UPDATE: Several people have commented that this could simply be the house of a local high school athletics coach, whose property gets TP'ed as part of the usual traditions around this time of year. Considering that the festooning was left intact all day, with nobody making any attempts to clean it up, I guess that's the more likely explanation. The TP is a flag, in its own way...

After the lecture, attendees filed out of the hall to discover that the protesters had massed so as to allow only a narrow passage between themselves and a retaining wall. In effect, all those leaving the lecture were forced to walk a gauntlet. Some ducked their heads, others set their jaws in anger, squeezing past the dozens of assembled faces chanting "Shame! Shame! Shame!" as fists pumped the air in unison.

A young woman in a kaffiyeh screamed up at a Jewish student significantly larger than herself. Her lips were wet with fury. "If I don't agree with you, then you call it anti-Semitism!" she shouted, as friends arrived to support her. The young man was surrounded. "You call it anti-Semitismmm!" she raged. "Why can't you tolerate anti-Semitismmm?"

"I can tolerate it," the student replied, his voice a low, tired rumble. "I have to. It exists. I just don't have to like it."

• Of the eight states (Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon and Utah) that currently impose similar taxes, seven let the lawyers eat first (the state takes their share only after attorneys' fees are paid). California would join Indiana in taking its 75% share before the payment of attorneys' fees.

• The article predicts that Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposal may succeed if the tax is whittled down to 50% and the lawyers are allowed to eat first.

UPDATE: J Greely sends another example of "progressive architecture" run amok. Sweet merciful crap, I'm beginning to loathe the word progressive...

UPDATE: Keith & Fred send this previous Gehry concoction, which "hangs over the Mississippi, looking like a
derelict car stuck on the bank among the trees".

UPDATE: More thoughts from Sissy Willis, in response to this and Lileks' followup assessment. Yikes—I've never seen a groundswell of crosslinkage like this, around these parts. I guess Gehry wouldn't be too pleased to hear of it.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What do you suppose we'll think of these buildings in, say, twenty or fifty years?

UPDATE: Paul Denton appears willing. Deserves a blogroll link, too.

UPDATE: A response from Alisa in Wonderland.

OUTNUMBERED British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers in the Army’s first bayonet charge since the Falklands War 22 years ago.

The fearless Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stormed rebel positions after being ambushed and pinned down.

Despite being outnumbered five to one, they suffered only three minor wounds in the hand-to-hand fighting near the city of Amara.

The battle erupted after Land Rovers carrying 20 Argylls came under attack on a highway.

After radioing for back-up, they fixed bayonets and charged at 100 rebels using tactics learned in drills.

When the fighting ended bodies lay all over the highway — and more were floating in a nearby river. Nine rebels were captured.

An Army spokesman said: “This was an intense engagement.”

The last bayonet charge was by the Scots Guards and the Paras against Argentinian positions.

• "Daddy, wasn't Saddam in violation of 17 UN resolutions, and repeatedly violating the cease-fire agreement?"
• "Aren't chemical and biological weapons really easy to conceal, and just as easy to store as harmless components?"
• "What about that sarin bomb that blew up on a roadside? Doesn't that count?"
• "Remember Somalia? Isn't there something to be said for being extremely firm, and a little bit overeager, in response to 9/11—because the fact that we retreated whenever we got bloody noses like in Somalia is exactly why 9/11 occurred?"
• "What about Ansar Al-Islam? Haven't there been all kinds of links drawn between al Qaeda and Iraq?"
• "Even if Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, wasn't it worth getting rid of him for all the crimes he'd already committed, and just in case he decided that if 17 UN resolutions against him weren't going to be enforced, then there was no point in trying to avoid incurring an 18th?"
• "Isn't it a good idea, when the Middle East is exporting Islamic terrorism daily, to make sure that there aren't any avowedly anti-US dictatorships operating in the Middle East, whether they're sponsoring terrorism or not?"
• "How is one of our soldiers making fun of an Iraqi prisoner's wee-wee to get information about terrorists remotely the same thing as Saddam feeding people feet-first into shredders for failing to agree with him?"
• "Daddy, this is Iraq we're talking about! Saddam Hussein! The guy who gassed his own people and killed 300,000 of his citizens! The guy who's been the personification of evil in every sitcom and stand-up routine produced in the 90s! The guy that all America's been aching to get rid of ever since 1991! And now all of a sudden it's a bad thing, because we actually seem to be willing to do it?"

UPDATE: Greg Kihn is having similar thoughts; apparently he's taking all kinds of heat from listeners via e-mail regarding his opinions that he injects between the classic-rock tracks, and he's likening them to his second ex-wife who used to respond to things she didn't want to hear by sticking her fingers in her ears and going LA-LA-LA-LA-LA! "There's no money. We're going bankrupt!" "LA-LA-LA-LA! I can't hear you!"

It's like the airwaves are filled with Rage Addicts...

Barring a miracle, the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself. This is a time for concerted prayer, divine wisdom and greater courage than we have ever been called upon to exercise. For more than 40 years, the homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan that has had as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family. The institution of marriage, along with an often weakened and impotent Church, is all that stands in the way of its achievement of every coveted aspiration. Those goals include universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, discrediting of Scriptures that condemn homosexuality, muzzling of the clergy and Christian media, granting of special privileges and rights in the law, overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia, indoctrinating children and future generations through public education, and securing all the legal benefits of marriage for any two or more people who claim to have homosexual tendencies.

UPDATE: Now this is an interesting point.

Kris points out, by the way, that if the scammer were smart and/or ballsy, he'd recognize the street value of the P-P-P-Powerbook!! and put it on Ebay. He'd probably make back the money he lost...

I watched with my partner, Michael, sitting next to me. Michael is a U.S. citizen now, but a native of Syria. He’s an Arab. An Arab-American, in the parlance of hyphenation. And his reaction to the video, described below, is telling.

Michael came to America as an adolescent and learned English with no help from the Los Angeles schools he attended. By the time he and I met, shortly before his graduation from Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Texas, he had become a fully acculturated American.

When the video ended, Michael and I sat here for awhile in silence. Then he turned to me and asked,

“Baby, are you mad at me?”

No, Habibi (Arabic for ‘my love’), I’m not mad at you. What makes you even ask that?

“I don’t know. Maybe you’ll associate me with that.”

Of course, I do not associate him with that. But Michael, now well-acquainted with the psychology of his fellow Americans, intuitively knows what Mr. Berg’s murderers evidently do not. An act of barbarism against one of our own will shock and hurt and repulse and horrify us. But it will also enrage us. If radical Islamists think this act will induce us to cower, they misjudge the American character. We aren’t the French, or even the Spanish.

Americans can't figure this one out, how to respond. In reality, the whole Moslem world is a tiny threat. Late 20th century media takes what goes on between them and the western world and blows it up a million fold. The video is an example. That's the best they can do. Stop and think about that for a minute. The germans quielty and calmly got the jews and others to queue up in an orderly manner before they gassed them and used their body parts to stuff pillows and make lampshades. Several million people. And the germans would have dominated the world eventually if they hadn't had the audacity to declare war on everyone except the japanese at the same time. The islamist snatch someone here, somewone there and make a video of their murder and put it out and its impact is way beyond the reality of what these people are capable of. 9/11 was their crowning glory.. probably. And even if they set of a nuke or dirty bomb, they won't come within a mile of doing the damage that was done to europe during the second world war or america during the civil war.

UPDATE: Here's a translation of the statement that was read.

"Have you not had your fill of the war of conferences and battle of words? Is it not time for you to take the path of jihad and carry the sword of the Prophet of prophets? We ask you not to condemn what we will do just to please the Americans.

So, I guess, never mind then.

Fallujah native Abdul-Qader Abdul-Rahman al-Ani, his left elbow wrapped in bandages, his right forearm bound in a cast, recounted how he was beaten by soldiers who picked him up last month. The soldiers tied him and two others arrested with him to a tree and sodomized them one after the other, he told journalists.

"I ask President Bush," he said. "Does he agree with this?"

As Ani, 47, repeated his story, he was interrupted by Jabber al-Okaili, a member of one of the human rights groups that organized the gathering. "He's lying," al-Okaili shouted. "He's a liar!"

Al-Ani was rushed to an office, where al-Okaili and others unwound the bandage on his left arm and found the elbow unscarred and healthy. They cut off half of the cast on his forearm, even as al-Ani insisted, "By God, it's true, everything I say is true."

SBS television just showed German news footage of Ani making his disputed claim -- and that's all. No mention of anybody calling him a liar.

UPDATE: What's even more fun is being in the middle of a news story when it happens. As we were passing San Francisco International Airport at about 4500 feet on our way up the peninsula, we happened to be being handled on the same Nor-Cal Approach control frequency that was also handling a minor emergency concerning a Northwest DC-10 jet that had taken off from SFO only minutes before. The pilot of the jet was reporting that he was circling over the ocean off the coast, dumping fuel; he was requesting a special landing clearance on runway 28R, the longest runway at SFO.

Turns out, the jet had blown two tires during takeoff. The runway he had used—28R—was closed at that moment as cleanup crews cleared away the debris from the blown tires, and the runway was still closed as the approach center cleared him into a pattern for a long, soft-field-style approach (using a loooong runway and floating down onto it ever so gently, to protect the remaining tires, after dumping fuel to reduce weight, and knuckling over onto the good landing gear as it comes to a stop) to that runway. He came barrelling in over the peninsula just as we, in our little Cessna, buzzed past; the tower had us descend a thousand feet and shuffle on out of the way while they took care of the near-emergency.

Finally, runway 28R was reopened, just as the jet turned to the base leg of the pattern; by that time, he had switched to the SFO tower frequency, and the airport was far enough behind us that we couldn't watch him land. But after we returned from our trip around Northern California and landed at Reid-Hillview, we turned on the radio and the first news item we heard was: "A Northwest Airlines jet out of SFO en route to Tokyo was forced to return to the airport after two of its tires blew out upon takeoff..."

How cool is that?

Yesterday a friend of mine, who’s also a doctor, visited us. After chatting about old memories, I asked him about his opinions on the current situations in Iraq. I’ve always known this friend to be apathetic when it comes to politics, even if it means what’s happening in Iraq. It was obvious that he hadn’t change and didn’t show any interest in going deep into this conversation. However when I asked him about his opinion on GWB response to the prisoners’ abuse issue, I was surprised to see him show anger and disgust as he said:

In the wake of revelations of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners, John Kerry has launched an important petition calling for President Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld. Getting rid of Secretary Rumsfeld would be a huge step forward for all of us who oppose the Bush war policy, and Kerry needs to hear our support.

Thom T. sends the following comment:

Actually, I think these vermin are even worse than you
suggest, at least if the snipet you posted is
representative of the whole.

What is the implication from this statement? That the
scandal should be used to get rid of Rummy because it
would be a huge step forward, etc., AND NOT BECAUSE IT
WOULD BE THE RIGHT THING TO DO, GIVEN THE SEVERITY OF
RUMMY'S BREACH OF DUTY.

In other words, there is nothing to suggest that
Rumsfeld should be fired simply for his dereliction of
duty, but rather only because it would advance their
cause. Missing from this is any mention of concern
for the Iraqis injured (okay, maybe they don't deserve
it), or any view toward improving how our military
operates. Rather, to them the value in having
Rumsfeld removed is in advancing their own goals, so
what they're advocating is not action to rectify what
has occurred, but rather a cooption of it to in aid of
said advancement. And any attempt to actuaaly correct
the problem and see that it doesn't happen again be
damned.

More and more, the message I get from the Left is the
famous one attributed to Richard Nixon: "Screw the
doomed".

Yeah. The MoveOn.org message is actually quite different from the Kerry statement that it's built upon. Kerry says, "The Pentagon didn't move fast enough; we need to do something decisive to show resolve and good faith." MoveOn says, "It's Rummy! Let's get 'im!"

Now that they've managed to unstick my shopping cart, busted since
the 4.5 update, I went exploring in iTMS again and discovered something
that I shouldn't have been surprised by: Google is indexing links to
the store, correctly.

If, for instance, you search for "William Hung", at the end of the
first page you'll find links to his album on iTMS. This has some
very interesting implications for the future of online music sales.

I won't reach every reader no matter how hard I try. I don't even expect to reach the majority. But if nearly all the mail I get about a specific post is pedantic, then it suggests that I didn't reach hardly anyone. If that goes on and on, post after post, it makes me feel as if I'm not succeeding overall in what I'm trying to do when I write for this site.

That's what gets me down. Perhaps it meant that the forests I've been describing weren't really very important, or weren't there are all. Perhaps I failed to write well enough about them to make them real for my readers, and all they could see was trees. If nearly all the comments I receive about some article are nitpicks, it means that article failed. If that goes on day after day, post after post, then I'm failing as a writer.

Though African Wild Dogs reproduce sexually, packs of dogs reproduce by fission. When a pack grows too large, some members will split off and found a new pack. They'll take with them the learned behavior patterns from their parent pack, so that knowledge passes from the original pack to both of its offspring.

Just look what Den Beste said today:

...Dogs reproduce by fission.

He said it! He did! Right there in black and white! I agree with Philip Shropshire-- who could possibly take this man seriously?!

Bored with the political speechmaking in Harlem's Alhambra Ballroom, 6-year-old Iris Kerry Kaler reached out with both arms for her uncle, Sen. John Kerry, to pick her up.

The Massachusetts senator, however, ignored his niece's entreaty, offering Iris only an awkward pat on the stomach despite the array of television cameras poised to record the potentially precious moment. It was a missed opportunity to demonstrate his warmth by holding the little girl in his arms just days before last month's New York primary.

"This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9-11."

Bush stopped and turned back.

"He changed from being the leader of the free world to being a father, a husband and a man," Faulkner said. "He looked right at her and said, 'How are you doing?' He reached out with his hand and pulled her into his chest."

Michael Moore is making headlines with his controversial documentary, but one group is targeting the filmmaker for his waistline.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has selected the gadfly filmmaker as one of its “Flab Five” and is treating him to a Veg Eye for the Fat Guy makeover. “Looks like the ‘Downsize This’ author has been doing too much supersizing,” notes PETA.

“We’ll be sending him a nice little care package, a makeover kit filled with health and diet tips, PETA’s vegetarian starter kit, and suggestions on how he might change his lifestyle,” PETA’s Michael McGraw tells The Scoop.

American Idol winner Ruben Studdard is also getting targeted by PETA. “If ‘The Velvet Teddy Bear’ doesn’t want to become known as ‘The Velveeta Teddy Bear,’ he might want to idle his meat and dairy intake,” notes the group.

Now this here's the story about the Rock Island Line
The Rock Island Line she runs down into New Orleans
And just outside of New Orleans is a big toll gate
And all the trains that go through the toll gate
They gotta pay the man some money
But of course, if you got certain things on board
You're okay and you don't have to pay the man nothin
And just now we see a train comin down the line
When you come up to the toll gate
The driver, he shout down to the man
I got pigs, I got horses, I got cows
I got sheep, I got all livestock, I got all livestock
I got aaall liiivestock
The man say, you alright boy just
Get on through, you don't have to pay me nothin
And then the train go through
And when he go through the tollgate
The train gotta have a little bit of steam
And a little bit of speed
And when the driver think he safely on the other side
He shouts back down the line to the man
I fooled you, I fooled you
I got pig iron, I got pig iron
I got aaaall pig iron,
Now I'll tell you where I'm goin boy

UPDATE: Perhaps even more damning, though, would be if Iran developed nuclear weapons even with the UN breathing sternly down its neck. What would that say about just how effective the UN is at dealing with a threat that even it recognizes?

On this date in 1941 (May 5th) a not very well know clash of WWII took place. This event was overshadowed by the much bigger news a couple of weeks later of the sinking of the Bismarck.

After the Germans had captured France they used some of the French fleet for sea raiding of Allied freighters. The British created strike forces to go after these raiders. One French frigate in particular was particularly onerous to run down. The French had named it, for some strange reason, "Water of Mayonnaise", but, that's the French for you. I guess it sounds better in French - "Eau de Mayonnaise".

Finally, with the British, playing catchup, spotted the frigate and gave their battle cry:

"Sink Eau de Mayo!"

Other recent Appointments at the UN:

1. Bill Clinton appointed to head the Commission on Marital Fidelity and Sexual Abstinence.

2. Mike Tyson appointed to head the Commission for the Eradication of Domestic Violence

3. John Gotti appointed to head the Commission for Ethical Business Practices

4. Michael Moore appointed to head the Commission for Truth and Accuracy in Journalism

5. You get the point

Sudan’s delegate immediately shot back that the U.S. delegation was “shedding crocodile tears” and turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq against civilians as well as against prisoners.

May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investor Warren Buffett and Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs are advising Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on economic issues.

Kerry, 60, the four-term Massachusetts senator challenging President George W. Bush, ``reached out to them and they're giving him economic advice about the deficit and job creation,'' said David Wade, Kerry's campaign spokesman.

``Political campaigns are always looking for celebrity endorsements and these are two eminent celebrities in the investment world,'' said James Lucier, a political analyst at Prudential Equity Group LLC. ``But I don't think investors are looking for celebrities, they are looking for policies.''

UPDATE: Particularly as long as I'm guaranteed to be far, far away from Ted Rall.

Two summers ago, I was in Covington, KY and Cincinnati, OH with my son and father for a conference relating to his special needs. Everyone was so nice, and friendly and caring. When they said, I'll be praying for you, they meant it. When they asked how we were doing-they really wanted to hear.

We were checking out of the hotel and the clerk asked me how was my stay. I said it was fine-but that the reason I was there had to do with my son's condition. She smiled and said she knew all about children in hospital. Eight years before her son was born with a fatal heart condition. The doctors said that he was not going to live without a heart transplant. She named him Michael.

She sat at his bedside, praying for her baby. The doctors said that they came up with a risky procedure to use some kind of plastic rod to fix one of the veins, but that he could die in surgery, too. She decided to go ahead with the surgery. They were prepping her infant son when another baby died in the NICU.

The mother of the dead infant walked right over to this lady at her son's bedside and said "My son just died, and I heard your baby needs a heart."

She gave her baby's heart to that woman's child. And you know what that mom's baby was named? Michael.

I said to the clerk that she had been graced by an angel, and we both started crying.

You get it Zephyr??? Americans will give their hearts to you. So piss off.

UPDATE: Sgt. Stryker has given it the first good scouring.

Around one in 10 people in Britain are looking forward to Luvania joining the European Union this weekend. That's right, Luvania.

Telcoms provider One.Tel invited participants in an marketing survey to identify the 10 EU accession nations -- and cheekily added fictional Luvania to the list as a red herring.

Eight percent of all 2,500 respondents plumped for the mythical country -- a proportion that went up to nine percent among Scots, and 11 percent among over-50s.

"People aren't generally aware," One.Tel spokesman Carol Barnes said Thursday. "They're more involved in their day-to-day lives rather than the bigger picture of what is going on in the EU."

Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder doesn’t even draw the strip these days. The street-talkin’ honky-hater just sits around thinking up great jokes which he then hands over to an underling:

He passed the sketching and inking duties to a Boston-based artist, Jennifer Seng, around the time of the Condoleezza Rice flap, last fall. “If something had to give, it was going to be the art,” he told me. “I think I’m a better writer than artist.”

Too close to call, Aaron.

BUSH iZS SToo00p!D!!11``` LOOOOOOL!!!!11~ © 2004 Aaron McGruder

"So you want to know how Take One for the Country started?". McDonough leans back in her chair, "It was back in February of 2003, when a lot of troops were leaving Ft. Benning. My girlfriends and I were partying at a bar frequented by soldiers. At some point one my friend leaves with a young soldier. The next day we questioned her and commented that the soldier didn't seem her 'type'. My friend just shrugged and said, 'Hey, his unit was going to ship out in a few days, so I decided to take one for the country', I knew right then and there that this was an incredible idea, so I started Operation Take One for the Country".

TOFTC has not been able to maintain complete secrecy and word has leaked out. I contacted Annette Spargas of the UC Berkley chapter of NOW and asked if she had ever heard of Operation Take One for the Country. Spargas said that she, in fact, had heard of TOFTC and was working to find and protest the group at the first opportunity. "These women are really sick, they are prostituting themselves", Spargas ranted, "they are objectifying their bodies to the killers of the Bush cabals war machine. They need to examine how men have made prostitutes of women throughout time". McDonough is un-phased by this type of objection, "What a bunch of bay-auches! Those femi-nazis really make me mad. Yeah, we have a TOFTC 'battalion' in Oakland, but nothing else in the bay area. Berkeley girls are too femi-nazi granola and the Stanford girls are too stuck up intellectual. Not to worry though, we're getting some good indications of interest from Sacramento and Amador Counties (outside of San Francisco) and we'll be able to take care of the men of the Pacific Fleet, don't you worry".

Every time something like this is published it drives the wedge between liberal and mainstream America just a little bit deeper. The places that this cartoon appears are the same places that have been severely bleeding audience over the last few years. All it does is help cement the dominance of conservative thought in this country. Ironic, ain't it?

UPDATE: Well, that was pretty much a bust, I guess. Ah well—that'll teach me to try to pretend I know how these guys think. Or to pretend that I'm mean-hearted enough to go undercover there successfully.

Nonetheless, thanks to Sean S. for doing the, er, artificial dissemination.

If by ‘America’ you mean the majority living here now, then I hate America.

If by “America” you mean the vision of the Founding Fathers, then I love America. But it’s hard to keep that vision in front of me when the majority of “Americans” are fundamentalist, fascistic, homophobic, racist, sexist, ignorant, American Idol-loving morons who think Bush is a strong leader. I think that the America I love is beyond retrieval because it would take more than a new President, it would take a re-awakening of a whole group of stupid people who don’t want re-awakening. Bush didn’t destroy America. Americans who had no idea of the wonderful country they were given destroyed America, and will continue to destroy it whether Kerry is elected or not.

This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. (Applause.) The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution. (Applause.)

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. (Applause.)

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq. (Applause.)

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo. (Applause.)

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace. (Applause.)

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Poll question: Is Bush ahead in the polls because most Americans are racist?

The polls show most Americans support a foreign policy that embraces preemptive strikes outside legal bounds (ie. Iraq).

They are willing to kill foreigners willy-nilly behind a policy that says “all Muslims are a POTENTIAL threat.” Never mind the ramifications of killing innocent people, as long as these attacks hinder terrorists they are justified. After all, in the end us Americans represent the good guys: Christian/Jewish brotherhood, and the Muslims represent the terrorists.
Generalizations like this are what leads to mass genocide. It’s no different than the anti-Jewish propaganda that Hitler promoted as a cover for his brutal imperialism.

Jermaine, also a singer, told Reuters in an interview: "I do not agree with the U.S. government. What they are saying about Muslims and Arabs is all propaganda and brainwashing."

• "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."

• "Here in the United States our Muslim citizens are making many contributions in business, science and law, medicine and education, and in other fields. Muslim members of our Armed Forces and of my administration are serving their fellow Americans with distinction, upholding our nation's ideals of liberty and justice in a world at peace."

• "The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qur'an. It teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace."

• "It should be clear to all that Islam -- the faith of one-fifth of humanity -- is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries -- in Turkey and Indonesia, and Senegal and Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, of the nations of Western Europe, and of the United States of America."

• "This new enemy seeks to destroy our freedom and impose its views. We value life; the terrorists ruthlessly destroy it. We value education; the terrorists do not believe women should be educated or should have health care, or should leave their homes. We value the right to speak our minds; for the terrorists, free expression can be grounds for execution. We respect people of all faiths and welcome the free practice of religion; our enemy wants to dictate how to think and how to worship even to their fellow Muslims."

• "According to Muslim teachings, God first revealed His word in the Holy Qur'an to the prophet, Muhammad, during the month of Ramadan. That word has guided billions of believers across the centuries, and those believers built a culture of learning and literature and science. All the world continues to benefit from this faith and its achievements."

• "We're taking action against evil people. Because this great nation of many religions understands, our war is not against Islam, or against faith practiced by the Muslim people. Our war is a war against evil. This is clearly a case of good versus evil, and make no mistake about it -- good will prevail."

• "Do you think that Bush has characterized Iraq as an 'imminent' threat to America?"
• "Would you say that Bush has used anti-Muslim rhetoric in his speeches to the country about terrorism?"
• "Did Bush give the impression in his speeches that the war in Iraq would be easy and quickly accomplished?"
• "Do you think Bush has unfairly fomented anti-Muslim sentiment in America in the wake of 9/11?"
• "Would you say that Bush is a racist?"
• "Would you describe the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as being characterized by widespread, reckless destruction of civilian property and lives?"
• "Would you say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fundamentally 'racist'?"
• "Do you think Bush's speeches regarding Islam and Muslims post-9/11 are similar to Hitler's speeches regarding the Jews in the 1930s?"

How I love the life I lead
Cannot think and cannot read
Watch our values slip away
play the game of U.S.A!

UPDATE: Sigh. Twice today I've had friends approvingly tell me that in this post, I've very effectively made my case: that most Americans are morons who don't read.

That was the exact opposite of the point I was trying to make. (Is there a theme here?)

What I'm trying to say here is that most Americans are not morons; they're way more in-tune with reality than most of "us" (the self-described Enlightened Elite) are willing to believe. Most people are rational, open-minded, and willing to listen to reasoned discussion from both sides of an argument. I mean, think about ten random acquaintances, and think back on twenty random people you met or saw during the course of the day. How many of them would you describe as clinically stupid? By which I mean, how many of them—driving on the highway, walking past you in the mall, serving you your Arby's sandwich, delivering your package—would you call idiots, people on whom you wouldn't feel comfortable conferring the sacred trust of democracy?

How many would you guess are racists? How many would you guess are ignorant?

DU says "most". Are they right? I don't think so.

The problem I'm trying to highlight is that the Leftists, the DUers, the elitists who are positive that Bush is a Muslim-hating racist and that Americans can't be trusted with sharp scissors because they're actually (gasp!) polling in his favor, are singularly and unusually prone to this behavior. I believe they're worse than the statistical average when it comes to being open-minded about alternate viewpoints. I believe they're (perversely) inured to rational, multifaceted discussion because they're convinced of their own superiority, whereas most everyday folks tend to have a humility about them that lets them accept that they might not be aware of the whole story on a given issue.

A contemptuous lack of faith in the decency, intelligence, and social competence of the majority of Americans is a clear sign of the kind of immaturity that you see concentrated, primarily and almost exclusively, on the Left these days.

And I want no part of it.

EUROPE TO BECOME GIANT THEME PARK!

Member nations of the European Union have announced plans to discontinue their status as individual countries in order to merge into one giant theme park!

The new park will be called EuroWorld and will cover the entire continent of what is now known as Europe. The decision was made by the EU countries in response to their collective realization that no one in Europe has had an innovative idea in well over a century.

With nothing new to offer visitors, the European countries decided to stop pretending they were still relevant, and to start celebrating their colorful pasts.

"Our stagnant continent has been a virtual museum for decades," explains an unnamed EU representative. "Many could argue that we already were nothing more than an amusement park. The decision to legally become a large theme park is really only a formality."

For generations, Democratic candidates and liberal journalists have asserted with impunity that Republicans, by their very nature, hate blacks, gays, children, the poor, the environment, animals, and immigrants.

Al Gore ran as a champion of the "people against the powerful," claiming he cared about Americans more than Bush. His campaign manager declared that Republicans "have no love and no joy. They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them." Clinton routinely said that the GOP wanted to "punish" children. The organizers of the Million Mom March insisted that "good" moms support gun control.

Again: Why is it fair game to question conservatives' love or loyalty to children or to their fellow man, but beyond the pale to question liberals' love of country?

In fact, I think liberal defensiveness sometimes undermines their case. After all, if I angrily asked, "Are you saying I'm gay?" as often as liberals say, "Are you questioning my patriotism?" a lot of people would think I'm hiding something.

Jermaine, also a singer, told Reuters in an interview: "I do not agree with the U.S. government. What they are saying about Muslims and Arabs is all propaganda and brainwashing."

"As far as I'm concerned, when they bomb London, the bigger the better," says Abdul Haq, the social worker. "I know it's going to happen because Sheikh bin Laden said so. Like Bali, like Turkey, like Madrid - I pray for it, I look forward to the day."

"I understand their feelings but do not approve of their methods. Islam is a religion of peace. They are wrong," he said.

"I agree with you, brother," says Abu Yusuf, the earnest-looking financial adviser sitting opposite. "I would like to see the Mujahideen coming into London and killing thousands, whether with nuclear weapons or germ warfare. And if they need a safehouse, they can stay in mine - and if they need some fertiliser [for a bomb], I'll tell them where to get it."

"I don't think it is right for us to go to someone else's country and tell them what to do and how to do it," said Jermaine, who is a guest of the royal court in the pro-Western kingdom, which hosts the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet.

According to Sayful, the aim of al-Muhajiroun ("the immigrants") is nothing less than Khilafah - "the worldwide domination of Islam". The way to achieve this, he says, is by Jihad, led by Bin Laden. "I support him 100 per cent."

Does that support extend to violent acts of terrorism in the UK?

"Yes," he replies, unequivocally. "When a bomb attack happens here, I won't be against it, even if it kills my own children. Islam is clear: Muslims living in lands that are occupied have the right to attack their invaders.

"Britain became a legitimate target when it sent troops to Iraq. But it is against Islam for me to engage personally in acts of terrorism in the UK because I live here. According to Islam, I have a covenant of security with the UK, as long as they allow us Muslims to live here in peace."

"I think Muslims have become the new Negroes in America. They are being mistreated at airports, by the Immigration -- everywhere," he said.

But Sayful and his friends laugh at the idea that they are local pariahs. "The mosques say one thing to the public, and something else to us. Let's just say that the face you see and the face we see are two different faces," says Abdul Haq. "Believe me," adds Musa, "behind closed doors, there are no moderate Muslims."

Anybody want to tell me that an evangelical Christian handing out tracts is more dangerous to society than this kind of bile? Guess which one the Left is fighting though.

School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty. But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as "collateral damage."

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? Cuuuuuuuuhntryyyyyyyyyy music!!!

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who use the same word over and over again! . . . Read a f---in book or two, increase your vo-cab-u-lary f*ck*ng idiots."

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STUPID PEOPLE!!! Why must so many people be so stupid!!? . . . YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? When people mispronounce words! and they dont even know it to, like acrosT, or eXspreso, pacific (specific), or 2 pAck. learn to speak correctly you morons.

It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in the videos he and Klebold made. But Fuselier recognized a far more revealing emotion bursting through, both fueling and overshadowing the hate. What the boy was really expressing was contempt.

He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority. It may look like hate, but "It's more about demeaning other people," says Hare.

Just read the "Fear of God" post. While I normally
simply appreciate your blogging very much, for the
past few days, it seems like either I'm channelling
you, or vice versa. Scary, I know. :)

Anyway, I'd been thinking about precisely this issue
lately, about exactly what it is these cretins don't
get, and it crystallized in my mind when I read the
passage in which you wrote your solution.

What they don't get is that for the majority of the
world, existence on Earth is a pretty crappy
experience from cradle to grave, and for a good
number of those people, existence on Earth is a
horriffic, shitty, really, really, REALLY
unconscionable version of Hell on Earth.

This is not exactly a stunning revelation, obviously.
The vast majority of humanity lived somewhere in
between these two states until 1850 at the earliest
(and that's being generous, time-frame-wise), and we
know this. Why this is important in regard to the
cretins is that they have their history all mixed up:
I have heard, first-hand, several people, most of whom
are friends of mine and who are not extremists, posit
the view that there were so many other, greater,
NON-WHITE civilizations from the past that
accomplished so many great and beautiful things, and
that our civilization is but a crude, cruel, inhuman,
conformist joke on humanity, where the rich prosper,
the poor are crushed, and the rest of us are drones.

What they don't get is that while Michelangelo was a
great sculptor and painter, THAT WASN'T THE MAJORITY
OF ITALY AT THE TIME. That while the Egyptians built
some of the most breathtaking structures, which are
rightly named wonders of the world, THEY WERE BUILT BY
SLAVES. That while the Greeks may have been more
ahead of their time intellectually than any other
civilization before or since, THAT WAS ONLY A FEW VERY
FORTUNATE GUYS. The vast majority of people who lived
during those ages, and during the great ages of China,
Babylon, Persia, Phoenicia, the Almohads, etc., were
either slaves, or one or two steps above, and that
life for them was pretty damn piss-poor.

They see only the greatness, and, combined with their
ideas of multi-culturalism, project the past onto the
present, and see America as this crude infant
stumbling blindly across the world and wrecking all
that is good, and replacing it with Wal-Marts and
McDonalds. Among these people are those who went to
Iraq (remember, this was once Mesopotamia!!) to become
human shields, and were stunned to learn that the
majority of Iraqis really, really wanted freedom more
than anything else.

What they don't get is that the Industrial Revolution
was vastly more important than the Rennaisance. What
they don't get is that Adam Smith's "The Wealth of
Nations" is the most important work in the history of
humankind (outside of the Bible, for me), and not
Joyce's "Ulysses". What they don't get is that the
Cotton Gin was a far more important discovery than oil
paints.

What they really don't get is that personal and
economic freedom are the same thing, and the it was
recognition of such that truly freed the decrepit, and
that, if that didn't happen, they, and we, would be
the decrepit of today. They see themselves as being
the spiritual descendants of the Michelangelos, the
Plutarchs, the Aristotles. Wrong. We're the
descendants of their slaves.

And, finally, it's much simpler than all this, really.
It's freedom OF, or freedom TO, not freedom from.

And if they really want to free people from hunger,
poverty, and oppression, they should stop reading Maya
Angelou, and start reading Adam Smith. The world
outside the West largely sucks. The pagodas should
not be destroyed, but building a few Wal-Marts along
side them would be far more helpful than corrupt
Oil-for-Food programs.

I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps.... [T]he Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population.... [I]t is a safe guess to assume that more than 80% of the white men living in the rural sections of Florida have violated this statute.... [T]here has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it has been generally conceded to be in contravention of the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested.[1]

By the way—did anyone else notice, on the Simpsons episode that aired last night (the one where Lisa becomes student body president and gets art and music and athletics cut from the school budget, in a parody of "Evita"), how studiously the animators softened their caricature of Moore for his self-voiced cameo? They slimmed him down by a hundred pounds or more, and gave him a clean shave. Yeah, the line he got was a gentle self-effacing poke at the dubiousness of his statistics, but damn they were flattering on the visuals.

Eton College is to become the first top public school in the country to appoint an imam to help pupils gain an understanding of Islamic culture and thought.

The school, which has taught 18 British prime ministers, is also to offer Arabic as a language for the first time from this September to increase better understanding of the Muslim world.

The appointment of Oxford graduate Monawar Hussain has already been supported by many who say it is a positive initiative on behalf of Eton and a sign that many traditional British institutions are changing.

United Nations (news - web sites) police in Kosovo are holding four Jordanian members of the force following a gunbattle with U.S. police in which two American women prison officers and a Jordanian male were killed.

"Four Jordanians were detained yesterday after the incident and they are in custody," U.N. Police Commissioner Stefan Feller told a news conference in the provincial capital, Pristina.

"We don't know the motive," he said in response to questions about a report that violent emotions over Iraq (news - web sites) was behind the clash. "I cannot say the reasons for the incident," Feller added, calling it a "reckless attack."

Whatever the cause, a lethal firefight is unprecedented between two of the 30 or so national contingents of the Kosovo U.N. law enforcement mission, which numbers some 3,500 officers.

“I have to say, this was a sad day for U.N. peacekeeping,” Feller said. But he said no changes to the mission were planned.

I don't think we need a script or a rehearsal, people - we all know our parts. Let's have the "he was kidding crowd" to our left, please, the "earnest but humorless" group to the right, and our topic is Sen. Kerry's recent quip to a group of 4 and 5 year olds:

Mr. Kerry obliged, but still seemed to have politics on the brain as he narrated the story of the magic wand — "Zoop!" — making things disappear.

"I could go zoop! and Republicans would disappear," he said.

Now, the crowd on the left has it easy - just keep yelling "he was kidding". "Don't we have more important issues to discuss" is also good. Counter-examples of bad Bush behavior are encouraged; lacking that, we are glumly aware of a certain tendency to drift towards personal invective as a substitute for actual argument, and we hope that can be minimized.

The group on the right - be sure to mention press bias. The Note admitted that Sen. Clinton got a pass on her Gandhi joke a while back, so see if anyone makes a similar admission here. Also, we expect you to hit on the probable response if Bush had said this - don't forget Ashcroft, the Patriot Act, stifling of dissent, the importance of our leaders promoting pluralism, etc. Let's see some emotion!

. . .

For a big finish, someone please make a connection to Kerry's "lying, crooked Republicans" comment, and address the question of whether Kerry really wants to be President of all the country, or just half of it.

But what perked up my ears was one of the anthropologist’s assertions that there is no difference between a two-parent / two-sex family and a two-parent / same-sex family. None. He said: Any preference for a traditional mom/dad family was based in a “superstition.” His word: “Superstition.” Because, you see, there was no evidence that two moms were different in any important way than a mom and a dad. Belief in werewolves, belief in the evil eye, belief in the walking undead or the superiority of a mom-dad household: superstition.

In his zeal for a brave new world, this fellow managed to insult and demean everyone. And I mean everyone. Moms? Any guy can do your job. Dads? Your son or daughter doesn’t need to grow up with a male role model in his or her daily life. It’s the sort of pernicious nonsense that thinks gender is an arbitrary social construct. It’s not enough, apparently, to say that gay couples can be great parents. You have to insist that heterosexual couples have no inherent advantages. It’s not enough to say that kids raised by gay couples can grow up well-adjusted. You have to deny the advantages of growing up in a family where the child is exposed to both male and female role models on a molecular level. It’s not enough to support the rights of a lesbian couple to bring life into this world; you have to stifle your own suspicions that having a dad in the house is better than not having one. Otherwise you’re one of those curious old things who lives in a world dominated by superstitions. Quaint, amusing superstitions.

This is what dismays me: no matter how much I may support gay rights, in the final analysis my belief that my daughter needs a dad brands me as a reactionary.

As the gunman's pistol was pointing at him the hostage "tried to take off his hood and shouted: 'now I'll show you how an Italian dies,'" [Frattini] said.

ALB: Now, when you were talking to the prisoners who tried to hijack a plane, one told you he was a fisherman, and you said, "Why then didn't you take a boat?" Why did you ask that?

OS: Well, it seemed to me that if they were familiar with boats, it seemed to be the best way.

ALB: Did you know that in Cuba there are virtually no boats? The boats that are used for fishermen are tightly controlled. One of the more surreal aspects of Cuba, being the largest island in the Caribbean, is that there are no visible boats.

OS: I see.

. . .

ALB: For the second film, you received permission to see the dissidents Osvaldo Paya, Vladimiro Roca, and Elizardo Sanchez. They spoke critically of the government. Obviously, that couldn't have happened unless permission for them to see you was granted, right? What do you make of Castro allowing that to happen?

OS: I don't think he was happy with it. I don't think he wants to be in the same film with Paya. In his mind they are faux dissidents.

ALB: He actually calls them faux dissidents? He called them the so-called dissidents?

OS: Yeah, so-called, right. I was in Soviet Russia for a script in 1983, and I interviewed 20 dissidents in 12 cities. I really got an idea of dissidents that was much rougher than here. These people in Cuba were nothing compared to what I saw in Russia.

ALB: Did you ever think to bring up why he doesn't hold a presidential election?

OS: I did. He said something to the effect, "We have elections."

ALB: Local representative elections. But what about a presidential election?

OS: We didn't talk about it, especially in view of the fact that our own 2000 elections were a little bit discredited.

My immediate reaction was to charge at these bastards and try to smash thier placards and hurt them as much as possible. I was accompanied by several other enraged demonstrators. Unfortunately the more militant socialist groups had already marched away so most of the immediate crowd complained that we where ruining a peaceful march. I stand by the actions we took. When Liberals have the confidence to attend a anti-war demo it clearly isn't a good sign.

If people are serious about activism they should realise that change doesn't come from wishing problems away it comes from militant direct action. By standing there debating with a bunch of right wingers at a rally, not only are people wasting time and demoralising everyone, they are giving them confidence to come back and disrupt more rallies. In the ideal situation Young Liberals should be left bruised, bashed and bleeding if they dare show thier face at a rally like that. That way they will be more hesitant about coming next time, and if they do the police will be more likely to quickly move them on.

This will sound crass, but bear with me.

9/11 would make a hell of a movie.

It’s the most dramatic day of modern times. The story lines are clear; it writes itself. You don’t have to make up heroic characters; every minute has a dozen. No Hollywood falsities need intrude – no star-crossed lovers, no cheerful archetypes, no swelling music (take a cue from “A Night to Remember,” which didn’t introduce an orchestral score until halfway through, to great effect.) Just tell the story as it happened that day, and people would cram the theaters by the millions. Just like they went to see “The Passion.” And with the same emotions, I’d bet: from the opening moments the audience would have the same sick clot in their stomachs, the same old throb of dread we all felt during “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” This wasn’t pleasant, but it was important to see it, and know.

It doesn’t demean the day to make a movie of it, anymore than it would be an insult to write a novel about the events. Movies are how we tell stories; they’re the means by which the culture coalesces around certain ideas, or learns which ideas they should coalesce around.

And that’s the problem. I wonder whether Hollywood execs shy from a 9/11 movie because they think it might send the wrong message.

It would anger people anew, and we’re supposed to be past that. It would remind us what was done to us instead of rubbing out noses in what we do to others – I mean, unless you have a character in the second tower watching the plane approaching and saying “My God, this is payback for supporting Israel!” it’s going to come across as simplistic nonsense that denies the reality in the West Bank, okay? It would have to tread lightly when it came to the President, because even though we all knew that he wet his pants and ran to hide, we’d have to pretend and do scenes in Air Force One where he’s taking charge instead of crying help mommy to Dick Cheney, right? I mean the idiots in flyover people believe that stuff, and you’d have to give it to them or they write letters with envelopes that have these little pre-printed return address stickers with flags up in the corner. Seriously. Little flag stickers. Anyway, we would have to show Arab males as the bad guys, and that’s not worth the grief; you want to answer the phone when CAIR sees the dailies of the guys slitting the stewardess’ throats? And here’s the big one: if we make a patriotic movie during Bush’s term, well, it doesn’t help the cause, you know. People liked Bush after 9/11. Why remind them of that? Plus, you can just kiss off the European markets, period.

Richard Clarke’s book is available? Here’s a blank check. Option that sucker.

I would contend that there are two distinct camps in the anti-war crowd. There are the Berkeley brats and the Evan Maloney interviewees-- mostly amiable leftists against the big bad establishment as it's still the in thing to do among the more bellbottoms than brains crowd. That's fine, I can handle stupid kids doing stupid things, that's more or less a given.

What worries me, though, is the other camp. The organizers. The sympathizers. The people who carry North Korean and Palestinian flags and actually believe that the US should be destroyed, and have for some 20 years of their lives. These people are the price we pay for the 1st Amendment.

I'm glad they exist, in principle. I'm glad we can point to them as they rave and rant about things they've never actually experienced or even have a basic understanding of and say, that's the difference. Those people aren't being dragged off to the gulag for dissent against the government. Our system works better.

However, there must be a line in the sand, when it's no longer free speech and dissent. When it comes to aiding and abetting the enemy, these people have to be removed from society and pay the price of their actions.

. . .

Now, I know some of my readers will balk at the implication that people chanting clever little slogans and waving signs are committing treason and should be put to death because of it. To those people, I'll say this: I would tend to agree with you. However, when those slogans are "Burn America, Burn" and the signs read "War against America is the real war on terror", it's time to draw a line and say this crap stops here.

These people, as I said, are a byproduct of the freedom we all enjoy. 50 years ago, we had a strong society that simply wouldn't tolerate this sort of thing. If a gaggle of morons walked down main street in the 50's waving flags of the Soviet Union, men would have loosened their ties, rolled up their sleeves, and proceeded to whip the snot out of them. The cops, if anything, would likely join them. The local judge, if anything, would probably charge the people getting the snot whipped out of them with inciting a riot or disturbing the peace or some such.

Unfortunately, for all our marvelous advances in technology, medicine and manufacturing, society has been going to hell in a hand cart for the last forty years. Instead of men rolling up their sleeves to deal with such things, we're now forced to stand by the sidelines and grumble, lest we be charged with assault by the justice system that has been so mutilated by soccer moms and trial lawyers, it's possible to sue fast food chains because you're fat or are prone to drop coffee in your lap.

The problem is that most Americans have forgotten what an enemy is...someone you have to kill because otherwise he will kill you.

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when it looked like that would change, but in the end, 9/11 wasn't enough of a shock to the system to change the dominant way the US public thinks, which is basically that as long as "Friends" airs on time and the local mall is full of fun stuff to buy, nobody really cares what radicals (here and overseas) are saying about us.

If any man in the american millitary can take Hatsumi I will pay them a
thousand bucks.

Mentality or not, no redneck military guy is going to pound someone who
dedicates 50 years to a martial art.

Don't bitch about stereotypes when you compare some crash course in self
defense given by an elitist jock club to a multi thousand year old technique
that's been practiced for more generations than this country has existed.

With all the fraud in the industry in the US, it's kind've annoying when
people downplay martial arts because they're comparing military guys to some
poorly run organization lead by a guy who gave himself a black belt.

What troubles me about Fielding's statement is that all of our system's did not fail. One of them succeeded --- the ability of the citizens of this country to identify a threat and take action as individuals to elminate it. The ability that was demonstrated so dramatically --- and successfully --- by the passengers on Flight 93, the only hijacked plane where the terrorists failed in their mission to crash into a valuable target.

As I wrote one year after the 9/11 attacks, I don't believe that America began responding effectively to Al Qaeda when we invaded Afghanistan. I believe we began responding effectively the moment that the passengers of Flight 93, fed information via cellphone calls from the ground, recognized what the terrorists on their flight planned to do --- and acted to stop it.

After all the hearings that the commission has had on the failures of our government to prevent 9/11, or even to respond effectively while it was happening, shouldn't there be at least one hearing to discuss what went right on that day? Where is the session devoted to studying the actions of the passengers of Flight 93, and their success at foiling the terrorists they confronted? Is there nothing at all to be learned from their actions, and their sacrifice -- or is the comissison just more interested in finding fault than in actually recognizing success?

UPDATE: The following post reached the list today:

As much as we may all say we love to hate the millitary we must still be
very proud of them. I am proud to live freely as a canadian and am proud of
the peacekeeping work my country's forces do to try and spred that freedom
to other nations. So with out any any hesitation I salute all of north
america's men and women who have, are now, and will give to keep our great
nations free and proud.

I can't tell you how pleased I was to read that.

But when I saw that banner saying "Mission Accomplished," I thought, no, no, it isn't accomplished at all, it's barely begun, and if we're going to do this thing, accept this challenge, fully absorb the import of this moment, it's going to wind up making the Hundred Years War look like a performance of Nicholas Nickleby.

And please don't hand me that "Well, he just meant the major operations, and the rest of the message was more nuanced, and if you read the text . . ."

Baloney. I support the president in all of this, but what he should have done then, in my opinion, is what he can still do now. What I've been waiting for. What the whole country needs, for, against, and in between.

A speech. A big one. A grave one. Say that the world is a very bad place and has been for a long time, and that we're going to stop it in its tracks and make it better because we have to, and because, as Tony Blair said when he spoke to Congress, "It's your destiny."

Stand next to a map of Iraq, and another one of the world, and point out what's good and what's bad, what's been done and what's left. Say, "You may disagree, but here's where we are, and here's where we're going."

Message to the administration: No one in Europe or on the left is ever, ever, ever going to like you from seeing a photograph of a marine handing a bag of groceries to a woman in a burkha. Jacques Chirac is never going to say, "Well, they have built a lot of community centers. Maybe Bush was right."

Win. Stopping building schools. Win. There's plenty of time and need for hospitals, but first . . . Win. Yes, yes, Iraqi girls can be very empowered by seeing a female colonel running an outreach program, and we can all chip in for the posters that say "Take Your Daughters To Mosque Day," but in the meantime, would you please win.

If I have to listen to one more administration spokesperson say, "The overwhelming number of Iraqis is with us, it's just a small percentage of cranks causing all the trouble," I'll be tempted to say something I swore I never would: "Du-uuh."

A small percentage, huh? About the same size as the few thousand Bolsheviks who took over the 100 million Russians in 1917? More? Less?

In service of this goal, I would like to propose a new slogan. It's based on the old anti-war chant from the sixties, "Peace Now!" You must've heard that one. Demonstrators have been shouting it for the last 40 years. "Peace Now, Peace Now, Peace Now." Hell, I think I probably shouted it, myself, somewhere around '73. (This would have been shortly before the drinking age in Massachusetts went down to 18, after which my friends and I took to shouting far more sensible things, like, "You can't cut us off, it's only 11:00. Hey, let go of me.")

Here's the new slogan: Win now.

Since Canada has no First Amendment, anti-bias laws generally trump free speech and freedom of religion. A recent flurry of cases has mostly gone against free expression. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ruled that a newspaper ad listing biblical passages that oppose homosexuality was a human-rights offense. The commission ordered the paper and Hugh Owens, the man who placed the ad, to pay $1,500 each to three gay men who objected to it. In another case, a British Columbia court upheld the one-month suspension, without pay, of a high school teacher who wrote letters to a local paper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation but a condition that can and should be treated. The teacher, Chris Kempling, was not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state defines as improper.

. . .

The churches seem to be the key target of C-250. One of Canada's gay senators denounced "ecclesiastical dictators" and wrote to a critic, "You people are sick. God should strike you dead." In 1998, lesbian lawyer Barbara Finlay of British Columbia said "the legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a struggle between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation."


It's starting to be defined just that way in other countries. In Sweden, sermons are explicitly covered by an anti-hate-speech law passed to protect homosexuals. The Swedish chancellor of justice said any reference to the Bible's stating that homosexuality is sinful might be a criminal offense, and a Pentecostal minister is already facing charges. In Britain, police investigated Anglican Bishop Peter Forster of Chester after he told a local paper: "Some people who are primarily homosexual can reorientate themselves. I would encourage them to consider that as an option." Police sent a copy of his remarks to prosecutors, but the case was dropped. In Ireland last August, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned that clergy who circulated a Vatican statement opposing gay marriages could face prosecution under incitement-to-hatred legislation.


In the United States, the dominance of anti-bias laws and rules limiting free speech and free exercise of religion is clear on campuses, not so clear in the real world. Still, First Amendment arguments are losing ground to antidiscrimination laws in many areas, and once stalwart free-speech groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, have mostly gone over to the other side. An unlikely split has occurred. In the interest of fighting bias, liberal groups reliably promote laws that limit First Amendment principles. The best defenders of free speech and freedom of religion are no longer on the left. They are found on the right.

UPDATE: As a reminder, here's what the Canadian Constitution has to say about free speech:

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.

Gee, it's good to know everybody "has" freedom of opinion and expression. But without a provision that the government shall make no law abridging it, what exactly does this passage mean? Anything? Anything at all?

UPDATE: Deep breath... deeep breath...

The best-selling book by former counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke may soon be a movie. Sony Pictures Entertainment has purchased the film rights to "Against All Enemies," Sony vice chairwoman Amy Pascal told The New York Times for yesterday's editions. In the book, Clarke charges that the Bush administration made Iraq more important than threats from Al Qaeda before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

UPDATE: Read this. And this.

Los Angeles: Brawny movie hero and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger became a real life hero when he saved a cramp-stricken swimmer from possibly drowning off the coast of Hawaii, aides said Friday.

The "Terminator" star -- used to saving people, and indeed entire planets, from terrible fates in his Hollywood movies -- spotted a man in trouble off the coast of the lush island of Maui, where he is enjoying a weeklong family holiday, and stepped in to save him on Wednesday.

"He saw a man in distress in the water and brought him back to the shore," an aide to the former Mr Universe bodybuilder and Republican politician said.

"The man was hanging onto a boogie board and the governor knew there was something wrong and asked the guy if he was OK.

"The swimmer said he had cramps all over and couldn't swim back to shore, so the governor told him to hang on and swam him 100 yards (meters) back to the beach," the source said.

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: Washington, April 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."

When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.

When an off-target U.S. bomb killed scores of Afghan civilians who had taken refuge in a mosque, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar announced a global boycott of American products. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the United States, and Washington was forced into the humiliating position of vetoing a Security Council resolution declaring America guilty of "criminal acts of aggression."

Here's the problem for the Democrats. You can't be both for and against unilateral action. You can't be both for and against a pre-emptive attack against a known enemy who has vowed to do us harm. You can't talk about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s and then pretend now that they never existed. You can't call for toppling Saddam Hussein and then criticize someone for actually doing it. Actually, I guess you can do these things, because that's exactly what the Democrats have been doing.

According to principles of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a subatomic particle to occupy multiple positions at the same time. Perhaps the Democrats hope to become the quantum party. If so, it explains why John Kerry, the consummate Quantum Candidate, is the perfect person to head the Democratic ticket this fall. Here's a man who criticizes President Bush for not giving our troops in Iraq sufficient supplies and equipment. But when he was given a chance to vote for an $87 billion package to supply our troops, he ultimately voted against it. (Although, in fairness to Kerry, I should note his nuanced stance on the issue: he explained his vote by saying, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.")

Principled, persuasive arguments can be made both for and against the tenets of the Bush Doctrine. Unfortunately, the Democrats are squandering their opportunity to outline an alternative vision and instead are resorting to knee-jerk criticisms and ad hominem attacks. That's too bad; this is a discussion our country must have, because it will determine how we handle this war against radical Islam, a war that could easily last a century. But it seems that the only war the Democrats want to wage is one against President Bush.

So nice to see Coffman advertises on a site that calls for an ethnic cleansing of an entire region in retaliation for the - completely unwarranted - killing of four men. Yes it was a terrible thing, but killing women and children fixes this how?

And then we have the lovely insult to Islamic women, like this:

(Accompanying a photo of Islamic women in traditional garb) I don't know why more people - especially women - aren't converting to Islam. They make it seem so inviting.

Tell Mr. Coffman that America is not about ethnic and religious hatred.

UPDATE: Charles says:

I’m just curious; has anyone ever heard of a blogger or other citizen on the right side of the aisle demanding that a left wing site be shut down, by making false claims of TOS violations? Has anyone heard of a blogger on the right side of the aisle trying to find a home address and phone number to encourage their readers to harass and stalk the owner of a left wing site?

Remember, Charles Johnson was a liberal prior to 9/11-- a long-haired bike-riding art hippie.

He still has the hair and the bike. And the artistic sensibility. And everything else. And then some.

Feedback from focus sessions and my own conversations with educated Iraqis confirm that there is an association of democracy with chaos. Moreover the lack of a civil society or even a civic consciousness in Iraq will be a monumental and long-term problem to solve. It entails reeducating the entire Iraqi society. For example, Oxford University conducted the most comprehensive survey of Iraqi attitudes in the November-December timeframe and discovered that seventy-nine percent of the population did not trust the Coalition. Of course, this was the news in the American media. The much more relevant finding, however, was that less than ten percent trusted their neighbors. This is the effect of thirty-five years of Ba’ath rule and intimidation. An entire society had been corrupted. This endemic distrust among all the Iraqis, even to the point some Iraqis would not tell their relatives that they worked with the Coalition, is no doubt the greatest obstacle to the implementation of democracy. The same survey indicated the Iraqis overwhelmingly welcomed democracy, rejected the idea of a religious government, and did not consider democracy some sort of nefarious Western import, as many of the religious Ulama preach.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, I hope everybody's seen this cover article in Animation World magazine, the premier periodical in the animation industry, which does a deep exposé on Odd Todd, Weebl, and Homestar Runner. Evidently there's talk of bringing one or more of them from the Flash Meme world into the sphere of syndicated animated series...

THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF THE TAX CUT
Why It's Smaller Than You Think

UPDATE: There seems to be some uncertainty over whether the quote in question is directly attributable to the person purported to have written it. And I'd be a lot more skeptical if this were the first thing like this to have been documented at LGF or elsewhere-- or even remotely the first.

THE PASSION OF THE JEW: If you didn't see South Park last night, my commiserations. Watching a cartoon Mel Gibson in his tighty-whiteys jumping onto his own sado-masochism machine was one of the more sublime sights of the year. Yes, he is clearly bonkers. And yes, Stone and Parker are geniuses.

I have a confession to make:

I killed Jesus.

And I had many co-conspirators, including you.

Yes, you. All of us. We all killed Jesus. All of us – the Romans, the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, the Greeks, the Asians, the Rastafarians, the Egyptians – ancient and modern - the Babylonians, the Russians, the French, the Mexicans, the Canadians, the Americans and even those nice people who live down the street from you and go to church every Sunday.

We're all guilty.

We all killed Jesus because we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God – and Jesus came to earth, withstood real human temptation, lived a sinless life, was crucified despite His pure innocence, and then rose from the dead, thereby triumphing over evil's ultimate weapon. Because He paid the penalty for our sins, we can live without fear of death because, by accepting what He did, we accept God's free gift of grace: salvation and eternal life with Him rather than eternal life without Him.

There can hardly be a government in the world, including the Arab world and the wider Muslim world, which has not for a long time considered  that a lot of life's problems would have been resolved if Saddam Hussein had been called some time ago by the Almighty to receive the judgment which awaits him in the next life.

But the "selection" by the US Supreme Court of George Walker Bush to the office of President of the United States of America has had consequences unimagined by the Western World since the end of World War II.

Who would ever have thought that a majority of the peoples of Europe would ever regard the United States of America as a real threat to the peace and stability of the world ?  But they do.  That is primarily a consequence of the Bush 'n' Blair invasion and occupation of Iraq. 

The war  was unlawful as a matter of international law.  It has vastly weakened the United Nations, it has led to the impending demise of NATO.  It has split the European Union.  It has created  divisions between the West and the Muslim world which may take decades, if not centuries, to heal.

Within a matter of months we shall be closing this page to start a new page for the next US Administration.   For the sake of the rest of the free world, we hope and pray it will not be under the leadership of George Walker Bush and that he may be rapidly consigned by the American people to the dustbin of history.

The biggest truism about the Army in general and the Guard/Reserve in particular is the unbelievable education of the troops. My last driver was a young corporal who had joined the Guard to get an education. He had his Bachelors degree and was within striking distance of his Masters. We had a medical unit attached to our battalion. There were enlisted medics in that section. All of the enlisted medics were Registered Nurses. One of my NCO's was a practicing attorney, another was a CPA. Fully 60% of the unit was enrolled in college. In short, the guys in the Guard/Reserve take advantage of the educational opportunities, and they make the unit stronger because they are so educated.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Intellectualism, as it is practiced today, is a trap.

It is not a palatial hall of great minds looking for answers and then testing them in the real world; it is a basement in your parents house filled with lazy and filthy hippies eating your leftovers and drinking the last of your milk. Intellectualism is certainly not the same as intelligence, and more and more, it is becoming antithetical to intelligence. When well-off people who call themselves intellectuals drive their SUV's to march in support of Marxism, you can see the chasm between intellectualism and intelligence in full flower. When elitists who fancy themselves brighter and more compassionate than the rest of us choose to support the Taliban, with its stoning of women and execution of homosexuals in football stadiums before mandatory audiences, over a representative democracy with unparalleled structural protections of minorities and freedoms of expression, then self-styled intellectuals have abandoned intelligence altogether, as well as morality, reason, compassion and indeed sanity.

These ‘intellectuals’ are cowards. Action, and the consequences of action, completely paralyze them – it literally strikes them loquacious. They become so afraid of doing something that they are reduced to a non-stop, really quite pathetic jabbering. The French, in particular, have made this into an art form that has religious overtones for them. They seem to really believe that as long as you are talking nothing bad can happen to you. Their historical vision stretches back less than fifty years. And they say we are the unsophisticated ones, the adolescents.

The Bush campaign and the GOP say pro-Kerry groups are illegally spending soft money in the presidential race, and that Kerry's campaign is illegally coordinating that spending. The groups have contended they are operating legally.

''They're making a mockery of what the rules are,'' Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot said.

Kerry campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter accused Republicans of political gamesmanship.

''We take the law very seriously. Republicans can't stand the fact the American people want change, so now they are playing politics with the law,'' Cutter said.

A worldview--i.e., a philosophy--is not normally something people look at, but something they look through. A philosophy is a frame of reference for understanding and dealing with the concretes (and middle-level abstractions) we confront in life. It takes a special act of reflection and abstraction to make a philosophy an object of cognition, rather than a means of cognition--i.e., to make it a "what" rather than a "how."

Unreflective people, which definitely includes journalists, are not aware that they have a philosophy at all. But they are inescapably aware of philosophies different from their own. So liberal journalists think that they are not using any philosophy, they are just looking at and describing events "non-ideologically." But when they see conservatives coming to what strikes the liberal journalists as "weird" conclusions, they know that the conservatives are led to them by their political philosophies.

An apparent attempt to blow up a McDonald's drive-in restaurant in northern Italy was foiled on Sunday but the suspected terrorist died when his car exploded with him strapped inside.

Witnesses said a man, later identified as Moustafa Chaouki, a native of Casablanca, drove his Fiat Tempra into the queue of cars waiting at the restaurant in Brescia, 100km east of Milan, at 10 pm. His car contained four cylinders of kitchen gas, each with a capacity of more than 70 litres.

I keep picturing the Hamburglar in a suicide bomber vest.

President Bush opened his 10-minute remarks to the gathering with a reference to what he referred to as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "favorite show" on television. Those anticipating an "Apprentice" punch line -- the Donald, after all, was only a few yards away -- guessed wrong.

"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," Bush said, generating a roomful of laughter. "My Cabinet could take some pointers from watching that show. In fact, I'm going to have the Fab Five do a makeover on [Attorney General John] Ashcroft."

From there, Bush went on to poke at his own malapropisms before unveiling a slide show titled "White House Election Year Album" that had the crowd chuckling. Yes, there were a few jabs at the Democrats, including a couple of shots taken at Democratic challenger John Kerry. Bush described a picture of himself doing what looked like the shuffle in the Oval Office in front of Condoleezza Rice as "here I'm trying to explain John Kerry's foreign policy to Condi." He also faked a phone conversation between Kerry and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. "Hey, John," he said. "Kim Jong Il here. Just wanted to let you know, you're my guy."

Mostly, though, he put up dorky-looking pictures of himself. A recurring joke involved photos of the president in awkward positions -- bent over as if he's looking under a table, leaning to look out a window -- accompanied by remarks such as "Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere!" and "Nope, no weapons over there!" and "Maybe under here?"

We've thus far received e-mails from 101 readers who identified themselves as members of the U.S. armed forces, service members' relatives, veterans or military trainees. This is a selection of those e-mails. Of those who wrote, three expressed disapproval of President Bush's jokes at last Wednesday's Radio and Television Correspondents dinner; the other 98 approved.

Our son served in the Sunni Triangle, Balad and Samarra, in a mechanized infantry unit that came under fire frequently. I read the humor to my wife blind and asked her what she thought. She said it was hilarious. When I told her of the "outrage," she sighed and said, "Well, they were outraged by the aircraft carrier speech too."

I wasn't in Iraq this time, though I'm still in the reserves. I was there for round one in 1991 as a chemical defense officer--let's just say I know from WMD and I'm voting for the President.

You might note that I'm also a stand-up comic, and I know from funny. I thought he was hilarious.

According to an e-mail sent to prior customers of BuyMusic.com (link intentionally left out), the online store will become "integrated" with its parent site, Buy.com, within several days. What this means to the fate of what was once called "The World’s Largest Download Music Store" is unclear.

Launched before iTunes for Windows, BuyMusic.com initially expected to sell one million songs per day – or 200 to 300 in the first year – according to estimates by founder and CEO Scott Blum. When re-interviewed in December, Blum offered no statistics, but did say, "We’re nowhere near Apple’s numbers."

“Kerry’s trouble is that he is simply not the common man,” Clotaire Rapaille, who’s been contacted by Kerry’s campaign team for advice, told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

In the wake of the US-led war on Iraq, which France opposed, the Democratic hopeful’s command of the French language, plus his background in France and Switzerland, could be a real liability among US voters, he said.

“Forget the French connection,” he advised.

“The French are thinkers — ‘I think, therefore I am’. Americans want somebody who is going to take action. All this association of Kerry with thinking too much and nuance and five-sentence answers is off-code.”

He added: “American culture is an adolescent culture... In America, you have to be the common man, be able to make people think you are the common man.”

Rapaille, author of the forthcoming book “Archetypes of the President,” specializes in psychoanalysing cultures. His expertise is sought out by major US corporations, and he’s often interviewed in US media on mass culture.

Besides dropping the French connection, Rapaille suggested that Kerry take fewer holidays, start giving “one word or two” answers to questions — and do something about his wardrobe.

“Go to K-Mart, buy jeans and cowboy boots... Dress like you are going into a bar in Kansas to drink from the bottle,” he said.

NRO: It seems "cool" these days for right-of-center Americans to French-bash: Hasn't it gone a little too far? Aren't you just adding to the lifespan of "freedom fries" with a book about a "betrayal?"

Timmerman: It's a serious matter when the leaders of a country such as France show by their actions that they are willing to jettison a friendship with America that goes back 225 years in favor of a dictator such as Saddam Hussein, whose claim to fame includes the massacre of some 300,000 of his own people. And yet, that is precisely what French president Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin have done. They have shown that they were willing to exchange exclusive oil deals with Saddam, and political payoffs, for the French alliance with America.

NRO: Did Chirac actually lie to President Bush before the Iraq war?

Timmerman: Yes, and this is why the president and Secretary of State Powell were so taken aback when foreign minister Dominique de Villepin pulled the rug out from under United Nations negotiations on January 20, 2003, by announcing, apparently out of the blue, that France would never ever agree to using force against Saddam Hussein.

Before the first U.N. vote in early November 2002 (actually, it was the 17th U.N. resolution condemning Saddam and calling on him to voluntarily disarm or suffer the consequences, which included his forceful ouster), Jacques Chirac picked up the phone and called President Bush at the White House, personally reassuring him that France "would be with" us at the U.N. and in Iraq. To demonstrate his intentions, he said, he was sending one of his top generals to Tampa, Florida, to work out the details with U.S. Central Command leaders for integrating French troops into a Coalition force to oust Saddam.

"Chirac's assurances are what gave the president the confidence to keep sending Colin Powell back to the U.N.," one source who was privy to Chirac's phone call to Bush told me. "They also explain why the administration has been going after the French so aggressively ever since. They lied."

NRO: You accuse France of actually encouraging genocide — it seems like an outrageous charge.

Timmerman: It's a very specific charge, made by Hoshyar Zebari, who is now the Iraqi foreign minister. Zebari was referring to the massacre of the Marsh Arabs who used to live in the Howeiza marshes along the southern border between Iran and Iraq. In the mid-1990s, at the urging of the French, who worried about sending their oil engineers into the area, Saddam drained the marshes — an area the size of the state of Delaware — turning the rich, fertile homeland of this ancient people into a dust bowl. Then he sent in the Republican Guards, massacring thousands of civilians. Why? To make the area safe for French oil engineers and French oil workers.

NRO: You say in your new book that the Iraq war was, in fact, all about oil.

Timmerman: The war in Iraq was indeed a war for oil — waged by the French, not the United States. The Chirac government was desperate to maintain its exclusive — and outrageously exploitative — oil contracts with Saddam's regime, which would have earned the French an estimated $100 billion during the first seven years of operations, according to experts I interviewed for my book. My worry today is that a Kerry administration would back the French, who continue to assert that these contracts are legally binding on the new Iraqi government. That would be a travesty and a dishonor to all those Iraqis who died under Saddam.

NRO: What are French motivations when dealing with these regimes — purely economic?

Timmerman: Contracts are certainly very important. Americans need to remember that France is not a free-market economy, as we still are (despite the efforts of Hillary Rodham Clinton to nationalize the U.S. health-care industry!). When French businessmen go abroad, they often travel in delegations led by the prime minister, or the foreign minister, or some other top official. The French government gets involved not just in opening doors, but in negotiating contracts. Often, these contracts have involved substantial kickbacks to French political parties. Even today, French companies can declare as an expense on their income-tax declaration the bribes and commissions they pay to foreign agents. This was banned in the United States in the 1970s under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is one of the reasons the French like to do business with dictators. In a free and fair market, their companies can't always compete.

"We need all kinds of computer books."
-- Ashraf T. Hasson, founder, Linux Users Group of Iraq

Donate an extra copy of a good computer book to help Linux and free software education in Iraq. You bring the books, and we'll ship them! Money donations are also welcome. Thanks to our sponsor BookCrossing for supporting the event.

You wouldn’t know from today’s paper that he’d said these things. You would have only read an allusion to a “tape,” with no explication.

Why?

As you may have heard, Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism advisor to Bush, and a registered Republican who has worked in every administration since Reagan, has exposed Bush's mishandling of 9/11 and the war on Iraq. In his book "Against All Enemies," Clarke does an amazing job of presenting the facts and connecting the dots. Instead of refuting Clarke's claims, the Bush Administration has launched a campaign of character assassination, hoping that the story will just go away.

We're committed to stopping that from happening by making sure that the American public hears Clarke's extraordinary comments. If we can raise $300,000 in the next few days, we can run a hard-hitting ad nationally that highlights his message.

"WE WANT DEMOCRACY LIKE THE OTHERS:" Here's some more evidence that the freeing of Iraq is sending ripples across the Arab world, to the discomfort of despots:

Kurdish residents claim the government responded to what they call peaceful protests with violence as an excuse to say Syria remains too unstable to introduce the kind of democratic reforms that are helping their brethren in Iraq.

"We want democracy like the others," said Hoshiar Abdelrahman, another young shopkeeper in Malikiya, 60 miles east of Qamishliye.

More here:

Many of those present had relatives and friends in northern Syria and were in cell-phone contact with them hour by hour. In and around the city of Kamishli, in the past few days, several dozen Kurdish protesters have been shot down by Baathist police and militia for raising the Kurdish flag and for destroying pictures and statues of the weak-chinned hereditary ruler, Bashar al-Assad. In tussling with local party goons who shout slogans in favor of the ousted Saddam, it is clear, they are hoping for a rerun of regime change.

It is early to pronounce, but this event seems certain to be remembered as the beginning of the end of the long-petrified Syrian status quo. The Kurdish population of Syria is not as large, in proportion, as its cousinly equivalent in Iraq. But there are many features of the Syrian Baath regime that make it more vulnerable than Saddam Hussein's. Saddam based his terrifying rule on a minority of a minority—the Tikriti clan of the Sunni. Assad, like his father, is a member of the Alawite confessional minority, which in the wider Arab world is a very small group indeed. Syria has large populations of Sunni, Druze, and Armenians, and the Alawite elite has stayed in power by playing off minorities against minorities. It is in a weak position to rally the rest of society against any identifiable "enemy within," lest by doing so it call attention to its own tenuous position.

And that's not all:

In Syria, and tomorrow in Iran, there are forces at work who intend to take these pronouncements with absolute seriousness. It would be nice if American liberals came out more forcefully and demanded that the administration live up to its own rhetoric on the question.

Yes, the Administration shouldn't chicken out now. The dominoes are teetering, and we should be giving them a shove.

UPDATE: Greg Kihn on KFOX Thursday morning told the story of how PETA is now handing out buckets of blood to kids in front of KFC restaurants, to protest the fact that KFC, uh, serves chicken.

My e-mail to him:

I wonder if PETA has a problem with shiploads of thousands of sheep and goats being imported to, say, Mecca, for the ritual animal sacrifice at the Hajj.

I wonder if they plan to make vegetarians out of the people of Central Asia, China, Latin America, and Africa.

No?

KFC's an easy target because it's in a country where people won't fight back, where they'll capitulate to terrorists (yes, PETA are terrorists) if it's politically correct to do so.

Then again...

People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call "the third world," or the "developing countries") often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men from very wealthy families with plenty of clout in the very narrow political system, who went to the same elite university and even joined the same secret society to be socialized into the manners and attitudes of the rulers, and who are able to participate in the election because they have massive funding from highly concentrated sectors of unaccountable power that cast over society the shadow called "politics," as John Dewey put it.

The world has changed. What was once liberal is now illiberal, and the old progressivism has become mean-spirited and opportunistic. What was once idealistic is seen as calculating. When I read about the “Jews” now, it is almost always negative and emanates either from the European left or the so-called liberal university here in the United States. Israel, still democratic and still attacked by autocracies, is now hated rather than respected, not for what it has done, but for what it is. The world snored, for example, this week when suicide bombers were foiled in their attempts at getting at a chemical weapons dump so that they might once more gas Jews. Neither Kofi Annan nor Desmond Tutu, for all their recent media appearances, said a word when Palestinians apologized for murdering a jogger in Jerusalem on the mistaken impression that the poor Arab was a “Jew.”

When I turn on the TV and see some wild-eyed crazy-like public figure ranting, it is not a John Bircher frothing about pure drinking water and statesmen of dual loyalties, but prominent Democratic politicians like an Al Gore or Howard Dean screaming to the point of exhaustion, alluding to the end of America as we have known it, and citing a “betrayal” of the United States. Secret meetings, stealthy friendships, and contorted past relationships—the purported exegesis of all this intrigue and plotting now comes out on NPR and in the New York Review of Books, not garish 1950 pulp newspapers printed in pink.

. . .

I don't know quite how they did it, but the Democrats' candidate looks as at home snowboarding at a ritzy ski resort as George Bush does at a NASCAR rally. And when I hear anti-Semitism, hatred of Israel, warning about Jews in government, fury about foreign aid, visceral hatred and rude exclamations, sinister conspiracy theories, and racial separatism it usually has come far more often from someone on the Left than Right and from one educated and affluent rather than poor and ignorant.

I hate the SkyDome and the CN Tower too;
I hate Nathan Philips Square and the Ontario Zoo!
The rent's too high,
The air's unclean,
The beaches are dirty,
And the people are mean!
And the women are big and the men are dumb
And the children are loopy 'cause they live in a slum!
The water is polluted and the mayor's a dork!
They dress real bad and they think they're New York...
In Toronto . . . !
Ontario . . . oh-oh!

"You know . . . now that I think about it, I pretty much hate all of Ontario!"
"Yeah! Me too!"

The 90s were the time when rock & roll ceased being primarily about love and sex, and began being primarily about alienation and pain.

Take your pick, fuckwit. There's plenty of mini-Caliphates for you to move your ass to. No, it's all about leeching off of and destroying all that's great with the West.

It's like living next to a guy with a great restored car. Ask him how much he'll sell it for, and he says $25k. Well, if you can't afford that, what should you do? Why throw a cinder block at the windshield one night. Then go to work on the side panels with a baseball bat on another. Slash the tires the next. Throw a flaming towel into the interior the night after. Then dump some sugar in the gas tank. "Now how much for the car?"

Sooner or later, the poor neighbor won't want it. Nor will the destructive jealous person. But it wasn't about the car in the first place.

HE WEIGHS in at somewhere in excess of 17 stone, has suffered several heart attacks and undergone triple heart bypass surgery. With his protruding belly, addiction to doughnuts and Duff beer and his fear of any form of physical exercise, Homer Simpson is nobody’s idea of a figure of good health.

Unfortunately, the message appears to have gone over the heads of the health police. They want him to change, cut down on the fatty snacks and eat some pasta. It’s not going to go down well with the Atkins people, but they appear to be serious.

A team of researchers from New Jersey’s Rutgers University ploughed through 63 episodes of the hit cartoon show to analyse what sort of a health message it was sending out. Failing to see the joke, they were unimpressed.

"Fats, sweets and alcohol, particularly beer, doughnuts and salty/fatty/snacks accounted for 52 per cent of all foods eaten in this programme," their report said. "Homer was also portrayed eating food more often (he alone accounted for 21 per cent of all actions showing food being eaten) and ate greater quantities than other characters."

Al-Qaeda is no longer the fresh hotness. In fact, Al-Qaeda never was the fresh hotness. So they blew up the World Trade Center and killed three thousand people in one day. Yeah, that was shocking, mostly thanks to television news. Do you know who else killed three thousand people in one day? Just about everyone. In fact, as wars go, killing three thousand people in a single day is not exactly an epic accomplishment. During World War II the US and England firebombed Dresden and killed (according to some sources) over 200,000 people over a three day period, and we were the GOOD GUYS. Let me slow that down and run that by you again Al-Qaeda, we firebombed the refugee filled city of Dresden killing hundreds of thousands of people and history still recognizes the United States as one of the good guys.

Do you know why? Because we were better than the alternative. Do you know what's not better than the alternative? You.

Subject: Stop Spreading Hatred


I think being a Muslim you are not working for peace. You are misguided, mistaken and spreading hatred through disinformation and false accusations, which is resulting in death and miseries for number of innocent people living around the world at the hands of merciless KILLER MUSLIMS and also bringing bad name to MOHAMMED as Founder Of Islam.

Try and work for peace and reconciliation, and prove to the WORLD through your deeds that MOHAMMED teaches "love & peace" and not Cruelty, Inhumanity and "Hatred & Killing" of the innocent civilians.

S.A.R