Live from Londonistan

From the heart of Jolly Olde we bring you this representative of the oxymoronically-named Institute of Islamic Thought, courtesy of LGF.

Kofi Annan: When merely corrupt won’t do

Guess what year this cartoon was published.

Visit Michelle Malkin for the shocking answer.

Meanwhile, Michelle is also all over the story I heard this morning about those UN “observers” who got hit by Israel. One of them, a Canadian solder, had been emailing a general back home about how Hezbollah was “all over” their position in an obvious attempt to draw Israeli fire. Prepare yourself for another shock: According to Lee Rodgers this morning, the only person who could order them out of that position was… Go on. Guess.

Of course he’d be profusely and publicly grateful if, say, the IDF were to save the life of a UN soldier. Right?

The 20th Terrorist

Michael Yon links to this story in the Washington Post (of all places – congrats to the MSM on this one) about a young man who almost became one of the 911 hijackers, but has since gone straight.

Thabit continues to receive death threats. “They are like a mafia, a gang, and I am revealing their secrets. They want to silence me,” he says.

It’s encouraging to see that not all the reaction has been negative.

Since his book came out, Thabit has gotten favorable fan mail, and in March Prince Khalid al-Faisal, governor of Asir province, where the majority of the Saudi hijackers came from, bought 50 copies of “The 20th Terrorist” in Lebanon. The prince then invited the heads of Asir’s education departments to his weekly salon and distributed it to them as mandatory reading.

Read the whole thing to learn about how the Islamofacists manipulate young men.

The Right Stuff

One of my favorites, from a movie chock-a-block full of great lines:

“We’re not saying anything new here today. We’re just saying what needs to be said, again and again, with fierce conviction.”

According to Myrna Blythe, Senator Rick Santorum has enough of the right stuff to say what needs to be said.

There was no buoyant “campaign speak” that the group might have expected to hear. Instead, he was sober and very intense as he talked about what he said was “the biggest issue facing our children’s future, the world war we are now fighting, which, at its heart, is just like the previous three global struggles.”
Unlike the president, he said, he does not call our current conflict the War on Terror. That, he maintained, would be like saying the Second World War was just “a war against blitzkrieg.” Rather, he said we should name the enemy we are fighting, not the tactics they employ. “Our world-wide enemy is Islamic Fascism.” But, he also said, “we are unable to come to terms with this terrible reality.”

And K-Lo calls him Senator Do-the-Right-Thing.

He could have fewer headaches — and less public ones at that — as a well-paid lobbyist or lawyer. But when you ask him why the heck he wants a job that entails so much abuse and so much frustration — some of the latter caused by his own party — he responds knowingly, but with an obvious humility: “Right now is an important time in the history of our country,” he explained to me recently, with a sense of something bigger than himself he is participating in and being guided by. He believes he has made a positive contribution as a senator and has something more to offer. Going from Iraq discourse to just talking American to American, he explained that, for him, political service is just the right thing to do. And that’s what he knows he ought to do. Because that’s what we do.

The War Zone

Michael Yon likes him. So does BLACKFIVE.

So, naturally, Buttle’s World had to check him out. He’s a filmmaker from Hollywood, but on our side. He’s doing documentary filmmaking right with the troops in Iraq. I mean close enough to be able to give a first-hand account of an IED attack.

With a warning for language (you expected soldiers to talk like Kindergarten teachers?) Buttle’s World invites you to bookmark:

Pat Dollard

Recognize the war you’re in

As Orwell put it, “[W]e have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

Whether Bush remembers it or not, we need to remember that this World War is a religious war. It doesn’t matter that we don’t want it to be one. It takes willful blindness not to see that, to the enemy, that’s precisely what it is.

Religion can’t be reasoned with. That’s why religious wars are the longest and bloodiest.

“A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.”

–Edward De Bono

Footfall

Every time I see an Islamist wearing glasses, or talking on a TV or, for that matter, using a car, I’m reminded of a very entertaining book by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: Footfall.

In it a civilization of under-evolved, elephantine creatures overrun a much more advanced civilization by force, and inherit their advanced technology. They proceed to use it to clumsily conquer every planet they find.

It’s not spoiling the ending to say that things don’t go as expected for them on Earth. And the book has one of my favorite descriptions ever. A space ship is lifting off, a large one. It is lifted by a series of atomic bombs going off under it. (This was a real idea called Project Orion.) The authors describe the launch as experienced by the passengers:

“God was knocking on the door. And He wanted in real bad.”

Anyway, I often think of those space barbarians when I see cretins from a culture totally incapable of producing anything like eye glasses or the internet using the technology of its enemies. Here’s hoping things don’t get quite as bad as they did in Niven and Pournelle’s book before we win.

As we shall. Some day.

UPDATE:

Dan Simmons thinks they’ll get that bad. And worse. (Caution: language)

UPDATED UPDATE
Speaking of terrifying technology in the hands of savages, how did I miss the bomb?

It’s baaa-aack!

Old. Slow. Deadly.

And about to get deadlier. The warthog is back.

The aircraft, which is known for flying low and slowly over battlefields in support of ground troops, will be upgraded to the A-10C configuration. The upgraded aircraft will have more computer technology and precision-guided weapons and the ability to shoot from higher altitudes in all weather.

Bad news for Jihadists everywhere.

Heads in the sand? Or their own lower GI?

Just today I was reflecting on the mental acuity of those who don’t realize that it’s all the same war, and wondering what it’s like to see one’s own colon from so close up. Michelle Malkin has had similar, if less scatalogical, thoughts prompted by watching buffoons on the MSM who don’t think Hezbollah is our problem.

And Jeff Jacoby took care of the Chicken Hawk straw man, prompting this from Cliff May.

There is a war of arms. And there is a war of ideas.

They are not just inter-related, they are interdependent. They are equally consequential. When we get the ideas wrong, when we misunderstand the problem, we end up with the wrong solution and all that follows from that.

Dear Santa

I have a confession to make. I was never comfortable telling my daughter the Santa Claus lie. It’s really important to me that I always tell her the truth. And that one bugged me. Last August she figured it out, and accepted my apology for the story. I was very proud of her.

So why am I blogging about this now? Because I really wonder how I get so worked up about Santa in a world where people do this to their children.

Rocket to nowhere.

I’ve said for years (even before the first one blew up, I think) that the Shuttle is a dog. It’s the 1975 panel-sided Mercury station wagon of space. And that’s on a good day, when it doesn’t kill its crew. On Idle Words is an article which lays out the case in delicious detail that it’s time to stick a fork in it. (And in the ISS, too.)

The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it. But the Shuttle program has shown the flip side of NASA, as rational goals detach from reality under constantly changing political and funding pressures. NASA has learned valuable bureaucratic lessons – it knows to spread its work over as many jurisdictions as possible, it has learned that chronic funding is always better than acute funding, however much money a one-time outlay might save in the long run, and it has demonstrated that ineffectual projects can be sustained indefinitely if cancelling them is sufficiently awkward. But these are lessons we have already learned for far less on the ground, with Amtrak, and building a more photogenic, spaceborne version of the Sunset Limited in orbit hardly seems like a space policy for the 21st century.

Are you Jewish? Do you read the New York Times?

Why?

While Jews consider the paper an ally in their battle against prejudice, they seem to ignore the paper’s treatment of their own community. Anti-Semitism is an awkward subject for many people, Jews included, to consider. Many might regard those who touch upon it as hyper-sensitive and too focused on their own well-being.

However, American Jews celebrate and support the self-regard that other groups display when they campaign to be fairly treated. Such self-regard is a fundamental principle of self-preservation. If blacks or Hispanics were treated the way Jews have periodically been treated by the New York Times, some Jewish readers would be outraged. So why the apathy regarding principles that Jews have always held dear: civility, justice, and equal treatment?

Is such a betrayal of principles a double standard? Aren’t double standards themselves a sign of anti-Semitism?

Pacifists do not bring Peace

The indespensible Thomas Sowell points out why pacifists bring war.

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.

“Peace” movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called “peace” movements — that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.

Or, as Orwell put it:

“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other.”

And now for something completely different

The Register is on the discovery, in China, of a very strange military base.

If you happen to live on the Chinese/Indian border, you may choose now as the time to be concerned. About what, nobody can tell you.

Daniel Pipes Up

I’m sorry. That’s an inexcusable pun. I just couldn’t resist. But his article seriously remonstrates Israel for their Unnecessary War.

To undo this damage of thirteen years requires Israel returning to the slow, hard, expensive, frustrating, and boring work of deterrence. That means renouncing the foolish plans of compromise, the dreamy hopes for good will, the irresponsibility of releasing terrorists, the self-indulgence of weariness, and the idiocy of unilateral withdrawal.

Bush Doctrine, RIP

Andy McCarthy bemoans the demise of what I had at the top of the very short list of things Bush has done right.

Of course, the underlying logic of the Bush Doctrine was that rewarding terrorists and their rogue state benefactors with negotiations and concessions inevitably encourages more of their barbarism. Firmness is the only language they understand. As top terror recipients of Iran’s largesse wage war with Israel, it’s worth asking whether we’ve forgotten that.

How demoralizing propaganda is done

Found this on LGF. Seen this photo?

You’ll be shocked – shocked! – to learn it was set up by foreign journalists.

How the MSM fights for the enemy

You gotta hand it to the MSM. If they get too close to the truth, they just back off.

In fact, editors have grown increasingly resistant to embedding reporters with combat units, something they demanded be done before the invasion in March 2003. The purported reason: They think contact with U.S. service members hurts the reporters’ objectivity.

“They come to see the world through the eyes of the troops,” said the retired officer’s e-mail. Now, newspapers and magazine rely heavily on Iraqi stringers who telephone in reports from various combat scenes.

“We are clearly winning the fight against the insurgents, but we are losing the public relations battle, both in the war zone and in the States,” said the e-mail.

Credit where credit is due

People not familiar with Mexican politics and history may not appreciate the significance of this close presidential election. It’s easy to wring our hands about how “Peje Lagarto” (Lopez Obrador) got so many votes, and decry the leftward shift in Latin America. There’s no real surprise there, since Mexico has really been a Marxist state with a thin veneer of democracy since 1939. To quote Evelyn Waugh in Robbery Under Law (a book I highly recommend even if you’re not interested in Mexico, just because Waugh is incapable of being dull) there are no conservatives in Mexico.

No, the great news is the closeness of the election. During the old single-party-rule days of the PRI there was no such thing as a close election. If they “lost” an election, they merely did their own “recount” – and arranged for the ballots to tragically be destroyed in a fire. Or an inconvenient candidate might just turn up dead. A close election can only happen when elections are honest.

While Vicente Fox turned out to be even more Clintonian than I feared during the last campaign, and has been a disaster as a president, his election was a giant step forward for Mexico. And the man who deserves credit for not rigging the election is Ernesto Zedillo.

So while Zedillo may not get credit elsewhere for honestly losing an election, Buttle’s World salutes him for it.

Meanwhile, we would do well to learn something from Mexico’s election system. There you must present your voter card, which is a photo ID, before being allowed to vote. In California poll workers aren’t even allowed to ask for any kind of proof that you are who you are.

How to run an opposition

In Israel, the Prime Minister stands up and says, “Enough. We have to prevail.” And then the leader of the opposition party gets up and says:

The prime minister must “not do half a job, he must finish the job” against Hizbullah, said Netanyahu. “Israel must learn their lesson this time – a decisive victory without concessions to eliminate Hizbullah once and for all.”

I wonder what it’s like to live in a country where “opposition” means opposed to the other party and not to the country itself.

One thing you could say for Communism

It was funny.

The first jokes about the Russian revolution surfaced immediately after October 1917. In one, an old woman visits Moscow zoo and sees a camel for the first time. “Look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!” she exclaims. As the system became harsher, a distinctive communist sense of humour emerged—pithy, dark and surreal—but so did the legal machinery for repressing it. Historian Roy Medvedev looked through the files of Stalin’s political prisoners and concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes, such as this: Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”

French military victories

This is pretty funny. And I’m linking to it to keep it number one on Google.

Best of the Century

I’m not a fan of lists. In fact, after the AFI released about a hundred of their stupid “Top 100” lists, I pretty much swore off the things. Without validating the list concept, let’s consider the ASME 20th Century Mechanical Engineering Achievements a collection of interesting stuff. I especially like the reference to the Ribbon Machine, which I’d never heard of before.

Tectonic shift

Yet another “why isn’t this bigger news?” item, hat tip: BlackFive. The Belmont Club reports on Zalmay Khalilzad’s remarks at the CSIS on July 11:

I will give my bottom line up front. I believe Americans, while remaining tactically patient about Iraq, should be strategically optimistic. Most important, a major change – a tectonic shift – has taken place in the political orientation of the Sunni Arab community. A year ago, Sunni Arabs were outside of the political process and hostile to the United States. They boycotted the January 2005 election and were underrepresented in the transitional national assembly. Today, Sunni Arabs are full participants in the political process, with their representation in the national assembly now proportional to their share of the population. Also, they have largely come to see the United States as an honest broker in helping Iraq’s communities come together around a process and a plan to stabilize the country.

How dumb is this?

Dear US Government:

I am a church. Please give me visas for my, uh “brethren” Religious Workers.

A report on the investigation, obtained by the Globe, said that instances of fraud were particularly high among applicants from predominantly Muslim countries, and the report raised concerns about potential terrorism risks.

Iran looking for war?

Omar, blogging on IraqTheModel, gives his take on what the axis of evil is up to.

I don’t know for sure what made Hizbollah do what they did this morning but I can make some guesses starting from the fact that Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizbollah collectively form one big axis of evil in the Middle East with connected interests and shared goals so the abduction of the two Israeli soldiers looks like an act planned to serve the interests of the members of the axis without the least regard to the harm it can bring upon Lebanon.

The whole thing is worth reading. The sad part is his parting shot:

Those extremists do not understand the language of compromise and they do not believe in negotiating even if they declare the opposite.
They want a war and I think they’re going to get one.

Turning D.C. into England

Tsk, tsk. Seems they’re having to declare a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital.

District of Columbia Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared a crime emergency in the city after Senitt, a volunteer for the potential presidential campaign of former Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner, was killed.

The crime emergency declaration allows commanders more flexibility to adjust officers’ schedules and reassign them to high-crime areas.

What a surprize that D.C. is becoming dangerous just like London. Gee. I wonder what they could have in common?

Perhaps they just haven’t considered trying this.

England to outlaw choosing baby’s sex

Here’s a real head-scratcher from Jolly Olde.

Health Minister Caroline Flint told MPs she was minded to introduce a “clear and specific ban” on the use of new techniques to choose one gender of baby.

My question for Flint is how exactly do you enforce this without completely outlawing abortion? Not to worry, though. Perhaps you won’t be able to determine your baby’s sex, but whether he and/or she has a dad will be completely optional.

Ms Flint also indicated that rules allowing fertility clinics to block treatment for single women and lesbian couples could be scrapped. Present regulations include the need for a father in considerations of the future child’s welfare – an element the Government considered should go, she said.

Orwell was an optimist.

Don’t Assume the Worst

Skepticism has an honored place in science. But when it becomes cynicism it threatens to do damage to science and, hence, to all of us. Jonathan Adler blogs on the Volokh Conspiracy about why private funding of research doesn’t have to mean a conflict of interest.

There is no question that some researchers may be influenced by their sources of funding. Research protocols may be altered to increase the likelihood that test results please private benefactors or generate government grants. But a given study or scientist’s source of funding does not inherently taint research results. Over time, the scientific process weeds out those results that result from sloppiness or greed. Those who attack private funding of scientific and medical research have sought to don the public interest mantle, but if they are successful, we will all be worse off.

The Courts Get One Right

As reported on arstechnica, a Colorado court has ruled that third parties may not bowdlerize movies, even if they call it “sanitizing”, without the permission of the copyright holders. When I first heard radio ads for Cleanflicks I got dizzy from the simultaneous eye roll and jaw drop. I’m glad they lost this suit.

This a victory for intellectual property rights, and should have been a slam dunk on those merits alone.

I have no patience for people who alter someone else’s work. I think pan-and-scan transfers are an abomination, but re-editing someone’s film is just vandalism.

But I also have a question for the customers of these services: What are you thinking?

Are you so knee-jerk, dim-wittedly prudish as to think that just removing the nudity or swearing from “objectionable” movies automatically makes them OK? So much so that you’ll relegate your responsibility to choose your entertainment carefully to some drone in Utah? And do you really think that all movies with no nudity or swearing are fit for the whole family?

What would Cleanflicks do with a movie chock-a-block full of profanity and vulgarity, but whose plot could have been written by Focus on the Family? And what about one with no nudity or naughty words, but truly ugly ideas?

This is worse, and (ubelievably) even more stupid than letting the MPAA decide what you should see. You have a brain. Use it. And, if you can’t, how about just not watching the movie at all if you fear it’s objectionable? Surely you have better things to do.

Don’t support vandals just because you’re too lazy to make intelligent entertainment choices.