Say you wanna a revolution. . .

The moonbats have progressed with their Bush Derangement Syndrome to the point where they are talking about rising up in armed rebellion against Chimpy McBushitlerstein and his regime.

There is just one problem.

They are complete and total wussies when it comes to guns. Fits at Shooting the Messenger found these posts on a "we're going to have a civil war" thread on the moonbat website Democratic Underground:

The thought of having to touch a gun makes my skin crawl to start with."

"You see everywhere that uzis and other assualt weapons are for sale everywhere, CNN just had a special on it. I know for a fact I don't want to live in a country where my 6 year old can buy a gun from the ice cream man.

I read an article in the local newspaper about a guy that robbed a liquor store with a fully automatic revolver, do you want to live in a country like that?"

Not only insane but ignorant. With enemies like this we hardly need friends.

If at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again

The Moonbats have found something new to get their panties in a wad about.

From WNBC.com:

NEW YORK -- There is a nationwide alert to members of law enforcement regarding a new kind of handgun which can render a bulletproof vest useless, as first reported by NewsChannel 4's Scott Weinberger.

The most shocking fact may be that the gun -- known as the "five-seven" -- is being marketed to the public, and it's completely legal

It was a very difficult decision for members of law enforcement to go public about the new weapon, but officers fear that once word of the weapon begins to circulate in the wrong circles, they will be in great danger. They agreed to speak to NewsChannel 4, hoping the public will understand what they call the most devastating weapon they face.

The weapon is light, easily concealable and can fire 20 rounds in seconds without reloading.

"This would be devastating," said Chief Robert Troy, of the Jersey City Police Department.

[Snip]

In Jersey City, Troy said he will appeal to lawmakers, hoping they will step in before any of his officers are confronted with the five-seven.

"This does not belong in the civilian population. The only thing that comes out of this is profits for the company and dead police officers," Troy said. "I would like the federal government to ban these rounds to the civilian public."

Ok, so we’ve heard the moonbat version. Now let’s get the truth. From the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action:

Given the large number of lies that anti-gun groups and politicians have told over the years, we hesitate to say that this is the most dishonest and deceptive thing we have ever heard from them. But what they are saying about Fabrique Nationale`s Five-seveN pistol is among the most dishonest and deceptive to date.

By way of background, the Five-seveN is a conventional semi-automatic pistol designed to fire various types of ammunition in Fabrique Nationale`s (FN) new caliber, 5.7x28mm. As required under federal law,1 only non-armor-penetrating types of 5.7mm ammunition are imported for sale to the public, however. One such type (designated SS196) is loaded with the Hornady V-MAX ("Varmint"-Max) varmint bullet. Some ranchers, who would otherwise carry a rifle for varmint control, have taken to the Five-seveN, which is easier to carry when working in the field. A hollowpoint bullet variety (SS192) was imported initially, but FN has discontinued it in favor of the V-MAX round.

There is nothing special about the Five-seveN. It is a conventional semi-automatic pistol, like millions of other semi-automatic pistols. BATFE has determined that it is "particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes" and approved its importation. There is also nothing special about the 5.7mm ammunition being sold to the public. V-MAX bullets, introduced in 1996, are used in nine other popular calibers. BATFE has examined the V-MAX round and determined that it is "not armor piercing ammunition."2 (Emphasis in the original.)

However, Brady Campaign (formerly Handgun Control) began claiming in February that the Five- seveN should be banned, further claiming that FN`s website says that "Kevlar helmets and vests . . . will be penetrated" with the pistol.3 On March 3, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and several others repeated the false claim during a press conference announcing legislation by Lautenberg and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to ban the pistol and the SS192 variety of ammunition.

Brady Campaign and their legislative water-carriers are lying. FN`s website makes that statement only with regard to "Five-seveN pistols and SS190 round"4 (Emphases in the original.) In boldface type, FN clearly specifies that its statement applies to only the SS190 variety of 5.7mm ammunition, which under federal law is not legal to manufacture or import for sale to the public.

Of course when hysterics are not enough lie through your teeth. Check out this whopper:

Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said the "cop killer" gun has a 20-round magazine, is able to shoot 50 to 100 yards with great accuracy and its bullet can pierce 48 layers of Kevlar.

Brown said that of the 616 police officers killed in the line of duty nationwide between 1994 and 2003, 425 were killed with this handgun.

This is a neat trick for a handgun that has only been available for around 2 years and has not in fact been involved in any police shootings. In fact I cannot find any evidence that it has been used in any homicides whatsoever.

Those of you who read here regularly know that I rented one of these guns and shot it at Rex’s Indoor Range in Hendersonville, NC recently. You can read about it here. Also there is a picture of the gun and its ammunition.

Some of you who are old enough may remember the brouhaha over the introduction of the Glock 17 to the US market. For the non-firearms people the Glock was the first polymer (plastic) framed pistol. It was very reliable and very durable. The anti-gun moonbats, the same people who are denouncing the Five-seveN, claimed that it was nothing but a terrorist gun.

Completely ignoring the fact that the Glock is 85% steel by weight and that every component of the gun shows up clearly on an airport X-Ray machine (including the plastic frame) it was declared to be invisible to all known firearms screening technology.

We were told that terrorists had been caught smuggling large numbers of them for use in airline hijackings. We were told that there was no legitimate reason for such a gun to exist.

They were even immortalized by Bruce Willis in one of the Die Hard movies when he described them as a “porcelain pistol made in Germany” that could be smuggled onto an airliner.

Then the majority of law enforcement agencies in the US began to issue them, including NYPD and the Washington DC police.

The gun-control loons always need some kind of boogie-man to frighten the sheep into sending in their “maximum emergency contribution”. It looks like it’s FN’s turn this time.

Today's nature post

White Trash Republican was out with her camera and caught a picture of the Shrieking Moonbat (nullbrainus asshatus).

Once rare (they were hunted almost to extinction during the Second World War) they have made a strong comeback since the late 1960's. They are found mostly in large urban centers and have an affinity for college campuses.

Alone they are harmless, although their obnoxious vocalizations are very annoying. However in large numbers they can be extremely dangerous.

Hillbilly Hog Roast number 3

It is time for another Hillbilly Hog Roast. This time we will pick the official Hillbilly TV show. Here are the obvious suggestions to start things off:

The Beverly Hillbillies

The Dukes of Hazzard

I have one more suggestion that I'll hold back for a few days to see if anyone else comes up with it.

No, I have two more suggestions that I'll sit on for a couple of days.

Now the rest of you, get to work.

As usual, any Ecosystem member can nominate a TV show and any Ecosystem member can vote. Leave your suggestions and votes in the comments or email them to me.

Nominations will be open until next Sunday and voting will be open until August 13.

Have a good time and remind the other Ecosystem members to participate.

If you want to nominate a show or vote and you are not an Ecosystem member all you have to do to join is email me for instructions or click on the roadsign on my sidebar. Anyone can join who isn't a moonbat or neo-Nazi. In other words if you don't think the US needs to sign the Kyoto Treaty or that the Jews have brought their troubles on themselves you can join.

Good Catch!

From The American Spectator:

Bulgaria seems an unlikely country to deserve the world's gratitude. But it appears we can thank the alertness and professionalism of the Bulgarian customs authorities for saving us -- and not for the first time -- from the consequences of the incredible, almost treasonous, ineptitude, dysfunctionalism and general lack of joined-up-thinking that appears to pervade every aspect of the governance of New Labour's Britain.

Bulgarian border guards recently seized a British truck carrying radioactive material -- to the Iranian military -- that could have been used to make a "dirty" nuclear bomb.

Smuggling? Not a bit of it! The material was being sent to Mr. Ahmadinejad quite legally and with the blessing of the British government.After a scanner showed it had radiation levels 200 times normal, the truck was found to be carrying ten lead-lined boxes addressed to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. Inside each was a soil-testing device containing radioactive caesium 137 and americum-beryllium. (Soil-testing is usually the province of agriculture, not defense, ministries.)

The head of the Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Agency (who knew until now that Bulgaria had a Nuclear Regulatory Agency?), Nikolai Todorov, said he was shocked that devices containing so much nuclear material could be sold so easily: "The devices are highly radioactive -- if you had another 90 of them you would be able to make an effective dirty bomb." That meant if nine similar loads got through.

[Snip]

If this was a one-off incident, it would be a bad enough indictment of the present British Government. In fact it is only the latest of a series.

On August 31, 2005, a truck carrying 1,000 kg of zirconium silicate was stopped by Bulgarian authorities at the border with Turkey. The Bulgarians, detecting unusual radioactivity levels, discovered the truck was owned by a British firm, and alerted the British Embassy, which informed London on September 7. Although the
trade in zirconium is meant to be tightly controlled, the truck had traveled through Britain, Germany and Romania without being stopped. The British authorities maintained there was nothing illegal about the shipment, and it was eventually allowed to proceed.

John Large, an independent nuclear consultant, said: "It is not a very sophisticated process to extract the zirconium from such material. Even though this cargo does not fall within international control, I would still be concerned. Zirconium is used for two purposes: for cladding nuclear fuel rods inside a reactor and as material for a nuclear weapon."

Previously, in May 1999, Bulgarian customs officers trained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection discovered highly-enriched Uranium U-235 concealed in an air-compressor in the trunk of a car at a border-crossing checkpoint. It was believed this was a sample to show prospective buyers.

As I have said before the Eastern European nations which labored long under the lash of communism will be our best allies in the long war to come. I pray that EU membership will not sap the will to survive from them.

Also, you all realize that this means that the terrorists are actively attempting to build a dirty bomb.

Putting the blame where it belongs

Truth from the New York Times of all places:

TYRE, Lebanon, July 27 — The refugees from southern Lebanon spilled out of packed cars into the dark street here Thursday evening, gulping bottles of water and squinting in the glare of the headlights to find family members and friends. Many had not eaten in days. Most had not had clean drinking water for some time. There were wounded swathed in makeshift dressings, and a baby just 16 days old.

But for some of the Christians who had made it out in this convoy, it was not just privations they wanted to talk about, but their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah — a contrast to the Shiites, who make up a vast majority of the population in southern Lebanon and broadly support the militia.

“Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. “They are shooting from between our houses.”

“Please,’’ he added, “write that in your newspaper.”

Anyone who wants to play the "blame the Jews" game should ask themselves how many Lebanese would be dead or injured now if Hezbollah had not attacked Israel.

Manchester Methodists are good dhimmis

From The Brussels Journal:

Until recently I did not know that Muslims are not allowed to face Mecca (nor turn their back to it) when sitting on the loo. I heard about it last April when the British press reported that Brixton Prison near London is rebuilding toilets so Muslim inmates can defecate in the right direction. First I thought it was a joke. This week, however, the BBC website has a story on a housing estate in North England. The homes, with wind turbines and solar panels on the roofs, have up to seven bedrooms, kitchens that comply with halal cuisine and “bathrooms that face away from Mecca.”

The estate, developed by Manchester Methodist Housing Association, has been built exclusively for Muslims because, as one of the residents says, “We’re all Muslims here so yes, it is important [to live exclusively among Muslims]. For myself I’m not really too bothered but to a lot of the Muslim people, yes it is important to them and yes it is a very good idea.”

Try to imagine what would happen if a housing company in contemporary Europe were to develop a project exclusively for non-Muslims. Undoubtedly there would be an outcry, while anyone in contemporary Britain who would dare to state (even in a private conversation) that “to a lot of non-Muslims people, yes it is important not to live among Muslims and yes it is a very good idea” might find themselves convicted in court for racism.

If I were a more crude and base man I could invent a list of other things that a good Muslim couldn't do while facing Mecca. However I choose to take the high road.

All humor aside, this is another example of why Europe is lost. This is not just a case of a land developer seeing a market and seeking profit by filling consumer demand. These houses will be government subsidized and constructing a segragated housing development for any group other than Muslims would be unlawful under British law.

That Muslims alone receive this kind of dispensation from the state is an example of how the laws of the United Kingdom are being conformed to Shaira.

Update:

Here is video of a good Muslim crapping in a direction other than toward Mecca.

OUR WAR!

Paleoconservative nutjob Pat Buchanan recently said that Israel's war against Hezbollah is not "our war". Oliver North lists some of the debts which America has to settle with Hezbollah:

-- April 18, 1983: A suicide bomber driving a pickup truck loaded with explosives rams into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 -- including 17 Americans.

-- Oct. 23, 1983: A suicide bomber detonates a truck full of explosives in the U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut International Airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen.

-- Dec. 12, 1983: Hezbollah operatives attack the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. Near simultaneous attacks are carried out against the Emir of Kuwait, the French embassy, the airport, a major oil refinery and an American residential compound. In all, six people die; more than 80 are wounded.

-- April 2, 1986 -- a bomb aboard TWA Flight 840, en route from Athens to Rome Rome to Athens kills four members of the Kluge family from Annapolis, MD, an American family that included an infant girl.

-- Feb. 17, 1988: U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins, assigned to the U.N. Peacekeeping Force for Lebanon, is kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

--
June 14, 1985: TWA Flight 847 is hijacked and landed at Beirut International Airport. During the 17 day stand-off, U.S. Navy Seabee Diver Robert Stethem is murdered aboard the aircraft and his body is dumped on the tarmac.

-- In a wave of kidnappings between 1982 and 1988, Hezbollah took more than 30 Westerners hostage in Lebanon, among them, CIA station chief William Buckley, American University of Beirut President David Dodge, AP reporter Terry Anderson, American University of Beirut librarian Peter Kilburn, American University Hospital Administrator David Jacobsen, Father Martin Jenco, a Roman Catholic Priest, and Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary. Though most survived captivity -- Anderson was held 2,454 days -- some, like Buckley, were tortured to death.

-- June 25, 1996, the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia is bombed, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel and wounding more than 400.

It is time and past time that the United States settle accounts with Hezbollah -- and with their Syrian and Iranian paymasters. The current dustup they're having with Israel gives us the perfect opportunity. We should not waste it.

We're not worthy

From The Washington Times:

GENEVA -- A U.N. rights panel yesterday demanded the immediate closure of any secret U.S. detention facilities and criticized Washington on a range of other issues -- calling for a moratorium on capital punishment, representation in Congress for the District of Columbia and for improved treatment of poor and black citizens victimized by Hurricane Katrina.

I HOPE that the United States has some secret detention facilities in which captured terrorists are being tortured for information which could save innocent lives, but I doubt it. That would take a little more testosterone than I think we actually possess.

As for voting in DC just give the residential areas back to Maryland. That way you won't see any extra Democrats in the Senate.

And Katrina? Show me a country that does as much for disaster victims.

Like it says in the post below, the UN is useless to us and useful to our enemies. It is time to bulldoze the whole thing into the river.

Dhimitude on Turtle Bay

Fjordman writes in The Brussels Journal:

Historian David Littman is a representative to the United Nations (Geneva) of the Association for World Education. He has spent years tracking the rise of Islamic influence at the UN. According to him, “In recent years, representatives of some Muslim states have demanded, and often received, special treatment at the United Nations.” “As a result, non-diplomatic terms such as ‘blasphemy’ and ‘defamation of Islam’ have seeped into the United Nations system, leading to a situation in which non-Muslim governments accept certain rules of conduct in conformity with Islamic law (the Shari’a) and acquiesce to a self-imposed silence regarding topics touching on Islam.”

On August 5, 1990, the 19th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. According to the official English version, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a.” The CDHRI has since then become “a quotable source at the United Nations.”

David Littman warns that “The new rules of conduct being imposed by the OIC [the Organization of the Islamic Conference], and acceded to by other states, give those who claim to represent Islam an exceptional status at the United Nations that has no legal basis and no precedent.” “Will a prohibition of discussion about certain political aspects of Islam become generally accepted at the United Nations and beyond, contradicting ‘the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ promised by Article XIX of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Unless farsighted states, both Muslim and non-Muslim, make it their business to assert and reassert the need for freedom of speech, this precious liberty is at risk of being eroded throughout the system of international organizations.”

Fifty-seven Muslim governments are pressing to include a “ban on the mocking of religions” in a new U.N. human rights body by pushing a resolution under the agenda item “Racism” condemning what they called the “Defamation of Islam.” In a clear reference to the Muhammad cartoons controversy, the proposal stated that “defamation of religions and prophets is inconsistent with the right to freedom of expression.”

[Snip]

While Islamic nations are trying to get the UN to outlaw criticism of Islam on an international basis, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan assures Americans that the plan of leaving the UN in charge of the Internet is nothing to worry about, it is only to make the Internet more efficient. “One mistaken notion is that the United Nations wants to ‘take over,’ police or otherwise control the Internet. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United Nations wants only to ensure the Internet’s global reach,” according to Annan.

Even as they were passing six resolutions condemning Israel, the United Nations General Assembly failed to define terrorism because the Organization of the Islamic Conference demanded exceptions for terror gangs like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the head-hacking Al Qaeda holy warriors in Iraq. Still, Secretary General Kofi Annan praised the OIC, an organization consisting of some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, stating that “Over the years, and especially the past decade, the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have worked to promote tolerance, equality, development and the peaceful resolution of conflict.”

The time has come to end America's involvement with the UN. Less than half of the UN’s member states are fully free according to Freedom House. Any organization derives its character from its members. A majority of unfree states make the zeitgeist of the UN hostile to freedom.

Fjordman is correct that the UN is useless to free states and useful to their enemies. I believe that what is needed is an organization of free nations which is dedicated to the defense of human liberty and active opposition to those ideologies, whether political, religious or economic, which threaten freedom.

The problem with this is that aside from the United States, the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe and India (perhaps) there aren't any nations left whose national populations will support any kind of lengthy, expensive and bloody campaign of opposition to evil in support of good.

Think of this as an intervention

To all of you sad losers out there who just know in your hearts that the Jewish people have brought all their troubles on themselves and that the Muslims have legitimate grievances which force them to use terrorism because they have no other way to make themselves heard on the word stage.

Here is the company you are keeping.















Now aren't you proud of yourselves?

Hezbo' wannabe acts up

From The Washington Post:

SEATTLE, July 28 -- One woman was killed and five others were hospitalized Friday after a man who allegedly declared he was "angry with Israel" opened fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building.

The alleged gunman was arrested without a struggle inside the building, police said.

On the one hand you kind of have to admire the "gunman" for having the guts to do what his friends in the neo-Nazi Pat Buchanan right and Cindy Sheehan moonbat left only dream of doing – while they lay in bed at night masturbating to fantasies of a world without Hebrews.

Of course the real lesson here is that guns save lives. If it hadn’t been for the presence of armed guards at the building the nutjob would have gone on killing until he ran out of ammo. You see a “gun free zone” is actually a “disarmed victim zone” and the morgues are full of people who had no means to defend themselves.

It’s too bad that he was taken alive. Now the state of Washington will have to pay for his trial and his incarceration (assuming that he can be convicted, this is the Left Coast after all) for the rest of his life.

Shining

The link on Blue Star Chronicles was down, so here is the video.

Enjoy.

Good or evil? It's all in the edit.

Beth at Blue Star Chronicles has a video post up that is a must see. Someone took clips from the movie The Shining, the original one with Jack Nicholson, and edited them into a trailer for a movie called, Shining.

Shining is a happy upbeat movie about a down on his luck author suffering from writer's block whose fortunes change when he meets a single mom and her little boy. As the three find love and become a family Nicholson's creative energies are released and he begins to write again.

Now anyone who has seen The Shining, or read the Stephen King novel from which it was made, knows that the story is very dark and tragic. An author takes a job as caretaker for a hotel located in the Rocky Mountains. The deep cold and deeper snows force the establishment to close for winter, leaving only a caretaker to maintain the building.

As Nicholson and his wife and son settle in to the routine of isolation in the snowbound hotel Nicholson begins to fall under the control of the malevolent supernatural force which infests the building. The force which feeds on the psychic or spiritual energies unleashed by those who have died violent deaths, by murder or suicide, on the premises desires Nicholson's young son, who is a powerful psychic (although he does not yet suspect how powerful he is, or will become as he grows).

As Nicholson is drawn into an elaborate fantasy world constructed by the evil intelligence in the hotel he slowly gives way to hatred and madness until he seeks to murder his own son.

As I watched the trailer for Shining I laughed at how easy it was to use creative editing to generate an impression which is 180 degrees away from reality.

Throughout the morning in into the afternoon my thoughts kept coming back to the film and I realized that, whatever its creator's intentions, it was a brilliantly constructed commentary on today's media.

Think about it. We cannot be everywhere in the world. When events happen which are important to us we can almost never be right there where they are happening, when they are happening. To tell us what is going on in the world we depend on various media. For most of us for most of our lives television has been the primary way in which we learn about the world, with newspapers and magazines coming in a distant second.

This gives the news media enormous power to shape public perceptions of world events. All they have to do is select the images which they show, narrate the images with whatever script they chose to write and add their choice of "background music", by which I mean the exact mix of stories which they chose to present.

For example in the current fighting between Hezbollah and the IDF we are introduced, by name, to Lebanese children who have been injured and lost their fathers in Israeli attacks. In pathos ridden newspaper articles we are invited into their lives and asked to share their terror and grief. Civilian casualties among the Israelis are reported as statistics. This is done to create sympathy for the Lebanese while subtly dehumanizing the Jews.

Ignored is the fact that the IDF goes out of its way to minimize collateral damage. Also ignored is the fact that Hezbollah operates in such a way as to maximize civilian death and injury. We are not told that Hezbollah locates arms caches in residential neighborhoods. That It sets up rocket launchers in the backyards of civilian’s houses. And that it uses clearly marked ambulances to transport its fighters out of areas being attacked by the IDF. Then when the Israelis are forced to begin targeting those ambulances they are filled with wounded civilians and the news media is invited to film the carnage in order to show the world what barbarians the Jews are.

If you don’t get your news from talk radio or the internet you don’t know this. The real life events in the Middle East are edited to create an image which is the opposite of the truth in the same manner in which scenes from The Shining are arranged and narrated to create Shining.

Half the battle in finding the truth consists of knowing that you are being lied to. Next time you watch a network news broadcast think about that warm feel-good story about a hard luck novelist finding redemption and renewal in the arms of a new family.

The UN acts decisively (yeah, right)

From Iran Focus:

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Key U.N. Security Council members agreed informally on Thursday on a resolution demanding Iran suspend nuclear enrichment and reprocessing work and threatening to consider sanctions if it refuses, diplomats said.

They're going to consider sanctions. Might that not bee too harsh? After all Iran is only building nuclear weapons in order to provoke a worldwide nuclear holocaust so that the little imam will come out of his well and conquer the world for Allah.

And for that triviality the UN is going to consider sanctions?

I’m afraid that the organization has lost all sense of proportion. It must be the influence of that Bolton character. If only Kerry had won the election the UN wouldn’t even be considering sanctions.

The death throws of the death cult?

Thomas Lifson has an interesting post on The American Thinker. He quotes fellow blogger Robert Godwin:

Clinical psychologist Robert Godwin proposes an interesting framework for understanding the increasing bizarre behavior of the American Left at his very interesting website One Cosmos. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic anthropologist Weston LaBarre, he posits that the left has become a “crisis cult” such as are found in societies whose bedrock assumptions break down in the face of the superior strength of foreign cultures impinging on their territory.

Godwin compares the American left to cargo cults which developed in Melanesia and American Indian "Ghost Dancers" who believed that when . . .facing the complete dissolution of their way of life—loss of their hunting territories, near extinction of the once vast buffalo herds, a series of disastrous military defeats, multiple droughts, and new and fatal diseases. . .that “a new skin would slide over the old earth, covering up the whites and all their works, and bringing upon it new trees and plants, great buffalo herds, the ghosts of the dead, and the great departed warriors and chiefs.” . . .if only each person in all the tribes danced the elaborate Ghost Dance.

Lifson concludes:

I think it is almost unquestionable that the Left’s belief systems have proven incongruent with the real world. Communism didn’t work and only survives as a pretext for despotism in North Korea and China. Welfare is a trap, and poor people’s lot in America has improved since access to it was term-limited. Higher taxes on “the rich” depress economic growth and throw people out of work. The list could go on.

With their gods having failed them, leftists have turned to cant, ritual, and hysterical repetition of their golden oldie playlist of slogans. And most of all, to demoinization of their opponents. It is fairly primitive, and often comic, with tinges of tragedy.

Metaphors are an effective way to understand such bizarre behavior. The more the merrier.

As you know I believe that the Left is a death cult and like any cult whose doctrines and beliefs are attacked they will fight back. Since their doctrines and beliefs are fundamentally irrational, since you cannot in fact think clearly and believe what the Left believes, their defense will be irrational.

World War III

From FrontPageMagazine:

Haifa, Israel – Some have suggested that the latest round of fighting between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon is the beginning of World War III. Think again.

“This is more like the Spanish Civil War,” says Daniel Seaman, an Israeli government spokesman. “What we are seeing is a series of conflicts that foreshadow a future world conflict, just as the Spanish Civil war prefigured the
Second World War.”

Seaman’s analogy is worth exploring.

Just as Hitler used Franco as his proxy in Spain to test new military techniques and equipment on the battlefield, so Iran is using Hezbollah as its proxy to do the same.

Mr. Timmerman is correct that Iran is using Hezbollah as a proxy against Israel, and by extension the entire West, but he is incorrect to say that this isn't the Third World War.

To understand you must take a longer view than most people do. World War One began with the war between England and France for control of the North American continent. That war has gone down in American history as the French And Indian War. It grew to encompass all the great European powers and ended with the final defeat of Napoleon.

World War Two began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

World War Three began in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution which saw Iran fall under the control of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and is still ongoing. Southern Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan are all battlefields in this war.

World War Three will end in one of three ways. The destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish race worldwide along with the conversion to Islam of Europe and the United States; the reform of the Islamic religion into a non-violent form which "spiritualizes" the militant passages of the Koran, or the extermination of the Muslim people.

Mr. Broder's imaginary playmate

David Broder writes in The Washington Post:

My weekend visitor was one of the founders of the postwar Republican Party in the South, one of those stubborn men who challenged the Democratic rule in his one-party state. He was conservative enough that in the great struggle for the 1952 nomination, his sympathies were with Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, not Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He has lived long enough to see Republicans elected as senator and governor of his state and to see a Republican from the Sun Belt behemoth of Texas capture the White House. His profession won't let him speak with his name attached, but he is sadly disillusioned.

"My wife was thrilled by the veto" Bush administered last week to the bill expanding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, because she shares the president's belief that those clumps of cells destroyed in the research process represent human life. "I thought it was stupid," he said. "I know too many people who are like this" -- and he shook his hands like a victim of Parkinson's disease -- "and their only hope of a cure is in stem cells. Now Bush is forcing that science to move overseas."

He went on: "How the hell long can they refuse to raise the minimum wage?" He was furious, he said, with the Republican leaders of Congress who keep blocking bills to raise the minimum wage, which has been stuck at $5.15 an hour for years. "I'm a conservative," he said, "but they make me sound like a damned liberal the way they act. They spend like fools, they run up the deficits and they refuse to
give a raise to the working people who are struggling. How the hell are you supposed to live on $5.15 an hour these days?"

He had me right up until the part about the minimum wage. There are conservatives who are "simmering with rage" at what they (mostly correctly) perceive as a betrayal by the Bush administration, but their issue is not the minimum wage.

The fact is that religious conservatives are more likely to support an increase in the minimum wage than the libertarian economic conservatives. There are a great many religious people out there who know right from wrong on moral issues like abortion and stem cells but who don't have a clue about economics. They sincerely believe that the government can wave a magic wand and force employers to give workers a raise and it will not result in fewer jobs for unskilled workers and higher prices for consumers. They also believe the myth that there are large numbers of families out there being supported by a sole breadwinner making minimum wage.

What can you say; they went to public school.

Broder is correct that the libertarian minded fiscal conservatives are upset with the stem cell veto. Many of them, like Broder's almost certainly fictitious "friend", are older and have, or fear to contract, a disease like Parkinson’s or one of the tens of thousands of other ailments which stem cell advocates deceitfully promise cures for if we’ll just raise Mengele from the dead and turn him lose with a government grant.

These folks are also upset and disgusted with congressional Republicans' profligate spending, but because they know enough economics to understand why grabbing a larger and larger share of the nation’s GDP for the state is a bad idea they will also realize that the minimum wage is a lie which harms the people which it is intended to help.

The minimum wage is an entry level wage which is paid to new workers who lack the skills and work ethic to create significant value for their employers. When a worker has been trained in the performance of his job and has learned the importance of things like showing up on time, being polite, maintaining an acceptable appearance and so on his pay is raised. Otherwise the employee will be lost to another company because in today's workplace there is a shortage of people who can do the job while showing up on time, not stinking and not cursing at the customers (see: Public Schools).

Libertarian fiscal conservatives know this. They become angry at the suggestion that the minimum wage be raised, not the other way around.

What the conservative base, a large segment of which is made up of the “religious right”, is upset with the President and Congress about is first and foremost the sellout on illegal immigration. Next on the list would be out of control spending and the general growth of government. We thought we were getting Reagan II. Instead we got LBJ, Jr.

Thought Crime!

From The Brussels Journal:

Ruby Schembri is a white 35-year old Maltese national who moved to Britain in 2004. She recently earned £750 by taking her employer, HSBC Bank, to court claiming race discrimination because she had overheard a private conversation between colleagues.

Watford Employment Tribunal found both Debbie Jones, a local bank manager, and HSBC guilty of racial discrimination after Ms Schembri claimed that she had overheard Ms Jones say “I hate foreigners” and “I am against immigration” in a conversation with Rosemary Johnstone, a colleague, in April 2005.

According to Schembri:

“Debbie asked Rosemary if she supported the Tory or Labour Party and bluntly stated ‘I am against immigration.’ My ears pricked up and then Debbie added ‘I hate foreigners.’ I was shocked and offended. Debbie made her statement with real conviction. I found Debbie's racist comment to be offensive and very hurtful. I left the room and was on the counter. I began to cry.”

Debbie Jones told the tribunal all she had said was that she would vote for Robert Kilroy-Silk of the United Kingdom Independence Party in the May 5, 2005 general election because he would get rid of immigrants. She denied using the word foreigners. Schembri told the tribunal that she had been upset by Jones’ comments and reported them to her employers. Despite HSBC describing Jones’ remarks as “unacceptable”, she was cleared internally of misconduct and was not disciplined by the bank. She remained at her post at HSBC’s branch in Barnet, North London, apart from a few days’ compulsory “race awareness training.”

However, the employment tribunal in Watford stated that it was reasonable to infer that Jones’ remark showed a “substantial dislike of foreigners.” It unanimously ruled that Jones and HSBC were both guilty of racial discrimination and ordered them to pay £750 compensation to Schembri. The latter, who now works for NatWest, another bank, reacted to the verdict with relief: “I feel vindicated.”

The case is one of the first to find that that a comment not made directly to another person can be construed as racism. Moreover, the court ruled that using the term “foreigners” is racist. The verdict also indicates that the mere fact of “disliking” foreigners constitutes a crime, even if one’s dislike is purely private and is not shown directly in one’s behaviour towards a foreigner.

[Snip]

People who in the past would have pursued careers as Inquisition officials, as Gestapo or Stasi informers, or as interrogators in Lubyanka Prison, have new prospects. Thanks to the multicultural society they can snitch on colleagues and neighbours.

Back in the old Soviet Union the name for an informer was "suki" which means "bitch".

How long will it be in the UK before simply saying that you plan to vote for a political party which favors limiting immigration and deporting illegal aliens is considered a crime?

Europe is lost. If you love freedom get out -- NOW.

Stop The ACLU Blogburst

Well it comes at no surprise to us at Stop The ACLU and Wide Awakes Radio that the American Civil Liberties Union is opposed to passage of H.R. 2679, the Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005.

A review of the bill is as follows:

PERA would eliminate the ability for judges to award attorney’s fees compensation to groups like the ACLU in Establishment Clause cases only. These fees where originally authorized by CONGRESS so that good attorneys wouldn’t be dissuaded from accepting civil rights cases pro bono.

But in the hands of the ACLU it has become a source of income for the organization. In any other type of lawsuit, ie: personal injury, the attorney’s fee if any comes out of the settlement with their client if they prevail. But not under the law authorizing these fees.

The ACLU actively shops around for reasons to challenge any public displays of religion in order to collect these “attorneys’ fees”. This has led to a systematic removal of your Constitutional protections under the 1st Amendment to freely exercise your religious beliefs. They accomplish this by judge shopping. They shop for a district to present a case in. A district in which one of their “best buddies” activist judges will hear the case and more often than not, rule in the favor of the ACLU.

The ACLU prefers to bring these types of lawsuits against cities, towns, and states which are usually cash strapped. First it is a matter of sending a letter to the governing body recommending that they cease and desist from further allowing public displays of religion. That if they fail to do so, it will cost the city, town, or state massive amounts of money to defend against them in court. And usually, a city or town is likely to not challenge. They will capitulate to the will of the ACLU. But if it does come to trial and they prevail, the amounts awarded to the prevailing party are often compounded by the amounts awarded to the ACLU attorney(s) for fees that had they NOT prevailed, would have gone uncollected.

This is extortion. Do what we tell you or something bad is going to happen. Pure unadulterated extortion.

It is these practices that the Public Display of Religion Act of 2005 (H.R. 2679) promises to eliminate so of course the ACLU would be opposed to its passage. They aren’t interested in protecting your right to freely express your religious beliefs in public.

From the ACLU’s News Release on H.R. 2679 dated 07.26.06:

The American Civil Liberties Union today urged the House Judiciary Committee to reject H.R. 2679, the “Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005″ (PERA). The panel is expected to vote on the legislation today [meaning Wednesday - in committee]. The bill would bar the recovery of attorneys’ fees to citizens who win lawsuits asserting their fundamental constitutional and civil rights in cases brought under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

“If this bill were to become law, Congress would, for the first time, single out one area protected by the Bill of Rights and prevent its full enforcement,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Proponents of the measure claim that the bill is needed to protect religious freedom, when in fact, the bill would undermine it. We hope that the committee will stand for the Constitution and reject this unwise proposal.” emphasis mine

Hold the presses… Stop Stop Stop…..

Did they actually make an argument that if the bill becomes law, Congress would single out a Constitutional protection and block it from enforcement?
WRONG!

The only thing being discussed is a law written and adopted by Congress for the awarding of the fees. And the removal of the fees from a certain kind of cases in order to remove the ability for unscrupulous people like the ACLU to abuse it. In other words, shop around for cases in order to create a money making enterprise out of the award.

The so-call establishment clause only appears one place, in the first Amendment. The leftists at the ACLU are addicted to abusing the so-call protection of separation of church and state. Which is a fantasy created by people like the ACLU in order to have grounds in which to remove religion from the public sphere.

Here’s what it actually says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Amendment I of the United States Constitution

Where is this phantom “separation of church and state”? I don’t see it mentioned.

I do see a provision whereby the Congress of the United States is preventing from making a law which establishes a religion in the United States. The founders were escaping a government that dictated that if you didn’t follow the Church of England, you were a criminal. This is what they were trying to avoid.

I fail to see how putting a nativity scene in the public square or a cross being present on a war memorial constitutes Congress making such a law. Because Erie, PA allows the erection of a nativity scene in Perry Square doesn’t constitute Congress taking any action what-so-ever to establish a national religion.

Democrats strongly opposed the bill yesterday.

A veterans’ group, the American Legion, has pushed for the legislation out of concern that war memorials and cemeteries could be cleansed of religious symbols. Mr. Nadler called the gravestone issue a “red herring” and submitted a letter in which the ACLU said it would “vigorously defend” the rights of veterans to use any religious symbol they choose on grave markers. The letter did not address the use of Christian crosses in publicly owned group memorials or tombs for unknown soldiers.
…..

After more than an hour of debate yesterday, the committee adjourned before taking an up-or-down vote on the bill.

But the ACLU would have you believe otherwise. Their press release continues:

The ability to recover attorneys’ fees in civil rights and constitutional cases, including Establishment Clause cases, is necessary to help protect the religious freedom of all Americans and to keep religion government-free. People who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees — often totaling tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Few citizens can afford to do so. But more importantly citizens should not be required to do so where the court finds that the government has violated their rights and engaged in unconstitutional behavior.

The ability of the ACLU to collect attorney’s fees in establishment clause Cases does not protect your religious freedoms, it attacks them. The ACLU actively shops for these types of cases because in the hands of judges like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the former Chief Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and former National Board member, the ACLU will prevail every time. And it becomes a business.

It is time that these types of abuse be brought to an end. Call, write, email, fax, and visit if you can , your Congressman and urge him to vote for the Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 (H.R. 2679), and put an end to the abuse and prostitution of our Constitution and our Judicial Branch of government.

This has been a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay or Gribbit. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 200 blogs already on-board.

A blast from the past

From The American Spectator:

In the Sixties, if truth be told, a lot of students joined the anti-war movement for two fundamental reasons: that's where one found the best drugs and the hottest hippie chicks. How else were nerdy, unathletic upper middle class guys going to score? Let's face it, even today -- though Conservatism has come a long way -- not many girls get turned on by a Dick Cheney black light poster.

Patrick Korte wasn't born till midway through the Reagan Administration, but his sudden notoriety is proof that some things never change. Korte is one of those earnest upper middle class high school kids who hopes girls will make out with him if he plays the political radical in the Che Guevara T-shirt. Late last year Korte, a senior at Connecticut's tony Stonington High School, organized a group called "World Can't Wait: Drive Out The Bush Regime," but apparently the name was too dorky even for Stonington High School girls. So Korte did what comes natural to high school students. He plagiarized a few lines from an old history book.

Korte judged it would be cool to resurrect the moribund Students for a Democrat Society, the Sixties anti-establishment movement that in 1969 splintered into Maoist and terrorist factions, before ultimately self-destructing. The Connecticut teen styles himself as the reincarnation of SDS founder Tom Hayden (I know, he only seems dead) sans the movie star ex-wife. No slouch when it comes to academics, Korte has expertly memorized all the Left's usual cliches and gripes: U.S. imperialism, racism, sexism, poor education in the inner cities, pollution, homophobia, the prison-industrial complex, etc., etc. Naturally Korte and his new/old organization have no original ideas to resolve these issues, just the conventional strategy of attacking the current "authoritarian" administration. And I do mean "attack." For a peacenick Patrick Korte sounds an awful lot like a Marine sergeant in Anbar Province. He can scarcely open his mouth without spitting out the words "enemy," "militancy," "fight," "combat," "sink," "tearing down."

[Snip]

The SDS did play a bit role in the Sixties and America's subsequent moral, social and intellectual decline. (I suspect it was responsible for disco, too, though I can't prove it.) It took the U.S. decades to recover from that hangover, but thanks to Ronald Reagan's hair of the dog we survived. So no matter how unpopular the war in Iraq, it is doubtful that Americans (red state Americans, anyway) are going to put up with any more of SDS's shenanigans.

Patrick Korte plans to be in Chicago August 4-7 hosting the first SDS Convention in 37 years. Some of the old veterans will be there, captivating their younger audiences with tales of their heroic exploits of avoiding service in Vietnam. There'll be educational workshops and long mornings of vapid forums doubtless culminating with some idiotic demonstrations against the war. Hopefully the Chicago cops will be there too.

I'm old enough to remember the first SDS and the Black Panther Party and all the rest. I look forward to the amusing jape that will accompany their attempted resurrection.

Hand wringing in DC

From The Washington Post:

Even as the fighting continues and the civilian casualties mount in Lebanon, sentiment in Congress is overwhelmingly on Israel's side. Last week, the House passed a resolution, 410 to 8, that went even beyond the Bush administration in supporting for Israel in its battle with Hezbollah militants.

A bid by the four House lawmakers of Lebanese descent to add language urging restraint against civilian targets was rejected in negotiations. The resolution's only nod to those caught in the crossfire came in a recognition of "Israel's longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss" and an expression of condolences -- in the last sentence of a three-page document -- "to all innocent victims of recent violence in Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories."

"We're going to be vindicated," predicted Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a Lebanese American who failed to secure language urging "all parties to protect innocent life and civilian infrastructure." "On the night of the vote, that wasn't the will of the Congress. But . . . 10 weeks from now, the fighting will be over. In 10 weeks, I think we will regret not having shown more empathy for the suffering of innocent Lebanese."

[Snip]

In today's heated atmosphere, even the Lebanese American lawmakers are careful to express their support for Israel and for its right of self-defense. Each represents a district with a large Lebanese population, and each said he has heard harrowing stories of devastation and angry constituent appeals for action.

"Violence and warfare are always disturbing, but as policymakers, we need to look at what steps need to be made to make a lasting peace, not just knee-jerk reactions," Boustany said. "I agree with what Israel is doing.

"But as conversations continue, their concerns quickly swing to the stories that constituents tell: of Israeli raids on a Beirut airport fuel depot "just so they can have a July Fourth fireworks event," as Issa put it, or the bombing of a radio tower in LaHood's ancestral village of Atou, 100 miles north of Beirut and far from Hezbollah's influence.

"I understand why the Israelis would attack the sources of the rocket launches in the south," Issa said. "But I'm not going to ignore these attacks on targets far to the north, in Christian neighborhoods where it appears to be punishment of the people of Lebanon."

It is too bad about the civilian deaths and injuries. However let us remember that the elected government of Lebanon has been allowing Hezbollah to operate against Israel for years. The people of Lebanon acting through their elected representatives have allowed Hezbollah to import thousands of missiles from Iran and Syria and stockpile them in hardened bunkers on Lebanese soil.

We should also remember that Lebanon was one of the nations that invaded Israel after its founding and tried to wipe it out. This was done while the Maronite Christians were still firmly in control. Despite this Israel backed them in the Lebanese civil war. They repay Israel's attempt to aid them in preventing their defeat and domination by Muslims by siding with Hezbollah against Israel.

I just find it hard to have too much sympathy for them.

If they want the bloodshed to stop let them mobilize their army and assist Israel in exterminating every last trace of Hezbollah from the surface of the earth.

Today's controversial post

If the rabbis of pre-WWII Germany had turned their synagogues into festering cesspools of hatred by constantly preaching that God hated the Gentile German people. If the Jews of Germany had been brought up from birth to believe that the existence of non-Jews in Germany was an affront to God and that Gentile Germans deserved only to be slaughtered to the last man, woman and child. If the Jews of Germany proceeded to act upon these beliefs by strapping explosives on their teenaged children and sending them into crowded places to blow themselves up and kill as many Gentiles as possible. If they sprayed machine gun fire into German school buses and constantly rioted in the streets throwing rocks at civilians who’s only crime was to be non-Jewish. If they used sanctuary in neighboring nations like Poland and France to launch artillery shells and rockets into Germany targeting civilian residential areas. If they made alliances with other nations which hated Germany which supplied them with ever more powerful weapons with which to murder innocent Germans. If they infested a nation bordering Germany, like Poland, to the degree that the section of Poland bordering Germany was nothing more than a Jewish stronghold and staging area for attacks into Germany. If the Polish government allowed this to happen because the Polish people had elected a majority of politicians to their parliament who supported this alliance with the Jewish terrorists. If the Polish government had issued statements threatening to send the Polish Army into battle against the Germans if they dared to send troops into Poland to deal with the Jewish terrorists using Poland as a base of operations.

If the only thing that Germany had done to merit this kind of treatment was to simply exist. And if Germany had tried over and over to make peace. If they had offered the Jews land to build an autonomous state and financial assistance in doing so. If they had shone tremendous, almost superhuman, restraint time after time in dealing with the Jews.

Then Hitler would have been 100% justified invading and conquering Poland and he would have been 100% justified to have built places like Auschwitz, complete with their gas chambers.

What made the Holocaust evil was not that a lot of people died. What made the Holocaust evil was that a lot of people who didn’t deserve to die were murdered.

After all would anyone have a problem with taking Hitler and the people who supported him and aided his rise to power and carried out his evil orders and shoving them into the “shower room” and turning on the gas?

The past is another country. . .

Thomas Sowell asks a good question. He is talking about the situation in Lebanon, but his comments apply to the war in Iraq as well:

Those of us old enough to remember World War II face many painful reminders of how things have changed in Americans' behavior during a war. Back then, the president's defeated opponent in the 1940 election -- Wendell Wilkie -- not only supported the war, he became a personal envoy from President Roosevelt to Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

We were all in it together -- and we knew it. People who had been highly critical of American foreign policy before we were attacked at Pearl Harbor now fell silent and devoted themselves to winning the war.

What if the people, institutions, and attitudes of today were somehow taken back in time to World War II? What would have been the result? Would we have ended up winning or losing that war?

Can anyone imagine John Kerry or Al Gore serving as an envoy from George W. Bush to the new government of Iraq?

To ask the question is to answer it. There is no way that the Democrat Party will do anything to help America to win it's war as long as a Republican in the White House.

Introduction to Sluggy Freelance

Chapter One: Bun Bun

Fits at Shooting the Messenger posted this picture of a rabbit with a pancake on its head.

As a longtime fan of the web comic Sluggy Freelance the first thing that went through my mind was Bun-Bun. Of course if the rabbit in the picture was Bun-Bun then taking that picture would be the last thing that the photographer would do in this life. I left this thought in the comments on his blog.

Fits realized that folk might not be clued into what Sluggy was all about so he posted a daily strip. Unfortunately the strip he posted didn't feature Bun-Bun. So here is a Bun-Bun primer.

This is Bun-Bun a homicidal Miniture French Lop with a switchblade a Glock and a bad attitude.

Here is Bun-Bun in action:

As you can see Bun-Bun is able to take care of himself. The comic is very much worth reading, not only for Bun-Bun but for the other characters as well.

Torg, the web designer with a magic broadsword which has super powers, but only when fed the blood of the innocent.

Rif, genius inventor and freelance bum whose inventions, while powerful, never quite do what he intended.

Sam, the on-the-make neighbor whose life changed forever when he became a vampire.

Zoe, the communications major who now has her own radio show where she tells stories of time travel, fighting demons and aliens and visits to alternate universes, which are all true.

Gwen, the near sighted witch whose power comes from the Book of E-Ville.

Kiki, the sweet natured ferret who has "another bathroom behind the couch".

Aylee, the formerly man-eating alien.

Government Science

In the ongoing debate about embryonic stem cell research there are people who insist that the research simply must be funded by federal funds because the uncertainty associated with this kind of research makes it impractical for private corporations.

Remember the Human Genome Project, a government project which was to cost (at least) 3 billion dollars and take (at least) 15 years? A private effort with a 300 million dollar budget did the job in 5 years. The rage of the Left at this object lesson in the superiority of the private sector was rivaled only by Satan’s fury at the sight of the empty tomb.

Ever stop to wonder why private scientific research does so much better than government funded research? The answer is simple. Researchers are self interested just like all other humans.

This is how government funded scientific research works. A scientist works at a government funded lab like the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. He comes up with an idea and applies for a grant from a government agency to fund research into his idea.

ORNL keeps its doors open and meets its payroll by the steady inflow of government grant money. The scientists who work at ORNL need the steady inflow of grant money to keep their individual labs funded and justify their employment. When they have a project to work on their position is secure. When they finish a project they get some pats on the back and are able to publish some journal articles (and in 10 or 15 years they might even win a Nobel Prize) but, bottom line, the successful conclusion of a research project means a loss of funding and the need to come up with another proposal for a research project followed by another search for grant money. They need the occasional breakthrough to help keep the money spigot open, but mostly they need ongoing projects more than they need successful results.

What about the money that can be made from a successful advance in science or technology? Well the law requires a government funded laboratory to license all commercially viable discoveries to American companies. The lab gets a license fee and a share of the profits amounting to a few percent. The actual scientist gets a taste, but the profits from a past discovery do not fund your lab in the present. Only current projects funded by grants can keep you employed.

This means that the incentives in government funded research lead scientists to value ongoing projects more than completed projects. They are led by economic realities to make only enough progress to satisfy the check writers. Final results are only sought when the check writers are finally ready to give up and look for some other project to fund.

If it had not been for Celera Genomics the human Genome Project would still be chugging along producing just enough in the way of results to keep the cash flowing.

This is not a slam at scientists. They are human and are only acting like any other group of humans would act. When the incentives lead them to do rapid and efficient work they will do so. Private companies do not get paid until they finish the job and get a product on the market. This is why Celera was able to do the job for one tenth the money and one third the time that the government funded effort.

This is why people who believe that state funded human embryonic stem cell research will be a medical panacea are destined to disappointment. The nanosecond that the research falls into the hands of government funded researchers the object of the project will be to milk it for as much government cash as possible.

Innocent Lebanon?

David Horowitz on the war in Lebanon:

. . . the very idea that Lebanon is an innocent bystander in the war against Israel won't wash. Lebanon is host to the terrorist aggressor which has sworn to eliminate Israel and its Jews from the face of the earth. This is the explicit creed of both Hezbollah and its sponsor Iran. And not just in their charter or in statements made months or years ago. Iran's little dictator reiterated the threat even yesterday in the midst of Islam's aggressive war against the Jews: "Israel has pushed the button of its own destruction. The Zionists made their worst decision and triggered their extinction by attacking Lebanon." Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, occupying two cabinet positions and seats in its parliament. The Lebanese government agreed to enforce UN Resolution 1559 which calls on it to disarm all militias on its territory, namely Hezbollah. If the Lebanese Government had performed this obligation, there would be no war, and there would be no Lebanese civilian casualties.

Instead the Lebanese government allowed Hezbollah to build its headquarters and underground bunkers in the populated neighborhoods of Beirut. It allowed Hezbollah to import 13,000 missiles to be fired into Israel's cities and towns. The 75,000-man Lebanese army has not sealed off the Syrian border and, according to reports, has allowed Syria to re-supply Hezbollah in the midst of its aggression. The Lebanese government has allowed Hezbollah to build underground fortresses on its southern border in position to attack. It has allowed Hezbollah to launch rockets into the towns of northern Israel to terrorize and kill innocent civilians.

Israel has done nothing to provoke this attack lebananese territory. But in the midst of Hezbollah's aggression against Israel, Lebanon's prime minister has joined the attackers, blaming Israel for Lebanon's misery instead of its source. . .

. . .The Lebanese army has not lifted a finger to obstruct Hezbollah's aggression, but the Lebanese prime minister has been out front in attacking Israel. Who, watching the Lebanese interviewed by reporters during the war - including the Lebanese Americans evacuated to safety - can doubt that their hatred is for Jews and not for the Islamic killers of both the Jews and the Lebanese.

These attitudes do not make the Lebanese deserving of the war that Hezbollah and Iran have inflicted on them; but it does not make them innocent either. Hezbollah's Shi'ite fanatics are Lebanese. Over the last twenty years Hezbollah has become an integral part of Lebanese society and Lebanon's government. All the while Hezbollah has sworn to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. If war has come to Lebanon, no one can pretend that they didn't see it coming. . .

. . . Until the arrival of Arafat and the Palestinian terrorists, Lebanon was a Christian democracy. But Islamic radicalism could not tolerate either Christianity or democracy. This - not the presence of tiny Israel (one hundred times smaller than its current antagonists) is the root cause of the violence in the Middle East. The cause is Arab intolerance and Islamic hate. One Jewish state among 22 Arab states was one too many. Six million Jews among 300 million Arabs was too much to bear. A sliver of land, less than one percent of the Arab land mass, which belonged to first to the Turks and then to the British was an imperialist outrage. Lebanon, a country raped by the Syrian-Iranian axis and the Palestinians has become an integral component of the terrorists' war plan to push the Middle Eastern Jews, who have lived continuously for 3,000 years in the region, into the sea. Lebanon is a tragedy of the 58-year Arab war against Israel, against democracy, and against Christianity in the Middle East. But it is not innocent.

I disagree with Horowitz about one thing. The attitudes of hatred for the Jews as a race, Israel as a nation and support for the Islamofascist terrorists do make the Lebanese deserving of what is happening to them.

Think of it this way. Would the Lebanese government have allowed a Christian or Jewish militia whose stated goal was to murder Muslims and destroy Islam to opperate within its borders?

What the government can do wo Wal-Mart it can do to you

From The Washington Post:

MARYLAND'S state lawmakers thought they were David fighting Goliath this year when they passed a law aimed at Wal-Mart Stores' employment policies. But a federal judge found last week that David missed his shot. The Maryland legislature's law, which required the mega-merchandiser to spend at least 8 percent of its payroll on health care for its workers, conflicted with federal statute, the court ruled.

State Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller (D-Calvert), who described the legislature's election-year battle against Wal-Mart as a fight between good and evil, is promising to redraft the legislation and pass it again. He should spare the state another round of his ill-advised battle with this corporate giant. According to U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz, the legislation contravened the federal Employment Retirement Income Security Act, which prohibits states from setting employee health and pensions standards that would keep multi-state companies from maintaining uniform benefits programs across state borders. But even if Mr. Miller could find a way to draft a legally viable version of the law, he still shouldn't reintroduce the measure.

The Post is correct. Wal-Mart does not hold a gun to anyone's head and force them to work there. I don't care how much anyone hates Wal-Mart this is still a free country. If you think that a company should treat its employees better then go out and start a retail store of your own.

If you work for Wal-Mart and find it intolerable then go work somewhere else.

Here and There

The Brussels Journal says:

In the US you have the Department of Homeland Security, issuing official threat level advisories".








In European countries we have Ministries of Truth, issuing status reports about their progress in achieving total thought control through censorship.


Created by blogger Dog of Flanders

It’s not like we need the oil or anything

From The Washington Times:

Cuba is drilling for oil 60 miles off the coast of Florida with help from China, Canada and Spain even as Congress struggles to end years of deadlock over drilling for what could be a treasure trove of offshore oil and gas.

Republicans in Congress have tried repeatedly in the past decade to open up the outer continental shelf to exploration, and Florida's waters hold some of the most promising prospects for major energy finds. Their efforts have been frustrated by opposition from Florida, California and environmental-minded legislators from
both parties. . .

. . .That prospect and the involvement of China and Venezuela in exploration activities have attracted the attention of the CIA and other national security agencies, even if congressional opposition to offshore drilling has not budged.

Sterling Burnett, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank, said Cuba's activities show that the quarter-century ban on offshore drilling is putting the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage at a time of increasingly scarce energy resources and record high oil and gas prices that are hampering economic growth and stoking inflation.

"Canada and even economically backward Cuba are oving forward with plans to drill in offshore areas that abut U.S. coastal waters," he said. "Since pools of oil do not respect international boundaries, it is almost certainly true that Canada and Cuba will be accessing oil that could otherwise be developed by and for the benefit of Americans."

More than half of the nation's untapped offshore oil and gas reserves lie within the Gulf, much of it within Florida's protected waters. In the latest attempt to exploit the reserves, the House last month passed a bill that would allow coastal states to
decide whether to open the first 100 miles of their waters for exploration. . .

On the one hand no matter who drills for the oil, pumps the oil or refines the oil it will go on the world market and increase supply. This will ease pressure on the price and give a break to American consumers. It would give a break to European consumers as well, except that their governments will raise taxes to offset any drop in wholesale price.

On the other hand if Cuba profits from the oil their crumbling communist economy will get a boost (as will the Castro brother's Swiss bank accounts) which will make it a little less likely that the Cuban people will taste freedom when Fidel and Raoul finally wind up as tasty morsels cooking on Satan's new three burner gas grill.America will also see its technological edge begin to slip as other nations learn by doing.And to cap it all off Red China will use its share of the profits to upgrade its military so that when the inevitable war comes we will have helped pay for the weapons which are killing our soldiers.

All in all not a prospect we should relish.

We need to pass a law that would allow the ammunition companies to use politicians who attempt to block offshore drilling (and drilling in Alaska) to test the effectiveness of various bullet designs.

I mean they should serve some useful purpose, shouldn’t they?

Latin Family Values Myth Debunked

From InMuscatine:

National Review Online - Myth Debunked
A Latin conservative tidal wave is not coming.:

The myth of the redemptive Hispanic is finally cracking. For years, conservative open-borders advocates have touted Hispanic “family values” as a prime reason to increase immigration. Hispanic immigrants, these conservatives say, will save America from itself. At a time when Anglo and black families are disintegrating, when society is becoming increasingly atomized and alienated, Hispanics will bring the traditional values that the country so desperately needs. In a classic iteration of the theme, Larry Kudlow wrote on NRO last May that Hispanic immigrants would “become a much-needed churchgoing blue-collar middle class . . . that is crucial to a healthy America.”

The truth is now supplanting the fiction. Last Friday, the New York Times ran an editorial, “Young Latinas and a Cry for Help,” that laid out the real state of the Hispanic family. A quarter of all Latinas are mothers by the age of 20, few of them married, reported the Times. This out-of-wedlock teen-birth rate is three times that of white teens, and significantly more than that of blacks as well. The Hispanic dropout rate is also the highest in the country — the Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene puts it at 47 percent.

There is simply no way to square the facts about Hispanic family breakdown with the myth of the redemptive Hispanic. Talk to any social worker and she will tell you that illegitimacy has become completely normalized among her Hispanic clients. And the usual explanation for this epidemic of illegitimacy — an unresolved culture clash between young people and their traditional parents — is equally bogus. The mothers of teen mothers are themselves completely on board with single parenting, say the social workers, having often been single parents themselves. And they have no qualms about hooking their daughter and grandchildren into the public-benefits
apparatus: “It’s now culturally OK for that population to be served by the welfare system,” says a case manager in a Santa Ana, Calif., home for teen mothers.

Our problems with immigration are just the beginning. This wave of welfare-sucking immigrants combined with our baby-boomers retiring could bankrupt America. The predictions were for the waves of baby-boomers hitting social security to put us at the brink of bankruptcy, and this wave of welfare for immigrants may be enough to push us over the edge.

**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let us know at what level you would like to participate.**

Dhimitude

On The Brussels Journal today Fjordman explores the institution of dhimitude in Muslim Spain:

Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom state that: “We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed ‘Euro-Islam’ fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values.” “Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.”

“In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis – like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings.”

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.

According to Bat Ye’or and Bostom, “Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later.” “Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.”

Richard Fletcher observed in Moorish Spain that “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.” A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims. Ibn Abdun forbade the selling of scientific books to dhimmis, under the pretext that they translated them and attributed them to their co-religionists and bishops.

Bat Ye’or and Bostom state that: “The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation – massacre, captivity, and forced conversion – was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim ‘inquisitors’ (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators.”

“The socio-political history of Andalusia was characterized by a particularly oppressive dhimmitude that is completely incompatible with modern notions of equality between individuals, regardless of religious faith. At the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist that Muslims in the West adopt post-Enlightenment societal standards of equality, not ‘tolerance,’ abandoning forever their hagiography of the brutal, discriminatory standards practiced by the classical Maliki jurists of ‘enlightened’ Andalusia.”

There is a lot more and it merits your attention.

Pay attention. This is what Islam wants for the whole world. If you don’t like it the first step is to get behind what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and what Israel is doing in Lebanon.