’s separatist group said yesterday it had begun raiding brothels in revolt-hit Kashmir to stamp out “adultery and the flesh-trade.”

Aasiya Andrabi, head of the separatist Dukhtaran-e-Milat, or Daughters of Faith, announced over the weekend the formation of all-women squads to raid brothels in the Muslim-majority state .

“We will expose those indulging in immoral activities,” Andrabi, a fiery speaker who has in the past voiced admiration for Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, told the Current News Agency.

“We raided several places in Srinagar on Monday after getting calls from people,” she said, issuing an appeal to people to “arrest moral degradation.”

The women, travelling in three-wheel auto-rickshaws and cars, were staging the raids enveloped in head-to-toe veils in line with strict Islamic tradition, a witness said.

However, the REAL offenders got away:

“During one of the raids, the men immediately fled from the house but the women were caught and questioned,” she said, adding the group was seeking to persuade them to change their ways.

In fact, I imagine the men got away in ALL the raids. Keep in mind that this is a psycho-patriarchal society supported by the civil government: it takes the unified testimony of four women to equal that of a man. In view of this, these women can probably make the men flee and make any probable case stand up in a civil case, but only if they band together and stick together: individually, they are no match if the menfolk decide to pick them off in the privacy of their own homes. However, ONLY if the menfolk know whose wife is whose.

And THAT, my friends, is what is precisely prevented by the Burka: one shape-less walking black sack looks just like another shape-less walking black sack.

However, I think the women deliberately let the men get away because they may be afraid of a possible ID. And what will you bet, when the Glorious Caliphate is estabished and imposes full-throttle Sharia, that this sort of united action will suddenly be declared Unislamic?

Hattip Dan Darling via Rantburg.

Sheesh. I've been sick.

And too busy...

Via Orrin Judd comes this article:

A seven-year legislative veteran is switching parties, giving Republicans a milestone 100 seats in the House of Representatives.

State Rep. Greg Morris, a Vidalia Democrat and entrenched party insider, is set to appear before friends and supporters in his hometown today to announce his defection to the GOP.

I didn't know about this, and HAD to learn it via the blogosphere. Sheesh, how far out of touch AM I?

A note: Our family vigorously campaigned for Mr. Morris' opponent, Rick Berry, in the last election. Rick lost by about 5%, which was a disappointment: He had a level of strategic vision that would have served the Republicans well in the State house. His error was that he didn't know how to work the endorsement game, and failed to turn in a survey from Georgia Right To Life regarding his position on abortion. Consequently, their endorsement of Morris was trumpeted by Morris Campaign handouts stuffed into every mailbox in town. This was ridiculous: Rick's personal history (which I will not recount) indicates that he would have been the most reliable pro-life vote in the capitol. Rick would not have made the same mistake NEXT time, mainly because I told my wife this. She, in turn, told him, whereupon he swore he'd talk with me during the NEXT election.

I think Greg Morris knew he wouldn't have a free shot like THAT again. Best to get on the winning team.

An interesting phenomenon is happening here locally: many Democrats have switched sides when the margin between themselves and their Republican opponent was less than 10 percentage points.

Once in a while, my better half gets into a fierce budget-cutting mood, and we have a general financial review (some battles are worth fighting, but the majority are not: knowing the difference is an important key to a good marriage). It appears that the high speed uplink provided by my current ISP, Cybersouth, cannot support the IP-based security packets needed to remotely log onto my wife's computer at work. Bellsouth's connection does, and we've been running with two ISPs in parallel, using some special house wiring, for quite some time. I was hoping to keep the connection and become a general hoster for the web-sites of some friends and local charities, but I've come to the conclusion that open source web host maintenance software isn't going to cut the mustard, and I can't assure the reliability of my computer. My wife's recent binge has convinced me to start looking for alternatives.

While looking around for a good webhoster, I came across Ace-Host.net, which has a re-seller plan. I signed up for it, checked it out, and got blown away by all the features! If a webhoster offers you CPanel, treat it as a plus: it has a KNOCKOUT html editor! If an ISP offers you Fantastico, an open source package installer, that's a plus also.

Thus, at the moment, I am busy learning the system and moving the websites of friends over to my new hosting account, and am already hosting the websites of two local non-profits. As soon as I complete the move, I am going to look at moving this humble website over as well. The current problem is ensuring that all the internet references to my past articles are still available and won't result in a broken link. Luckily, if people used the proper URL, its just a matter of uploading all the archive files to the proper sub-directory. The big issue is that the hoster uses a multiple-processor machine to host the site, and Moveable Type's license requires a payment in such a case. I'll have to move to something supported by Fantastico, maybe WordPress, which advertises a converter for Moveable Type. I have three solid requirements: mass spam comment deletion, doesn't hardwire "archives" as a subdirectory, and is implemented in PHP. (As a programming language, Perl is a pure horror: some swear by it, while I swear AT it. PHP is not perfect, but is a lot cleaner and has none of the kludges of Perl to implement necessary Computer Science stuff.)

In addition, I am very close to realizing a long-time dream of mine: publish a paper or two in Dr. Dobb's Journal, although the first article I'm contemplating probably better belongs in the C/C++ Journal. That's taking some of my time also.

Finally, school is again in session for the Dean's kids. The War College campus, of course, is always open, even though the Dean of Students is seriously delinquent.

That's the term being applied to Condolezza Rice in this MSNBC website news link to the Washington Post article about her taking over at the State Department.

She may have changed the direction of State at the top, but there's still a lot of cruft and near-treasonous appeasers in the lower ranks: The attitude at Foggy Bottom (in opposition to the guys out in the field) seems to be to serve other nations in dealing with the United States, rather than serving the United States to deal with other nations.

The difference is significant.

Via an Email from Tamar comes an interview with Pierre Rehov, documentary filmmaker, on the psychology behind suicide bombings. Read the whole thing, but the following is noteworthy (despite it's neo-freudianism):

What insights did you gain from making this film? What do you know that other experts do not know?

I came to the conclusion that we are facing a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization. Most neuroses have in common a dramatic event, generally linked to an unacceptable sexual behavior. In this case, we are talking of kids living all their lives in pure frustration, with no opportunity to experience sex, love, tenderness or even understanding from the opposite sex. The separation between men and women in Islam is absolute. So is contempt toward women, who are totally dominated by men. This leads to a situation of pure anxiety, in which normal behavior is not possible. It is no coincidence that suicide killers are mostly young men dominated subconsciously by an overwhelming libido that they not only cannot satisfy but are afraid of, as if it is the work of the devil. Since Islam describes heaven as a place where everything on earth will finally be allowed, and promises 72 virgins to those frustrated kids, killing others and killing themselves to reach this redemption becomes their only solution.

It is not necessary for kids to "experience sex": Initimacy is what is required, but something that is emotional and intellectual can be satisfying enough until maturity arrives.

What was it like to interview would-be suicide bombers, their families and survivors of suicide bombings?

It was a fascinating and a terrifying experience. You are dealing with seemingly normal people with very nice manners who have their own logic, which to a certain extent can make sense since they are so convinced that what they say is true. It is like dealing with pure craziness, like interviewing people in an asylum, since what they say, is for them, the absolute truth. I hear a mother saying "Thank God, my son is dead." Her son had became a shaheed, a martyr, which for her was a greater source of pride than if he had became an engineer, a doctor or a winner of the Nobel Prize. This system of values works completely backwards since their interpretation of Islam worships death much more than life. You are facing people whose only dream, only achievement is to fulfill what they believe to be their destiny, namely to be a shaheed or the family of a shaheed. They don't see the innocent being killed, they only see the impure that they have to destroy.

Reminds one of the closed universe of Liberal Trolls.

Now the following is interesting. I've bolded the part in Mr. Rehov's response.

Is there a suicide bomber personality profile? Describe the psychopathology.

Generally kids between 15 and 25 bearing a lot of complexes, generally inferiority complexes. They must have been fed with religion. They usually have a lack of developed personality. Usually they are impressionable idealists. In the western world they would easily have become drug addicts, but not criminals. Interestingly, they are not criminals since they don't see good and evil the same way that we do. If they had been raised in an Occidental culture, they would have hated violence. But they constantly battle against their own death anxiety. The only solution to this deep-seated pathology is to be willing to die and be rewarded in the after life in Paradise.

Now, I should point out that Mr. Rehov is not a Psychologist or Psychiatrist, but a film maker and director, so I'd take his psychology prescriptions with a beaker of salt. However, the following quote is telling: " In the western world they would easily have become drug addicts, but not criminals. Interestingly, they are not criminals since they don't see good and evil the same way that we do. "

In other words, this guy is a liberal asshat: To him, criminality is not objective, but subjective. Criminality is not founded on the provable violation of objectively stated laws, but based on what one believes to be right and wrong. Here's another quote from Mr. Rehov to prove his liberalism:

Describe the culture that manufactures suicide bombers.

Oppression, lack of freedom, brain washing, organized poverty, placing God in charge of daily life, total separation between men and women, forbidding sex, giving women no power whatsoever, and placing men in charge of family honor, which is mainly connected to their women's behavior.

In short, this is not a wild-eyed radical right-ist, but a living, breathing, quite-actual-liberal asshat.

However, he is a MUGGED liberal asshat. Realism forces upon him the following (my emphasis):

What role does the U.N. play in the terrorist equation?

The UN is in the hands of Arab countries and third world or ex-communists countries. Their hands are tied. The UN has condemned Israel more than any other country in the world, including the regime of Castro, Idi Amin or Kaddahfi. By behaving this way, the UN leaves a door open by not openly condemning terrorist organizations.

But wait! There's MORE!

In addition, through UNRWA, the UN is directly tied to terror organizations such as Hamas, representing 65 percent of their apparatus in the so-called Palestinian refugee camps. As a support to Arab countries, the UN has maintained Palestinians in camps with the hope to "return" into Israel for more than 50 years, therefore making it impossible to settle those populations, which still live in deplorable conditions. Four-hundred million dollars are spent every year, mainly financed by U.S. taxes, to support 23,000 employees of UNRWA, many of whom belong to terrorist organizations (see Congressman Eric Cantor on this subject, and in my film "Hostages of Hatred").

The following two quotes are out of order because I wanted to emphasize Mr. Rehov's orthodox liberalism first.. However, they are worth noting:

Do all Muslims interpret jihad and martyrdom in the same way?

All Muslim believers believe that, ultimately, Islam will prevail on earth. They believe this is the only true religion and their is no room, in their mind, for interpretation. The main difference between moderate Muslims and extremists is that moderate Muslims don't think they will see the absolute victory of Islam during their life time, therefore they respect other beliefs. The extremists believe that the fulfillment of the Prophecy of Islam and ruling the entire world as described in the Koran, is for today. Each victory of Bin Laden convinces 20 million moderate Muslims to become extremists.

and....

How can we put an end to the madness of suicide bombings and terrorism in general?

Stop being politically correct and stop believe (sic) that this culture is a victim of ours. Radical Islamism today is nothing but a new form of Nazism. Nobody was trying to justify or excuse Hitler in the 1930s. We had to defeat him in order to make peace one day with the German people.

This article is significant because there is a lot of debate about the existance of "moderate" Muslims. Mr. Rehov believes that they DO exist, but that they are transmorgifying into Islamists, not because of the supposed crimes done against Islam, but because of the responses of the world to Islamist crimes.

I think it is entirely reasonable, when a Moderate muslim sees technologically and militarily superior people giving in to the unreasonable demands of Islamists and the Palestinians, for him to think "Hey, maybe it CAN happen in my lifetime!"

The moment he believes that it CAN happen, here, now, in THIS lifetime, and starts to act on it, THEN he becomes an Islamist.

It would HELP to make sure there's power to the hub...

Via Brothers Judd, comes this enlightening little excerpt:

He was polite as he welcomed me into his home. The house was surrounded by a high cement wall that had been fortified with steel. We sat down in a large, simply furnished room whose walls were inscribed with verses from the Koran. On one wall was a poster showing green birds flying in a purple sky, a symbol of the Palestinian suicide bombers.

S had just turned 27. He is slight, and he walked with a limp, the only trace of his near-death. He invited his wife to join us, and he answered my questions without hesitation.

I asked him when, and why, he had decided to volunteer for martyrdom. “In the spring of 1993, I began to pester our military leaders to let me do an operation,” he said. “It was around the time of the Oslo accords, and it was quiet, too quiet. I wanted to do an operation that would incite others to do the same. Finally, I was given the green light to leave Gaza for an operation inside Israel.”

“How did you feel when you heard that you’d been selected for martyrdom?” I asked.

“It’s as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from Paradise or Hell,” he said. “Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise — it is the shortest path to Heaven.”

There's more at the link. It's a long article detailing the involved process of choosing and preparing a suicide, er genocide, bomber. What's interesting is that if the bomber wavers during the preparation period, he's not immediately washed out but has an experienced handler come in to encourage him.

Those who insist that there is not a religious component to the War on Terror are insisting on looking around the streetlight when they lost their keys down the sewer.

At Michael Yon's blog, via Rantburg, comes a haunting photo...

Major Mark Bieger found this little girl after the car bomb that attacked our guys while kids were crowding around. The soldiers here have been angry and sad for two days. They are angry because the terrorists could just as easily have waited a block or two and attacked the patrol away from the kids. Instead, the suicide bomber drove his car and hit the Stryker when about twenty children were jumping up and down and waving at the soldiers.

Michael Moore's minutemen at work...

If it can give a welcome surge of energy to a U.S soldier in the Iraqi desert, then it should do the trick for a runner, a hiker, a third-shift worker or even an on-the-go mom.

The Army even calls it "warrior-tested."

What is it?

The new HOOAH! Bar, an energy bar that has earned praise from soldiers, is now being distributed in U.S. commercial retail outlets and via the Internet.

"The soldiers love it. Its performance is off the hook," said Christian D'Andrea, who with his brother, Mark, licensed the federally registered trademark HOOAH! from the Army for commercial sales last year.

"But the other thing is, the war fighter simply liked it in terms of taste," he added.

The bar is scheduled to hit major retailers this summer, including Wal-Mart, CVS, 7-Eleven and GNC, and a portion of the proceeds are going back to the Army laboratories that create food products for troops in the field.

I've been on a cruise in the Carribean, and am now heading back to port, trying to outrun hurricane Dennis, when news of the London Bombings hit the news.

We at the War College stand in solidarity with our British cousins: all members of the Fighting Anglosphere have now been hit by terrorism.

More on this later. In the meantime, there are only two alternatives available to us: We can either fight on until we win, or give up and give in. Any who thinks that, having "defeated" the west. that those who oppose it will somehow then cease and desist with their initial set of demands, simply have not looked within: The trolls who infest this and other sites WOULD NOT GIVE UP if they scented a win in one area, but would go on and press their advantage in another area. They themselves demonstrate the behaviour when they "win", and yet will deny that terrorists will display when they "win". This sort of miraculous "exclusion" from natural consequences that they somehow enjoy, but is denied to others not of their agreement, is their exclusive hallmark.

Never give up. Never give in.

Comments are shut down while we're on vacation. Have a great 4th of July, be sure to single out our military for extra special thanks and appreciation, and see ya after the 8th.

To show partiality is not good, Because for a piece of bread a man will transgress. Proverbs 28:21

In other words, if someone forsakes a consistent and even-handed application of principles, logic, and facts, in order to show favoritism toward one or malice toward another, then they will sell you out for next to nothing when push comes to shove.

Think about THAT the next time you hear a Senator blather that American soldiers at Gitmo, who have killed no one there, are no better than Nazi concentration camp guards who killed millions. When the heat is on, OF COURSE he'll backtrack and apologize for your stupidity in misunderstanding his carefully thought out, reviewed, and written words, spoken on the Senate floor carefully and with gravity. He'll stab you in the back to preserve his ass in a heartbeat.

It isn't, as usual, as nasty as the ACLU and the NYT make it out to be. A bit MORE of the truth is revealed at NRO.

Via Barking Moonbat Early Warning System comes these delicious quotes from Karl Rove:

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."

Right on!

Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others."

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

I wonder if those criticizing Rove REALLY believe all that they say about him. Aren't they at all worried that what he said is merely a move on a political chessboard setting in motion an unstoppable chain of events that would lead to their ruin?

It will be interesting to see what he does in response to all the DEMOCRATIC calls to resign.

Via Dr. Hanson's website comes this article by Jeb Babbin at The American Spectator: Not Missing: Moved.

For those of us who are occasional targets of the Soros-funded propaganda machines, it's encouraging to discover a useful purpose that they can serve. The hyperlib machinery, and the reactions it commands, are as accurate a gauge as I can find to measure the import of the key points of the liberal dogma. As demonstrated by the reaction they manufactured to some comments I made on MSNBC last week, the volume of hate mail the organized hyperlibs generate is directly proportional to the importance they assign to an issue and the weakness of their position.

I was wondering about what's been affecting the Liberals and Democrats lately, but I will let Mr. Babbin elucidate:

At issue was the so-called "Downing Street memo," a top-secret Brit document memorializing a meeting in July 2002. The document says that the decision to take military action against Saddam had already been made two months before we took the case of Iraq to the U.N. Security Council. It is as significant historically as Nick Nolte's DUI record, and far less accurate. After Ron Reagan pressed me to admit our casus belli was a tissue of lies, I told him that the fact we haven't found Saddam's WMD proved precisely nothing. That's so, I said, because while we fiddled and diddled in the U.N. for six months before military action began, Saddam almost certainly moved all his WMD and scrubbed away all the evidence of it.

When Reagan pressed me further, contending that none of the commissions investigating the missing WMD said they had been moved, I cited the report of Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, which spent many months searching for WMD in Iraq. That report, I said, showed the substantial body of evidence that a lot of people, money, and materials, possibly including WMD, were smuggled out of Iraq in the months before March 2003. The destination of these cargoes was Syria. I had touched a nerve: by the time I got home, the "Media Matters for America" blog had accused me of lying, and dozens of nearly identical e-mails (on the intellectual plane of, "liar, liar, pants on fire") were pouring in. I quickly stopped reading them and just hit "delete" when I saw them.

Showing more curiosity than I could muster, Mr. Babbin muses:

I hadn't merely touched a hyperlib nerve. I had challenged the basis for the hyperlibs' existence: to discredit George Bush and the war at any cost. But the problem, for them, is that I had stuck to the facts. Which are very uncomfortable things, if you're Soros or Howard Dean. Or any of their Michael Mooron drones. Having demonstrated that I can drive them into a fit of apoplectic rage with a 30-second comment on television, the scientific method requires a controlled, repeatable experiment to see how many can be driven to nervous breakdowns with a more elaborate exposition of the facts. In the interest of science, let us proceed.

This will be interesting.

WHAT I SAID ON MSNBC was, of course, just what the Duelfer's ISG report said, and what Duelfer has said personally and repeatedly in Congressional testimony. You can look it up. On November 17, 2004, Duelfer told the House International Relations Committee that a lot was moved by Saddam's people from Iraq into Syria and no one knows whether or not the WMD were among the shipments to Syria: "I can't confirm anything one way or the other. What we do know is that a lot of stuff was crossing the border before the war. Trucks, but you don't know what was in them. So that's -- you know, I would like to be able to state definitively one way or the other an answer to that. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to." On October 6, 2004, Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "...But what I can tell you that I believe we know is a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points. We've got a lot of data to support that, including people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say."

Duelfer's report also said that Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service "operated a series of laboratories in the Baghdad area" (up to five in that area alone) and that one of them, a clandestine lab in the Baghdad Central Public Health Laboratory, was "emptied of all equipment and documents in December 2002," and that other labs were also found in the scrubbed-clean-of-evidence condition.

The only reasonable conclusion anyone can draw from the Duelfer report -- even if we ignore the other mountains of evidence about Saddam's WMD -- is that Saddam had WMD and in the six months we spent trying to convince Kofi, Dominique, and their pals to act, Saddam's regime moved the WMD, cleaned out the evidence, and did their best to conceal what they had done. That they did so with the active participation of Assad's Syria is also terribly clear.

It is a pity that the embittered hyperlibs can't accept facts or use them to assemble the logical, and inevitable, conclusions to which they lead. When any of them -- Soros, Moore, Dean, Franken, or any of them -- call a conservative a liar, it must create a rebuttable presumption that it is the lib who is falsifying. Not that they care.

Bah. This is hardly an experiment.

However, the thesis is intriguing, and seems to find indirect confirmation when Not Michael Moore pops into Rantburg: Some kind of event or occurrance provokes these people into a frenzy, so SOMETHING must be bugging Durbin, Pelosi, Kennedy, and the entire Left into apopolectic fits.

The problem of figuring it out will be a challenge, because these people start off thinking in wildly different ways than we do. We may look at some event and think "hmph. Peanuts.", and yet would spin up a Liberal's bonnet so tightly that blood flow would be seriously compromised.

Another possiblity is the "blood in the water" thesis: The Right has suffered a setback of some sorts, leading the Lefties to try and press their advantage via Extrava-gab. The problems with confirming Bolton to the United Nations Ambassadorship spring immediately to mind.

Another possiblity is the "To the Barriers, mes-amis!" thesis: Their allies,the Islamists, are taking a beating someplace, so the Liberals must put up a smoke screen or lay down a sort of cover fire to allow them to escape. The tempo of the war in Iraq has indeed picked up, with one sweep along the Syrian border being immediately followed by another closer to Baghdad. (Some have speculated that this is an Okinawa moment, while I prefer to use the "Battle of the Bulge") The palestinian terrorists have pushed Israel too far, resulting in the latter resuming targeted eliminations (finally!). The Taliban have been taking a big beating, with over 100 bodies confirmed and still climbing.

However, my take goes along the lines of "Scream at the top of your lungs so they don't notice you're naked": The tempo of car bombings in Iraq went up the moment speculation arose that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have been seriously wounded, or even dead.

I wonder...

Via The Tony Snow Show.

The best quote is regarding Senator Durbin's asshat equvalencing of Gitmo with the Gulag:

MR. SNOW: And now the conclusion of yesterday’s interview with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the conversation turns to Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Let’s now talk about Guantanamo. I think the facts are more ascertainable here. Senator Richard Durbin – you know what he said. Your reaction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Anyone who says something like that is going to have to live with those words the rest of their lives.

(Pause.)

MR. SNOW: I’m trying to get you to continue now.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, I’m — that will not be a happy prospect for a person.

Later in the Interview:

MR. SNOW: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with us here on the Tony Snow Show.

Mr. Secretary, earlier you said of Richard Durbin and his comments that you wouldn’t want to be in his place. Why?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, I think that — you know, nobody is perfect. People always — some people always in their lives say something they wish they hadn’t said. We’ve just watched Jane Fonda run around trying to recover from the things she did and said during the Vietnam War. And I just think that that’s about all I have to say about him — is that he said some things and he’s going to have to live with them. And I’m — I think that that’s not a happy prospect for a person.

Durbin and the Democrats are now in a tizzy, demanding Rumsfeld's resignation because he said that Durbin would have to live with his words.

The Democrats have now descended to a point where the mere SUGGESTION of future accountability is seen as a THREAT.

Oriana Fallaci is one of the rare birds: a classical, consistent, serious liberal who got her hands dirty fighting the Nazis in Italy during WWII. Despite her age, she's now fighting Islamism in Italy. Opinion Journal has the latest interview from her:

Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.

"When I was given the news," Ms. Fallaci says of her recent indictment, "I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true." An activist judge in Bergamo, in northern Italy, took it upon himself to admit a complaint against Ms. Fallaci that even the local prosecutors would not touch. The complainant, one Adel Smith--who, despite his name, is Muslim, and an incendiary public provocateur to boot--has a history of anti-Fallaci crankiness, and is widely believed to be behind the publication of a pamphlet, "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," which exhorts Muslims to "eliminate" her.

Surprisngly, someone DOES have a sense of Irony over there:

Ironically, Mr. Smith, too, faces the peculiar charge of vilipendio against religion--Roman Catholicism in his case--after he described the Catholic Church as "a criminal organization" on television.

Read the whole thing.

Hattip mrp via Rantburg.

Interesting post at "The American Enterprise".

Yes.

Chris Muir of Day by Day has this to say:

LOL!

Part of the problem I've been having keeping this blog up is work and career oriented: several long-term projects are coming to fruition, keeping me rather busy.

However, more seriously, the dearth of posting is also due to a realization, on my part, that the set of core categories of ideas and concepts that I use to process the world (my worldview) has been undergoing a sea change of sorts. Most of the time, people change the way they look at the world and express their views of it only under duress, in times of extreme stress or crisis. The set of facts that they must process in that situation cannot be adequately explained by their existing way of looking at things, and they have to cope with that somehow. Some people resort to denial of the facts and elect to withdraw from reality by ignoring the obvious. Others reinterpret and reprocess the facts until they are in a form that can be processed by their set of mental concepts and ideas. Still others, apparently bound by the literary form in which their concepts and ideas take in their minds, indulge in redefining the core words of their vocabulary so that the situation becomes re-defined into something more processable.

And then there are the realists who recognize that the facts cannot be changed, and thus undertake the much harder task of revising their worldview by going through that set of ideas and concepts that they use to process the world to see if it needs revision. To take part of a line from Shakespeare, they recognize that "their fault does not lie in their stars, but in themselves." (it is the liberals who buy into ALL of Cassius' diagnosis: "that we are underlings", i.e. not in power.)

I won't go into what happens when one changes their worldview. Rather, I want to address the fact that sometimes it doesn't have to take a crisis to change one's worldview: Education is a far more preferable means for changing worldviews, and the whole point of the Left's take-over of the education system is to do just that without provoking a crisis and being traced back as the instigators.

And then there is Transformation.

The intent of this blog, from the very beginning, has been to record my personal journey to recover a viable First Century Christianity, live it, and help others recover it and live it. Although I have not always thought of the task as being one of recovery, I can see how many milestones, trials, and accomplishments in my past life could be seen as events taking place that sped me along on that journey to that goal. Indeed, my definition of the journey may change this afternoon, but that's how I see it as I write this entry now. At this moment.

It is obvious, in retrospect, that an important side-effect of the journey-that-I-didn't-know-I-was-on is that my way of looking at the world necessarily HAD to change. Romans 12:2, the Apostle Paul says:

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

In the next verse he says:

For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.

This is a call to realistic thinking, but with the proviso that there is more to reality than what one sees, hears, touches, and smells. There can be more dimensions of space, and there even may be dimensions of time, and it is perfectly rational and reasonable to suppose that there are entire universes sitting right next to ours. This is not fantasy, but hard mathematics.

Now, I come to the main point of this post, having just given an example: My set of basic concepts and ideas by which I view the world has changed (transformed) to the point where I find that I have become less capable of expressing my views apart from the use of the Holy Scriptures. Indeed, the only way I have articulated this transformation is by citing Scripture, as I have done above.

This has several consequences.

Firstly, I am finding it more and more difficult to translate my findings and realizations into religion-free, scripture-free jargon. I realize that there are some who would thus summarily declare that I should cease to speak because it would be an "establishment of religion". However, that phrase applies only to Congressional Legislation, and not to the public square. Furthermore, it would be an infringement of my freedom of speech and the free exercise clause. Finally, this same transformation has made tolerating the hate of those who demand the exclusion of religous thought and speech from the public square easier by enabling me to understand their motivations. That is, the knowledge of WHY my enemies hate me is of far more value than the "peace" that would come by indulging them. (Illumination is not a one-way street: keeping silent in the face of the demands of the self-interested irreligious in the name of "peace" and "tolerance" is the religious equivalent of appeasement, and is just as viable a strategy in this area than it is in politics and statesmanship.)

The second consequence is that I will probably lose readership. Not that it was that high in the first place, but one writes publicly in order to be read publicly. However, it is now clear to me that I've unconsciously lost the focus of this blog: Documenting a religious journey and the recovery of a primitive Christianity lost for 17+ centuries. How I came to believe that I could do that apart from citing the source documents is something of a mystery, but not one worth solving because it is founded in ignorance. (A co-worker of mine in a former job, the supervisor of computer services, once remarked that computer security based on keeping a secret is doomed to failure because "Ignorance is volatile". A mystery is worth resolving and a problem worth solving if there is a chance that it will recur. if "ignorance of X" is a problem, then coming to know "X" simultaneously solves the problem and prevents recurrance.)

The third consequence is that I will definitely offend someone.

Now, it appears that resolving this last consequence to my satisfaction has been the most rewarding aspect of this recent bout of meditation and reflection. The best way to explain is to actually commit the offense of offending. I quote from Hebrews 4:12-13:

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.

If reading the above words does not offend you, then congratulations, the following sentences do not apply to you. I repeat, they do not apply to you. However, you're welcome to listen in.

I am addressing those who ARE offended: I'd like to ask WHY those words, as well as any other passages from the scriptures, offend you, but I don't think I'd get a straight answer. In fact, I'd think you'd give any sort of explanation EXCEPT the one I've come to realize is the REAL answer: Because the above quotation is true.

It took a long while for me to understand. In fact, I'm still trying to figure it out, but since the benefit of this blog is to record stuff like this, as well as a tool to help me figure it out, I'll give it a try.

My operating assumption is that the Scriptures are a true account of what God wants us to know, believe, and act upon. I don't care what YOUR belief about the scriptures are, because frankly, that's not only what differentiates me from you, but that the whole point is BELIEF. If belief is what it takes to "activate" the scriptures, to make its promises work, then it is pointless to argue with someone who says, "I don't believe the scriptures because they don't work": failure was assured before the task was undertaken. Yoda's reply to Luke Skywalker's "I don't believe it!" is pertinent: "That is why you fail."

My personal experience has been that Bible promises are best activated when taken literally. My worst experiences have been when I did not take the promises seriously, and my best experiences have been when I changed my mind and DID take them seriously. Thus, in light of Hebrews 4:12, my entire life experience tells me to believe what it says, and proceed on the basis that Scripture is a weapon that has spiritual and physical capabilities. Spiritual, because it can "divide asunder soul and spirit", and physical because it can "divide asunder ... joints and marrow". How, exactly, to pull this off is something of a mystery at the moment, but then again, the whole point of this blog is to explore how to do this very thing (among other things), document how to do it, and thus enable other Christians to do it as well. (I should point out that, from the Christian view-point, Jews quoting the Torah should be equally effective, since the power lies in the Words of God mixed with faith.)

Via John Ray's Dissectin leftism comes this article: The European Elites and the Death Penalty.

Contrasting their nation's policy with that of the Americans, Germans point proudly to Article 102 of their Basic Law, adopted in 1949. It reads, simply: "The death penalty is abolished." They often say that this 56-year-old provision shows how thoroughly the postwar Federal Republic has learned -- and applied -- the lessons of Nazi state-sponsored killing. (Communist East Germany kept the death penalty until 1987.)

But the actual history of the German death penalty ban casts this claim in a different light. Article 102 was in fact the brainchild of a right-wing politician who sympathized with convicted Nazi war criminals -- and sought to prevent their execution by British and American occupation authorities. Far from intending to repudiate the barbarism of Hitler, the author of Article 102 wanted to make a statement about the supposed excesses of Allied victors' justice.

The historical roots of German opposition to the death penalty supports a theory of ours, namely that death penalty opposition is based more on self-preservation than morality. Specifically, the ruling class in Europe sought in the aftermath of World War II to limit the penalties available for any genuine or perceived crimes they may commit. The reason for seeking this protection is clear: European elites to this day are still haunted by visions of cascading guillotines and always cognizant of a population that finds more solace in the street-mob than the ballot box. Eliminating the death penalty all but ensures the Europe’s ruling elitist class will endure for the foreseeable future.

Jeff, the commentator, continues:

On a related note, noted liberal scholar Cass Sunstein, recently wrote a paper based on the findings of a research group at Emory University. The study found “a direct association between the reauthorization of the death penalty, in 1977, and reduced homicide rates,” but also that “the ‘conservative estimate’ was that on average, every execution deters eighteen murders.” Sunstein and his co-author concluded, “this calculus makes the death penalty not just morally licit but morally required.” It can be expected that this report will never see the light of day in the European, or even the U.S. press for that matter.

Edit: John Ray gives a link to The Lost Tooth Society's post on capital punishment as a deterrent.

Via ed's comment at Rantburg comes this link to The Jawa Report on Kos's declaration that U.S. Torture is the same as Saddam's. Warning: the links are very graphic.

More on this later.

The vast majority of the time, I heartily agree with Dr. Victor Davis Hanson's excellent writings. He demonstrates excellent instincts when it comes to collaborators, for Bruce Thornton is also a joy and an education to read.

Thus, it is with disappointment that I have to express my disappointment at Dr. Hanson's latest writing: "The Global Shift:The world will soon better appreciate the United States"

He starts off with an unassailable discussion of how cultural and economic hegonomy has passed from one culture to another. Although there is no dispute that the United States is the current hegemon, he discusses the validity of the usual canards that this possession will be more fleeting than usual. I start quoting half-way through.

If we have avoided the state socialism of Europe that stymies growth, we have also already passed through all the contradictions of a breakneck capitalist transition — the dislocation of rural people, industrial pollution, unionization, suburban blues, ubiquitous graft, and petty bribery — that will increasingly plague both India and China as they leave the 18th century and enter the 21st.

But the real question is how both China and India, nuclear and arming, will translate their newfound economic clout and cash into a geopolitical role. If internal politics and protocols are any barometer of foreign policy, it should be an interesting show. We mostly welcome the new India — nuclear, law-abiding, and English-speaking — onto the world stage. It deserves a permanent seat on the Security Council and a close alliance with the United States.

Damn Straight. No argument there.

China, however, is a very different story — a soon-to-be grasping Soviet Union-like superpower without any pretense of Marxist egalitarianism. Despite massive cash reserves and ongoing trade surpluses, it violates almost every international commercial protocol from copyright law to patents. It won’t discuss Tibet, and it uses staged domestic unrest to send warnings to Taiwan and Japan that their regional options will increasingly be limited by Beijing.

China could rein in Kim Jong Il tomorrow. But it derives psychological satisfaction from watching Pyongyang’s nuclear roguery stymie Japan and the United States. China’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia is governed by realpolitik of the 19th-century American stripe, without much concern for the type of government or the very means necessary to supply its insatiable hunger for resources. The government that killed 50 million of its own has not really been repudiated and its present successor follows the same old practice of jailing dissidents and stamping out freedom. When and how its hyper-capitalist economy will mandate the end of a Communist directorate is not known.

The world has been recently flooded with media accounts that U.S. soldiers may have dropped or at least gotten wet a few Korans. Abu Ghraib, we are told, is like the Soviet gulag — the death camp of millions. Americans are routinely pilloried abroad because they liberated Iraq, poured billions into the reconstruction, and jumpstarted democracy there — but were unable to do so without force and the loss of civilian life.

This hysteria that the world’s hyper-power must be perfect or it is no good is in dire contrast to the treatment given to China.

It's called hypocrisy, but I'm interjecting.

Yet Pavlovian anti-Americanism may soon begin to die down as the Chinese increasingly flex their muscles on the global stage and the world learns better their methods of operation.

Here's where the good Doctor starts departing from reality (in my opinion).

So far they have been given a pass on three grounds: the old Third World romance accorded to Mao’s Marxist legacy; the Chinese role as a counterweight to the envied power of the United States; and the silent admission that the Chinese, unlike the Americans, are a little crazy and thus unpredictable in their response to moral lecturing. Americans apologize and scurry about when an EU or U.N. official remonstrates; in contrast, a Chinese functionary is apt to talk about sending off a missile or two if they don’t shut up.

The Patriot Act to a European is proof of American illiberality in a way that China’s swallowing Tibet or jailing and executing dissidents is not. America’s support for Saudi Arabia is proof of our hypocrisy in not severing ties with an undemocratic government, while few care that a country with leaders who traverse the globe in Mao suits cuts any deal possible with fascists and autocrats for oil, iron ore, and food.

Gotta hand it to Dr. Hanson: He's terrific at pointing out the obvious, even while he's driving the tour bus off the mountain road.

Yes, we are witnessing one of the great transfers of power and influence that have traditionally changed civilization itself, as money, influence, and military power are gradually inching away from Europe. And this time the shake-up is not regional but global. While scholars and economists concentrate on its economic and political dimensions, few have noticed how a new China and an increasingly vulnerable Europe will markedly change the image of the United States.

The sound you hear are the guardrails giving way. Such magnificence in the face of imminent disaster arouses the deepest facination, bordering on the morbid.

As nations come to know the Chinese, and as a ripe Europe increasingly cannot or will not defend itself, the old maligned United States will begin to look pretty good again. More important, America will not be the world’s easily caricatured sole power, but more likely the sole democratic superpower that factors in morality in addition to national interest in its treatment of others.

China is strong without morality; Europe is impotent in its ethical smugness. The buffer United States, in contrast, believes morality is not mere good intentions but the willingness and ability to translate easy idealism into hard and messy practice.

Most critics will find such sentiments laughable or naïve; but just watch China in the years to come. Those who now malign the imperfections of the United States may well in shock whimper back, asking for our friendship. Then the boutique practice of anti-Americanism among the global elite will come to an end.

I fear that what is laughable or naïve is Dr. Hanson's touching belief in the capability of post-modern man to repent. I suppose we should cut him some slack: he is, after all, STILL a Democrat.

You see, he is utterly right about Europe, India, China, and the United States. This is a terrific screed. It outlines the hypocrisy going on in simple language and in such a way that the message cannot possibly be missed. I will be using it as a reference. It's magnificent.

In fact, the hypocrisy is so blatant, so obvious, so palpable, that the Leftist/Socialist/Democratic/Liberal refusal to acknowledge it has made me realize that SOMETHING ELSE IS GOING ON. I'm working my way through the logic and, God willing, I will have something to say on it soon.

What I'm driving at is that Dr. Hanson, while being (as usual) stunningly and eloquently right about the current geo-political situation, is naively and tragically wrong about the capability of the botique elite to reverse their expressions of anti-american sentiment.

Firstly, Dr. Hanson has overlooked a fourth reason for the botique elite giving the Chinese a pass: They are resolutely socialist and communist, and thus will forever be aligned with those nations whose structures reflect their politics. The American political structure, in their eyes, commits two grave faults: it is diametrically opposite to their politics, AND it is popular. Past is prologue: They overlooked Stalin's slaugher and Mao's slaugher. They overlook the Cuban and North Korean Gulags. They did this, and will continue to do this, because they AGREE with the stated reason: All this blood is NECESSARY to bring about the desired political end result.

Secondly, the Red Chinese are smarter than Dr. Hanson credits them. America is the Biggest Obstacle in their path to world power, and antiamericanism is a valuable weapon against her. The botique elites will not be given a reason to reconsider it and ask for America's friendship until America itself is reduced to a state where its friendship would be of no value whatsoever. Hell, if the Islamists are able to play the Liberal Elite Main Stream Media like a violin, how can one think that the Chinese are not doing it with much more skill and experience?

Thirdly, the botique elite will never admit that they were wrong about the United States because that implies that Truth is an important value to them, and they feel the obligation to obey it. The fact is, Truth is not their supreme value, nor an important value: Power is their supreme value, and the only obligation Power lays on its admirers is that they obtain it and wield it.

I will probably write more about this in a separate post, but I will attempt to explain briefly: The problem of regarding Power as a value is that it must necessarily destroy all other values within the value system and leave it unopposed. You see, a value is a value because it intrinsically motivates a person to act to gain or to keep it. When a person acts in response to a threatened value, or when circumstances arise that the person must oppose or support because of the dictates of that value, THAT VALUE HAS POWER. It has power because it made someone DO something specific. Power, as a value, is a JEALOUS value, in that it WANTS that power. To leave a value with influence is to leave a value with power that Power does not have. Since the only obligation Power lays upon its admirers is to obtain power and wield it, the value possessing the power that the admirers does not have must be either subjugated, perverted, or destroyed as a value, so that the admirers either manipulate it as a proxy, or it is destroyed so that the power they currently have is unopposed.

This explains a lot of leftist behavior: It is NOT hypocrisy for feminists to cry discrimination and fight it tooth and nail in the United States, AND say not a word about clitorectomy and female subjugation under Islam and Talibanism, IF their supreme value is Power, not the Female sex. If they truly valued the female sex, they would have applauded the fall of the Taliban and cheered when the rapist son of Saddam was shot full of holes. Feminism, and the regard for females in the United States, is a value that people respect and which makes them act in certain ways. THAT IS POWER, and they are feminists because they want the POWER, not the true uplift of women.

This is the MAIN reason why the botique elite will not abandon their anti-americanism: it motivates people to act against the United States, AND it motivates people within the United States to act to appease the anti-americanism inspired people. Motivating people IS POWER, and those whose supreme value is Power will ACQUIRE that power, WIELD it, and act to KEEP it.

As long as there are people who will riot when hearing a lie about Americans, and there are Americans that worry about what foreigners think of them, Anti-Americanism will be a tool of power that will be used.

They will still curse America for not stopping the boot that descends to erase their faces.

Via Israpundit comes this juicy little interview of Jose Maira Aznar, the former (and best) Prime Minister of Spain:

Israel need not pay much attention to Europe, which is using its Middle East policy to separate itself from the US, has a tendency toward appeasement and is largely pro-Palestinian, former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar told The Jerusalem Post Monday.

"Europe likes appeasement very much; this is one of the most important differences between us and the States," Aznar said in an interview on the Bar-Ilan University campus. "Europeans don't like any problems. They prefer appeasement."

Exactly my diagnosis.

Aznar said Europe had no chance of independently impacting on the situation in the Middle East and would be wise to work closely with the US. "Do we Europeans have the capacity to change the situation and influence this area? The answer is no," he said.

Aznar said that European policy was "not favorable to Israel," and that different political leaders in Europe used the Middle East question as a way to establish a different identity from the US.

Like Duh.

"In Europe, Israel is not very popular, not only this government, all governments," he said. "Most Europeans support the Palestinian cause. Europeans sincerely wish for a peace agreement and support the peace process, but the reality is that the peace process is closed. At this moment I think that Europe should work closely with the States, because that is the only opportunity to change the region."

One major problem with the Roadmap is that the Palestinians want the benefits, but not fulfill the obligations. This is the sort of mentality that the Euros relate to: birds of a feather...

Asked if Israel should, as a result, pay attention to the US, but not necessarily to Europe, Aznar succinctly replied: "Certainly."

Israel, forget the Chinese and terminate all technology exchanges (especially involving American technology and know-how) with them. It may not bite you now, but it WILL bite you.

He said that the French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution last week provided the EU a good opportunity to reform its polices and move away from the isolationist, anti-Americanism that he said defined much of its foreign policy.

Aznar's a good man, but does have his blind spots. But he can hope.

While Aznar, when in office, was considered one of Israel's closest friends in the EU, Spanish public opinion and the Spanish media are considered by some in the Foreign Ministry as among the most unfavorable in Europe.

Asked to explain this phenomenon, Aznar said that "the situation is improving." He attributed the negative image of Israel in Spain to the fact that the countries did not establish diplomatic ties until 1986.

"It is very difficult to have a good image without diplomatic relations. It is true in general that the majority of Spain supports the Palestinians, but this position has changed over the last few years, and is not as strong as it was," he said.

Exactly what's been said at Israpundit: They've been losing the PR war for decades, and aren't near to turning it around. Maybe they should take a page from the Saudis and use a Madison Avenue Advertising agency.

It's now here.

*sigh* I must really do something about this situation. While I do not want to subject the Belmont Club to the vagarities of my house server, I've been looking at getting a reseller account to resell accounts, but not charge anything. I have an account, and it is really NEAT.

Just thinking about it...

"Never has a man confused so many people by telling them exactly what he was going to do."

This little jewel was made by Orrin Judd in these comments.

Orrin's response to David of "going Harry" on them can only be appreciated by the regulars.

In observance with the United States holiday of Memorial Day on Monday, May 30, I wish to express my deep felt gratitude, not only to all of our deceased American soldiers, but also to those still living, as well as for those of our Allies, whose blood mingled with our citizen-soldiers as they both fell together on the field of battle, and who now rest together until Messiah returns.

I would like to take the time to remember the service of three veterans who made an impact on my life.

The first is my own Father: he grew up in the corn fields of Nebraska, and had ambitions to become a doctor. When his country called, he joined up with the Air component of the Army and was assigned to the Alaska theatre as an aide in the medical corps, helping to receive and process the wounded who fought in the Pacific theatre. He was appalled, when he arrived, to see the condition of the system which processed and forwarded the medical records of the soldiers coming through: the quality of the follow up treatment depended vitally on good records being kept, and men had died because their charts were missing or not up to standard. He took it upon himself to whip the system into shape, did so, and was rewarded by being kept in Alaska, freezing his butt off, for the duration of the War: His commanding officer fiercely fought off transfer orders, arguing that my father was essential in making sure that men who had survived a jap bullet or bomb didn't die in a mainland hospital from screwed-up paperwork. After the war, he went to Medical School on the GI-bill, graduated, met and married my mother during his internship. He earned a reputation for extra-ordinary skill and became the Head Resident of a hospital in Norwalk, California. I regret that some of his later choices in life, as well as some of mine, prevented me from telling him how proud I have become of his service while he was able to understand me.

The second is my Father-in-Law: He was a Georgia farm-boy when the War started, and was determined to go with the best, so he joined the Marines, became part of the 4th Marine Division, and participated in the island hopping campaign manning an artillery gun at Tinian, Saipan, and Iwo Jima: He was on the island when the flag was raised. The dropping of the Atomic bombs spared him from invading the Japanese home islands, and he returned to Georgia to marry the best Mother-in-Law in the South. He is still with us, thank the Lord, and I have made sure he knows how much I appreciate him, as a veteran, a man, and as as great a replacement for a father that one has right or hope to expect.

The third was a good friend of mine, and who became almost like a father to me long before I even met my wife. Arthur ("Art") Mason didn't tell me much about his service, although I knew he was a veteran from the way he and the other two veterans in our Prison Ministry interacted. During a particularly difficult part of his life, I felt it necessary to go to his house and stay with him after a prison church service one Sabbath (Saturday) afternoon. Amongst other things that came out that afternoon, I found out that he had been in a unit serving as the spear-tip of Patton's 3rd Army when it entered Germany. He was doubtless one of the first Americans to enter a concentration camp. I assure you, when all you've known about a man is when you work with him in saving men's souls, and where you can tell the love he has for them in his eyes and his voice, the chill that goes up and down your spine when he looks at you and says, "Even after all these years, if I ever meet an SS soldier, I'd kill him." is unique because the voice you heard came, not from a man, but from Nemesis herself.

Art eventually retired and passed away many years ago, but never spoke again about what he saw during the war with the Nazis.

---

It is good to take time to remember these worthy men who served us while serving their Country. However, what is more important is not that we remember them, but HOW we remember them.

How do we do that?

By telling their stories to each other and to our children, as humans have done around campfires for as long as language and fire has been with Man.

And in doing so, we not only remember them, but gain strength from them.

Thus, when I tell them of their paternal grandfather, I will tell how a farm boy from the Nebraska plains realized, while shivering in Alaska in the service of his country and staring at long rows of cabinets, that a technologically advanced nation like his own lived on INFORMATION. That even though he wasn't under fire saving countrymen who had been struck by the enemy bullet, he HAD to do what he could to raise the quality of the information his nation's doctors and nurses needed to save those same men from dying in a hospital bed safe in his homeland. And he knew, deep down in his bones, that that would be a tragedy that was not to be borne any more lightly than the slaver's collar around a free man. In doing that job, and saving those men, that farm boy had to strive for and learn EXCELLENCE. That lesson enabled him to get through Medical school, open a practice in Southern California, and led eventually to a position as the Head Resident of a Hospital who earned his position, not by wealth or by influence, but by sheer, unadulterated competence.

He did his part to fight for the American way of life, and became one who demonstrated, by his own life, that the American Dream was not a chimera, but a bright and true reality.

And my boys will learn. And will Remember.

Unlike my father, when I talk to them of their maternal grandfather, they will have, in their mind's eye the old man who tinkered about the house, in both city and country. A man who could cook the best chili and beans they ever had. And if they ever wonder why he MADE them make their own beds JUST THIS WAY, and tested them with a quarter, I'll tell them that, when he was only a few years older than they were, he went to serve his country with the meanest fighting force that his nation and ours could field at the time: The United States Marines. I'll tell them of the island hopping campaign, of the fanaticism of the enemy, of the sands of the islands that drank the blood of his companions as they were cut down on the beaches. Of how he got deaf flinging shells of death toward the enemy, making sure that they didn't go too far and miss the enemy, or fall too short and hit his friends.

And I will tell them never to be ashamed of their nation because it learned to tear energy from the very core of nature, and unleashed slivers of the sun over two cities of a fanatical enemy who thought that suicide was an acceptable and worthy way to wage war. That far more people were saved in the long run than were lost in those brief moments when Hell showed its face among men.

One of those people was PaPa. And if he had died THEN, on a far-away shore, mommy would not have been. And if mommy was NOT, then they THEY would not BE either.

And they will learn. And will Remember.

And at the right time, when they are deemed capable of withstanding the knowledge that humans became demons during that time, I will tell them of a young man in their country's service who was fighting so far in advance of his countrymen that there were literally no American bodies ahead of him to take the enemy bullet. I will tell them that one day, that young man and his fellow soldiers walked into a camp deserted by the enemy, and beheld the bitter fruit of a man's ideology gone mad. Men, women, and children walking about like skeletons. The bodies of the dead piled up like cordwood. And heaps of ash everywhere.

And as he walked about ministering as best a boy from the Appalachians could, he was also a witness. And what he saw made him make a vow to the dead that he would forever be ready and willing to visit justice on any man who had been in the service of their torturers and murderers.

And when my boys ask why they should remember that young man's story, when he was not an ancestor, I will tell him that that young man grew up to be a winner of men's souls and a good friend. That he had told me of his vow himself, because he was a witness, and that he remembered, and he wanted me, who had not witnessed the camps, to know that they did exist, and that he had seen them, and that all that had been told about those camps and those who ran them by good and valorous men was true. All true.

And I will tell them that they MUST remember, for there are men about who want them to FORGET. Who want ALL of us, to FORGET, and NOT remember. They want us to believe that the camps did not exist, and that my friend and his platoon and countless others, and also the survivors of those camps, were liars and parties in a vast conspiracy. And they will taunt and sneer and demand that the witnesses come forth, counting on the long stretch of time for age and time to wear away at the numbers until no one can witness, because they would be dead.

But now, I bear witness that I knew one of the liberators, and he saw and passed the knowledge to me, and that I vouchsafe the testimony.

And because I remember, they must remember also.

---

Those are the three true stories of the Veterans that I knew, and that I will pass on to my sons.

And these are the three lessons. That their country was, and still is, a place of promise and opportunity, where the limits placed on them are not put on by other men, but arise from laziness, and can be lifted by hard work, perseverance, and a burning desire for excellence.

And that their countrymen know that such a country as theirs is special among the nations for the fact that such opportunity is available and attainable by all who are willing to pay with the coin of wisdom, learning, skill, perseverance, and hard work.

And that to preserve that special nation, they will not hesitate to accomplish incredible feats of science and technolgy to add to the strength of their fighting countrymen and mulitply the effects of their courage and patriotism. All to ensure that they come home safely to enjoy the fruits of the land for which they fought, and for which some of their companions died.

Their land. Their nation.

And because of those opportunities, and because of the courage and strength in arms of our fighting forces, we will never be reduced to walking dead skeletons, or to piles of ash, in the camps of the destroyers of men.

But only as long as we, and they, remember that it DID happen, and that it thus CAN happen again.

Instead, because of our current blessings that they will inherit, they are given a choice. They can choose to create the camps and live as demons, or they can choose to find and close the camps and hunt down and destroy the demonspawn who made them. Destroyers or liberators. The Hunted or the Hunters. The choice is theirs.

Choose wisely, my sons. Rare is the nation to whom Destiny grants such choices.

=> Read more!

Via Orrin Judd at Brothers Judd comes this quote from this article at the London Times.

YOU HAVE to hand it to the French. No one matches their panache when it comes to demolishing the ancien régime and proclaiming a glorious new dawn. For the guerrilla resistance that has ambushed the heavy cavalry of the establishment, the likely “non” in tomorrow’s referendum on the European constitution is another dash for a radiant future. May 2005, they hope, will join all those other revolutionary beacons which have illuminated modern French history, from July 1789 to May 1968. Most of those revolts ended in tears and it is worth examining why this one is heading the same way.

The Elysée Palace and much of the continent will certainly view a “no” as a self-destructive tantrum by the nation that fathered the European project and put a Gallic stamp on the constitutional treaty. Amid the likely glee in Britain on Monday, though, remember that French rejection is largely driven not by hostility to the idea of Union but by the desire for “another Europe”, a dream alternative with France in the driver’s seat.

For the mutineers of Right and Left, the looming “no” is a chance to give a bloody nose to a rotten political class. This arrogant nomenklatura is being punished for failing to listen in 1992 when President Mitterrand almost lost his Maastricht referendum and again in 2002 when Jacques Chirac pursued business as usual after his traumatic re-election against Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-right bruiser. Beset with high unemployment, France clings to its protective state while blaming out-of-touch politicians for the malaise that has afflicted it for three decades. It has dumped its governments at every parliamentary election since 1978.

Voter whiplash. Entirely proper and the way a REAL Democracy REALLY WORKS.

As good French revolutionaries, the nonistes also see themselves blazing a trail not just for France but for humanity. They want to lead Europe on a hop back to the future. For the left-wing voters, this is the Utopia imagined by Karl Marx and last glimpsed elsewhere in the 1970s. For the Right, it is the sombre patrie of the paranoid and protectionist 1930s.

The people of Europe, say the nonistes, will cheer a “no” as the opening shot in the battle for a new, socially protective Union. “Ours is a ‘no’ of foundation,” says Philippe de Villiers, the rural aristocrat who has eclipsed Le Pen as champion of the nationalist Right. “Ours is a joyful ‘no’ of hope,” says Marie-George Buffet, the Communist leader, whose party is enjoying a new lease of life. Laurent Fabius, the socialist grandee who leads the middle class left-wing resistance, is talking about a salutory “no” of liberation.

Now, this makes some sort of sense: One MUST say "no" to one choice, if saying "Yes" to that choice blocks one's ability to say "Yes" to a better alternative at a later time.

This is astonishing: socialists are actually GRASPING the concept of causality.

However, the problem is that "better alternative at a later time." The current alternative is here NOW, while the better is later off. What IS the alternative of the nonistes?

Alone in Europe, France has no main party that openly favours the market. After 1981, the Socialists, under Mitterrand and Lionel Jospin, their recent Prime Minister, reformed by stealth while soothing their public with Marxism. M Chirac has most to answer for. Since his election in 1995 he has lulled the country with Socialist-sounding talk while his governments have stirred public wrath with modest reforms to the welfare state that clash with the President ’s promises. This has led to the surreal campaign this spring in which the dirtiest of words, for both the “yes” and “no” camps, has been “liberal”, meaning free-market thinking.

Thus, they are saying "non" now, because they think the proposed EU draft constitution is NOT SOCIALIST ENOUGH, since there are provisions in it that implement components of a free-market economy. Mind you, whatever free-market components are in the constitution, they won't be of help because they need the free-market components that are missing.

The argument of the nonists is that the mix of socialism and free-market components in the Constitution won't work. What a coincidence: I agree.

A rickshaw and a Jaguar automobile are perfectly fine means of transportation. Each will get you from point A to point B, and have their merits and demerits. But they work because the rickshaw is 100% rickshaw, and the Jaguar is 100% automobile. Thinking that you can merge a rickshaw with an automobile in a way to get all the merits and none of the demerits is the motivation of compromisers. What you'd get would be a rickwar (or a jagshaw), but I daresay the resulting mongrel would be impractical and nobody would buy it.

In the name of design purity, I'd toss the socialist components and go with a pure free-market system. They, ALSO in the name of design purity, would chuck the free-market components and use a pure socialist system.

We both agree that a mongrel system isn't going to work.

We just don't agree on which is the Jag and which is the rickshaw.

The Filibuster is nonconstitutional. That is not the same as saying it is unconstitutional: Unconstitutional means its contrary to the Constitution, while nonconstitutional means that the Constitution doesn't say anything about it. It is merely an operating rule of the Senate because the Constitution grants both Houses of Congress the right to set their own operating rules. For instance, the Constitution does not say anything about the Committee system used by the House and Senate to conduct business: it is allowed by the Constitution because the Constitution grants the House and Senate the right to set their own operating rules, and that's how they decided they wanted to do business. The so-called "Nuclear option" IS LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL: If it was unconstitutional, then the Democrats would have taken it to the Supreme Court for ajudication (like they did for the Nixon Tapes and the Impoundment issue). The fact that they CAN'T is a reflection of the Senate majority's RIGHT to change their operating rules granted by the Constitution. The Supreme Court was reluctant to get into Presidential election disputes with regard to the States, and you think they'll intervene when it comes to the SENATE?

If the Constitution somehow requires that the Senate have a Filibuster, why doesn't the HOUSE have it? They don't.

The Filibuster's purpose is obvious: to STOP A VOTE.

Think about that for a moment. The basic goal for a filibustering Senator is EXACTLY THE SAME as a tyrant and Dictator: THEY DON'T WANT A VOTE.

Look through the entire Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and whatever founding documents were written that went into the making of our Constitution, and you'll NEVER find a phrase like "shall not vote". Nothing in the Constitution forbids a VOTE. It forbids the making of certain classes of laws based on their content, but not on a VOTE.

Also, last time I looked, the President had the option of vetoing such legislation, and the Supreme Court the (questionable but accepted as logical) option of declaring it unconstitutional when the ones it harms brings suit. The "Congress shall not" phrases scattered throughout the Constitution and Bill of Rights gives the President and the Supreme Court the necessary "check" against Congressional imbalance.

I've read all kinds of opinion all over the internet on the Senate compromise. Some of the posts at Brothers Judd have led me to realize that Bush (whose performance is, in my eyes, hovering a hair below 100%) : The President and his advisers are free to read the relevant Federalist paper FOR HIMSELF and come up with a different interpretation of what "Advise" means in "Advise and Consent" that is free from the Senate's desire to magnify their power over that of the Presidency. The Presidency is free to try to magnify its power over that of the Senate. The ORIGINAL design of our Consitution is fiendishly ingenious in that it exploits the natural human lust for power in the system of checks and balances between the branches of Government. This wrangling and maneuvering is not bad or evil: It's a FEATURE, not a bug.

To me, it's quite simple: When the Senate consents, it's when they vote in favor of the nominee. When they Advise, it's when they vote AGAINST the nominee and send them back with their SPECIFIC objections.

In short, a "I still have questions" or "I'm not comfortable with the nominee" IS NOT ADVISING. The President is not obligated, by the Constitution, to interact with a SUBSET of Senators. He is intitled to look past a domineering or subverted Senate "leadership", bypass them, and submit the nominee directly to the ENTIRE Senate. He is not required, by the Constitution, to grovel before the desires of a MINORITY in the Senate, much less 14 of them.

Here's hoping the President plays HIS Constitutional role and fights for HIS Office's power.

Via John Ray's "Dissecting Leftism", comes this nice little article detailing the reason for misery on the Left., "No Limbaughs on the Left"

In the past months, as the world and I were concentrating on more serious matters, our thousand-eyed media couldn't help noticing, in a desultory way, a certain small sideshow.

Compared to the events sweeping across the center stage of history, it seemed a bit like a lost sea-bird fluttering on the fringe of an armada, but perhaps you noticed it, too. I refer to the liberals' increasingly desperate effort to discover or create a Rush Limbaugh of the Left. Hapless candidates for the job were trotted out, wealthy partisans forked up millions for the cause, and so on—the details fade mercifully with time. But one theme kept bobbing to the surface of the reportage and commentary. It came from friends as well as critics and neutral observers, if I remember, and it was not a deep insight, in itself. But it was suggestive. It caught the mind's eye and invited at least a little more desultory attention.

What kept bobbing up was the observation that it is not much fun listening to liberals. Compared with the real El Rushbo—ever buoyant, larger than life, overflowing with conservative joie de vivre—the lefty pretenders appeared, to friend and foe alike, anemic, wan, somehow depressing. In a word, grim; even the professional comedians. The Left is not a barrel of laughs.

snip.

Here on any given day millions of listeners can hear the world as it sounds through a megaphone of old-fashioned or new-fangled Marxist theory, race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, animal rights theory, hard-core environmentalism, and various brands of multiculturalism. The leitmotif: If you are a person of less than plutocratic means, a person of race, a person of gender, a person of unusual tastes or inclinations, a non-Western culture, an animal, a forest, an ocean, or an innocent stream—America is out to exploit or destroy you. In the world of "Democracy Now!", there is no greater danger, to anything and everything decent democratic people everywhere love and cherish, than the U.S. of A.

Since at the same time America shows disturbing signs of being the most broadly prosperous, free, tolerant, and democratic nation in history, a loyal Lefty would naturally begin to grow a little bitter, somewhat testy, even shrill on a bad day. And the more free, just, prosperous, tolerant, and democratic America proves itself to be, the worse the day and the more desperate must be one's message. Because either one's life and reputation have been staked on ideas that have departed from reality, or the only people who understand the world are you and…the "so-called" terrorists?

Hence, perhaps, the bleak, ascetic zeal of "Democracy Now!" star Goodman (Ms. Goodman is thought of by some, however implausibly, as a budding radical Rushette, but her radio personality is closer to Medea with a migraine). When reality keeps stacking up against you, incorrigible faith is all you have left. And so, as you announce with a sneer America's "so-called" liberation of Iraq, you call the last Saddamite official you can get on the phone in Baghdad and ask him for a true perspective on the war. How upbeat and happy can a progressive be with that?

Here, then, is the root cause of the Left's chronic depression and the irresolvable problem at the core of the Democratic Party: America's success is their failure. And here is the corresponding cause of the good humor and vitality of conservatives: So long as America succeeds, they cannot fail.

Republican Senators obviously. 55 to 45,and they cannot stay united long enough to amend a patently non-constitutional parlimentary rule?

I'm with Dane: Not a penny more!

From now on, all donations to Republicans. ALL DONTATIONS TO ALL REPUBLICANS, will go through the National Right to Life PAC until further notice, and only after further investigation to ensure that THOSE funds do not go to support ANY of the Republican senators party to this betrayal.

It took a long while, but thanks to CNN (of all places) for the list of the Stupid Seven:

John McCain (Arizona)
Mike DeWine (Ohio)
Lincoln Chafee (Rhode Island)
Susan Collins (Maine)
Lindsey Graham (South Carolina)
John Warner (Virginia)
Olympia Snowe (Maine)

They say DeWine is really an honorable man, but he's clearly the most naive of the bunch.

By the way, it's amazing that it took a long while for me to track down who these people are.

Via Rantburg comes this truly singular web page detailing an insidious hidden message in every Coca Cola you buy!

That's it. No more Pepsi for me!

This is an article at Rantburg where comments were closed. "Which side is nuttier? Democrats or Republicans?" Here are MY comments.

I think that the article and the comments are exercises in strained moral equivalence. Instead, I prefer using the following rules:

"By their fruits ye shall know them." What is the outcome of their life? Of their teachings? Of the laws they advocate? The results of their programs?

"Buy the truth, and do not sell it" Do they follow logic? Do they respect the facts? Are their comparisons strained or flow naturally? Are there questions they avoid answering, or questions that make them angry and set them off?

"Birds of a feather flock together" What kind of company do they keep? Who do they praise? Who do they condemn? What are the fruits of those they support? Of those they condemn.

The current plight of the Democratic party (and the potential future of the Republican party) can be explained by the sayings "Where the Body is, there will the vultures gather also.", and "Bad money drives out good". There are people who do not want to work their own way through life, but want to live off the sweat and blood of others. They will be attracted to where "the body is", where the power, the money, and the authority are, in order to hijack it and use it for their own profit. Look at the numbers: the Democrats used to have majorities in the House and Senate, the Presidents, and thus the power. The vultures were attracted to it. When they arrived and took over some of the power centers, they drove out the good and worthy Democrats. Some of the best Republicans were former conservative Democrats, and they brought the Conservative South with them into the party. As the old guard dies out, pining for the good old days, the brats of the 60s move in and take over.

Prediction: The same thing will happen to the Republicans. As Democrats lose power, the vultures will start going over to the Republican side, seeking the body to feed upon. Not only will it happen, but given the RINOs in the party, the process is quite well underway.

So which side is Nuttier? At the moment, clearly the Democrats and everyone to the left, since their fruit is known and has been shown to be bad economic juju. Hundreds of millions of dead bodies is bitter fruit. Their silence in the face of hundreds of thousands killed and tortured, and their screams at the non-fatal humiliation of less than a couple of dozen, is quite damning.

I'm sure there are some rational democrats still left in the Party, but the political platforms are an official expression of what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican, and the Republican platform is clearly more rational, while the policies of the Democrats has bourne bad fruit and have not been repudiated. At the same time, I admit that there are RINOs in the Republican side that contain elements of the hair of the dog that bit the Democrats.

However, I believe natural processes will reward the rational and respecters of reality, and punish the irrational and the willingly ignorant. As I outlined above, the rewards going to the Republicans will eventually attract the vultures. The bad will drive out the good, and the pendulum will swing the other way.

Imperial Minister of Truth Bill Whittle at "Eject! Eject! Eject!" has two essays out: Sanctuary I, and Sanctuary II

They're so great, that any commentary on the same page on them would be embarassing.

=> Read more!

Steve White via Rantburg.

And it seems there's a lot more to things than meets the eye.

The first comment at Rantburg noted that this was not a typical "red meat" Vintage Coulter article. There was no need to add damning commentary when the facts themselves are laid out, in the public domain, and damning in and of themselves.

Comes from Bruce Thornton via Dr. Victor Davis Hanson's website:

Last week riots broke out in Afghanistan and Pakistan over an unfounded rumor, irresponsibly published by Newsweek magazine, that an American interrogator had flushed a Koran down the toilet. In response, the administration has been anxiously assuring the Muslim world that we indeed respect their religion and begging them to please like us.

Meanwhile, in last Friday's sermon televised on Palestinian Authority television the paid employee of the PA described the Jews as an AIDS-like virus responsible for all the world's evils, blamed their economic sabotage of Germany for the Holocaust, and predicted the future triumph of Islam over America, a time when "everything will be relieved of the Jews, even the stones and trees." Yes, this is the same Palestinian Authority whose elected leader, himself a published Holocaust denier, will soon visit the President of the United States and whose organization will receive millions of taxpayer dollars.

Anyone familiar with the history of Islam and its 14-centuries-long violent jihad against the West and the Jews will not be surprised or shocked by these events. They express perfectly the arrogant intolerance of a religion convinced it has been chosen by God to rule the world, and so is justified in using every means, whether violence or propaganda, to fulfill that divine mandate. As the final and complete revelation of the divine, Islam feels no need to respect or tolerate other religions or secular notions like "human rights," for they are all the detritus of infidel history to be swept away in the final triumph of the one true religion.

One of the most intereting thoughts I've had is that Islam (Not just militant Islam, but Islam in general) and the Left (and I mean EVERYONE, from the Democrats leftward) is that they both share a depressingly large number of critical misbehaviors that seriously affect their judgment.

This section illustrates one: a belief that their cause is so righteous and just and good that all standards not approved by their cause are not applicable to them. Whether it be leftists overlooking the sins of Stalin or Muslims overlooking the suicide bombings, these acts were committed in the name of The Cause, and so are excusable, while minor offenses by their opponents become henious crimes never to be forgotten or forgiven for a thousand generations.

Of these two, the more freckless and idiotic are the Leftists: The Muslims are painfully aware of their stunning run of military defeats since the Poles came to Vienna's rescue and their expulsion from Iberia. Thus, at any slight and upon any pretext, the Islamist preachers of Revenge and Conquest do not hesitate to rally the masses and call attention to the imminent threats that they see. I think their boasts and their declarations of ultimate victory should be seen as evidence of internal panic: Should the leaders of the Western World actually DO what they (the Islamists) are doing now, they KNOW, based on past experience, that their own defeat is certain.

Lefists and liberals, endowed with a prediliction to projection, would automatically and immediately read what is under the surface of Islamist/Muslim bluster. Both military history and Marx assures them of victory over Islam. That same military history and the same teachings of Marx assures them as well of the threat of democracy and capitalism. Of course, if democracy and capitalism had not created the modern military that these leftists and liberals despise and slander, they themselves know that they would be sitting ducks for the Islamists.

So why would the L&L's try to sabotage the very institutions that protect them from an even worse fate?

The key to understanding Leftist behavior, surprisingly enough, derives from my observation that Islamist and Leftist behaviors are similar. This post about and article, "The Key to Jihadist Ideology and Strategy", explains not only Islamist behavior, but also Lefist behavior as well.

Lawrence Auster explains that Islamist strategy seems fragmented only because different Islamists do not see eye-to-eye on what is the most viable threat to Islam. Some see apostasy from the Islamic faith as the biggest threat, while some see foreign armies occupying current Muslim lands as the biggest threat. These are distinguished in Auster's article as being "The near enemy". On the other hand, some see the greatest threat coming from non-Muslim countries sitting on formerly Muslim land, reasoning that peoples and nations that had to fight Muslims, AND who succeeded to occupy the land are the greatest threats. Finally, there are those who see the most powerful non-Muslim nations as being the biggest threat, regardless of being near or far, although given the track record of innovation in Muslim lands compared to Western ones, the ones furthest from Islam would have been affected the least, and thus be the biggest. These are characterized as being "The Far Enemy."

Auster points out that the strategies used by the Islamists depends on their view of who the enemy is, and also (fortunately for us) are derived from the strategies that Mohammed, their Prophet, followed when he encountered the same threats. Auster's thesis is that the Life and Acts of Mohammed are being used as a template by Islamists to generate specific strategies for fighting the Infidel.

However, divining Islamist strategies is not my goal here: What is of interest is the classification scheme of enemies: It is clear that Al Quaida's main concern is The Far Enemy: they concluded that the near enemy, Israel and Spain, would have fallen to Islam earlier if it was not for the support of the United States, the Far Enemy. This is logical, since the structure and mode of operation of the upper echelons is patterned after the Think Tanks spawned during the Cold War to handle thinking about enemies whose emergence is decades away. The upper echelons sold the basic concepts to the major donors. The middle echelons acted like venture capitalists looking for opportunities to invest in terror acts against the Far Enemy, while the lower echelons acted like commando units.

It should not be a surprise that Liberals are more concerned about the Near Enemy than the Far Enemy: Hard headed, realistic, long term thinking about CONSEQUENCES was NEVER their forte. Their LAST long term thinker was Marx. Everyone else after that devoted themselves to tactics, being content to leave the really long-term thinking to Marx. The only intellectual effort being expended on the Left is devoted to whitewashing the tacticians and patching the inevitable cracks in Marxism.

Thus, since the majority of leftists are in the West, it is no surprise that the Left's Near Enemy, and Islam's Far Enemy, just happen to be the United States.

While the Islamists rightly fear Uncle Sam, it seems counterintuitive that the Leftists do NOT fear Islamism. With all the wailing and screaming about Religious Fundamentalism, why aren't they panicking about Islam? Baptists do NOT lynch people and burn down buildings and wildly riot when someone spits on John 3:16, but the Left ISN'T worried about Islamists when they run riot at a rumor that the Koran was flushed down a toilet? What gives?

What gives is Marxism: If the ideal state is X (rule by the proletariat), then Communism was state X-1 (rule by the servants of the proletariat), the United States X-2 (rule by the capitalists), and Islam somewhere between X-3 (rule by kings and king-like dictators) and X-4 (rule by the clergy). Marx assures the Leftist that Islam can be taken care of. The tacticians assures the Leftist that the battle between X-2 forces and X-4 forces can be managed to destroy both and bring everyone to state X-1 at worst, and to state X at best.

In short, the Leftists have been conning the capitalists for so long that the Left is sure they can con the even more primitive Islamists.

Which brings up another similarity between Leftists and Islamists: they're both racist. However, that's for another post.

Via Brother's Judd comes this article from The Telegraph about recently completed research correlating abortion with risks in subsequent pregnancies

A French study of 2,837 births - the first to investigate the link between terminations and extremely premature births - found that mothers who had previously had an abortion were 1.7 times more likely to give birth to a baby at less than 28 weeks' gestation. Many babies born this early die soon after birth, and a large number who survive suffer serious disability.

The research leader, Dr Caroline Moreau, an epidemiologist at the Hôpital de Bicêtre in Paris, said the results of the study, which appear in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, provided conclusive evidence of a link between induced abortion and subsequent pre-term births.

The link?

Dr Moreau said: "Clearly there is a link. The results suggest that induced abortion can damage the cervix in some way that makes a premature birth more likely in subsequent pregnancies."

Her study compared the medical histories of 2,219 women with babies born at less than 34 weeks with another 618 who had given birth at full term. Overall, women who had had an abortion were 40 per cent more likely to have a very pre-term delivery (less than 33 weeks) than those without such a history. The risk of an extremely premature baby - one born at less than 28 weeks - was raised even more sharply, by 70 per cent. Abortion appeared to increase the risk of most major causes of premature birth, including premature rupture of membranes, incorrect position of the foetus on the placenta and spontaneous early labour. The only common cause of premature birth not linked to abortion was high blood pressure.

Mr Peter Bowen-Simpkins, a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and a consultant obstetrician at the Sancta Maria Hospital in Swansea, said the study revealed that abortion might not be as safe as previously supposed. "This study shows that surgical termination of pregnancies may have late complications and may not be without risk," he said.

Denials and conspiracy theories will commence in 5, 4, 3, 2, . . .

At some point you have to stop tracking, gathering information, analyzing the data and stringing together the variable and just shoot the bastards.

This priceless gem comes via Shipman's comment at Rantburg.

Orrin Judd has an excerpt from Alexis de Toqueville cited in an article by Dr. Samuel Gregg at the Action Institute that is astoundingly prophetic:

All of Tocqueville’s writings repay careful reading. Yet it is his concerns about democracy’s future that are most relevant to Europe today-especially old Europe. This particularly concerns Tocqueville’s warnings regarding what he called “soft-despotism.”

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested that democracy was capable of breeding its own form of despotism, albeit one without the edges of Jacobin or Bonapartist dictatorship with which Europeans were all too familiar. The book spoke of “an immense protective power” which took all responsibility for everyone’s happiness-just so long as this power remained “sole agent and judge of it.” This power, Tocqueville wrote, would “resemble parental authority” but would try to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving people “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

Such circumstances might arise, Tocqueville noted, if democracy’s progress was accompanied by demands for a leveling of social conditions. The danger was that an obsession with equality was very compatible with increasingly centralized state-power. Leveling social conditions, Tocqueville observed, usually involved using the state to subvert those intermediate associations that reflected social differences, but also limited government-power.

Tocqueville’s vision of “soft-despotism” is thus one of arrangements that mutually corrupt citizens and the democratic state. Citizens vote for those politicians who promise to use the state to give them whatever they want. The political-class delivers, so long as citizens do whatever it says is necessary to provide for everyone’s desires. The “softness” of this despotism consists of people’s voluntary surrender of their liberty and their tendency to look habitually to the state for their needs.

Dr. Gregg cites this in context of Old Europe, but it quite vividly describes the social compact made between the Democrats and their constituency.

Astounding. Dr. Gregg is quite right:

2005 marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of 19th century Europe’s most insightful political thinkers. Less well-known than Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville may have the last laugh when it comes to predicting accurately the course of history. This is especially true when it comes to understanding some of “Old” Europe’s current economic and political malaises.

And you won't like it.

In fact, I don't think ANYBODY would like it.

Via Orrin Judd comes these quotes from Spengler's Asian Times article, The Pope, The Musicians, And the Jews:

For a Catholic theologian, dependence on biblical exegesis rather than church tradition amounts to a revolutionary innovation.

Damn Right. That was the main bone of contention back at the Reformation.

Benedict XVI broke with hoary church tradition when he argued (for example) that in the Epistles of Paul "the covenant with the Patriarchs is regarded as eternally in force". Scripture is not quite enough, however. American evangelicals of the past generation look not only to the promises of scripture, but also to the fact of Jewish continuity over more than three millennia. As the Reverend Pat Robertson observes, this makes credible God's promise to Abraham in the Hebrew scriptures. If God kept his promise to Abraham's seed, the argument continues, so well he may to Christians who enter into God's covenant through the crucifixion. If the Jewish people were to disappear, the Christian promise of salvation would die with it.

Spengler's confused here: The preservation of the Jews is a fulfillment of the promise/covenant made to Abraham. However, his quote of Robertson is on the money: God is as good as the promises He keeps, and the whole enterprise goes in the shitter if He fails to keep one.

The German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig put it this way:

The Old Testament ... is more than a mere book. Had the Jews of the Old Testament disappeared from the earth like Christ, they would now denote the idea of the People, and Zion the idea of the Center of the World, just as Christ denotes the idea of Man. But the stalwart, undeniable vitality of the Jewish people, attested in the very hatred of the Jews, resists such "idealizing". Whether Christ is more than idea - no Christian can know it. But that Israel is more than idea, that he knows, that he sees. For we live. We are eternal, not as an idea may be eternal: if we are eternal, it is in full reality. For the Christian we are thus the really indubitable. The pastor who was asked for the proof of Christianity by Frederick the Great argued conclusively when he answered: "Your majesty, the Jews!" The Christians can have no doubts about us. Our existence stands surety for their truth.

Even more convincing for American evangelicals is Michael Wyschogrod's contention that God's love for all peoples begins with his particular love for the Jews. As the Methodist theologian R Kendall Soulen writes, "By allowing room for God's freedom to fall in love with Abraham, the gentiles gain a heavenly Father who is also concretely concerned with them, and not just with humanity in the abstract".

Damn straight.

A crucial difference of opinion between Benedict XVI and the American evangelicals lies in the question of when Jews shall recognize Jesus as their Messiah. Although Benedict believes that Christians should not "force their faith" upon Jews and should live with them in mutual respect, he would prefer that they do so immediately. Although the evangelicals proselytize Jews to the endless annoyance of Jewish religious authorities, they believe that Jews will recognize Jesus only at the end of time. Liberal Jews object that the evangelicals wish for a new Battle of Armageddon in the Middle East, which is a silly complaint; on the contrary, the evangelicals mean that they would prefer that Jews remain Jews until Jesus extends an invitation in person.

The intellectual mismatch liberals have (regardless of being Jewish or not) comes from their reluctance to ascribe honest and good-hearted motives to Evangelicals. We simply wish that all men be saved, and will object to anything that gets in the way of us telling men about the Gospel. There's nothing objectionable, and everything commendable, about sincerely believing that there is a threat and trying to rescue people from that threat. However, Liberals believe that being sincere and honestly caring for others is their personal, exclusive monopoly, and so do not hesitate to slander others to maintain that exclusivity. Evangelicals have come to a better (and more biblical) relationship between themselves and the Jews that is reflected in William Russell Mead's observation that the Evangelicals have become content with the belief that God has the salvation of the Jews already covered.

Alas, Spengler clearly doesn't get it:

That brings us to the matter of the musicians. Jews look for the Kingdom of God in the sanctified life of a human family, whose highest expression is the Sabbath, "a foretaste of the world to come". The wild shoots of the nations grafted onto the olive tree of Israel hope for the Kingdom of God beyond the grave.

I'll let the Jews speak for themselves, but Spengler clearly doesn't know his Scriptures. Jesus said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand", or "The Kingdom of Heaven is in the midst of you." Peter said, in I Peter 1:4 "By these He has given us very great and precious promises, so that through them you may share in the divine nature, escaping the corruption that is in the world because of evil desires."

This deserves an entire SERIES of essays, but here goes the short explanation: Modern secular belief, as represented by materialistic determinism, rests upon the premise of a physically closed universe that is physically comprehendable, and with a chain of causality that has ALL effects being derived from purely physical causes. Certainly, all the causal chains seem to melt in the fury of the Big Bang, but the assurance that materialistic science is making is that all the possible causes of all current effects is necessarily physical and confined to within the Three Dimensions of this universe.

The concept of God PLUS Promise is the key threat to this view of the universe. Nobody objects to God, provided, as many modern, non-Evangelical Christians religions assure us, He keeps his distance and honors physical law and causality. The Devil, as a source of evil, must be banished, not because of some supposed belief that evildoers would cite his existance as an excuse for their behavior (the henchmen still get convicted along with the big cheeses), but because (I now realize) he is the originator of a causal chain that is not physical in origin.

But God AND Promise is a different matter: If God keeps his promises to his people, both Jewish and Christian, and if some of those promises involves physical blessings, then God necessarily has to invade The Three Dimensions to create causes that will have the effect of fulfilling those promises. This upsets the neat and tidy balance sheet that Materialistic Determinism assures us that the Universe keeps.

There's also the matter of Liberal and Leftist fury: I have as yet to meet a modern liberal or leftist that is not pissed off that someone has an advantage over another that has not been vetted by them, the liberal or leftist. A level playing field is not enough to ensure the goal of equal results that they crave if GOD, in response to a biblically based appeal that any Christian Tom, Dick or Harry might make, dives into the game and works in favor of some people to the detriment of others.

Indeed, if the Christian God exists, what WOULD keep Him from intervening as He wishes? Liberal philosophers and ethicists have proclaimed that there are no objective moral standards, and thus no such thing as absolute right and wrong. Thus, what moral basis do they have to declare that God's intervention is somehow "wrong"? How could it be "against the rules" for God to intervene in this world if, as they state, the game has no rules whatsoever? If one is counting on the Laws of Nature and physics to step in and prevent God from playing, how is one sure that Mother Nature isn't willingly and happily hiking up her skirts, dropping her panties, and bending WAY OVER in the back room of the Universe's ticket booth when God says, "GRAB those ankles, Hunnah!"??? If SHE lets GOD fuck her over, what exactly can mere humans do about it?

To establish a new people in a new land, the founding dream of American Protestantism, bespeaks a Judaizing heresy rather than strict adherence to Christian doctrine.

This is the Restorationist idea, and they are quite right that it has a long tradition stretching back to the Founding Fathers of our Nation. However, it's quite wrong in the face of Romans 9. Our founding fathers would have done better to say "As Christians, we believe to be blessed by the promises of the New Covenant. However, we also covet the blessings of the Old, and so we beg that the Jews come and enjoy our protections and the benefits of the New World. In thus doing, we ensure the smile of the God of Abraham upon both our undertakings."

=> Read more!

...because it's gotta be damn good stuff: .com, a regular at Rantburg, yells, "FLAME ON!", and gives the best performance I've ever read from him. (I'm sure he's done classics before that I've missed).

#3 I feel like a rant.

[rant]It is a hallmark of those who do not practice or know dick about democracy to claim it can't be exported. Never having the choice - or having it removed by force by dictators, thugs, mullahs, Islamists, fascists, socialists, communists, the spectrum of "ist" asstards - is no "proof" of anything except rule by force. That's the rant of a dictator's mindset.

Choice. Give people the choice. A free and honest choice - throughout the entire process. There are so few examples, since throughout history there have always been competing factions who sought to assure their own ascendancy. Today there are global interests at work -- media and power-brokers and malignant neighbors and "ist" movements everywhere all seeking to subvert the process for perceived gain.

Has anyone, anywhere, who enjoyed freedom of choice ever freely chosen bondage or slavery or dhimmitude or servitude? Yes, but that's because they're fools. The "honor" of that distinction is, and always will be, reserved to the Moonbats. The self-hating tools and fools who have swallowed the "ist" lies hook, line, and sinker. They deserve it, for being so stupid, but they should have the sense and decency to commit suicide in solitary fashion - not taking everyone else down with them. Since they don't, here in America - the last bastion of freedom where the majority is not the tool of some "ist" mindfuck - they'll just have to suffer. I hope it's extremely painful. Let those who can't discern between freedom and, say, socialism, live in perpetual pain - pain so extreme that it generates a fog so dense thay can't find the polling place on election day. Fuckwits.

What the Iraqis, as a confabulated group, have done, and will do, isn't exactly sterling, but it's a start. It may end in partition. So what? There is nothing inherently wrong with undoing a mistake. Sykes-Picot. Look it up, if you don't already know that Iraq is as artificial as Yugoslavia. The only tragedy that can befall them now, since they are under a level of protection by the presence of coalition forces, would be to allow stupidity to get in the way: To give up or waste this opportunity to make their own choices - and choose freedom. It's obvious that it's not an easy thing for them to do in the face of customs - sources of duress, stigma, and subversion. But the good shit always seems to demand some dues, often heavy. I'd say that, marketing BS aside, most things cost what they're worth.

What democracy (which is press-speak for freedom, and thus patently misused and misleading) is about is choice. Freedom of choice and choices. Looking around, it's pretty clear that's something rare... equally clear is what it's NOT:

Not Russian-style, which is cult of personality based - born of a totalitarian mentality which knows only manipulation and subornation of elections, both at home and in neighboring countries - combined with the Russian custom of kleptocracy, whether communist or czarist in nature, writ very large. Russians have kleptocracy down pat. They're still clueless about freedom, I'm afraid.

Not Arab-style or Paleo-style, which is merely dictators / thugs with guns deciding who can vote or count votes - so the winner can loot whatever oil revenue / aid is available. Since they are incapable of actually producing anything, themselves, foreign aid or a sea of oil, developed by others, is all there is.

Not Chavez-style or Mad Mullah-style, which is to revert to a thugocracy / mullahcracy and then steal elections to proclaim a backward leap into destruction, chaos, and oppression.

Not UN-style with cabals of power-hungry kleptocrats, peddling inane and asinine schemes with no point other than to loot the world. All the rest is window dressing. The legitimacy joke. The justice by world court joke. The world tax joke. So many jokes, so many collaborators, so little to merit saving. A weaving of ponzi and pyramid schemes perfected by others, wrought new in touchy-feely pastels and for-the-children feelings to appeal to the "ist" suckers. OWG? Nah, just the biggest collection of freelance scam artists ever to convene in one location.

Not Chi-Comm-style, which has evolved from pure Imperial dictatorship into communist centralized command economy dictatorship-by-committee into a bastard communist centralized dictatorship-by-committee with some free-trade zones, totally controlled by the cabal's pet kleptocrats. If the Chinese had any trace of honor or justice or guts or gumption or even masculinity left in their genes - after millenia of being yes-men, patsies, servants, suckers, tools, and fools - they'd toss this cabal, this tiny group of a few dozen wankers, into the dog-pits for a snack and get their asses into freedom and capitalism - in a big way. What potential. What waste. Wotta buncha fools. A few dozen wannabee ChiCom dictators holding hostage a billion people. But it's been this way since the dawn of China. And endless stream of kow-tows. This example, China's thousands upon thousands of years of history, is the height of cowardice, the pinnacle of stupidity, the peak of weakness, the pluperfect example of the failure of man's will and sense. China is the ultimate example of the failure of man, thus far. No wonder they're so fucking sensitive. The shame of their perpetual failures is mind boggling. History's perfect losers.

Putin holding forth on democracy is utter rubbish. He's whoring for the whores of Khaleej Times - equally clueless asstards. Now war, well hey, he probably knows a smidgen about that. But it's irrelevant. Whatever comes out of this cretin's mouth, even if agreeable or complimentary, is self-serving and deserves zero notice.

Good thing I don't have any strong feelings about it. Might get all worked up.
[/rant]

The article in question was Putin opining on the success and failure of Democracy in Iraq. More at the above link.

.com, if you want a guest lectureship here at the War College, just let me know...

At MSN. Check it out.

I pretty much agree.

Via Israpundit comes "I was raised for Jihad", by Nonie Darwish:

Terrorism coming out of the Muslim world did not happen by coincidence; it is the direct result of a culture that has been promoting hate, jihad and anti-Semitism for generations.

I grew up in Egypt controlled Gaza in the 1950's, at a time of President Nasser commitment to unify the Arab world and destroy Israel. He mobilized the Arabs in Gaza to start the 'Fedaeen' movement to make undercover cross-border attacks to terrorize Israel. My father who headed the Egyptian military in Gaza and the Sinai at the time, was killed as a result of these operations. He was hailed as a national hero, a 'Shahid,' meaning martyr. Nasser vowed that all of Egypt would take revenge and made no mention of the heavy toll of death and destruction brought upon Israel.

During that time Jihad meant a holy war and was not yet developed into the current epidemic of Muslim suicide bombers. The reason jihad has developed into the epidemic of suicide bombers is because of the deterioration of Arab educational system that has based its curriculum on hate, vengeance and retaliation against non-Muslims, especially Jews.

In Gaza elementary schools I learned of hate, vengeance and retaliation. Peace was never an option and never mentioned as a virtue as long as Jews existed.

snip.

The goal of education was to instill a commitment to destroy the state of Israel; which became the Arab national obsession. Arabs convinced themselves that the existence of Israel gives them a carte blanche to do anything, and nothing was more sacred. The end result is a culture -- out of control, fueled by oil money, and contaminating the world with terror.

Why haven't we heard of this before?

As a child, I was discouraged from questioning the teachings of hatred of Jews and other non-Muslims; to do that was an unforgivable sin. I quickly learned to keep my opinions and questions to myself. One has to hate the enemies of Islam to be a good Muslim.

The original article is at Teach Kids Peace, and is worth reading in its entirety. (The site itself is definitely liberal/lefty, but the current petition (as of 4/21) addresses this very issue. Could this be an actual sighting of a flock of honorable Leftists? I'm shooting a memo to the Blogosphere AgStation and see what they dig up. As soon as I pick my jaw up off the floor, that is.)

Via Rantburg comes this jaw-dropping comment from Queen Margrethe II of Denmark:

We are being challenged by Islam these years - globally as well as locally. It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and lazy.

We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.

And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction.

She gets it. That quote goes on the masthead.

=> Read more!

This is a reproduction of a comment I made on this entry at Brothers Judd. It essentially is an attack on the currently popular pretrib, premilleniallist interpretation of the book of Revelation that is embodied in the "Left Behind" series. The attackers advance a form of "preterism", where they state that Revelation is a symbolic book that cannot be interpreted literally.

*throws up hands* there is so much WRONG with preterism that I can talk about that words fail me. I'll try to hit one big point.

The mental equipment of Leftist liberalism is fundamentally different from current Conservatism, but is remarkably uniform among liberals, communists, and statists of all stripes. What confuses people is that liberals APPEAR to apply that equipment in so many bewildering and variety of ways that one thinks there IS no underlying connection. The variety does NOT arise from the variety of liberal thinkers, but from the variety of the environments which they contaminate.

For instance, The denial that the Book of Revelation is inspired by God, and thus is predictive, springs from the same mindset that claims that there is no God. The Book of Revelation is "inspirational" (thus Prof. Rossing's title of it being a book of hope), but not "inspired." Being inspriational means we can pick and choose what lessons we need from it, while being able to turn away from those that displease us. Not much different from the a-la-carte morality espoused by Liberals.

The book of Revelation is held to be Symbolic. The outcome, of course, is that it is denied that it should be taken literally. Not much different from the liberal idea that the Constitution is a living document that should not be read literally. If a text cannot be taken literally, then there are many potential interpretations that are symbolic, and the bewildering variety of opinion is advanced as the reason why only "experts" should interpret the text, and that the rest of us should just swallow what's given to us and not bother to think for ourselves. Thus, the appearance of Jesus Christ in Chapter 19 is somehow NOT the second coming. Why? Because it comes before Chapter 20, which talks about the Millenium. Pre-millenial Coming of Jesus Christ! NAIVE! NON-SYMBOLIC! SIMPLISTIC! You must obviously ALSO be deluded into simplistically reading that the Second Amendment applies to CITIZENS and not STATE MILITIAS.

Note the production of the "few" "iconbclastic" "penetrating" "dissenters" who just happen to be "conservative" and thus whose opinions (which, not coincidentally, happen to accord with liberal thinking) MUST ABSOLUTELY be adopted by the knuckle draggers. The fact that there are MORE REAL conservatives that adhere to true conservative thought than that toe the liberal line is dismissed. Not much different from the way the two or three Swift Boat Vets that supported Kerry somehow magically outweighed, in liberal scales, the 30 fold more who opposed him.

And take this: "Rossing says: "I would just appeal to their experience of God in their lives. Is he a God who wants to destroy the world or who wants to redeem it and who gives us a vision of hope?"". Revelation is a book of PUNISHMENT by god in response to evil. We know exactly what political liberals think of accountability and punishment.

I'm not surprised that the liberal slant, er preterist, take on Revelation involves "replacement theology": the concept that the Church somehow replaced the Jews (Jive THAT with Rossing's concept of a God who wants to redeeem people.) Unfortunately, if replacement theology is wrong, then the Jews are still God's special people, which means that anti-semites are in deep doo-doo. "Can't have THAT!" the liberals cry, "NOBODY is special! There CANNOT possibly be a relationship between European Antisemitism and the decline of Europe, much less one between America's support of Israel, and the American Hegemon!"

In my view, Revelation is NOT a symbolic book: it is an ENCRYPTED book. It is axiomatic in the field of Cryptography that if you're going to send an encrypted message that you want the recipient to understand, you have to send the decryption code/password/algorithm by a separate channel that isn't compromised. My study of the book of Revelation tells me that the decription code-pad is the REST of the Old and New Testaments. Anyone who has studied the various schools of interpreting Revelation will notice that the pre-trib, pre-millenial, literalist school, is the ONLY one that dives into other parts of the Bible, letting one part of the bible interpret another part. Liberals prefer to be THE interpretative authority, and so the ones contaminating Eschatology deny that there are such connections.

This is not to say that I totally agree with some of the "Trib Force" theology of Hal Lindsey: His prejudices affect his ability to interpret Revelation aright in the same way Liberal prejudices do.

Here's an example: In the "left behind" books, the "Seal of God" is seen as a literal mark that can only be seen by those who also have it. The "Mark of the Beast" is also seen as a physical mark. A lot of the action revolves around being able to see the Seal of God, as well as the refusal of people to take the mark of the beast.

But if the book of Revelation is not symbolic, but encrypted, our task is not to come up with our own ideas of what this seal or this mark is, but look through the rest of scripture to find the decryption key-pad for this particular passage. (The nature of encryption requires that there be a unique decryption. Thus, the principle of Literalism, that there is only one correct interpretation of a passage, is still upheld if we hold the book to be encrypted, because decryption would yield only one result, not many.)

Actually, the decryption key-pad on this was sent out relatively recently: Recall that in chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation, Jesus instructed John to send the book to the Seven Churches of Asia Minor. One of them was Ephesus. They ALSO happened to get a letter from the Apostle Paul, later called the Book of the Ephesians. Here are two passages from that book:

1:13 In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation--in Him when you believed--were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. 1:14 He is the down payment of our inheritance, for the redemption of the possession, to the praise of His glory.

4:30 And don't grieve God's Holy Spirit, who sealed you for the day of redemption.

Given these passages, I see no reason why, when the Ephesians were reading THEIR copy of the Book of Revelation, that one of them DIDN'T say, "Hey, didn't Paul say something about being sealed in the letter he wrote us?"

Thus, I take the Seal of God as being the Gift of the Holy Spirit, with the evidence of speaking in tounges. Conversely, the Mark of the Beast is the demonic analog (and counterfeit) of this baptism. Hal couldn't take this tack, because it is held as axiomatic in Evangelical circles that the literal manifestation of the Holy Spirit terminated in the First Century. It is only this doctrine that allows them to hold that the Pentecostals and Charismatics are fanatics and heretics. BUT, if there will a manifestation of such in the Future, during the Tribulation Period, and there was a manifestation of such in the Past, during the First Century Church, then there is a possiblity that there is a manifestation of such in the Present. Now. Today. Thus, Lindsay HAS to interpret the Seal of God as a literal mark, not the Spirit of God that another part of the Scripture plainly states

Further, I postulate that the demonic manifestation will be manifested to such a degree that it can be detected by physical instrumentation, making possible the means by which people who have taken the mark to be distingushed from those who have not. How else could the laws mandating that those who have not taken the mark of the beast cannot buy or sell be enforced?

Is this possible? Not only possible, but NECESSARY: Anyone remotely aware of the current state of affairs in the world cannot deny that the West is becoming more and more secular. The scenario of a man being worshipped as a God, and having his commands to be worshipped as God and to take into oneself a detectable spiritual entity being taken seriously, would be PREPOSTEROUS in this current day and age of Secular materialism. In my mind, the only way for this end-time scenario to take place is for secular materialism to be totally discredited, replaced by a form of spiritualistic materialism, in which spirit is scientifically detected as being fused with matter. It would, undoubtedly, be regarded as a fifth state of matter, along with solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. It will have detectable properties that will be seen as so advantageous that people would willingly submit the matter of their own bodies to be so infused. These people would have such inherent advantages that they would be seen as strategic assets, and thus worthy of special privileges such as going to the head of the line and getting the first and best of everything. (Or conversely, those who do not so submit would be seen as drags and impediments. Unnecessary weights restricting the progress of those more advanced and enlightened, and thus deserving of elimination. Terry Schiavo was only the first.)

That's MY take.

Oh, and one last thing. For a while there, it looked as if Anti-semitism was going to die out. Only the wackos who believed the Book of Revelation literally were crazy enough to believe that the scourge of Antisemitism would return, and with a vengeance. Anyone who's vaguely aware of what's going on in Europe knows that it's rearing its ugly head again. If anything, the literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation teaches that Christians who will be raptured will be such effective protectors of the Jews, that the only way to start killing Jews is for those Christians to just VANISH. I always felt I had a duty to do so as a decent human being, but now I ALSO feel it as a religious one as well.

I was out of town when I heard the news that Pope John Paul II passed on to his very well-deserved reward from his God and Maker. I have no specific link to any tribute, other than to Wretchard's post, which cites only part of the full passage from "Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan that always comes to my mind when some great person, public or private, passes away:

After this it was noised abroad that Mr. Valiant-for-truth was taken with a summons by the same post as the other, and had this for a token that the summons was true, "That his pitcher was broken at the fountain." When he understood it, he called for his friends, and told them of it. Then said he, I am going to my Father's; and though with great difficulty I have got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who will now be my rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said, "Death, where is thy sting?" And as he went down deeper, he said, "Grave, where is thy victory?" So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

=> Read more!

Go Delay!

The majority leader said Thursday he wants to examine what he called the "failure" of state and federal courts to protect Schiavo, who died 13 days after the court-ordered withdrawal of her feeding tube.

Threat to judges?
DeLay issued a statement asserting that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." He later said in front of television cameras that he wants to "look at an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president."

Such plain speaking brought a predictable response:

Democrats continued to criticize DeLay yesterday, with Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) charging that the Republican might have broken a federal statute against threatening U.S. judges.

"Threats against specific federal judges are not only a serious crime, but also beneath a Member of Congress," Lautenberg wrote. "Your attempt to intimidate judges in America not only threatens our courts, but our fundamental democracy as well."

Criticism of ANY branch of Government is a legitimate right protected by the First Amendment. This is typical of the Magnify any Criticism Into A Death Threat mentalty afflicting the Democrats, Liberals, and Lefties when criticism is directed at THEM. They have become living, breathing, moving BOILS on the ass of humanity, smarting and hurting the moment they are even BREATHED UPON, demanding care, nuture, and unnatural contortions so as to be coddled and left at ease to continue their pus-brained growth.

Or perhaps Delay should have called the Judges Pigs and monkeys? Chimpies? Neo-Nazis?

Or would THAT be illegal too, because it would be too close to the Truth?

She's gone.

Cautions for us pro-lifers to not resort to violence are superfluous and slanderous: The time for any sort of "redemptive violence" (whatever the hell that is) was last week, and there is no justification whatsoever for it now. Besides, everything human pro-lifers did, was seen as springing from Flesh and Politics, not Spirit and Love. Ditto for what anything we will do from now on, for having abandoned an objective moral code in favor of a tailored, personal one, the pro-death advocates know that the perception of moral authority has ceased to spring from an overarching, impersonal code. It has been replaced by assurances that one's motives spring from sincerety and good intentions, and that the motives of one's opponents springs from self-interest: thus the avoidance of discussing Michael Schiavo's motives and lifestyle.

Rest assured, however, that there will be hell to pay.

But when the butcher's bill is presented, it MUST be delivered by a hand unmistakably non-human.

Wretchard at Belmont Club has the following commentary:

The fading of the Iraqi insurgency, the Syrian retreat from Lebanon are now growing clearer before us, but what do they mean? By way of context, Publius Pundit, a blog dedicated to following democracy moments all around the world, is filled with the rumor of mass rallies and political movements shaking the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and even North Korea. These developments are widely presumed to favor the United States; and in the narrow sense that collapsing empires play into the hands of the nation which holds the balance of power, this must be true. But first and foremost, they are evidence of dysfunction: proof that the Soviet model, Middle Eastern authoritarianism and to a certain extent transnational liberalism have lost their grip. In that respect the sudden and unexpected weakening of the United Nations is less the result of Kofi Annan's individual shenanigans than a symptom that the bottom has fallen out of the whole postwar system.

If this analysis is correct, the world crisis should accelerate rather than diminish in the coming years and months, not in the least because the United States seems to have no plan to fill the power vacuum with anything. The promotion of democracy is at heart an act of faith in the self-organizing ability of nations; it means getting rid of one dictator without necessarily having another waiting in the wings. It is so counterintuitive to disciples of realpolitik as to resemble madness. Or put more cynically, the promotion of democracy is a gamble only a country with a missile defense system, control of space, homeland defense and a global reach can afford to take. If you have your six-gun drawn, you can overturn the poker table. In retrospect, the real mistake the September 11 planners made to underestimate how radical the US could be. This does not necessarily mean America will win the hand; but it does indicate how high it is willing to raise the stakes.

Excellent analogy.

From the Pen of the incomparable Mark Steyn:

The problem with the entire concept of "international law" is that it can ensnare a Tony Blair while never laying a finger on a Saddam Hussein. A "legalistic" regime of global relations confers an inviolable sovereignty not on countries or peoples but on every tinpot thug holding down the presidential palace. Bush and John Howard are under no illusions about this postmodern concept of sovereignty. Tony Blair is.

Hatttip Danegerus

Sherri of "Straight Up with Sherri" recently posted an article regarding memos of some lawyers who analyzed the laws of Florida and the Terri Schiavo situation, and concluded that there was a legal basis for saving Terri. As I read it, I began to wonder if I was mistaken in my satisfaction with the performance of the Bush Brothers (George and Jeb).

However, as is usually the case, walking away from the issue and letting my subconscious chew over it eventually brought enlightenment.

I continue to hold to my opinion that the performance of both Bush Brothers is satisfactory. Here's why.

The article sounds convincing in making an argument that Jeb Bush has the legal right to step in. Of course. It was written by lawyers. THEY'RE PAID TO SOUND CONVINCING.

You see, the legal system is not like the natural world, and arguing a case before a court is not like determining the truth or falsity of a hypothsis regarding a natural phenomenon. We would LIKE it to be that way, and what angers us about Terri's situation is that not all the evidence was considered, and not all the tests were conducted. Michelle Malkin concluded that Terri's parents had poor representation during the initial court case that Judge Greer tried, and every appeal has been denied because it is Judge Greer who decides whether to admit additional evidence: the appeals courts were upholding Greer's court findings, and would have nothing to do with the explicit requirement in Terri's Law that her case be re-evaluated from the ground up. This applies even to Death penalty cases: New evidence is admitted ONLY because the Judge wants to admit it, not because the evidence is new. When it comes to the natural sciences, new evidence is greeted with excitement. When it comes to court cases like this, new evidence is greeted with silence, if not dread.

Let me cite a personal example: I successfully sued someone several years ago. My lawyer sounded very convincing in court, and anyone looking at the precedents would have thought we had a very solid case. However, in private, she warned me that it all depended on the judge: justice, it seemed, was not dependent on having a good case. Justice was whatever the judge says it is.

It seems to me that people simply have no conception of how Imperial our Imperial Court system is, and how subject it is to the whims of men and women who are reviwed and vetted only once in their life, and leave their jobs only when they die or get tired of it. The assumption people have of the Court system is that it is blind, impartial, and if slow, at least is sure. NOTHING is further from the truth.

The bitter fact of this matter is that the advice these lawyers gave was given to Jeb Bush's lawyers, not to Jeb Bush: It was to convince THEM to tell Jeb Bush, not that he couldn't save Terri Schiavo, but that he could win the ensuing court challenge that would be sure to be raised.

Here's the clincher: It would be the FLORIDA Courts that would determine if he won or lost. Remember, these are the SAME COURTS, run by the SAME JUDGES, whose rulings regarding Terri's case make them 100% responsible for her death. Why, pray tell, would Dyed in the wool Democrat/Liberal Judges tell the next most likely candidate to replace the President of the United States, "You're right. We MAY be complicit in the judicial murder of a disabled person, and we'll allow a new trial whose outcome may just prove that, because we value life so highly, no matter what physical condition the bearer is in."? Their heads would literally explode, besmirching the walls of the chambers of Justice with their blood and brains, half-way through them saying the word "right".

Don't believe me? Consider this: Janet Reno and the Clinton Department of Justice, contrary to the explicit orders made by the 11'th Circuit not to deport Elian Gonzalez until a full court hearing had been held, successfully returned Elian to Cuba by fooling a judge unfamiliar with the case with a factually false warrant. Because Elian was not in the country at the time, he never had his day in court, even though the 11'th Circuit was prepared to give it to him.

Now, many commenting on this incident focus on the hypocrisy of the 11th Circuit court, the same one who shafted Terri's chances for surviving her "loving" "husband's" "tender compassion". However, that is not the focus I want to point out here. Instead, I want you all to ask a different question: What did the 11th Circuit Court do in response to the actions of Janet Reno and the Clinton Administration's Department of Justice?

NOTHING.

If Bush does the same thing, but to save Terri Schiavo, do you honestly think the 11th Circuit would do the same thing (NOTHING) for the current Republican Administration that they did for the Clinton Administration?

If you say yes, then please shoot me an e-mail with your name and phone number: I've got a hot investment lead involving prime oceanfront property in Kansas in which I'm sure you'd be interested.

Look, I care as much for Terri as anyone else: I've been aware of her situation, reading up on it via the National Right to Life Committee for years. My pro-life creds go WAY back: *I* am the man whose tough pro-life/anti-abortion arguments and clearly non-trollish behavior forced the creation of newsgroup "alt.abortion" to move the discussion of abortion out of "alt.women" because the hysterical Wymyn on it couldn't answer me.

I am probably more fucking, steaming, boiling MAD at this travesty of injustice than anyone else, and have doubtless logged more hours at blood pressure levels 50% above normal than anybody else, because I have been silently ranting and seething about this for YEARS, not just a few months. I haven't popped an artery by now because I believed what I was told: "Let the American Justice system work it out. Have faith."

So I let off my steam, let my blood pressure return to normal, and got on with my life.

Because I had faith in our system of Justice, that they'd work it out.

Well, our Justice system FINALLY worked it out.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

GodDAMN. It's SHIT like THIS that convinces a man that Calvin was right about Total Depravity.

---

I talked in the immediately preceeding article about the source of the power of the Pro Life movement: truth, levelheadedness, persistence, and clear vision. We must take care that our anger fuels our motivations, not cloud our vision.

It is a sad fact that any stupid ASSHOLE LIBERAL can be a pro-abortionist, be stone-dead ignorant of ALL the arguments against abortion, and propagate patent, illogical, pro-abortion NONSENSE, AND GET AWAY WITH IT, while each and every vocal pro-lifer has to have a tactical and strategic level of understanding that reaches as high as a national leader appearing on TV, yet reach low enough so that the sole footsolder about to picket an abortion clinic doesn't put something on their sign that will appear in the cut-scene over which the MSM will overlay that national leader's voice. Pro-aborts have the luxury of only needing to plan a three hour counter-protest, confident in the skills of the MSM spinmeisters to cover up their foot-in-mouth moments, while pro-life protesters have to have the strategic insight to weigh properly what to do in the next ten minutes, knowing that the ENTIRE movement may have to deal with the consequences for the next ten years. The pro-life movement is an army where every soldier has to be a Lee, every tanker a Patton, every airman a Curtis LeMay, and whose "officers" go to bed every night praying that they do not wake up the next morning to find out they got instead another Paul Hill clone whose lineal ancestor was the Confederate bonehead who shot Stonewall Jackson.

Is that fair? Hell no, but that's the stacked deck liberals, leftists, and demons made sure we were dealt with. We'll have to play with what we got, and we still have to win. Leave the bitching and moaning about how life is unfair to the moonbats at Democratic Underground.

As I see it, I, the faculty, the staff, and the student body of this fine War College can, like some home front academics 6 decades ago, sit next to our radios, bite our lips and curse and swear and see red while hearing the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews, and just wonder how we'll win against such animals.

OR, we can do what they did: get up, troop over to that secret lab they dug out under the soccer field, pull on their gloves, and start breaking their backs shoving blocks of drilled graphite into a shape that markings of graphite on paper at that time told them would give them the fuel for a weapon that also existed, at that time, only as markings on paper.

We have only two options when it comes to faith after something like this:

We either lose faith in man's goodness.

Or we put that faith on the Right Man's Words.

=> Read more!

It appears that Terri Schiavo's parents have realized what I have suspected for a long time, and which was the reason why I have not discussed her plight on this weblog: The Judicial System, loaded to the gills with self-serving liberals, are asserting their right to control the official/legal view of the world as they see it. The last attempt to crack the containment sphere protecting the carefully constructed artifical world of Terri's condition that Judge Greer has constructed was the Federal law directing the federal courts to discard the old facts and re-evaluate her condition by including the testimony of experts put forward by her parents. I contribute regularly to the National Right to Life Committee, and have been very aware of Terri's plight for many years: the efforts Judge Greer has put forth to totally exclude the testimony of experts that would have painted a different picture of her condition have been obvious, notable, and consistent. Instead of following the law and allowing a re-evaluation of ALL the evidence, the federal judge chose to preserve the Monopoly of Artificial World construction and demolition for the Judiciary, narrowly interpreted the law in order to bypass it, and essentially sentanced her to death. We accord more rights, including the right to admit new evidence and techology, to convicted murderers on death row than to an innocent woman who has, apparently, been a victim of spousal abuse. Which, by the way, may have caused the initial injury that led her to her current impasse.

Construction, preservation, and advancement of artificial worlds to propagate Liberal agendas is nothing new: University professors construct them, teach them as gospel truth to their students, and make sure that the students do not learn the tools of critical thought that would reveal their artificiality. Deconstructionism deconstructs ONLY the real world: what is unstated is that a new, artificial world is implicitly rebuilt in it's place, containing only the facts that would not contradict the lies presented as truths. The careful selection of experts that would be guaranteed to preserve the Artificial World and give it legitimacy could be seen in the spin applied by CBS to preserve the illusion of the veracity of the TANG memos in the face of Charles Johnson's flickering GIF. Whatever happens, to the liberal mind what must NOT happen in the Judicial realm is the loss of control over the construction of the Artificial Worlds that they use to justify their rulings that the liberal Media has suffered at the hands of blogs. The rebuffs given to the Legislative and Executive branches of Florida and the United States are merely the Judicial version of the rants the liberal media publish against conservative blogs. The fact checking that blog writers expect of each other is NOT welcomed by liberals in the Congress, Judiciary, or the Media: it is considered an affront, an offense, a threat, and an attack. NOTHING is permitted to crack the protective sphere of liberal-created artificial worlds. (Trolls please note: The Big Liberal Media don't have open comments sections, and liberal papers state their RIGHT to determine which letters to publish. I, on the other hand, reserve the right to prove that you're an idiot. Yes, EVEN if it hurts your delicate, refined, and oh-so-worthy-of-respect feelings.)

There is, of course, a looming threat to the Liberal Judiciary Artificial World Creation Monopoly: Conservative judges with the authority and right to crack the shell and demand that the REAL WORLD (horrors!) be considered. If the TRUTH were known, John Edwards would not be rich from his lies about pediatricians. If the TRUTH were known, abortion would still be regulated by the States. If the TRUTH were known, Terri would be in far better condition than she is now, because her parents would have spent more money on giving her proper care than her cheapskate, money-lusting, two-timing husband who, literally, is nickel and dime-ing her to death by spending her lawsuit reward money on lawyers instead of her. THIS is why the MINORITY DEMOCRATS in the Senate threaten to filibuster Bush's conservative nominees. (By the way, in response to the whining that the REPUBLICANS did the same to Clinton's nominees, I delight to remind them that the Republicans did so when they were the MAJORITY party: No need to threaten to filibuster when you have the votes to defeat the nominees.)

Long ago, I concluded that there were no truly effective checks and balances against run-away judges, leading to an imperial Judiciary that evenually answers to no one. Checks and balances are a form of negative feedback that keeps systems reasonably stable and working well, but only if the time period is not too short (leading to wild and wide swings), or too long (leading to inadequate correction when the system DOES get out of balance). This is why Representatives are elected for two years, but Senators for six: The House was designed to be highly responsive to the people, while the Senate was designed to prevent responses arising from short-lived fads. If the change in the public mood was relatively permanent, then eventually the Senate would fall into line as members unwilling to respond to the people were voted out.

At the time, due to the shortened life spans of people, life-time nominations for the Judiciary were not onerous. It is with the advent of advanced medicine (the same advances that create the predicament in which Terri finds herself) that the length of time in which a particular Judge can exert influence has been increased. This was the problem FDR faced when he tried to push past a conservative Supreme Court the New Deal laws. He tried all kinds of schemes to swing the court over, including increasing the size of the court so that he could pack it with new appointees who would vote his way.

For a while, I thought that making Judgeships elective for a term instead of appointive for life would be the solution. However, Judge Greer, it seems, is an elected Judge who got a substantial donation from the law firm of Michael Schiavo's Lawyer. That's enough to make even Ralph Nader demand a review of Terri's situation. (I'm surprised. My respect for the man has gone up somewhat, although nowhere near my respect for Joan Baez, the anti-Vietnam War activist who gave equal criticism to the Vietnamese communists when the standard post-communist blood-bath the conservatives were predicting actually came to pass.) It looks to me, at the moment, that the best option is a one-time appointment with a minimum required time in the practice of law and a mandatory retirement age, but that's subject to change. Unlike the liberals, I prefer dealing with the REAL world rather than try to construct an artificial one and make others pay, in money and blood, the price required to keep me comfortable and happy in it. (It helps to believe in a God who won't intervene when reality gives your little artificial world the swift and brutal kick in the ass that you deserve.)

Like Terri's parents, I don't see any prospect of saving Terri herself given the current situation. Indeed, having been aware of Terri's plight for years, as well as our imperial Judiciary's tendancy to create artificial worlds when people were applauding them for doing so when it was in support of Abortion, I haven't written about it before now because I didn't want to discourage anyone else from the effort of trying to save her. Things worked out exactly as I feared and dreaded. It was also pointless to post pure negativism: it wouldn't have helped the situation any, and I'm not into crowing about my predictive powers.

As far as I am concerned, I was as helpless to help Terri's situation as I was on 9/11 to help my poor fellow citizens as the Towers burned and fell.

All that will remain for us to do is to let the families mourn the victims.

We must sympathize with their grief.

We must remember the fallen.

And we must impose consequences.

---

The whining and moralizing that you hear howling that we "not take revenge" for Terri are the voices of those who demand OUR blood and OUR money to sustain THEIR artificial worlds. Indeed, the ENTIRE PURPOSE of our blood and money is to DEFLECT the very consequences we intend to bring down on the precious artificial worlds of these parasites, smashing them into flinders as efficiently as we smashed the artificial worlds of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The liberals weren't so much as FOR the Taliban or Saddam as much as they were AGAINST the principle that a host-slave sustaining an artificial world rebel and destroy one. For all their moonbattery, American Liberals pay us a compliment in trying to neuter us in the face of the Islamist threat: The best way to know that your dog won't bite you if you kick him is if he doesn't bite anyone else that kicks him. If he bites THEM, then what would keep him from biting YOU? A supine America in the face of a terrorist attack is an America that won't rebel while they suck US dry. Unlike the Lilliputians, THEY have no illusions about their ability to hold Gulliver down when he opens his eyes.

So, which artificial worlds should we target first?

Clearly the first world we should be working on is Michael Schiavo's. He had a vision of a world of sexual satisfaction, plenty, and ease paid for by Terri's settlement. The only way to bring birth to that world and to sustain it is for Terri to die.

Michael Schiavo's little world, however, is like Al Quaida, sustainable only because of the Talaban Afghani artificial world constructed and sustained by Judge Greer and his supportive upper hierarchy of fellow travellers and co-parasites. Targeting Michael's world will involve taking out both Greer's little world, and Greer, the creator and sustainer of it.

I recommend the Brown/Goldberg maneuver: A civil lawsuit simultaneously launched against Michael Schiavo, Greer, George Felos, and Felos' law firm. Terri's body MUST be declared evidence and preserved, because it may provide evidence of abuse by Michael that would prove motivation for demanding her death. He'll burn through his cash to defend himself, burning up the prospects of funding his little artificial world and leaving it a smouldering cinder. Including Greer as an accessory prevents him from using his office to cover his ass: his acting to suppress expert evidence that would have supported Terri, or put enough doubt regarding her condition to require that she be kept alive, will not go over well with a civil jury. Including Felos and his law firm pulls their campaign contribution to Greer, and forces THEM to burn through the cash they got to defend themselves. Thanks to the concept of Joint and Several liability (a concept that they themselves support, defend, and worship as necessary), THEY will have to pay any civil award, as will Michael.

If we do not do this, but if we allow Michael Schiavo, Greer, Felos, and his law firm to profit from Terri's illness and death, then Greer will have established a legal precedent that will encourage other Judges to grant the desires of other parasites to fund THEIR little artificial worlds via the suffering and death of those as unable as Terri to truly speak for themselves. Terri will be only the beginning. Remember: Terri died because she suffered from the SAME condition (an impaired lifestyle) that Michael cited as a reason to pull the feeding tube, AND the reason for compensation be paid to her.

Our next target should not as much be an Artificial World as much as reigning in the artificiers of such worlds, and who pervert their authority in order to sustain them by legal dictat: The liberal Star Chamber of Judges permeating and perverting our legal system. This attack HAS to be done within the system, both because Republicans will get eaten alive if they do it any other way, and to make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease. My suggestion of a mandatory retirement age for ALL Justices, Supreme Court and down, is merely a suggestion, as well as a start.

I did not bother to write Jeb or George Bush to encourage them to try to save Terri Schiavo: I KNEW who I was voting for, and I am 100% satisfied about THEIR performance, hobbled as they are with constitutional checks that the Judiciary had been spared. I can't say as much about their advisers: They are not lawyers, and so must rely on THEIR lawyers for advice, and I think Jeb missed a golden opportunity to raise a stink and bring grief down on Greer when he, the Judiciary, ordered an Executive office NOT to enforce the law. Greer knew, even if some weak-kneed lawyers have forgotten, that ENFORCEMENT of the law is not a Judicial function, but is exclusively Executive. Andrew Jackson's statement, "The Supreme Court has made it's decision, now let them enforce it," is the unacknowledged check on the passion of the Judiciary to expand its authority and influence by the Executive. Having lost the Presidency and the Congress, having the Judiciary impose liberal social policy on the nation is the Left's last hope to keep their vampire teeth clamped into our body politic.

I don't know how they'll do it, but they'll work on it and come up with something, and then we'll look at it. However, they won't even try IF THEY DON'T HAVE OUR SUPPORT. I know what I'm going to do: write supportive e-mails and send in more money to strengthen and increase the Republican majorities. Whatever you do, don't whine about them not overstepping their authority, for the whole problem is with government overstepping their boundaries.

That's just shtoopid.

On that note, I announce the official War College nomination for the Paul Hill Pro-Life Idiot of the Year Award:

No, I'm not referring to the woman on her knees praying her heart out, God bless her. I'm referring to the Moron holding the sign behind her chiding Barbara Bush about her two sons. Personally, if my boy was responsible for the liberation of over 30 million human beings and the attending Obsetrician at the birth of liberty in the Middle East, my head would be so big it would take a D-9 running through my house to make a hole big enough for me to get out. However, this IDIOT is too damn stupid to BE a pro-lifer.

The sources of the power of the Pro Life movement are truth, levelheadedness, persistence, and clear vision. This PINHEAD clearly missed all the memos sent out over the last five elections that the Republicans are on OUR side, and the Judges are pretty much on THEIR side. Pardon me, but exactly WHY should Republicans bust their asses trying to please people who demonstrate that they shat their brains out their asses by not being aware of who REALLY is to blame in this whole sorry affair?

Hell and damnation! Thousands of charitable organizations and reform movements in our great land to choose from, and she HAS to choose the ONLY one where being stupid ACTUALLY DOES GET PEOPLE KILLED...

If one ignores the torrential downpours this morning (complete with thunder and a 10 second power outage), it was quite a lovely Easter. The Dogwoods and the Bradford Pears are in bloom, and everything's turning green again.

There's so much water in the road, I have to take several detours to get to Church.

The wife and I are in the choir. All the windows and the goldware are covered as we start a short little program, complete with readings in between songs. At the climax, when we sing "Jesus has risen from the grave", the curtains are pulled off, the goldware that was put away for the lenten season is revealed, and the Easter Lillies that people have purchased are put out. This represents the change in the world (darkness to light) that happened when Christ arose from the grave. We all then got in line to put flowers on the barren, rough cross that had adorned the sanctuary during that same season. (An interesting note: the cross comes from the main trunk of the Church Christmas Tree from last Christmas.)

A good start to a good Easter. Happy Easter, Everyone!

While rooting through my hard drive, I came across this e-mail and picture. Enjoy!

---

My sister-in law is from Oklahoma and has a slight accent. She has cats and when she lived in the south she would take them to the groomers and have what is called a Line Cut. To her a line cut is when all of the fur hanging down below the cat's tummy is taken off (because it gets matted or snarled). When she moved to Chicago with my brother, the cat's fur got all tangled up during the move so she took it in for a line cut. She was quite surprised when she heard the price as it was twice as much as it was down south. She confirmed with the groomer that he understood what a line cut was and he said "yes, I know what a LION cut is." It seems her accent came out sounding like LION not LINE and this is how her cat was returned to her. She cried for a week...but not as much as the cat. It was November in Chicago and the cat needed all the fur it had.

• Gas in car to go to groomers $4.50

• Cat car carrier $32.99

• Grooming fee $80.00

• Getting the look from one seriously pissed off cat:

=> Read more!

Via Rantburg comes this delicious article wrung by blood, as it were, from the New York Times:

Ordinary Iraqis rarely strike back at the insurgents who terrorize their country. But just before noon today, a carpenter named Dhia saw a troop of masked gunmen with grenades coming towards his shop and decided he had had enough.

The man got mad as hell, and he wasn't going to take it any more.

As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhia and his young relatives shouldered their own AK-47's and opened fire, police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived.

This is why we have a second amendment, and why Liberals don't want you to keep it.

"We attacked them before they attacked us," Dhia, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, said in a brief exchange at his shop a few hours after the battle.

Preemption. The only way to deal with scum like this.

He did not give his last name. "We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen. I am waiting for the rest of them to come and we will show them."

Smart man. The mujahedeen who so very bravely ran away know where to find him, AND know he's ready and waiting.

It was the first time that private citizens are known to have retaliated successfully against insurgents.

'Bout damn time.

The battle was the latest sign that Iraqis may be willing to start standing up against the attacks that leave dozens of people dead here nearly every week. After a suicide bombing in Hilla last month that killed 136 people, including a number of women and children, hundreds of residents demonstrated in front of the city hall every day for almost a week, chanting slogans against terrorism. Last week, a smaller but similar rally took place in Baghdad. Another demonstration is scheduled for Wednesday in the capital.

The Iraquis are learning quick: Took them only a month to realize that protests and marches work fine in Seattle, Davos, Paris, and Washington DC, but that it comes up somewhat short in Hilla and Baghdad, where the shooting actually is taking place.

Two of Dhia's young nephews and a bystander were injured, the police said.

Good job, lads. Here's for a speedy recovery, and wear the scars with pride. May you be the pebbles that start the landslide...

A man who claims "Academic Freedom" when he calls terror victims "Little Eichmanns" should support my right of "Free speech" if I call him a "middling Goebbels".

=> Read more!

Via Israpundit comes this quote from Barbara Lerner's article "Collapsing Temples in Gaza":

Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the man our press keeps assuring us is "a moderate," has made no move to disarm these men or the hundreds of thousands of others like them who form a majority of all Palestinians in the West Bank as well as Gaza. Instead, he proposes to integrate gunmen who are not already members of the Palestinian security forces into their ranks, arming and training them with huge new infusions of American and European cash.

Last week, Abbas sent a different message to the beleaguered minority of Palestinians who actually do want peace — those who try to thwart planned terrorist attacks by reporting them to Israeli authorities. Fifty-one Palestinians are currently under Palestinian death sentences, more than half of them for "collaborating" with Israel, but executions have been suspended since August 2002. On March 3, Abbas lifted the ban, ordering the execution of 15 of them this month.

Interesting how there was no storm of protest, no flurry of moral denunciatons from the normal suspects...

Via Little Green Footballs comes "Pests in freedom's way", an article in The Australian by Amir Taheri. I'll quote some significant snippets from the article, and I suggest you read it all.

Mr. Taheri starts off by noting:

THROUGHOUT the debate that preceded the liberation of Iraq two years ago, supporters of Saddam Hussein claimed that any attempt at removing him from power by force would trigger an explosion in "the Arab street".

Quite true. Then he notes this:

As it turned out, the explosion they had predicted did take place, but only in Western streets, where anti-Americans of all denominations, their numbers inflated by the usual "useful idiots", marched to keep the Baathist butcher in power.

Well, the explosion DID come from the Arab street, but NOT in the way expected by the liberals:

More than two years later, however, the Arab street seems to be heading for an explosion. From North Africa to the Persian Gulf and passing by the Levant, people have been coming together in various "Arab streets" to make their feelings and opinions known. These demonstrations, some big, some small, have several features in common.

Unlike the rent-a-mob marches concocted by the Mukhabarat secret services, this latest spate of demonstrations was largely spontaneous. Nor are the demonstrations controlled by the traditional elites, including established opposition groups and personalities.

In almost every case, we are witnessing a new kind of citizens' movement, an Arab version of people power in action. But the most important feature of these demonstrations is that they are concerned not with imagined external enemies – be they Israel or the US – but with the real deficiencies of contemporary Arab societies. In almost every case the key demand is for a greater say for the people in deciding the affairs of the nation.

After discussing the odds, Taheri makes the key turning phrase of the article:

What is interesting is that there are, as yet, no signs that the "Western street" may, at some point, come out in support of the new "Arab street".

He decides to do a bit of REAL invesigative reporting:

Over the past two weeks several Western capitals, including London and Paris, have witnessed feverish activity by more than two dozen groups organising meetings and marches to mark the second anniversary of the liberation of Iraq. The aim is not to celebrate the event and express solidarity with the emerging Iraqi democracy, but to vilify George W. Bush and Tony Blair, thus lamenting the demise of Saddam Hussein.

I spent part of last week ringing up the organisers of the anti-war events with a couple of questions. The first: Would they allow anyone from the newly elected Iraqi parliament to address the gatherings? The second: Would the marches include expressions of support for the democracy movements in Arab and other Muslim countries, notably Iraq, Lebanon and Syria?

In both cases the answer was a categorical no, accompanied by a torrent of abuse about "all those who try to justify American aggression against Iraq".

But was it not possible to condemn "American aggression" and then express support for the democratic movement in Iraq and the rest of the Arab world? In most cases we were not even allowed to ask the question. In one or two cases we received mini-lectures on how democracy cannot be imposed by force. The answer to that, of course, is that in Iraq no one tried to impose democracy by force. In Iraq force was used to remove the enemies of democracy from power so as to allow its friends to come to the fore.

After a review of the support (lack-of) for the popular demonstrations in Lebanon, Iran, and Syria from Western nations, Taheri concludes:

Why are so many Westerners, living in mature democracies, ready to march against the toppling of a despot in Iraq but unwilling to take to the streets in support of the democratic movement in the Middle East?

Is it because many of those who will be marching in support of Saddam Hussein this month are the remnants of totalitarian groups in the West plus a variety of misinformed idealists and others blinded by anti-Americanism? Or is it because they secretly believe that the Arabs do not deserve anything better than Saddam Hussein?

Those interested in the health of Western democracies would do well to ponder those questions.

I decided, in the interest of length, to ponder the questions Taheri raises in another entry.

Via Rantburg comes this little gem fom Pakistan:

17 lawyers injured in clash with police

Staff Report

ISLAMABAD: At least 17 people were injured when the Rawalpindi Police baton charged a procession of lawyers of the Rawalpindi District Bar Association on Tuesday.

More than 200 lawyers took part in the demonstration outside the district courts against the demolition of lawyers’ chambers in Gujar Khan. The lawyers carried placards inscribed with slogans against the chambers’ demolition on the directives of Rawalpindi District and Sessions Judge Chaudhry Asad Raza.

The demonstrators were heading towards Kachehri Chowk when policemen already present there stopped them. The lawyers and the policemen argued with each other and ended up in a brawl. The policemen baton-charged and tear-gassed the demonstrators to disperse them.

Fred asks "who to root for?"

Why obviously the POLICE: It's the Paki ISI we have issues with...

*sigh*

I just got word that an internet friend has just lost his girlfriend, and is taking the loss hard. He's rather private, so I have no details about either the young woman or how she passed away. Indeed, I have no name, but I suspect it was more likely an accident of some sort, with illness a distant second. There are other possiblities, much more messy and unpleasant, but there is no need to dwell on them when facts are absent and the probabilities are low to begin with.

Still, it IS a tragedy when a young life, full of promise, just STOPS.

I confess I have no categories in which to put such an experience: my father's death was bad, but it was at the end of a long illness, AND a long and fruitful life. I've had friends and acquaintances die, but they were very much older than I, godly for the most part, who I knew enough to know that grieving would have been pointless: We may have differed as to when, exactly, God gives his eternal rewards, but we shared the belief that death was not the end of the road, but a gate through which we irrevocably pass that puts us on a road that is far better to trod than the cowpath we had to walk while we were alive.

My particular difficulty with my friend is that he, as best as I can tell, does not share my beliefs: At this time in a person's life, we urge young people to become Christians because it lays out a path through life that, although not as thrilling or exciting, is nevertheless more fulfilling, safer, rewarding, and more secure. Christianity as a means to help one get through the death of a loved one is a "benefit" that we expect to avail ourselves of later in life: when you get to be MY age. Not 16, 18, or even 20.

To be frank, I have no categories or experiences of anguish which I can draw upon to help my friend: I've been dropped by girlfriends before (the first is always the hardest), so I have some knowledge of the empty, spherical vaacuum that seems to sit right under the lungs, about two inches under the breast bone and about two inches in, and which stays for several months. When I heard the news that a high school classmate had OD'd on drugs, I felt that sphere for about three days while my mind inadequately gnawed at the question of "why?", with as much success as a dog gnawing on a boulder.

But the loss of a girlfriend to death?

The closest thing would be to lose my wife or one of my two boys: I can BRIEFLY imagine it, but the attempt to really FEEL it makes my brain shut down. Scary. I have NO IDEA what I would do or say or believe if that should happen.

So what does one say when one's life vocabulary leaves you speechless in the face of things like this, or when the language you could use is foreign to the sufferer?

Since no human lives are immediately at stake here, I felt that saying the truth was the best option. So, in my responding e-mail, I simply said that I couldn't possibly put myself into his shoes since I knew he was experiencing an anguish that exceeded my experience. I didn't tell him to snap out of it. I told him I RESPECTED his feelings. I guess I should have told him he had a RIGHT to grieve, although I did tell him to give himself lots of time to work through the inevitable phases.

I know him enough to know that he and she had something special going: true love is always synergystic, creating something bigger than the sum of the two individuals. Marriage is a recognition of that "something bigger" and the vows are vows to keep that "something bigger" going until one or the other dies. I sense that he's weeping, not only for the loss of her, but also for that "something bigger" that had so much potential and promise, but which is now gone.

I may not be commenting as much, either here or elsewhere, as I try to be available to him. It is probably the most tangible means of support that he can feel at this difficult time in his life, although my personal belief is that my praying for him, and hoping he'll let God touch him through my prayers, is of better and more enduring import.

=> Read more!

I found this at MSN for kids: an Egyptian Hieroglyphics generator program. Enjoy!

[initial entry: Mar. 10, 2005]
It seems that it isn't only the Americans and the Israelis that are getting unjustly put down by modern "intellectuals". Seems that the Ancient Greeks, the philosophical forefathers of Western Civilization, are also getting the shaft. Bruce Thornton's latest article "Defending the Greeks" at Dr. Hanson's Website, makes the following observations:

When asked to define the achievement of the Greeks, we usually list the intellectual, artistic, and political equipment we have inherited from them: philosophy, history, logic, physics, criticism, rhetoric, dialectic, dialogue, tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, aesthetics, analysis, democracy—these are all Greek words. Taken together they constitute the cultural and mental foundations of Western civilization.

He then asks the following question:

What is it in the ancient Greek mind that provides the common denominator of all these words?

Good question. It would have been a great achievement to have accomplished any three of the above, but the sheer mask begs this question of what caused

The answer is that they are all the formalized expressions of the essence of the Greek achievement: critical consciousness. This is the impulse and willingness to stand back from humanity and nature and even the gods, to make them objects of thought and criticism, and to search for their meaning and significance—"to see life steadily, and see it whole," as Matthew Arnold put it, instead of remaining enslaved to custom, tradition, superstition, nature, or the brute force of political or priestly elites.

The impulse to critical consciousness has long been recognized as setting the Greeks apart from the other civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean. The Greeks, the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt said, "seem original, spontaneous and conscious, in circumstances in which all others were ruled by a more or less mindless necessity." What distinguished the Greeks from their Mediterranean neighbors, then, was not so much how they lived, but how they thought about how they lived, and how they gave formal expression to this thinking.

I shall be re-reading this article, pondering it, and adding to this entry as I solidify my thoughts.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson has definitely outdone himself in his latest article at his website: "Eurospeak: Sorting out the teenage sass".

There is simply so much good stuff, that I'd have to quote the entire article. His listing of the contradictory messages coming of Europe is dead-on: If you have EVER been irritated by the lefty-euro use of the magic word "BUT", then you have GOT to read how Dr. Hanson plucks it out of their hands and eviscerates them with it.

However, the following paragraph stands out head and shoulders in my eyes, since it puts in words a vague intuition that I have tried to voice in a couple of earlier posts, but never felt able to communicate clearly.

So if Europe sounds conflicted, that's because it is. One symptom of such a troubled patient is its blustering rhetoric — as if words can mask reality, as if idealistic vocabulary and shots at America can substitute for faith in Western values, sacrifice, and risk-taking. One reason that Europe understands so well the braggadocio and sense of inferiority of the impotent Muslim world is that it suffers precisely from some of these same maladies in its own problematic relationship with the United States. A Muslim in Europe who puts a picture of bin Laden on his wall is the equivalent of a European chanting that Bush is Hitler: The Arab does not really wish to destroy the opulent European network that he counts on, nor does the European in jeans with a cell phone truly wish the U.S. would stop protecting his lifestyle. Yet each feels terrible about his own hypocrisy and accompanying appetites for what he professedly hates, and so looks to express angst on the cheap.

Right on the money, in my humble opinion.

Let me throw out, in response to the above, my latest attempt at articulating this.

=> Read more!

One of the main reasons I've not been posting has been Varsity and Junior Varsity school sports: I'm "taping" the middle school baseball games, and helping out with the Varsity Tennis team when the coach can't make the games or the practices.

I had an 8mm video tape recorder, a gift from my terrific parents-in-law, and the quality was good at the time. However, time and technology marches on, and I realized, after seeing the truly horrible resolution when it was projected on a big screen, to get a higher resolution Video recorder.

I was AMAZED that details like lines and columns of resolution are NOT even given on the web sites of the VCR vendors.

I finally decided to play it safe and bought a Sony DCR DVD101, which explicitly advertised that it could record DVD quality video on mini-DVD disks.

Here are the plusses:

• The video quality is more than good enough, being standard DVD resolution. One can see baseballs and tennis balls go by in slo-mo, which proved to be a BIG help for the coach of our JV Baseball team diagnose hitting problems.


• Instant-on recording. When I hit the record button, recording starts instantly. Although there's a slight delay when you stop recording, the action is all over by then.


• Automatic scene splitting. Each time you hit the record button, it's marked on the disk as a new AND SEPARATE scene. More on this below.


• Battery life is terrific. Spinning a mini-DVD is a lot less power consuming than starting and stopping a tape. The included battery is about 90 minutes. I bought a "10 hour" battery, although it registers in the camera as closer to 6 hours than 10. At nearly $100 for the bigger battery, it's expensive, but for what I know I'll be using it for, it was worth not worrying about power. I'm planning on leaving the power cable at home about 95% of the time.


• Charging is FAST. A lot faster than I thought. In fact, I was afraid for a moment that I'd bought a dud. The 90 minute battery charges in 30 minutes, and the 6 hour one in about an hour. For the other 5% of the time, I'll get a separate charging dock, charge the 90 minute battery while using the 6 hour, then swap and charge the 6 hour while using the 90 minute battery.


• The scenes can be downloaded via USB connector. Happily, the connector is the SAME type as that used by my (also terrific) Zire 31 (the most optimally balanced PDA for the price on the market.).

Here are the drawbacks:

• The USB download speed feels like 1.0, not 2.0. I guess I should try connecting the Sony cable directly to my 2.0 port, although the overall speed may be limited by the DVD disk speed. I estimate that it takes me about 20% less time to download the scenes than it took to record them all.


• The mini-DVD disks are rather expensive: DVD-R's are about $3 apiece, and Sony socks you for DVD-RW's for $9! I decided to use Memorex DVD-RWs: they're only $5 apiece, which is not as outrageous. I've already saved more than enough money recycling the disks after downloading them from the camera.


• Another problem is that motion of the camera can scratch the DVDs or cause "DISK ERROR" problems. Also, some disks are flawed from the get-go, but you can't tell looking at them. I'll have to figure out a way to vet the DVDs ahead of time. In the meantime, I number their cases and put the ones that successfully record up front, and the questionable ones near the tail end. Another good reason to spring the dough for DVD-RWs, since one way would be to just start the camera, record the TV, and then see how many minutes it DOES record. I'm learning to adjust how I use the camera so that is less of a problem.


• It can double as a still camera, putting 8000+ pictures on a single mini-DVD. However, due to the scratch issue, I wouldn't. Picture resolution is 640x480, which isn't good enough to satisfy my finicky, photobug wife. Four megapixels minimum required for her needs.


• The disk capacity is only for 30 minutes at a time, meaning I have to worry now about changing the disk instead of the battery. And that's just an estimate: depending on the action, it could be up to 2 minutes less.


• It takes too long to swap DVDs. Too long to unload and spring the door open, and too long, after loading the new DVD, for it to figure out what's on it already. Even if its formatted.


• It's auto-focus, which is good, but NOT auto-contrast, which is bad. I was wondering why my shots seemed a bit bright and overexposed until I tried pushing the "exposure" button and realizing it was manual. Even then, the camera is very sensitive, and has to be babied when the cloud cover is patchy.


• Although, when connected to a computer via USB, the camera registers as a memory device, it doesn't show up on Windows Explorer as a separate drive. You have to use their software to download the scenes.


• As far as I can tell, the software they provide naturally sucks rocks. It's a customized version of a separate vendor's offering, so I anticipate buying or downloading (for a fee) the full version of the vendor's software.

The major reason for taping the JV Baseball games is for providing the coach with video highlights. He's great at video editing and copying to VHS tape, but generating DVDs seems to be beyond him right now. He also has problems pulling scenes off of DVDs, and prefers using VHS tapes. The scene splitting feature, in this case, is a virtual BOON, since it's easier to work with individual scenes and select what one wants out of them than try to search through a big file for what one wants.

Helping the kids with batting is easier if individual scenes are on disk and one can open them with a double click and single step through them. For batting and pitching evaluation, I copy them onto a regular DVD as individual files, which he can open using any file viewer.

I'm developing a system to help him and me with all these tasks: When there is a good play, I briefly record a hand signal of my finger pointing up, or with a thumbs up, as the next scene. If there's a flub, I briefly record a hand signal of my hand horizontal, or with a thumbs down if it was truly a dumb and awful play. If I make a goof, or record something in which nothing happens, I record my hand making a "C" to signal that I cut the previous scene. Downloads are in ascending time order, and a good video editing package allows thumbnail previews of movies on a hard drive, so the scenes that contain editing commentary of good and bad plays can be immediately detected and dealt with. It was easier to download everything, use a previewer, and delete the cut scenes, than try to not download the ones needing cutting. Luckily, the Sony software DOES do that.

Minor nits:

• The record button is located in such a way that the corner of the camera digs into the base of my thumb, making it go tingly and sore.


• It doesn't charge the battery while the camera is active or connected to the computer. Another good reason to get a separate charger.


• Selecting scenes on the camera to download is time consuming and a pain. I use the "select-first-jump-to-last-shift-select" method and download them all at once. I then delete the ones I don't want.


• Scenes downloaded from the camera into a hard drive directory always start with 1, rather than figuring out how many files were on the hard drive and starting with that number plus 1. Downside is the possiblity of overwriting existing files.


• Zoom in and out is in "reverse" to what I'm used to. With the old VCR, the zoom worked as if you were moving the VCR closer or further away from the subject, while with this camera, it acts as if you're pulling the SUBJECT closer or pushing it further away from the camera. NOT a design flaw, just a problem with what I'm used to.

Now the SUPER MAJOR PAIN-IN-THE-ASS "FEATURE": Part of the delay in loading the DVD is that SONY IS CHECKING TO SEE IF YOU ARE USING THEIR BRAND OF DVD. Then, when it figures out it ISN'T a Sony brand DVD, It'll flash "SONY DISK RECOMMENDEDED" for a whole 20 SECONDS! And YES. THE MESSAGE IS MISSPELLED IN THE CAMERA ROM! Half of me thinks the programmer was a bit careless, but the other half of me thinks the programmer thought that that was going overboard, and misspelled the word to register how stupid the message is.

I have half a mind, the next time I go to a BIG computer show with a Sony Tent, is to take along a Memorex DVD-RW, stick it into a camera, show the message to a Japanese speaking market-droid, then KICK THEIR ASS ALL OVER THE SHOW FLOOR.

Except if it's a male market-droid. In which case...

=> Read more!

Via Israpundit comes an article in which Martin Kramer expresses some doubts about Sharansky's thesis. The article is worthy of a separate post, but that post is NOT this one.

Rather, Martin Kramer makes the utterly priceless remark that is so rarely made, and yet suddenly clarifies all kinds of questions:

It is said of the Jews that they suffer from this peculiar flaw: they allow the least bit of doubt to be decisive.

VERY illuminating.

AND not just limited to the Jews.

Perhaps this is an outgrowth of some inability to assess risks and probabilities?

Lord knows there are enough people, who otherwise seem intelligent enough to assess risks and probabilities, who are incapable of doing so.

I thought, however, that this affliction was limited only to Evolutionists.

My mistake.

It will need considerable thought to digest and correct.

Via Israpundit comes the following article by Charles Krauthammer. A summary:

Why did Ariel Sharon do this? Did the father of the settlement movement go soft? Defeatist? No. The Israeli right has grown up and given up the false dream of Greater Israel, encompassing the Palestinian territories. And the Israeli left has grown up too, being mugged by the intifada into understanding that you do not trust the lives of your children to the word of an enemy bent on your destruction.

For now, you trust only the defensive fence and the deterrent power of the Israeli army. Sharon is no dreamer like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who bargained away land for a piece of paper. Sharon, like any good general — and he was a great general — is giving up land for a stable defensive line.

Everyone wants peace, but Sharon's real obsession is terrorism. From his days as a young commando in the 1950s, he has been a fanatic about fighting terrorism. Take away the terror weapon and everything else follows: safety, stability and the conditions for a final peace. A peace based not on the good will of a Sharon or a Mahmoud Abbas but on the new reality on the ground: separate nations delineated by a temporary barrier to produce a temporary peace — and the possibility of a final one.

A barrier can be torn down, but a life lost to genocidal terrorism can never be restored.

So, it appears that Jihad Islami (Islamic Jihad) has admitted to the suicide bombing in Israel yesterday.

Makes one wonder when Abbas decides to use the one weapon in his arsenal that even the Israelis fear the most:

"You, Jihad Islami! May your moustaches be cursed! I told you descendants of pigs and monkeys to lay off the suicide bombings! Years of Israeli occupation has decimated the PA security forces, so we cannot capture the perpetrators ourselves. But I will use the next better thing!

"Surrender the planners in 24 hours to the nearest PA police station, or I will get on the phone To Sharon and DEMAND that he use his Apaches and Hellfires to send you, the Jihad Islami leadership, to hell!

"And the blood of any Palestinians spilled in any attack will be on YOUR HEADS, NOT THE ISRAELIS!!!"

What is it, you ask?

A moral sanction.

And no, Dr. Hanson has NOT been sharing with me the shit he was smoking when he wrote this.

No country is a Democracy.

Rather, every nation claiming to be democratic must PROVE that it is democratic.

How?

By having it's next election.

Thus, the Palestinians COULD have made an argument that, when they elected Yassir Arafat to lead them, they WERE a democracy. However, they FAILED the test when Arafat stayed in power past his term. Ditto for Castro.

However, what happened in Iraq was NOT a democratic election: the people chose representatives to write a constitution while still under occupation. I believe it to be a (relatively) benevolent and enlightened occupation, since demonstrably the majority of the atrocities taking place are NOT being done by the occupation, but by representatives of terrorist groups and the former oppressive regime. (Moral equivocating panties on an iraqi's head to getting it blown to bits by a car bomb, or sawed off with a butcher knife simply demonstrates moral incompetence. Or moral malpractice.)

However, it is good practice for the real thing. Great practice if the former leadership threatened all kinds of dire consequences if one DID vote. (So why, exactly, are liberals not screaming against the terrorists with the same vigor that they ALLEGE electoral intimidation against the Republicans? Perhaps because they also are NOT screaming PROVEN electoral intimidation against Democrats: They're on the SAME side.)

Of course, when it comes to Iraq, and to Afghanistan, the REAL test they must pass to call themselves a Democracy is NOT the next election, when they REALLY choose their leaders, but the one AFTER THAT.

Let me put it another way: If, exactly 4 years from now, George W. Bush is STILL President, THEN we've failed the democracy test.

=> Read more!

Via The Brothers Judd is this article about the flap over Hillary Clinton's remarks regarding the front runner for the Iraqi Prime Minister

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has touched off a diplomatic flap with Iraq's incoming government by questioning whether the leading candidate to become the next prime minister is too close to Iran's ayatollahs.

[snip]

Clinton had infuriated al-Jaafari — selected this week by the dominant Shiite political conglomerate to become prime minister — by saying his past connections to Iran are cause for "concern."

The former first lady, considering running for president in 2008, ignited the diplomatic tempest after she appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday and noted al-Jaafari's leadership of the Dawa Party, a conservative Shiite group with longstanding ties to Iran.

"There are grounds for concern and for vigilance about this," said Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"I am willing to look at the situation and not yet jump to conclusions," she added.

"But I don't believe there is by any means a large body of opinion that wants to cede independence and control over Iraq's future to Iran."

What I snipped out is al-Jaafari's rejoiner to the Shrillary:

The likely new prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, shot back at Clinton, who just completed a visit to Iraq, by questioning her credibility as a spokeswoman for U.S. foreign policy.

"Hillary Clinton, as far as I know, does not represent any political decision or the American administration and I don't know why she said this," al-Jaafari told The Times of London.

"She knows nothing about the Iraq situation," he added.

How Subtle.

So Subtle, it went over their heads.

Almost went over mine too.

I guess I'd better explain.

I'm sure you've heard of the saying "Put your money where your mouth is"? It's usually thrown at someone who spouts off for effect, but cannot back what they said with proof. If there was a prospect of betting money on it, and potentially losing it if proof is not forthcoming, being reluctant to "put one's money where one's mouth is" is a prime indication that the utterance was false and made for political effect.

Al-Jaafari's comment, doubtless mangled somewhat in the translation, is an assertion that Hillary, lacking any authority or power or influence concerning Iraq, can afford to spout out ignorant nonsense because she won't suffer any consequences. Condi, being at almost the exact opposite position on the scale of power when compared to Hillary, must be more circumspect: witness how HER words are parsed on Israpundit.

To continue with the metaphor, Hillary can spout nonsense and get away with it, because if anyone challenges her to "put her money where her mouth is", her excuse for not doing so is not because she can't prove what she says, but that SHE HAS NO MONEY TO PUT WHERE HER MOUTH IS.

This guy may be too sharp for his own good.

Via Sobiesky at Rantburg comes a link to a USGS map of the Cascade Volcanos. Click on the individual triangles for a description.

Other good links left by commenters at Rantburg. Go visit if you're into Volcanos.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson has an article at Jewish World Review: Common Ground.

Democrats call for President Bush to use his conservative majorities to find common solutions to perennial problems that might find resonance with Americans tired of partisan bickering.

I very much respect Dr. Hanson's opinions, and agree with him most of the time, but his perception of the Democrats is way off, not only in this paragraph, but in the entire article: When in the Majority, Democrats cite majority rule and get their way. When in the Minority, as they are now, Democrats demand compromise to STILL get their way. SCREW them.

• The Middle East. The isolationist Right has not wished to risk much for anything abroad, while the hard Left recently has been happy with any dictator that praised the "people" and professed anti-Americanism. Yet most Americans in between can conclude that Middle Eastern autocracy is the fuel that drives terrorism, and that the only strategy to prevent wider war later is to promote freedom over there now.

  The way not to have to intervene militarily in Iran and Syria is to censure both diplomatically, elevate their dissidents to the world stage, and cut off all commerce with these rogue regimes. Call the promotion of democracy a conservative desire for American security or a liberal move to promote the unrepresented. Either way it alone offers hope for a safe Middle East.

Fat chance if the French are financially involved in the status-quo.

• Energy. It makes little sense to drive a 7,000-pound SUV down to the local grocery store. True, eventually the market would curb such extravagance — when gas climbs to $5 a gallon. But in the meantime, too many billions of petrodollars are going to too many terrorists in the Middle East.

  If the conservationist Left wins mandated fuel economy, then it should at least relent on nuclear power that has evolved well beyond the scariness of the Three-Mile-Island era, and would encourage energy self-sufficiency without heating up the atmosphere.

  No one wants to drill in Alaska. Yet unlike the sloppy Russian rigs in Siberia that nevertheless send their fuel to environmentally conscious Europeans, Americans can tap some of their own oil in a safe fashion. So it makes no sense to import petroleum under dubious conditions abroad, but not to drill safely at home — as if wildlife in Siberia or Nigeria has less rights than bears in Anwar, as if terrorists do not get hold of American petrodollars to kill our own.

He's asking for REALISM, BALANCE, FAIRNESS, EQUALITY, SOUND JUDGMENT, and LOGIC from the Democrats. *sigh*

• Education. The most critical but ignored issue in education is credentialing. One reason why teachers are so ill-prepared arises from the bizarre idea that after the baccalaureate degree they still must be certified to "teach" — even though M.A.'s and Ph.D's seem to do fine in junior college and university class rooms without such therapeutic coaching. Something is wrong when a Harvard doctorate in physics cannot be left on his own to teach his discipline in an American public high-school classroom.

  Public school instructors should have the option of obtaining either a post-baccalaureate teaching credential or a Master of Arts in their academic disciplines. The latter is the superior degree. It reflects real knowledge, and school districts would not have to wait long to see which of the two tracks proved the most beneficial in their classrooms.

  Conservatives would appreciate the emphasis on academic mastery rather than the gobbledly-gook of the education industry. Liberals that rail at administrative fat should welcome the chance of humanists to circumvent the establishment and bring their expertise directly to the student.

There are "Liberals that rail at administrative fat"??? News to me.

I'm all in favor of MA's (and MS's) teaching the lower grades. But bypass the NEA union lock on lower education? I recommend ignoring BUY orders for stock in companies exclusively exporting winter clothing to Hell for the forseeable future.

• Immigration. Everyone realizes that a few million illegal immigrants are a problem, but perhaps as many as 15 million to 20 million become a tragedy. Deporting those who have resided in the United States for over 10 years is unworkable and wrong. Yet rolling amnesty would only legitimize and encourage further illegality.

  The ethnic Left and libertarian Right should concede to strict employer sanctions, real border enforcement, standardization of legal Mexican immigration in line with other countries, and an end to bilingual and ethnic separatism, all in exchange for the idea of one final — and only one — amnesty for those who have resided here illegally for a decade.

The Libertarian Right will buy in, but NEVER the ethnic Left. They'll see the 10 year limit as a synonym for "assimilated latinos", and THAT'S not their ideal constituency.

• Subsidies. Federal payments to farms make no sense. A peach grower or strawberry producer gets nothing while cotton magnates earn thousands of dollars in federal funds at a time both of high commodity prices and record federal deficits. Conservatives who rail at welfare should recognize that if rewarding the lethargy of some of the poor could become counterproductive, then augmenting the income of well-off agribusinesses is ridiculous.

  One cannot call for free markets everywhere except on the South Forty. Congressional members of the Midwest should recognize that "saving the family farm" is the cover used by agribusiness to tap into the myth that we are still a nation of agrarians. We are not — but we all are very much awash in debt. Most who garner subsidies are rarely either families or farmers.

No proposal as to what exactly to do from the Good Doctor: Does he imply that farm subsidies should be erased (good), or just better targeted (not so good). Family Farms DO exist: we have NO OTHER KIND here in Vidalia. However, Vidalia Onion farmers are not asking for subsidies: All they want is that existing trademark protection for the Vidalia Onion be enforced, and that they crack down on the pirates passing off Texas Reds as Vidalias. NOT that much to ask for.

Instead of postfacto haggling over George Bush's reasons to depose Saddam or fretting whether Europe is angry, happy or neither, plenty of things could be done right now — quickly, without rancor and for the public good.

The good Doctor undoubtedly must have found the Marijuana somebody had chucked out their car window while under hot pursuit from the CHiPpies while piddling around in the back 40.

Damn.

Must have been goooood shit.

Before you liberal troll assholes speak up, this happens to be the title of an article by Bruce Thornton at Dr. Victor Davis Hanson's website, which reveals YOUR BLATANT HYPOCRISY on the academic campus.

We have this rule in the War College guidelines that all academics have agreed to as a condition of employment: Any academic who demands the firing of a fellow academic, or flunking of a student, due to the accused's exercise of academic free speech, is subject themselves to disciplinary action, up to and including DISCHARGE.

In other words, ANSWER THE GODDAMNED QUESTION, DON'T ATTACK THE QUESTIONER.

This entry is in response to "true nuff", comment #12 in this Rantburg post.

Romans 3: 19-28:

3:19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.

3:20 For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

3:21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it,

3:22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction;

3:23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

3:24 they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus,

3:25 whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins;

3:26 it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus.

3:27 Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith.

3:28 For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.

I would think it is unscriptural to take the words "apart from" apart from these verses.

=> Read more!

Via Rantburg:

Showing rare defiance, armed villagers challenged the Maoist militants in the southwestern Kapilbastu district, killing six of them on Sunday, Gurung said. Unlike in the past, villagers are no longer succumbing to rebel demands and have killed at least 20 insurgents in the past four days, Gurung said.

Bravo to the Nepalese! Keep up the good work!

I'm pretty irked at all the good stuff out there that the recent Campus outage prevented me from saving. Hopefully, I can dig it back up and comment on it.

Happily, Friday has come, and along with the weekend comes a link to another excellent article by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson that appears on NRO and on his website: Why Democracy?: Ten reasons to support democracy in the Middle East. While some are particular to the Middle East, others are perfectly good reasons that apply the world over. I'll cite my favorites:

1. It is widely said that democracies rarely attack other democracies. Thus the more that exist in the world — and at no time in history have there been more such governments than today — the less likely is war itself. That cliché proves, in fact, mostly true. There are gray areas of course in such blanket generalizations: The Confederates, British, Boers, and Prussians all had parliaments of sorts, but were clearly not as democratic as their adversaries in 1861, 1812, 1899, and 1914. While modern forms of democracy are sometimes hard to define, we more or less know them when we see them: All citizens are eligible to vote and hold office, a free press flourishes, and the rule of constitutional law trumps fiat. Thus should Iraq become a true constitutional government, it is less likely to invade a Kuwait, pay subsidies to suicide murderers, send missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, or gas its own people.

Liberals are people who say that the 90% of the cases that establish the rule should be ignored, and that the 10% of the cases that make the rule a rule of thumb, and not an iron law, should be regarded as definitive. This, of course, applies when those 90% are intellectually goring THEIR OX.

2. More often than not, democracies arise through violence — either by threat of force or after war with all the incumbent detritus of humiliation, impoverishment, and revolution. The shame of the Falklands debacle brought down the Argentine dictatorship in the same manner that Portugal's imperial disasters in Africa steered it from fascism to republicanism. Japan, Germany, and Italy arose from the ashes of war, as did South Korea and in a sense Taiwan as well.

Most likely Ronald Reagan's arms build-up of the 1980s bankrupted the Soviet Empire and freed both its "republics" and the enslaved states of Eastern Europe. So the birth pangs of democracy are often violent, and we should pay little attention to critics who clamor that the United States cannot prompt reform through regime change. Instead, let skeptical Americans (who were not given their own liberty through debate) adduce evidence that freedom is usually a result of mere petition or always indigenous. Even the Philippines and South Africa were the dividends of diplomatic strong-arming, the cessation of U.S. support, and veiled threats that continued autocracy would lead to disaster.

Obviously, there must be people ready to sieze the initiative in the liberated nation in order to move it toward consensual government.

3. Democracies are more likely to be internally stable, inasmuch as they allow people to take credit and accept blame for their own predicaments...

I'm beginning to wonder if leftist support for such regimes is not entirely due to the desire for personal exoneration.

5. In the case of the Muslim world, there is nothing inherently incompatible between Islam and democracy. Witness millions in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey who vote. Such liberal venting may well explain why those who blow up Americans are rarely Indian or Turkish Muslims, but more likely Saudis or Egyptians. The trick is now to show that Arab Muslims can establish democracy, and thus the Palestine and Iraq experiments are critical to the entire region.

6. Democracy brings moral clarity and cures deluded populaces of their false grievances and exaggerated hurts.

Like I said, I wonder if leftist support isn't entirely selfless, but has to do with assuaging their own shortcomings.

7. We fret rightly about the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But the truth is that we worry mainly about nukes in the hands of autocracies like China, Iran, or North Korea. No American loses sleep that the UK or France has deadly missiles. A Russia that used to paralyze American foreign policy by virtue of it atomic arsenal poses little threat as long as President Putin can be persuaded not to destroy his consensual government.

Exactly. The fact that the Left is NOT worried about nukes in the hands of Iran or North Korea just reveals the kind of people they are.

8. The promotion of democracy abroad by democracy at home is internally consistent and empowers rather than embarrasses a sponsoring consensual society. All sensible Europeans and Americans eventually ask themselves why freedom is fine for us but not for others. And if the novel orthodoxy of the post-Cold War era demanded that democracies must cease their support for rightist thugs, the subsequent wisdom is that they should be even more muscular, actively supporting democratic change rather than postfacto politely clapping after its establishment.

From the point of view of the left, it was perfectly legitimate for Communists to propagate their teachings, resorting to fomenting, then derailing, revolutions in other countries if necessary. To Muslims, it is perfectly legitimate for them to propagate their faith, resorting to by force if necessary. However, both groups are now howling because the shoe is being worn on the other foot.

9. By promoting democracies, Americans can at last come to a reckoning with the Cold War. If it was wrong then to back a shah or Saudi Royal family ("keep the oil flowing and the Commies out") or to abandon Afghanistan after repelling the Soviets, it is surely right now not to repeat the error of realpolitik — especially when there is no longer the understandable excuse of having thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons pointing at the heart of America. Since 1946 the United States has had to check the Soviet Union, attempt to save millions from its state slavery, and then liberate its subjects. That messy and brutal task is mostly accomplished, and now we can at least attempt to provide freedom to those states in the past we once neglected.

I'm as "guilty" as the next person when it comes to this: Communism was a great evil that had to be stopped, and at that point in time I was a supporter of "Primitive Islam", believing it to be a viable opponent to Atheistic Communism. I vividly recall a discussion with a fellow Graduate Student who was an Iranian. Like all the other Iranian students, they opposed the Shah, even while studying in the United States on his dime and at his encouragement. I recall pointing out that the only realistic alternative to the Shah was a Communist Iran, and I asserted we (the United States) would not stand for that. HE AGREED WITH ME, citing the fact that there were expatriate Iranian Mullahs who were ready to step in to take over. He promised me that Iran would NEVER go Communist, since Islam was naturally opposed to Atheism, and that there would be "religious reform" upon the arrival of these Mullahs. This satisfied me, since I had bought into the lie that Islam was a religion of peace.

And you know what? He was right!

On ALL COUNTS.

Talk about regretting getting what you pray for. Either he's now part of the Mad Mullahs' Army, or he's dead or in hiding.

I have figured out the problems with upgrading to Fedora Red Hat volume 3 that stymied me with suexec running user CGI programs: If you have user abc, group users, create directories /var/www/abc and /var/www/abc/public_html, create a symbolic link from /home/abc/public_html to /var/www/abc/public_html, add "SuexecUsergroup abc users" to the virtual host file, and (most importantly) make sure the cgi programs are mode 755, NOT 775 (suexec doesn't like cgi programs which can be modified by more than one user, which 775 does, since other users of the same group can modify the file. 755 restricts modification of the file to the owner, while everyone else can read it and execute it).

However, it appears that I can't port this install of MoveableType to the new system since it uses a different version of the database manager than I'm using (I didn't want to use MySQL because I didn't know how to backup the database. Time to learn, I guess). I'm kinda wary of the existing MT export/import function, so I may have to either hack something together, or (more likely) upgrade to the latest version of moveable type and use a different archive directory so all the links to my past posts will still work.

I don't know when I'll get around to this: I've a game computer to reconstruct, a second DSL connection to get onto the campus, and my wife is getting tied up so badly at work that #2 son is starting to misbehave. Sigh.

[UPDATE:] We're back to Red Hat 9: Investigations of Fedora 3 showed very strange behavior on the part of Apache 2 that didn't occur under RH9. I could have worked out all the other problems, but that one stymied me. In addition, we had problems with reconfigured network equipment. We're back on-line at the moment, but that's subject to change.

"This article is posted by participants of the January 27, 2005, BlogBurst (see list at end of article), to remember the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, sixty years ago, on January 27, 1945.

The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaign. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how.

As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish people.

After experimentation, the use of Zyklon B on unsuspecting victim was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice, and Auschwitz was selected as the main factory of death (more accurately, one should refer to the “Auschwitz-Birkenau complex”). The green light for mass annihilation was given at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942, and the mass gassings took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival, sometimes as many as 12,000 in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labour or “medical” experimentation. All were subject to brutal treatment.

In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Red Army POWs, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (though some authors put the number at 1.3 million). Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek and Treblinka.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, sixty years ago, after most of the prisoners were forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found in Auschwitz about 7,600 survivors, but not all could be saved.

For a long time, the Allies were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.

There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the PLO has been receiving from Europe, China and Russia to this very day.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the complicity we are witnessing, knowing where it inevitably leads.

---

Here's a link to the list of participants in the blogburst.

---

=> Read more!

It is not as if nothing has happened or I have nothing to say. The original and primary purpose of this blog is to record my personal research in experimental Christianity, so it stands to reason that there will be periods in which I'll be actually doing research, with periods of writing up what I've found. Of course I post on other issues, but only if I think they merit sharing my, umm, eccentric point of view. I still comment at Rantburg mostly, although a lot of great food for thought comes from Orrin Judd at The Brothers Judd.

The cause of this most recent hiatus is a book by Dave Roberson, "The Walk of the Spirit, The Walk of Power", which details that worthy's thoughts on speaking with tounges. I came across it at the local Bible Bookstore (Crosswalk) while getting something else, paged through it out of curiosity, and noted a rather interesting spiritual warfare tactic that seemed to bear further investigation. It proved effective enough to make me go back and buy the book ("the worker is worthy of his hire"). I've not finished it yet, but he has definitely cleared up some mysteries about speaking in tounges that had confused me, so he's already scoring big points with me. I wouldn't go through Amazon (I got it for $15 plus tax), but it's really worth a look if you believe in that gift.

I'm still looking at the problem with upgrading the OS on the campus server: this revision is worth it since there is now an open-source update service similar to Windows Update (yum), that would essentially obliviate the need to do this periodically.

Buildings and Grounds is intending to upgrade the College Server Operating System from Red Hat 9 to Fedora version 3 during the holiday weekend of January 15-17. This will probably involve a series of outages, the major one probably being the initial install from the CDs on Saturday morning.

Obviously, site availability will be erratic, but we anticipate being back on-line on a regular basis by the evening of January 17.

EDIT: Bah. They either changed SOMETHING about suexec or my assumptions about it were wrong, but something was changed enough that I was unable to access MT to update this blog. I rolled back and am re-evaluating.

I have taken to reading the Analects of Confucius. I have found some really pertinent observations therein, that have made me think. The following passage is much too late for the election, but is pertinent none-the-less:

Tsze-kung asked, "What do you say of a man who is loved by all the people of his neighborhood?"

The Master replied "We may not for that accord our approval to him."

"And what do you say of him who is hated by all the people of his neighborhood?"

The Master said, "We may not for that conclude that he is bad. It is better than either of these cases that the good in the neighborhood love him, and the bad hate him."

Via an e-mail from Tamar, a poster at Israpundit.
---
The following are true facts and verified statistics:
The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000,
or 20% of the world population.

They received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature
1988 - Najib Mahfooz.

Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yaser Arafat

Physics:
1990 - Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad

The Global Jewish population is aproximately 14,000,000 or
about 0.02% of the world population.

They received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charle s Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 -! Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis

Physics:
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1995 - Martin Perl

The Jews are not demonstrating with their dead on the streets,
yelling and chanting and asking for revenge, the Jews are not
promoting brain washing the children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims.

The Jews don't highjack planes, nor kill athletes at the
Olympics, the Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling
for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

The Jews don't have the economical strength of the Petroleum, nor
the possibilities to force the world's media to see "their side" of
the question. Perhaps if the world's Muslims could invest more in normal
education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems, we
could all live in a better world.

THINK ABOUT IT

---
Damn straight.

*sigh*

Dr. Ray, who writes Dissecting Leftism has a Bible Word Commentary . The post for January 10th says this:

What I hope to do on this blog is to look at one text only each day. There are of course MANY interesting texts to look at so goodness knows how long I will keep this blog up but my coverage will be devoted to texts relevant to the doctrine of the holy Trinity until that topic seems to have been exhausted.

*sigh*

Let me tell you what the problem is with this procedure: many of the doctrines established by the Christian Church are composites, and need to be understood as composites. Founding a doctrine on one text is foolish, and proving a doctrine using a single text is, rightly, scorned as "proof-textism".

Let me give three examples. A logical proof chains a selection of axioms and applications of acceptable deductive rules to arrive at a conclusion. Everything has to be looked at as a whole. While there are accepted methods for showing that a proof is invalid, the most insulting, stupid, and self-defeating method of all is to take the proof one step at a time, look at a SINGLE STEP, declare "This doesn't prove the conclusion", THROW IT AWAY AND REFUSE TO CONSIDER IT'S PRESENCE when you repeat the above on the next step. It's insulting, because the examiner is declaring that the prover cannot possibly have the power to chain more than two logical thoughts together, citing as proof the fact that he can ACT AS IF the proof wasn't logically chained together. It's stupid, because the examiner has, by his behavior, declared that he can't handle a deductive process more than one step long in their head at a time to examine it as a whole. It's self-defeating, because if that's the way to disprove THIS proof, then why refuse to apply it to ALL proofs longer than one step? The process denies that there can be a chain of deduction at all. The person who does this probably not only isn't a mathematician, but wants to terminate mathematics as a field of study.

Another example: A biologist wants to disprove that tree frogs exist. He tears a foot off a tree frog, examines it minutely, and dismisses it because it couldn't possibly live apart from a tree frog as it is. The next day, he tears off a leg, examines it minutely, and comes to the same conclusion. At the end of a couple of weeks doing this, he has a pile of separate, disjoint, and pretty dry body parts, and declares that such a creature could not obviously have existed since it couldn't have been born, much less survive, in such a disconnected state. If that's the way to properly examine ONE animal, why not use it examine ALL animals, and prove that NO animals exist? I don't think any biologist studies animals like this at all, and accepting this process as a valid method of studying animals will result in destroying biology as a field of study.

A third example: The Jews had a rule that any accusation had to be supported by two or three witnesses. The prosecutor brings forth a witness, who testifies against the defendant. The Defending attorney DEMANDS that the witness be expelled, and his testimony stricken, because he's JUST ONE WITNESS. Let's grant his demand, because that rule about two or three witnesses DOES apply here. The prosecutor brings forth his second witness, who testifies against the defendant, and incidentally supports the first witness. The defending attorney arises and DEMANDS that THIS witness be expelled and his testimony stricken ALSO, because he's JUST ONE WITNESS. When the prosecuting attorney protests (since it is obvious that this witness supported the prior, and thus constitutes a second witness), the defending attorney sneers "Where's the testimony of the first one? It's not on the record! It doesn't exist! That makes the testimony of THIS witness the testimony from a SINGLE witness, so it isn't admissible!" I don't think any REAL judge or prosecuting attorney would put up with BS like this, for the intent of the process the defending attorney is employing is designed to terminate the law court as an avenue of justice for everyone.

This, of course, is merely a perverse form of divide and conquer: the parts of the logical proof are not permitted to support each other. The parts of the frog are not permitted to remain connected to each other to keep it alive and thus prove its existence. The witnesses are not permitted to support each other's testimony against the defendant, and are not allowed to pile up to a level that would demand conviction. Hell, even the FRENCH can defeat the American Army, IF the American Army is only allowed to send out ONE soldier at a time to attack them every day.

Of course, the American Army isn't going to be this stupid and and send out JUST ONE SOLDIER a day. There's power in massed forces. However, because the Bible isn't a human being that can cry "FOUL!" against Dr. Ray, or FORCE him to try to consider a multi-verse doctrine, he clearly feels that he has the privilege of treating the Bible like our above mentioned pseudo-logician, pseudo-biologist, pseudo-jurist, or pseudo-French General.

In his post on January 9, Dr. Ray snarkily says:

He quotes Paul to say that you have to believe in the resurrection to be a Christian and seems to think that implies that you have to believe Christ is God. I would have thought it implied the exact opposite! Or was God dead for three days?

*sigh* Curt at North Western Winds is guilty of an incomplete proof chain, but he'll figure it out (First John, Curt). In the meantime, the last time I looked, Christians believed in the doctrine of the immortal soul, in which being dead is the death of the BODY, while the soul either goes to live with God until Resurrection Day or resides in Sheol until then. Absent from the body, present with the Lord, as Paul said. In Acts 2:24-27, Peter talks about the Resurrection of Jesus ending the agonies of death. What part of Jesus did you expect any reasonable Christian to believe WAS God? His body? God didn't HAVE a body (leastways, not up until then). It was his spirit, his soul, that was God. It was his SOUL that went to hell, and whose agony was terminated by the Resurrection. (How bad is Hell? Bad enough that an infinite God couldn't stand it longer than 36 hours minimum, 72 hours tops.)

But it's only one verse a day, so other doctrines, and other verses, are NOT ALLOWED to come to the rescue or lend logical support or inject their voices.

The posting for January 11 is an example of the old adage "A text without a context is a pretext." He compares the usage of "I AM" in John 8:58 and decides it isn't at all to be compared with the usage of "I AM" in Exodus 3:14. He then says:

What Jesus actually said in his native Aramaic, we can only guess of course. We have only John's (Gnostic) report in Greek with its usual deliberate ambiguity.

As compared to deliberate obscurantism?

57The Jews replied, "You aren't 50 years old yet, and You've seen Abraham?" 58 Jesus said to them, "I assure you: Before Abraham was, I am." 59 At that, they picked up stones to throw at Him. But Jesus was hidden and went out of the temple complex.

He may decide to DISALLOW verse 59 from speaking, but it's still there, and it's dishonest to put on blinkers and throw up walls to prevent it from being seen or heard. That's so MSM. He may confess that John's Greek is obscure, but it seems to me Jesus' contemporaries didn't think what he said was obscure, unintelligible, or ambiguous at all. Jesus escapes using the same method he used to escape his home townsmen, leaves the temple, but decides to chuck a logical BOMB in their midst by healing the man born blind, and whose denoument is given in the following chapter 9. When they said to the blind man, "Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner!", what sin does anyone reasonably reading and believing this account think they were accusing him of other than blasphemy in taking the ineffable name represented by "I AM"? (It's a shame that people don't see John 9 in a lighter vein: It's the Monty Python Dead Parrot routine, First Century Jesus style.)

A final passage from Ecclesiastes 7, on the process of wisdom:

23 All this I have tested by wisdom; I said, "I will be wise"; but it was far from me. 24 That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out? 25 I turned my mind to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the sum of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness which is madness. 26 And I found more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters; he who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. 27 Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, adding one thing to another to find the sum, 28 which my mind has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. 29 Behold, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many devices.

"...but they have sought out many devices."

I think the Wise man would have been amazed at the Internet, but NOT on what he would find on it. Dr. Ray's "verse a day" blog probably would be one of those.

[[EDIT: 1/12/2005] After musing a bit on this, I realized what might be Dr. Ray's "problem". I use quotes, since it's obvious to me now why he doesn't think it's a problem, but I do: he doesn't believe in the unity of Scripture. The basic assumption Christians bring to the Scriptures is that "All scripture is given by God", and thus has an underlying unity that is enforced by the Originator: Contradictions are only apparent, and is an indication of a problem in interpretation, such as misreading of a text, mistranslation of a text, invalid assumption, superfluous assumption, etc., etc.. This belief has served me in very good stead. However, being an atheist, Dr. Ray is not obligated to believe it. Thus, the fact that Hebrews 1 uses the same formula for describing how the world is created (and using the same greek root for "through") that John 1 uses is irrelevant to him, even though it potentially indicates "common usage". He feels justified enough to deny there's a connection and move on, while the Underlying Continuity principle requires that *I* MAKE SURE there's no connection before declaring there isn't any, because the default assumption is that there IS a connection.]]

=> Read more!

Bruce Thornton at Dr. Hanson's website has an excellent review of a guide put out by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE): FIRE's Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Both the review and the guide are highly recommended.

Bruce Thornton has a really good post at Dr. Hanson's site: This is Your Wake-up Call: Jared Diamond can't find the key to superior civilization. I won't quote from it here, but merely direct you to it and will share my thoughts that spring from pondering it. This entry is subject to expansion without notice.

• Thornton's discussion of Materialist Determinism mirrors C. S. Lewis' argument that it (known to him at that time as naturalism) cannot account for reasoning, and thus, as a philosophy, is self-refuting. A good book which polishes the argument and updates it is C. S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea, by Victor Reppert. Reppert says this activity is necessary because Philosophy goes through phases in which the basis for establishing a proof changes. It is not as much a posing of new questions as much as it is a demand that answers to old questions leap different hurtles. Lewis' original presentation in his book "Miracles" was designed to satisfy the standards of an earlier phase, and was thought to have been refuted at the time when, Reppert points out, it merely didn't satisfy the demands of the phase then in fashion in Philosophy.

  I point this out since the current hokum being peddled about Philosophy and university philosophers is that they are engaged in an eternal search for the truth, when the fact is that they periodically uproot the goal posts that any philosophical argument must pass, plunk them down someplace else, then imply that the arguments that they don't like have been refuted. This is like changing the rules of Football this year, then declaring that a different team actually won the Superbowl last year.

  The reason why Philosophy goes in phases is because the end of a phase is usually signalled by some eminence pointing out the questions the current phase can't or won't answer, and showing why answering those questions are important. I recall one particular phase in which the retortive argument was summarily declared invalid. The retortive argument essentially refutes a philosophical argument by showing that it is self-contradictory, which is the tack that Lewis' argument from reason takes to refute Materialist determinism's earlier incarnation, naturalism. I regret not remembering the name of the Jesuit philosopher who defended a form of Lewis' argument at that time and had to deal with the new location of the goal posts. Rather than try and rework the argument from reason in a way to satsify the ban, the Jesuit philosopher chose instead to refute the ban on retortive arguments by merely asking, "Says who?"

  The counterargument he made was sheer, unadulterated genius, since he pointed out that nobody ever gave a PROOF that the retortive argument was an invalid method of refutation. Absent a proof, it constitutes a mere DECLARATION that it cannot be used in disproving an argument. By saying "Says who?", he exposed the declaration of invalidity itself as an argument from Authority. To uphold the ban, the philosophers in question would ALSO have to ban the use of the Argument from Authority to refute arguments. However, the Argument from Authority is what Philosophy, and Philosophers, use to keep Church and State out of its turf. Give that up, and it has nothing else to keep either Church or State from saying, "This is what we say is truth, and you will teach it as the truth. Or else." It is one thing to play around with ideas like Materialist determinism that invalidates the Process of Philosophy only if taken too far: one merely chooses not to take them too far, and works out a gentleman's agreement with other philosophers not to take the ideas too far. It's quite another to tear down the only wall that keeps the Religious and Government esablishments from coming in and telling you what you should believe. Or worse yet, hold you ACCOUNTABLE for what you said. THAT would spoil the little academic sandboxes and gigs that University Philosophy departments have spent decades, if not centuries, to establish .

• Darwinian Evolution is the mechanism that Materilalist Determinism says accounts for life and man's existance. There is nothing in Materialist Determinism that demands Diamond's simultaneous adoption of Multiculturalism, defined as the declared equality of all cultures. Previous cultures have arisen, ruled, and then died out, so the question must be posed: why should cultures be EXEMPT from the process of cultural selection, which would involve a process of competition between cultures for the prize of passing one's values, ideas, and beliefs on to the next generation, in the same way that biological, natural selection requires a process of competition between individuals in a species, as well as competition between species, for the prize of passing one's superior (and selfish) genes on to the next generation? I can't see how he can consistently hold BOTH belief sets consistently.
• This may be philosophically naive, but I've always viewed the distinction between free-will/free-choice and fate as a question of whether the nature of the one (purportedly) making the decision is fundamentally non-deterministic or deterministic (respectively). The adjective "material" in Materialistic Determinism essentially says that "if a decision making entity arises from matter, then it is necessarily deterministic". It seems to me that that could be a good basis on which a Five Point Calvinist could found his understanding of "Total Depravity".
• The above is obviously not an endorsement of Darwinian Evolution. Selection based on competition between candidates to determine which is the fittest is based on observable facts, and is called optimization in some fields, and the Free Enterprise system in Economics. If you want some form of improvement, selection between candidates is necessary, and making them compete is a good way of selecting the best, but that is not, in itself, sufficient. Generation of candidates is also a factor as well. The question Darwinians haven't answered to my satisfaction is whether the existing biological mechanisms that use DNA to generate organic candidates generates the required variety and diversity to get a species out of a local optimum. Natural selection is a great for weeding out the insufficent, but it is mere selection. There's a saying "pickers can't be choosers", meaning that those who are given the privilege of picking from a selection often don't have the option of generating the list. You can choose door number 1, 2, or 3, but you can't determine what's behind the door. Current experience with animal breeding tells me the DNA mechanism self-limits variance, and many "proofs" of evolution (panda thumbs/moths) look to me like species variances jockying around a local optimum in response to noise and small environmental perturbations.

  My current (and evolving) belief is a form of punctuated interventionism: God lets living things (and situations) work themselves into a local optimum, at which point He's either satisfied and leaves things as they are, or intervenes by perturbing the system at a very low, and thus very invisible, level. When it comes to living systems, it works itself out as genetic intervention at the egg/sperm level. When it comes to societies, he starts with a single individual or group of individuals. At the moment, I find this rough hypothesis intellectually attractive because it presents a consistent style of Divine interaction that can be seen in Natural, Biblical, and personal history: waiting till things get stuck, and then stepping in, seems to me to be the way God chooses to act in the Old and New Testaments. It certainly seems to be the way He's worked in the past with me. It's consistent with the observations in the fossil record. I call my theory "puntuated interventionism" to show it as a variant of punctuated equilibrium, which tries to explain away the lack of many intermediate evolutionary forms as "recording artifacts". My theory holds that the fossil record itself is actually complete and reliable ("what you see is actually what happened"), but not completely read by us ("you haven't seen everything yet").

  In this sense, Mankind is unique because of the way that Adam was "made": by God breathing some of His Spirit into him to make him a living soul in a way that he didn't with other living things. The mechanism of the Incarnation, which C.S. Lewis saw as a divinely created sperm fertilizing a naturally occurring human ovum, indicates how God could have introduced "perturbations" into a species that are now explained as individuals getting environmentally isolated and producing genetically unique offspring. Looked at in this way, I believe that the last great leap of human evolution upwards took place in Jerusalem a bit over 1940 years ago, when God introduced a new mechanism for individual (and thus species) evolution.

Orrin Judd cites an article by William J. Stuntz at Tech Central Station that tries to make a case that the Religious Right and University Illiberals can unite politically. In it, he makes the following argument:

So what would this coming-together look like? What ideological territory, what issue space, can secular academics and evangelical Christians both occupy? Here's a short list:

1. Abortion. Begin with the hardest nut to crack. The secular left believes strongly in abortion rights. Conservative Christians believe passionately that abortion is evil. Surely common ground can't exist here.

Yet it might. The key is that the two sides don't need to agree on premises in order to buy the same conclusion. Pro-life Christians want to see fewer abortions. That is already happening: the abortion rate has been falling since 1981; from that year to 2000 the rate fell by 27 percent, according to census data. Among teenage girls, the decline is greater still. The abortion rate is probably lower today than in 1975; it might be lower than in 1972, the year before the Supreme Court legalized the practice nationwide. What lies behind these trends? Strangely enough, the answer has a lot to do with the law being pro-choice. When the culture is sharply divided on some kind of behavior, the side that wins the law's endorsement tends to lose ground, culturally and politically. Roe v. Wade has been the pro-life movement's friend. Those who want abortions to be rare would do well to keep them safe and legal.

There's more, but the first paragraph makes enough lying assertions and devious inferences to render the entire essay questionable.

His first trick to try to confuse matters is to avoid naming the fundamental reason why the Religious Right opposes abortion: it's killing a living, growing human being. I can't say "murder", because "murder" is a LEGAL term, and the whole point of Roe V. Wade was to DECLARE that abortion was NOT MURDER. Did that declaration make abortion okay? Technically speaking, if a Southern slaveholder shot his slave dead, it wasn't murder because killing a slave wasn't DECLARED murder. Did that legal loophole make slavery and the killing of slaves okay? Technically speaking, the Nazis did NOT murder millions of Jews in the Gas Chambers, because the Law, at that time, did not DECLARE it murder. Did that legal loophole make the Holocaust okay? When one asks the question with regard to abortion/ slavery/genocide, Mr. Stuntz says okay/evil/evil, while the Religious right says evil/evil/evil. Given the reasoning, it is obvious why Mr. Stuntz declines to get to the root cause of the opposition to abortion.

His second trick is a form of bait and switch, displaying either a profound degree of innumeracy (sp?), or a great deal of deceptive intent: He agrees that pro-lifers want fewer abortions, but then baits-and-switches abortion RATES rather than abortion NUMBERS. This is called "changing units" if you're doing a physics or math problem, and has cost many a student many a point.

The intent of the second trick is to obscure the third trick: picking a bad baseline. The claim in THIS paragraph is that Roe V. Wade somehow caused the decline in the abortion rate between 1981 and 2000, due to it being "the law of the land". Unfortunately, the TRUE baseline should be 1973, when Roe V. Wade went into effect. This table gives absolute abortion numbers, and indicates more than a DOUBLING of the number of abortions from 1973 to 1981. The mathematical sleight of hand is to divide the number of abortions by the TOTAL POPULATION, which grew from about 226 million from 1980 to about 281 million in 2000. The absolute decrease is closer to 14% between 1981 and 1997, while population growth was about 24% between 1981 and 2000. If you took a baseline of 1973, when Roe V Wade was declared legal, instead of 1981, then USING CENSUS DATA, the abortion rate in 1973 was 0.366%, compared to 0.485% in 2000. That is undeniably an INCREASE in the rate since Roe V. Wade, rather than the DECREASE that he suggests.

What IS Mr. Stuntz's problem? It took me 15 to 20 minutes using Google to find the basic statistics and run the numbers, and he just settles for vagueness, conjectures, handwaving, shifts in terminology, and patent innumeracy. If you're pro-life, at worst you had the vague feeling that he's trying to pull something over on you. If you're "pro-choice", you should be cringing: is your cause so indefensible that THIS is the only way to support it?

Mr. Stuntz, of course, changes tack and acknowledges, later in the article, that Roe V. Wade energized the Religious Right, which led to evangelization against abortion. He tries to make the case that the Law being on the Pro-abortion side is, in reality, good for the Pro-life side. I am sure that that situation is as much comfort to the aborted babies than it was for the slaves and the Jews. Christians recognize such an argument as being similar to "Let us do Evil, that Good may come." (And if Mr. Stuntz doesn't know how that applies in this case, then he really is in no position to argue that there is a potential for political reconciliation between Church and University, Religious Right and the New Left.) His use of the anti-slavery movement is counter-productive for his purpose:

This phenomenon -- legal victory that leads to cultural and political defeat -- has a long history. In the 1850s, slaveholders collected some huge legal prizes: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision. Those victories produced an anti-slavery movement powerful enough to elect Lincoln and win the Civil War.

The analogy implies eventual, total, and complete banning of abortion and the destruction of the pro-abortion movement and cause. His plea:

The compromise here is simple: let's agree to leave Roe alone, at least for now, and to fight this cultural battle on a cultural battleground. Not a legal one.

Could thus be mapped to something that could have been said over 150 years ago:

The compromise here is simple: let's agree to leave slavery alone, at least for now, in the states where it exists, and to fight this cultural battle on a cultural battleground. Not a legal one.

Mr. Stuntz's declaration that Roe V. Wade is similar to "The Law of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be revoked" is specious: the Illiberal left acknowledges the possiblity that there are pernicious and evil laws and court decisions which need to be overturned as a matter of moral necessity. His demand that pro-lifers abandon a similar belief regarding Roe V. Wade is merely an assertion that HE has a right that they do not, and will be treated as the blatant hypocrisy of a desperate man seeing the handwriting on the wall that he deserves.

And I shall leave it at that. His main goal in the article is to suggest that a political alliance between the New Left and the Religious is possible, mainly because both sides value justice, and thus would support a "redistributive" administration that would help the poor (which he declares as the #1 Domestic problem facing the nation today). This can't happen while the Religious right votes Republican, so he suggests how to talk them into voting Democrat. It appears that he has bought into the shallow model of Christianity that his fellows have shilled to the masses, which involves cherrypicking verses in true proof-text style. They ignore the passages in the New Testament that condemn idleness and demand that people work for a living: Paul ordered one of his protoges to keep young widows off the Church dole, but favor those who were older and who had a solid record of a good work ethic. I've talked about it here, where I question whether "charity" in which the IRS is a facilitator really counts as a virtue in the eyes of God.

Here's a closing rhetorical question that Mr. Stuntz may choose not to answer: Seeing how his compatriots, the Illiberal Left, has fought tooth and nail for the last 40 plus years to get their way via activist courts, biased Media, politicians who claim to be conservative but vote Republican, and University professors who teach propaganda instead of knowledge and wisdom, and have never deigned to cut us, their opponents, any real slack, when why should we, now that we've caught on and started to turn the tide, cut you assholes any real slack in return?

[edit:] My thanks to Orrin for linking to this article from his website.