About that whole “Don’t be evil” thing

Another reminder of why Buttle’s World left blogspot. Google is evil.

(You do use ask.com as your main search engine, right?)

Remember the Barbary Pirates?

So does the U.S. Navy.

What’s Wrong With America?

You’ve let us all down by not going to see our movies.

One

That’s all it takes when it’s the right one.

The Race Is Over

The other candidates can just pack it in now. Huckabee wins.

Could you get a job at the Times?

Take the entrance exam.

Islam Reform Watch

A link to this poll was just left as a comment on a previous Buttle’s World post. As with all internet polls it’s completely unscientific. But the fact that it even exists is a very encouraging sign.

Britain National Suicide Watch

Reversing the nursery rhyme, the Fly seems to be inviting the Spider in.

Rhymes with “Witch”

The TV station is trying to scrub this outrageous report from the web. It’s still here, for now.

It’s everything you hate about so-called journalists, in concentrated form. What a self-righteous b****.

I doubt that stupidity is a sufficient explanation

Krauthammer’s Razor doubted.

$2,100,100.00 and Counting

Scary Reid’s charitable contribution continues to grow.

Digging for Bad News

It’s all Bush’s fault.

Catching up on Iraq

I’ve been behind on these. Totten has a video, On Patrol in Ramadi.

Yon has a touching tribute in Under Distant Stars, which came with an email message:

I’ve just spent 10 days on the Iran-Iraq border with an excellent British “Battle Group” called 4 Rifles. We truly were living under the desert stars.

I am currently in Basra. There are reports that Basra is in chaos.

These reports are false. Basra is mostly peaceful; the British have not lost a soldier in combat for more than a month, and Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence has plummeted in the last six weeks or so.

The British have NOT pulled out of Iraq or Basra yet, but from what I can see, their force reduction decisions are militarily and politically sound, and are supported by top American commanders in Baghdad.

The news reports I am seeing about Basra are incomplete at best, and largely inaccurate.

(Reminds me of Mosul during 2005.)

And his latest dispatch also came with this:

Iraq is on the mend, al Qaeda is on the run, and the civil war has abated to a point where the term "civil war" no longer applies.

Accurate war coverage is increasingly important.  Even prominent seemingly well-informed
persons can get
it wrong, such as retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez who previously commanded the war in Iraq.  His recent public statements –selectively excerpted and then widely dispersed by the hot winds of media – made it clear that this former senior commander is far out of touch with the current situation.  
 
But there are commanders with a finger on the pulse.  

When earlier this year I wrote about the 1-4 CAV transforming an abandoned seminary in a Baghdad neighborhood that had been decimated by
civil war, the "surge" had not even begun;
but already pundits, politicians and editors had declared it a failure. Though I’d spent only a few days with LTC Crider and his 1-4 CAV soldiers at the new COP Amanche, I ended the dispatch on a note of hope based on observation. I recently received an email from LTC Crider with an update on that Baghdad neighborhood.  Please read "Achievements of the Human Heart" and see for yourself.
 
I was in al Basra province when I saw news reports claiming that Basra city had descended into chaos in the wake of an announcement about the draw down of
British Soldiers.  I emailed the facts
about Basra to several bloggers who hold the media accountable, and the resulting effort got the attention of Tom Foreman who anchors CNN’s "This Week at War."  We were able to make a CNN interview, and the result is a segment that accurately reflects a complex and changing situation.  Bravo to CNN for setting the record straight, and to the tireless bloggers who are making a substantial difference in the way news about the war is delivered.

There are major developments to share with readers in upcoming dispatches. If
things go at-least-mostly according to plan
(which is all we can hope for in war), and if I can rely on the help of readers who share my frustration with the lack of accurate reporting, we can  significantly widen the stream of news flowing from Iraq so more people can obtain a truer picture.  This will require the will and generosity of readers.  But more on that, soon.
 
Michael
Basra, Iraq

Investing Idea

Mikey Kaus may be on to something.

Time for the Invisible Hand to become a Fist

Maybe I’m just one little guy with one little blog. But I’m going to try to get this idea spread to the major gun organizations: NRA, GOA, and SAF.

This is a call for help from inside California to freedom lovers everywhere.

Background:

Governer Schwarzenkennedy just signed the so-called microstamping bill. This requires that new semi-automatic firearms sold in California starting in 2010 have microstamping technology which puts a unique serial number on the shell casing as it is fired. The trouble is that the technology doesn’t exist, meaning by 2010 you won’t be able to get a semi-automatic in this state.

Every firearms and ammunition manufacturer in the country needs to stop selling to California today. This especially means to California law enforcement.

Action items for every gun owner and shooter in the whole country:

1) Ask the following question at the gun shop:

Does the manufacturer of this gun/ammo sell to anybody in the state of California?

If the answer is positive, your reply has to be, “please show me a different brand, and tell them I won’t buy theirs until they stop”. If that means you leave the shop empty handed, so be it.

2) Contact the major manufacturers letting them know, politely, exactly why they should be following Ronnie Barrett’s example. Let them know that we’re on their side. If this sort of idiotic anti-freedom legislation rolls out to the rest of the country they’ll lose their entire market permanently. They know even better than we that microstamping is science fiction.

When every police department in the state starts running out of guns and ammo, maybe the littlebrains in Sacramento will get a clue. And the lethargic California gun owners who aren’t yet active will have to get busy being squeaky wheels.

This microstamping bill is as close to a ban as you can get without being one. Now is the time to act.

Here are contact links for Colt, Remington, Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Taurus, Sig Sauer, Heckler & Koch, Mossberg, Para-Ordnance , Wilson Combat.

Got another or better contact link? Please leave a comment.

Update:

Judging by some email I’ve gotten, I didn’t make it clear enough that I mean for this to be an ammo boycott also. If ammo suppliers think they’ll lose all their national civilian ammo sales because they’re
selling to California law enforcement, they might be willing to put on the brakes. And the sooner the cops in California run out of ammo, the sooner the heavyweight lobbyists will kick democrat (and RINO) patootie in Sacramento.

A Partial List

of those who did not win a Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Britain Happy to Submit or Die

Melanie Phillips calls them on it.

The Idiotarians Have Taken Over California

Governer Schwarzenkennedy just signed the microstamping bill. This requires that new semi-automatic firearms sold in California starting in 2010 have so-called microstamping technology which puts a unique serial number on the shell casing as it is fired. The Governator said at the signing,

While I appreciate and understand that this technology is not without
limitations, I am signing this bill to provide law enforcement with an
additional tool for solving crimes committed with semi-automatic handguns in
California.

Public safety is one of the most important roles of government and I
encourage all stakeholders to work on improving this technology so that it
may become an even more effective crime fighting tool.

I’m glad he “appreciates” that the technology is “not without limitations”. Allow me to list a few of the limitations.

First, it doesn’t work, and nobody makes guns that have it. Oh, some claim it works in a lab. But it really is still just science fiction. I guess that’s the “improving this technology” part is.

Second, it can be defeated in 5 minutes work using a nail file. That’s it. The high tech system can be nullified by just scratching the little stamper.

Third, you just know that some bad guys will sweep the ground at shooting ranges for brass to scatter at crime scenes.

Fourth, it won’t affect revolvers. Guess what’s going to get more popular. If not revolvers, it will be…

Fifth, the millions of guns without microstamps in them. This is a mature technology. Old guns will work just fine with new ammo. So either they’ll just be stolen or smuggled into the state from elsewhere.

This sort of nonsense really defines stupidity. I can only hope that all gun manufacturers stop selling weapons to all California police and state agencies right now. They certainly have no motivation to actually implement this absurd technology, so they may as well play hardball and see how the morons in Sacramento squirm when the cops can’t get guns anymore. Perhaps if they feel the heat they’ll see the light.

Rush’s Bid for Greatness

A brilliant move.

Bid here.

Update:

As of Sunday morning the bid is over $40,000. And you can see the backstory here.

Cascading Into Error

Be sure to read this cautionary article.

(Free registration required, or use bugmenot.)

In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.

There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn’t clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet.

Second, there wasn’t really a new epidemic of heart disease. Yes, more cases were being reported, but not because people were in worse health. It was mainly because they were living longer and were more likely to see a doctor who diagnosed the symptoms.

Algore’s Big Prize

Congratulations!

The Leak That Wasn’t

LGF has an update on that SITE story. May not have been as bad as reported.

The Most Powerful Microscope in the World

How about resolution down to a fourth the diameter of a carbon atom?

That’s so crazy only a university professor could believe it

Heh.

The Losers Can’t Lose Fast Enough

The most famous skyscraper in New York will be celebrating a holiday of the men who destroyed two New York skyscrapers.

Regretable

That’s what some are calling the leak that ruined SITE’s ability to monitor al Qaeda videos.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.

“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

Since it’s a WaPo story, the blame goes to President Bush, of course. The real blame belongs with the leaker (CIA, I’m looking at you), who should be hunted down and tried for treason.

Like that’s gonna happen.

Hat tip: Agrapha.

Wanna Barf?

The Nasty Little Man is getting a movie.

The trailer is laugh-out-loud funny. If you can keep your lunch down.

In Dutch

LGF and Christopher Hitchens are right on: America needs to stand behind Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Chill Out

The skeptical environmentalist points out that even if you buy anthropogenic warming (he does) Kyoto is not the way to fix it.

The typical cost of cutting a ton of CO2is currently about $20. Yet, according to a wealth of scientific literature, the damage from a ton of carbon in the atmosphere is about $2. Spending $20 to do $2 worth of good is not smart policy. It may make you feel good, but it’s not going to stop global warming.

We need to reduce the cost of cutting emissions from $20 a ton to, say, $2. That would mean that really helping the environment wouldn’t just be the preserve of the rich but could be opened up to everyone else — including China and India, which are expected to be the main emitters of the 21st century but have many more pressing issues to deal with first.

The way to achieve this is to dramatically increase spending on research and development of low-carbon energy. Ideally, every nation should commit to spending 0.05 percent of its gross domestic product exploring non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, be they wind, wave or solar power, or capturing CO2emissions from power plants. This spending could add up to about $25 billion per year but would still be seven times cheaper than the Kyoto Protocol and would increase global R&D tenfold. All nations would be involved, yet the richer ones would pay the larger share.

Gee… what non-carbon energy source somehow didn’t make the list?

Yes, he’s still an environmentalist, whatever that really means. I have to agree with his calls for cooling it, and kudos for pointing out that global warming just might be a good thing.

The Best Police in Iraq

Michael J. Totten has another post up. It includes a surprise chance to meet AQI face to face.

“Who is he in the cell with?” I said.

“They locked him up with Al Qaeda.”

I froze.

Al Qaeda was just down the steps? I was suddenly overwhelmed with morbid curiosity. Ever since September 11, 2001, I have wanted to look into the eyes of the kinds of people who would murder thousands of innocents and think their reward would be virgins.