Scrappleface is looking smarter and smarter: "As any good prosecutor knows, you rarely get a second bite of the apple." Why else would Delay, well, delay?

Venal Innumeracy Coalition Targets Bennett

Scrappleface is on a roll: "NARAL Applauds Bennett's Pro-Choice Remark".

On a more serious note, John has the real take-down of Bennett's thought police critics, while Jeff has the linguistic analysis worthy of Orwell. Jeff has it nailed: it's indeed a slippery slope ceding ANYTHING to the liberal thought police. Just say no.

Bennett's real problem was his unwillingness to point out the obvious: Blacks (as well as Hispanics by the way) have a crime rate that is multiples of the white population. And as Steve Sailer points out, the arguments that it's due to discrimination are absurd. One take on it even suggests that the Black violent crime rate may be as much as 50 times higher than for Whites.

Of course, this is the "Elephant in the room" that Bennett was crucified for assuming that his audience knew. The liberal thought police will always crucify you for implying numerical truths that happen to make them look like gibbering idiots.

There's also a second elephant here exposed obliquely by Scrappleface: the Black abortion rate is approximately 3 times that of whites. And Margeret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood actually did have an agenda of lowering minority birth rates. Shocked that PPM had it's actual origins partially in Nazi emulation? You shouldn't be -- their calling conservative's Nazis for wanting to SAVE LIFE fits a little better into the liberal projection obsession now, no?

Even though Sailer is skeptical of TPM's White-Trash transference theory for Black crime rates, it turns out that on more rigorous analysis, there is much to it. The intellectual giant, Thomas Sowell, has put the pieces together for us in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals". You need to read it. Did I mention that Thomas Sowell is black? And a true intellect who is probably about a dozen times smarter than I am -- never mind your average liberal humanities prof...

Bottom line is that when the facts are all brought out into daylight, you would have to be innumerate to argue that Bennett was wrong to connect the elephants and use "black babies" in his example (and he was equally correct to immediately point out this was not moral to pursue!). And he could have used "hispanic babies" and gotten a similar outcry -- and have been nearly as factually correct.

Just not politically correct. Hence the inevitable screams from the thought police liberals.

Venality? Innumeracy?

Yes.

Did I forget to mention that the MSM is innumerate? Ahhh, perhaps not... (HT Power Line)

OK, Not IKEA. Sorry!

Strategy Page has today's (I)CEA update:

American intelligence efforts, a war-in-the-shadows that has been fought with great intensity for over two years, has revealed a lot of detail about how Iraqi society really works. It is not a pretty picture. Saddam left behind a culture of armed gangs that use on terror and intimidation to control populations. This is the system that kept Saddam in power, and it is a clever perversion of traditional Iraqi society. Saddam took advantage of family, clan and tribal loyalties to increase the power of tribes or clans that would cooperate with him. For the groups that remained hostile (mainly Kurds and Shia Arab, but some Sunni Arabs as well), he allowed loyal "gangs" to terrorize and exploit these hostile groups. Many of these loyal gangs were, literally, criminal enterprises that controlled illegal activities in an area. The most valuable of these scams was the smuggling, especially oil smuggling, where the gangs with official permission, kicked back to Saddam part of their profits.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm now reading Peter's book and I'm going to straighten up and stop calling it the war on "IKEA". It was the meatballs that did it, I tell ya'...

"The only thing better than a mission to make Muslims like us would be the absence of such a mission." How pathetic.

TKO Hugh

Power Line captures a TKO by Hugh:

There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in their own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting inthe history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't.

Ummm, yeaah.

Did I forget to mention that I, too, support the Iowa rainforest?

I'm sure the Muslim terrorist front groups councils in Britain will find a way to nip this outburst of British ministerial rationality in the bud. I give it no more than a week.

Plaming pirouettes. (HT Glenn)

PublicIdiot'sEye looks at blogs. And of course, Hugh is doesn't have the credentials to make the cut. I think this got flushed down the MSMemory Hole too somehow. Can't quite figure out why... Did I mention they're idiots yet? As far as I can tell, none of them even knows that this exists either! And Mary goes blithering on.

Well, well, well. Turns out that all the LA buses weren't left to drown after all. Good for Plaquemines! This is the problem all of LA should have had...

Don't you worry now -- I'm the racist, not the MSM! No ... umm ... that would be a bit backwards now wouldn't it? ... (HT Glenn)

Versailles redux.

What happens when you have a whole "religion" that is not a religious practice in any way...

On killing schoolteachers. Why are you surprised? They target children as well. I believe it was Franklin Graham who has pointed out that Allah wants you to give your son for him -- but the God of Christ gave his son for you...

Glenn has an OUCH you need to read this morning on the CONTINUING corruption in Louisiana. Knock me over with a feather, WaP0 is having a temporary holiday from race-baiting Chimpy McBusHitler. Don't worry -- I'm sure their puppetmasters will yank them loose of it soon...

"The culture, the message to our forces, could not be more patent: protecting American lives is secondary to not being vexed by the ACLU and its fellow travelers."

"Silly readers!" NYeT!

On Connecting Ugly Virgins And Innumeracy

... by starting with a rather "interesting" guest commentary over at Iowahawk:

Iowahawk Guest Commentary
by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi
Senior VP, Al-Qaeda In Iraq

What's crackalackin', y'all? I know it's been long-time-no-post, but I gotta tell you it's a little hard to keep up with the blogging when you're getting a daily enema from infidel Tomahawks. I knew that war is supposed to be hell, but dude -- this one is starting to totally fucking suck. Bigtime.

Case in point: after taking in the nards in Tel Afar last week, let's just say the martyr recruiting has gone a little slow. And speaking of 'a little slow,' can we talk about this latest busload of asswipes from Damascus? Jeez, I thought the Saudis were stupid, but these Syrians take the fucking baclava. Send one of these choads on a simple martydom operation against a Bagdhad collaborator elementary school, and they're like, "Durrrr, a thousand pardons effendi, I got lost! Doyyyy, can I have a martyrdom car with OnStar?" Then you end up having to print out MapQuest directions for them, which totally chews up printer cartridges, and they end up smeared along some desert freeway because they mistook the detonator button for cruise control.

Just between us, it was almost a relief when Team Satan and their Iraqi puppets greased a couple hundred of my lovable losers last week. 'Thinning the herd,' if you know what I mean, and I suppose it probably raised our average insurgent IQ ten points. To 67, maybe. Still, word-of-mouth about this kind of missile strike crap gets around, and it has really screwed our recruiting. Even with the dipshit teenage mosque-rats in Damascus and Riyadh. It's gotten so bad, in fact, that we had to open up a recruiting office in France. I shit you not: reduced to recruiting Le. fucking. Fron-say.

Go ahead and laugh, sunshine. Yeah, it's humiliating, but these French dudes are actually kinda gung-ho. Until they get here and crap their pantalons after they realize that Le Monde might have exaggerated our success just a tad.

So anyway, I'm dealing with this garbage yesterday, in the middle of a meeting with my French ad agency, when Achmed comes in and he's like, "come effendi! Allah be praised! The infidels are marching against the Satan Bush on the C-SPAN2!"

So I'm like, cool, gather up the boys and throw some Pop Secret in the microwave, this ought to be a morale booster. Allah knows we need one. Then everybody gathers around the TV, and they're all like ululating and shooting off the AKs, when C-SPAN2 breaks out of Booknotes for live coverage of the big insurgent offensive.

Holy. Fucking. Dung.

Have you every been at Friday prayers when somebody just totally rips a gigantic falafel gasbomb while the Imam is cursing the crusaders and Jews? That's what it was like around the TV -- total dead silence. And with every shot of another placard-waving elderly hippie moron, every pachouli drum circle, possibly even more silence. Then, when the speakers started up, so did the uncomfortable buzz.

"Where are their weapons, effendi?"

"Well, ya see, um, they are using their um, voices as weapons, um, against empire and occupation, and..."

"It seems they will need much training for the street battles, effendi. Many are appear weak or fat or old."

"Well, see, er, they are basically offering more of a, uh, moral support, and..."

"Will they be conducting martrydom operations soon?"

"Okay, well, not exactly, but..."

"But... are these what the virgins in paradise will look like, effendi?"

...

RTWT.

And speaking of the invincible Zarqawi, you may spit out your coffee comparing Wretchard's latest casualty numbers to the venal crap the MSM is feeding you. He starts by looking at deaths:

Some of Portillo's facts are clearly inaccurate. He says, "the number of American casualties has been rising remorselessly" an indicator that progress was unachievable. The following are the casualty tables for equivalent months in 2004 and 2005. Granted, the tables only go to the 25th day of September, but the basic truth of Portillo's assertion of 'remorselessly rising' casualties is hard to sustain. The last three month's US casualties have actually appreciably dropped from an equivalent period last year and they have dropped in a period of offensive operations and in the run-up to the ratification of the Iraqi constitution, exactly when they would have been expected to rise.

576 in '04 from Jan to Sep. versus 574 for the same period in '05 less a week. It's going to have to be one hell of a next week for Zarqawi to validate Portillo's thesis based on deaths. "Hard to sustain" is Wretchard's polite way of saying what translates into "venal crap" in any rational assessment vocabulary.

So what about if you count total casualties? After all, everyone KNOWS the neo-cons are hiding that from you! Weeeeell ... not looking too good in the propaganda department there either:

Counting the wounded as casualties means Portillo's assertion is not only unfounded, but the opposite of the truth. The reader will notice that the proportion of wounded to killed has changed from 9.3:1 in 2004 to 6.6:1 in 2005. This is consistent with the DOD briefings that there are fewer attacks, but since these may involve larger explosives in the case of IEDs, the attacks kill a larger proportion of the targeted vehicle's occupants. Still, the number of killed and wounded is 73% of last year's figures. In the last three months, the number has been 50% of the same period last year. This was quite an interesting result, considering news accounts that Iraq is 'descending into chaos' and that things are going 'from bad to worse'. Counting the wounded, the figures for September 2005 so far are lower than for any month in 2004 and 2005. Yet the mood conveyed in the press is that things are sliding into the abyss. That may be true for other reasons, but with US casualties at a quarter to a seventh of their historical values in a month full of offensives and important dates, the honest analyst must at least ask himself if something is changing on the battlefield.

Whoops! Better get that analysis flushed down the MSMemory Hole ASAP.

Let's just get back to the invincible Syndicalist party line then: BusHitler has murdered 2000 or so of our fine young boys that we hate with his illegal Iraq quest for cheap oil. BusHitler is a monster. Did we mention he's worse than Hitler?

Did I mention that from 1980-1999 there were over 32,912 military deaths? That's over 1,600 deaths a year -- or over twice the current death rate in Iraq. It turns out that having a military at all is just a dangerous thing no matter how you slice it. In fact, for the latest year I can find (1999) -- and with a post-Clinton force size probably about comparable to what we have now -- the death toll was 761! Almost exactly the same as the recent yearly death rate in Iraq!

So you're telling me that fighting a war against "limitless" legions of insurgents vicious lunatics -- that the MSM feats as having nearly wiped us out already -- in fact has caused us to have a total yearly death toll only twice that of just fielding a military at all?

WTF, over? (Yes, this blog does have a flexible acronym, doesn't it?) This is a buried lede of epic proportions. So much so that they refuse to even print it at all -- down the MSMemory Hole it goes... (Heeelllooo George, you still in there?)

Wouldn't want to add any sense of numeracy, proportion or perspective when we have an ax the size of Jupiter to grind, would we?

Please try to contain your surprise. Well, you would have been surprised if it wasn't so drearily predictable anyway...

I might be enraged if I was surprised? But of course I'm not. PALLYWOOD is the "special jihad" where everything is justified with Nazi libels against the Jews. Everybody knows that the Jews deserve it for how they brutalized the Nazis in WWII. None of the other jihads do anything like that. No, wait. I think I may be just a tad confused.

But don't worry, none of the Pali terror groups are ICEAs. Run along now. Nothing to see here...