Two takes on French Rioting....

From BBC's John Simpson

No matter that events have thoroughly borne out his criticisms of the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Muslim teenagers who briefly applauded him then have long since forgotten all that - though of course if he had supported President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair then, he would be in even greater trouble now.

From Chicago Sun Times columnist Mark Steyn:

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

For the most part it appears the press is still going out of its way to NOT mention that the "youth" are largely Muslims and are likely being directed and encouraged (and perhaps soon to be aided) by local and foriegn Muslim leadership. Oddly, even Simpson mentions it, but of course downplays it -- saying only that it's a good thing Chirac opposed the toppling of Saddam Hussein, (and how "right" he was about it) or it would've been worse!

If you read the Al Queda manifestos, it's pretty darned clear which view is the correct one.

A History of Selective Misquoting in the Times

I've been too busy to write long posts lately -- but when I want to steer people that visit here to things, I'll drop a blurb.

Good example of media bias "for the cause". Because most journalists don't become journalists to report the facts. They become journalists to make a difference.

Got the link from Michelle Malkin's blog and followed it:

Lying Times

Michelle's post is good as usual and provides a bit more on the story.

Special (Democrat, mind you) Patrick Fitzgerald on the "Plamegate" indictment.

"This indictment is not about the war... This indictment's not about the propriety of the war, and people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are -- have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel"

Got that, Dems?

The lies that led us to War, or the lies that led us to Anti-War?

Very, very interesting stuff in the L.A. Times.....

Remember how CIA covert agent domestic employee Valerie Plame's husband Joe Wilson's trip to Niger "proved" that Saddam Hussein was not trying to buy uranium?

Well, it turns out that our little left-wing investigator twisted his own findings when he wrote that op ed piece in the famously left-wing New York Times. According tothe Senate Intelligence comittee, far from discrediting the Iraq-Niger uranium link, Wilson actually provided fresh details about a 1999 meeting between Niger's prime minister and an Iraqi delegation.

Ok, then, he didn't show a smoking gun, but nothing he found disproved the intelligence that said Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Niger, as Wilson basically claimed it did. It even found some supporting evidence for the uranium claim.

Bush lied? I think perhaps it was Mr. Wilson that was stretching the truth in order to further his anti-war agenda.

Go read the whole thing. It's pretty interesting. And there are several other interesting details I left out.

The left is reaching, more and more. Hopefully it really is imploding.

Can you FEEL the hypocricy?

Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.

Huh?

So it's ok to be "racist" if you don't like a person's politics? Well, doesn't THAT open up the door!?

The Left's ideological bankruptcy gets more and more obvious. Dudes -- this is ONE big reason why you aren't winning elections.

Casualties in Iraq

... and the disingenuous "concern" & use thereof by those on the Left.

(hat tip to Misha)

Exploiting the Dead (or if you don't want to sign up for the New York Post: here)

Very good, must read. Some very telling points in the article... At the rate of American soldiers killed we've had in Iraq over the last two and a half years, we would have to stay there another

• 76 years to equal the American dead in Vietnam (Quagmire!!!!!)
• 532 years to equal the number of American dead in WWII (in 4 years!)
• 470 years to equal the number of Union soldiers dead in the Civil War
• 729 years to equal the number of North and South soldiers dead in the Civil War

Every death, of course, is a tragic loss. However, I recently read this analogy for 20th century deaths due to wars, and 20th century deaths inflicted on populations by totalitarian regimes.

It said:

Fill a football stadium with fans and players.

The players on the field would represent the number of people lost due to wars in the 20th century. The stands full of fans would represent the number killed by totalitarian regimes.

Think of that the next time someone talks to you about the "illegal, imoral war."

The Press - Making the News

The teaser for Joe Scarborough's show on MSNBC for monday speaks volumes about the way at least a lot of the media see their role....

We're being told that Joe is going to "make sure" that the same "mistakes made by the fedaral government with Katrina" are not made with Huricane Wilma.

'Cause, you know, Joe -- it's a foregone conclusion, still, that it was the Fed's fault. And of course, the Press are the true leaders and heroes of our country.

A little more about war

So let me get this straight.

We're fighting a war against people whose religion alleges that we are unclean, worse than dogs, our women can be raped at will, and they feel free to blow us up eating dinner at a restaurant. Their religion is what drove them to war with us. It is a religious war, and they started it.

Now there wouldn't be this flap if we just shot them on the battlefield. So it's apparently ok to shoot them.

But insult them? Burn their bodies? (remember, they'd strap napalm to themselves if they could and blow up a movie theater, THAT'S OK.) They don't think twice about burning our bodies and hanging them from utility poles.

Now lest you think I'm talking about all of Islam, I'm not -- though I do have some serious questions about the Quran. Even more serious are my questions about the lack of vehement condemnation of acts committed in the name of "Allah most merciful."

No, I'm talking about the beliefs and actions of the people we are fighting. Frankly, f*ck them! I don't give a damn about insulting someone who would just as quickly burn my family and rape my daughters before killing them.

If the U.S. actually felt this way about all Muslims or Islam, we wouldn't be working so hard all over the world to help Muslims out.

If I can insult a low life that wants a society that holds public executions and amputations in football stadiums and get him to come out to where I can get a good bead on him, let me do it. I don't care what your religion -- or mine -- is.

Somethin's Burnin'

A deeper dig into the "Burning Taliban Bodies" story reveals that they were burned for sanitary reasons. They were starting to decay, they were near our soldiers position. The Taliban wasn't about to come and get them, and we weren't about to stand out in the open and bury them.

PsyOps came by and decided to use the burning as a tool to rile up other hiding Taliban -- you remember, the ENEMY, the ones who harbored Osama Bin Laden and the Al Queda Leadership as they planned and carried out 9/11 ... the ones who kill civllians because the Koran tells them it's all good in the eyes of Allah? (Unless they were devout Muslims, but even then it's still ok if it furthers the cause.)

Them. Yeah. We WANT to offend them. We want to piss them off so they'll make mistakes. That's what PsyOps DOES!

Those who want us to treat people who are out there with guns trying to re-establish a brutal totalitarian regime that harbors mass murderers of non-Muslims and not-good-enough-Muslims like they were Joe in the next cube in their Chicago Office building have a gigantic reality-disconnect.

I've noticed a definite pattern here. Take ANYTHING the United States does and twist it to come up with the WORST POSSIBLE CONCLUSION, while treating anything the enemy does with compassion, sympathy, and understanding.

That is not how to win a war. And make no mistake about it, the people doing it want us to LOSE.

Big Bad Bush - Elections & Saddam

Well, Iraqis voted on a new constitution last weekend. Saddam Hussein went on trial for his first Crime Against Humanity trial this morning. Al Queda fears democracy in Iraq. They're financially broken, and their leadership is pinned down and afraid the Pakistanis are getting a little too close.

Amazing how quiet the press was about the election. The coverage was pretty subdued compared to Katrina or Abu Graib or the alleged Koran flushing.

Saddam Hussein is on trial. They're showing quite a bit more interest in that -- although I imagine they'll go out of their way to avoid giving any credit to Bush.

Because Bush is a big, bad world terrorist who took us to an illegal, imoral war, humiliating and torturing Iraqis with a cold, evil heart. Anybody who buys the moral equivalency argument is delusional.

Stack of naked criminals in a prison. Live, innocent human beings put into chippers.

You make the call.

The Left is already howling that Saddam won't get a fair trial. And in the end, they will say he didn't as long as he is convicted. The only evidence they will accept that he got a fair trial would be his acquittal -- and somehow they would manage to find a way to blame Bush for that as well. Which just goes to show that their agenda has nothing to do with right and wrong, it has to do with blindly partisan politics.

Get the Lead Out

911 Mix-Up Keeps Victim Waiting

of course if she'd had a gun strapped to her thigh .... he probably wouldn't have knocked her down in the first place.

Nice Speech, Mr. President

Very well put.

It's very telling that today, the day after the speech, one is very hard pressed to find anything about it on CNN's website. What's up with that? I found the audio on the BBC site. I eventually found it on CNN under a heading of "10 Foiled Plots". I noted the name of the video clip is "BushCutLosses" -- WTF?

I read a couple of bloviations by Kennedy and Kerry I'll respond to:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said it was "foolish for the president to brag openly about disrupting al Qaeda plots to attack us. His 'bring it on' attitude hasn't worked, and such statements can only goad al Qaeda into trying harder."

Um, I think we know the president well enough to know he wasn't bragging. This man is not a braggart. Could it be, perhaps, that he was responding to the daily denunciation of his performance by trying to tell the American People that dispite what they hear daily from the leftists -- "hey, look, we are doing something"? Is responding to the constant barage of criticism bragging? Or is that a clever transparent way of continuing the barage, by spinning his rebuttal into something negative in and of itself, so we can dismiss it?

And our dear almost-but-not-quite president Kerry (thank God) put up this strawman:

"There's nothing pessimistic about demanding that our government do better by our troops," Mr. Kerry said. "And there's nothing more pessimistic than an administration refusing to provide candor and leadership equal to our troops' sacrifice."

I think the president would agree. However, he was probably talking about all of the "pull out now", "illegal immoral", "Bush=Hitler", "Imperialism" crap, and you know it. The pessimism is embedded in your unwillingness to address those issues because they suit your political purposes, Mr.'s Kerry & Kennedy.

That Does It. This is officially NOT FUNNY anymore.

I'm not kidding. This is it. Western Culture and those who value it need to draw a line in the sand.

Unfortunately, Liberal Western thought, an offshoot of Western Culture, is getting in the way. They need to choose which side of the line they will stand on.

In the name of "Tolerence", all pig-like items -- such as and including Piglet from Winnie the Pooh, have been banned from Dudley Council, West Midlands -- a government office in Great Britian.

Councillor Mahbubur Rahman, a practising Muslim, backed the ban. He said: “It’s a tolerance of people’s beliefs.”

No, it's not. It's a deference. There is a very, very big difference.

Liberalism has become so ensconced in far to much of the incestuous cycle of the self-appointed Western Intellectual Elite if any of them can say “It’s a tolerance of people’s beliefs” or agree with it with a perfectly serious tone and a straight face.

Tolerence would be for Muslims to tolerate my belief that Piglet is anything other than a lovable character in a childhood story that is very much a part of my culture. Tolerence would mean letting me display a figurine or image of Piglet in my office. This has nothing to to with tolerence, it has everything to do with intolerence and a not so sublte hatred of Western Culture by Islam and the Western Intellectual Elite.

Hey, dogs are impure, too. Even more impure than pigs. Are they next? If I have a picture of my dog in the office and it offends some Muslim, am I to remove it, too?

Muslims all over the world have to be laughing. This is insanity. If tolerence means we must bow to everything a particular religion is intolerent of, then we are intellectually bankrupt. We have lost it. There is no turning back if we accept this.

If Muslims by the thousands don't stand up right now and agree, then there is no place for Islam in Western Society. Period.

Democratic Rule - Gimme Your Stuff

"I vote you gimme the hard-won fruits of your labor and freedom."

China, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Switzerland, and Russia would like to see the United States relinquish its historic control of the Internet.

Yes, and there's a house out in the country I'd like to live in. I wish the owners would relinquish control of it.

Freedom, free-enterprise, and a lot of American tax dollars developed the infrastructure behind what we now know as the Internet. We allow, maybe even sell the services we developed to the rest of the world. But they want to tell us how to use our resource. You know, we could have just said "sorry, Americans only". But we didn't.

You want something that you control? Develop it yourself!

"M-om, Johnny down the street lets me ride his bike, but he won't let me tell him what he can do with it."

"This situation is very undemocratic, unfair and unreasonable," said Sha Zukang,
the ambassador from China, which this week imposed new rules that allow only
"healthy and civilized" news to be read by the mainland's 100 million Web users.

It's always fun to be lectured on democracy by a totalitarian regime.

"We want your stuff. I vote we take it."

Zombietime

Hmmm... this looks like a website to check out more frequently.

In the mean time, you should check out this article about just how subtle media bias can be -- there's pictures, and it is worth looking at. It speaks volumes.

http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_september_24_2005/anatomy_of_a_photograph/

One Canuk's point of view

http://www.bondwine.com/gulag/archives/000262.html

Are we getting confused on terms yet?

The BBC calls this woman an Islamist.

She sounds like anything but...

Islamic, yes. But I don't think she's a poster girl for Al-Queda.

HAARP

One such Lunatic Fringe theory -- only they ususally talk of such things as fact -- is that the US and Russia and maybe several other countries already have technology capapble of affecting the weather.

Once again, this is a subject near and dear to my heart.

People have no idea how big the atmosphere is. People have no idea what the scale of energy involved in a single summer afternoon with a light breeze in a city park would be. But people are afraid of what they don't know, and sometimes the thirst to "know" (so they can fear it less) is so great that they can be fed any logical sounding explanation. With no frame of reference to fit it into, the story stands alone and can't be rationally questioned by the listener. It "becomes" fact to that person.

The latest lunacy out is that --- Hurricane Katrina was "caused" by this technology. Some say it was the Russians. Some say it was some Japanese gang that leases "the device" from the Japanese Government for $1 billion a year (gangs come up with that kind of money annually all the time, right? Plus, as everyone knows it's always in a government's best interest to lease out extremely powerful and destructive equipment to unpredictible anti-social parties on its own soil). Some say that Bush caused it to help his oil buddies. Others say that "they used theirs, but then we used ours to try to steer it away from New Orleans".

These people are pur-a-dee nuts.

They have no clue. 1 single afternoon thunderstorm takes approximately the energy produced in a 1 megaton atom bomb. The energy released in a hurricane is about that much per second. Where in the hell do they think we can come up with enough energy to alter, let alone create something like that?

The device they point to is HAARP. Well, HAARP exists, for sure. People don't understand what it is or its purpose, so it becomes a perfect candidate for a conspiracy theorist detail. People don't know. They want to know. I will tell them. They will feel enlightened. And I will weave it into my story of international intrigue and deciet.

HAARP, since the department of the Navy is involved (fact), is a secret weapon (speculation). It emits energy and manipulates particles in the atmosphere (fact) and therefore it is meant to control the atmosphere (speculation) and since the weather is "what happens in the atmosphere" (fact), its purpose is to control the weather (speculation). Therefore, the US has or is developing a weapon to control the weather (wild-ass, off-the-charts speculation).

What is the scale of the energy we're talking about here? First, for those of you who didn't go read what HAARP is, it's basically a big radio transmitter antenna array made up of 180 antennas. This, in effect, makes one, big honkin' transmitter. When it's done, it will be able to transmit 3 microwatts (millionths of a watt) per cm². Tens of thousands of times less than the average we get from the sun at any given moment, and hundreds of times less than the random fluctuations in what we get from the sun at any given moment. In atmospheric science classes, we call that "negligible". On top of that, the stuff that will be negligibly altered over a very small portion of the earth's ionosphere's surface, doesn't affect the weather anyway.

Transmitted energy in the frequency ranges that will be used by HAARP is subject to negligible absorption in either the troposphere or the stratosphere - the two levels of the atmosphere that produce the earth's weather. Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near-vacuum of the rarefied region above about 70 km known as the ionosphere.

The ionosphere is created and continuously replenished as the sun's radiation interacts with the highest levels of the Earth's atmosphere. The downward coupling from the ionosphere to the stratosphere/troposphere is extremely weak, and no association between natural ionospheric variability and surface weather and climate has been found, even at the extraordinarily high levels of ionospheric turbulence that the sun can produce during a geomagnetic storm. If the ionospheric storms caused by the sun itself don't affect the surface weather, there is no chance that HAARP can do so either.

--- HAARP Website

The antenna array covers 33 acres. Even if all the transmitted power from the IRI was absorbed by the ionosphere it would take more than 33,000 HAARP-scale IRIs, transmitting simultaneously to account for just 1 percent of the auroral ionosphere's energy budget. If anyone can build and power a mobile device 33,000 times the size of this device and manage to keep it hidden from the world -- they would have a really weak instrument that would still be incapable of intentionally altering the weather in any perceptible way.

Katrina wasn't caused or altered by HAARP, folks. It was a big hurricane. They've happened for millions of years, and they will continue to happen for millions more.

The Lunatic Fringe

A relative of mine has completely embraced the Lunatic Fringe. Since he believes computers are evil, he won't access them directly -- preferring to let other get what he wants from them and send the information to him.

Instead, he gets his information largely from shortwave broadcasts.

I love radio. I grew up on Radio. The whole idea is pretty fascinating for me. However, there's little that AM, FM, or Shortwave have to offer anymore. Lots of homogenized, pasteurized, compartmentalized "music" formats and some news. Sports and some news is about the only thing radio has to offer anymore.

I lost any meaningful interest in sports years ago, and I get most of my news from various places on the internet, including, but not limited to, the BBC and Washington Times.

At any rate, this relative buys into various conspiracy theories and then spends vast amounts of energy trying to get others to buy in to them, ultimately in the hope of "proving" he's right so we'll all see how smart he is and it will satisfy his hunger for self-worth.

The Lunatic Fringe (and I'd love to have that old Macintosh Screen Saver/Game written for Windows) consists of the hardest core of the various counter-culture groups on the Left and the Right -- neither side has a monopoly on this anymore.

The conspiracy theories they buy into are the big brothers of the urban legend. Much more elaborate and far more well developed, they have bankers running world politics, our own government purposely staging 9/11, even an elaborate scenario under which the United States of America dissolved itself in 1861 and was replaced by an Evil , money-making corporation for the benefit of the Evil Bankers (who, if you press most of the theorists hard enough will turn out to be the filthy Jooooooooos.)

The stories get really wild and even the best of them get pretty self-contradictory. This is because they are bourne out of wild speculation with little regard to anything like fact-checking and common sense. The construction of the basic Urban Legends is to point to a few relatively obscure but ultimately verifiable facts, mix in a bit of comfortable common knowledge, and then turn the "What If..." dial up as high as it will go -- and state it all as fact.

Throw in a source, like "a friend of a friend", or "someone my cousin knows" to personalize it -- some way to show that the idea didn't actually form in YOUR brain but it did come from a source that YOU, the TELLER of the tale, could hop in a car and go visit if you wanted. Tell a story of intrigue, and you'll have people at the edges of their seats, eating out of your hand.

These conspiracy theories use the same elements - they're just far more elaborate. If a person should choose to check the story out, they'll generally go look for the well-recited and placed facts that the story is peppered with, and find that those facts jive -- and assume that your story is true.

The cleverness is to throw the right frame around certain details of the big picture, and spend most of your time on constructing and detailing the frame, and present the whole package as a complete explanation for What's Really Going On™.

People love intrigue. It's easy to sell. Today's Conspiracy Theories are presenting people with completely alternate realities, though, and some choose to imerse themselves in them so completely that they pretty much spend their lives there.

Michael Brown defends himself, FEMA

Former FEMA director Michael Brown, in an investigative hearing before members of Congress said:

I didn't have a problem with the evacuations in Mississippi or Alabama. They were doing it. (Florida Governor) Jeb Bush had already ordered evacuations through the (Florida) Keys as Katrina was making its way through that area.

My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday (two days before the storm hit) that Louisiana was dysfunctional.

FEMA doesn't evacuate communities. FEMA does not do law enforcement. FEMA does not do communications...

Many may be surprised to learn that, guess what, FEMA doesn't own fire trucks. We don't own ambulances. We don't own search and rescue equipment

The people of FEMA are being tired of being beat up, and they don't deserve it.

But William Jefferson, (D) La, says:

"I find it absolutely stunning that this hearing would start out with you, Mr. Brown, laying the blame for FEMA's failings at the feet of the governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans"

Then you're not paying attention. He's saying these things are not FEMA's failings. He's telling you what FEMA is for, and what it's not for. Now -- you point out where it was FEMA that failed and not the Governor or the Mayor, and maybe he'll talk about that. The idea that FEMA failed seems to be a foregone conclusion here -- I thought this was an investigation into what failed and why, not a search for apologies and plans to expand FEMA's role.

As he pointed out, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi didn't seem to have a problem with FEMA.