"The expanding use of Iraqi police and soldiers has also led to passing control of areas to Iraqi commands. This month, the Iraqi 6th infantry division took over military control of Baghdad. Last month, Iraqi security forces assumed control of the southern city of Karbala (the home of many Shia shrines and holy places.) More such transfers of control will take place each month. This is scaring the Sunni Arab minority like nothing else. Control of the army and police was, for generations, the cornerstone of Sunni Arab control of Iraq. With Shia Arab and Kurdish police and soldiers taking effective control of more and more of the country, and working with American troops to root out Sunni Arab terrorist operations, the Sunni Arabs see their dream of regaining control of the country fading away, and turning into a nightmare of democracy and majority rule."

neo-neocon yet again:"We can sense this thing, but can't describe it. It spooked people long ago, and it fills us with dread now, to look into those empty, empty eyes." Just making sure I get caught up ...

WHOOPS! (HT neo-neocon)

Did Grandpa Olaf know it would be coming to this?

Dr. Sanity spys strategic similarities. Symbiosis sanely suspected?

Eavesdropping on the Z-men...

Yeah, and Goebbels was the "spiritual leader" of the Nazis...

Delusional disorder.

"Bush has brilliantly made the important connection between the Islamists of this century and the Communists of the last. Is it any wonder that groups like ANSWER and thier ilk are primarily supported by communists and quasi-communists? They understand fully what they are supporting."

Khobar Towers justice? Nah! Clinton Library of course!

Britain flips a blinder up off one eye. How long before the Beeb flushes this down the MSMemory Hole?

Grand jury shopping update.

No dancing. No gays. And no problem for Western leftists idiot fascifist dupes.

neo-neocon: (Apocalyptic) Nihilist Mass-Murderers

I am becoming impressed as impressed can be with neo-neocon:

Mass murderers tend to go back to the scene of the crime, or to target the same type of victim over and over again. In this, as in so many other things, terrorists resemble the compulsivity of the mass murderer. So we have another Bali bombing, and the World Trade Center was struck until it was finally destroyed.

Terrorists want power, and are frustrated that they don't have it. If you think about it, what weapons or power do they really have other than the power to blow innocent people--so-called "soft" targets--up? They can't win over an army; if they try to battle a conventional military or police force they are usually decimated. They also lack the power of argument and persuasion; only a small percentage of people on the face of the earth are going to convert to a rigid sect such as Wahabism or its ilk, since most people lack a natural temperament for and interest in fanaticism. Modern explosives have allowed a relatively small but determined group of power-hungry, frustrated, and otherwise impotent terrorists to make a relatively big bang, if they so desire--and terrorists do so desire, quite ardently.

Hoo haw! Go thou forthwith and readeth it all!!!!

Her analysis is just gorgeous. The problem omitted, of course, is that our heedless breaching of the "Prime Directive" means that the bangs will keep getting bigger and bigger.

How I wish it weren't being made so...

Yon Rocks

"When I first stepped off the plane in Iraq, the three most dangerous places were Baghdad, Al Anbar province, and Mosul. Somewhere in the span of nine months Mosul fell off that list. The rest of Iraq may yet devolve into a large civil war. Zarqawi clearly intends to incite full-on hostilities between the Sunnis who still follow his insurgency and the Shia majority who have so far resisted his call to Armageddon. I do not know if their forbearance will outlast his insurgency. But I do know it would be a mistake to think of this as a strictly "Sunni thing."

After all, the Kurdish regions to the north are an unqualified success, and the Kurds are mostly Sunni Muslims. And Col Eid, and most of the men who serve under him on the Mosul Police Force are Sunni. Despite their key role in the problems in Iraq, the Sunnis are even more effective parts of the solution. The “full-spectrum” techniques that have shown so much promise in the Battle for Mosul, and before then, with the Kurdish resistance in the North, are also being used in other parts of Iraq."

Tell me that you knew the Kurds were Sunni? Not by listening to the MSM you didn't!

And Yon has some absolutely smashing stuff in here about leadership. If you don't read the whole thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST scan around in it. It's just beautiful photojournalism.

Yes, of course, Yon just got added to the blogroll! (HT Glenn)

Just askin'

NYeT that bombing...

"The Times. Always more informative for what it leaves out than for what it puts in." NYeT!

A Wow At Roger's

There is a horrid but obvious dynamic going on here: At some deep level, Europeans, European politicians, European culture are aware that almost without exception every European nation was complicit in Hitler's genocide. Some manned the death camps, others stamped the orders for the transport of the Jews to the death camps, everyone knew what was going on - and yet the Nazis -didn't have to use much if any force to make them accomplices. For the most part, Europeans volunteered. That is why "European civilization" will always be a kind of oxymoron for anyone who looks too closely at things, beginning with the foolish and unnecessary slaughters of World War I that paved the way for Hitler's more focused effort.

And so there is a need to blame someone else for the shame of "European civilization." To blame the victim. To blame the Jews. The more European nations can focus one-sidedly on the Israeli response to terror and not to the terror itself, the more they can portray the Jews as the real villains, the more salve to their collective conscience for their complicity in collective mass murder in the past. Hitler may have gone too far, and perhaps we shouldn't have been so cowardly and slavish in assisting him, but look at what the Jews are doing.

Does this resonate with moi? Check those Jaw Droppers over right...

Why Ask Why? (Hitchens again of course...)

"Arabs have gotten a close look at their heroes, and they don’t like what they see."

Katrina Intersects A Stopped Clock

Taranto points to WaPo acting like a stopped clock and using up its entire quantity of correctness for the year in one article:

Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims.

Claims of widespread looting, gunfire directed at helicopters and rescuers, homicides, and rapes, including those of "babies" at the Louisiana Superdome, frequently turned out to be overblown, if not completely untrue, officials now say.

The sensational accounts delayed rescue and evacuation efforts already hampered by poor planning and a lack of coordination among local, state and federal agencies. People rushing to the Gulf Coast to fly rescue helicopters or to distribute food, water and other aid steeled themselves for battle. In communities near and far, the seeds were planted that the victims of Katrina should be kept away, or at least handled with extreme caution.

To which I say: Duoh. They did it because it sells. The MSM took the Weather Channel's grade school hurricane sensationalism and turned it into HURRICANE PORN. Frip.

Very. Very. Very.

Very. Very. Very. Bad. News:

But it's different with China. They have a total addressable market of 400 million upper- to middle-class spenders they can sell to without ever having to touch the U.S. And another thing China has done, just like we did during the Industrial Revolution: learning from the mistakes of others who have gone before you, and also learning from the things that work.

One of the things they found that works is stock options. And so stock options are very lucrative in China now, and there is no capital-gains tax. Now, do I think our politicians understand this? Absolutely not. And yet daily our politicians enact legislation without fully comprehending what's really going on in China at all.

What should politicians be doing to protect the U.S. technological lead?

Eliminate the cap on H1-B visas, because we don't grow enough math and science graduates here internally. We've got to increase research funding at the National Science Foundation. We've got to extend DARPA's (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D arm of the U.S. Defense Dept.) horizon from 18 months to a longer time, because there's no Bell Labs doing basic research anymore.

And we've got to find a way to get kids interested in math and science. When I talk to people in the tech industry, we're all in such agreement, and yet nothing is happening.

The problem is that we're all in California and Texas and Massachusetts and New York. Beyond that, nobody cares. And not only do they not care, but they also think the people in the (tech) industry are a bunch of crooks and that their stock options are tools used by evil people for evil deeds. Tech people know tech issues.

But the President and the Congress aren't going to allocate dollars to Corporate America for something that people in the Midwest doesn't care about. They're looking for votes. You can explain textiles and farming. But almost everyone in Minnesota and Iowa has a cell phone and LCD TV or are about to get one. And they say we're still the leader in technology.

Unfortunately, you need to go read the whole thing.

Did I mention that China has no capital gains tax? Oh, yeah, I did.

But I forgot to tell you that China is now graduating approximately 3 TIMES as many engineers as the U.S.

It's looking more and more like adopting the "Fair Tax" and its elimination of the capital gains tax may be yet another "world historical" decision for us...

UPDATE: I hesitated to emphasize this since I work for Agilent but on further thought this is just so shocking I can't have you miss it:

Does China have an educational advantage?

I often tell a story that illustrates this. There's a major university in the (San Francisco) Bay Area that you would have thought was one of the best-funded universities in the world. And one of our fellows at National is a professor there. And he said they just got a new gift of a network analyzer from Agilent (NYSE:A - News). It's worth about $110,000 and they put it on a metal cart, and professors will hide it away and hoard it. And to use it, you have to sign up for it days in advance, and they roll it around from lab to lab.

And then he was invited over to China to give a speech and was given a tour of Tsinghua University. And he was shocked and amazed that every lab had one of those very same Agilent network analyzers. Some of them had never been used or turned on, but they had them just in case they ever needed one. The funding is incredible, and meanwhile we're sitting here thinking we're doing fine.

I think our politicians believe that that the leadership we have enjoyed since Sputnik has been God-ordained. It's not. Someone has to fund it. We're not asking for handouts for companies. But the vast majority of companies these days don't do R&D, they just do D. And we work with universities to get the R, and now the universities are saying that they can't do basic research anymore.

Look at Bell Labs back in the 1940s. It was very unsuccessful in that only 1 of 20 projects was successful. But look at the successes: the transistor, the laser, the Telstar satellite, stereophonic sound. That's my long-winded way of saying funding needs to increase for basic research.

Does that open your eyes just a bit? Is a third world America on the horizon?

Well, it would seem to me that 911 was simply inevitable with an idiot like this protecting us for most of the run-up period. Brother.

"Maybe there is some elasticity to petroleum demand after all..." (HT Drudge)

That's it. We now have irrefutable proof of global warming. That and me just having went out and drained my sprinkler system backflow valve so it doesn't freeze tonight...

Glenn links to a HEH that gets elevated to front page billing round these here fake VRWC parts:

C-C-C-Cuckoo About P-P-Piglet

"If Islam cannot "co-exist" even with Pooh or the abstract swirl on a Burger King ice-cream, how likely is it that it can co-exist with the more basic principles of a pluralist society?" (HT Glenn)

" ... bad things happen to you because you're a dumbass."

They. Are. Moving. Just. Not. To. The. Superdome. (HT Glenn)

"Schools, with their focus on raising students' self-esteem, are doing everything possible to raise our children as feelers. U.S. students do horribly on international math tests but get top marks in mathematical self-esteem. "

Top 10 Reasons You Might Be A Liberal ... (Early Fall 2005 Edition)

Yes, folks, we're long overdue for an updated Fascifist Gramscian neo-Syndicalist dupe liberal spotting tutorial.

You might be a liberal if:

10) You can't remember that there was a war in Kosovo but if reminded you're sure it was sanctioned by the U.N...

9) You believe that we are still in the "quagmire" that you shouted gleefully about in Oct 2001 regarding Afghanistan and you still shout down anyone who dares suggest we have actually captured Kabul.

8) You believe that we should have stopped the Coast Guard and "military occupation" of NOLA and just sent Sean Penn and his red bailing cup in instead since he had ever so much better intentions.

7) You believe that the NOLA Superdome and Convention Center were filled with raped and dead blacks because "those people" just can't control themselves and need your help.

6) You believe everything you see on 60 Minutes.

5) You can't remember anything from ABC news in the late 90's.

4) You're surprised to learn that the Iraqi left is fighting against your "insurgent" heroes.

3) You've never actually read the text of Earle's indictment of Delay. And if you did you wouldn't notice anything at all surprising about it... (UPDATE: Watch for the movie!)

2) You believe that Planned Parenthood's (via ABCL) Margaret Sanger was a great woman that had the best of intentions.

1) You believe a global war with a U.S. military death rate approximately twice that of normal peacetime operations is indisputable proof of unsustainability and impending defeat.

And your rationales for the Schadenfreude that sustains your self esteem are -- as those with pulses may have noticed by oh, say, #6 at the latest -- just a tad short of being "reality based"...

(more than) One Marine's View.

TigerHawk follows up with a post on Gen. Petraeus's recent speech at Princeton. You won't be reading about it in the media. But you really need to go read it! (HT Glenn)

In A Ruined Region

WARREN asks "what doctrine?": "At the very moment when the cause of democracy was finding voices in Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, Washington suddenly went silent."

In a lot of ways, Condi's recent Princeton speech was excellent -- especially for the job she did with historical context. And there can be no doubt whatsoever about her intellect. I TIVO'ed it and will be playing it over more than a few times.

But her hand-waving about there being some flexibility to absorb Hamas into the Pali political process was troubling. But now I'm reading Samuels' "In A Ruined Country" in The Atlantic which does a pretty good job of pulling together mostly things I knew along with some additional details of how Arafat's corruption machine really worked.

And most of all reminded me harshly of how awful Fatah is also. (It's pretty sad when PALLYWOOD actually cheers me up.) The sad truth is that there's about a dime's worth of difference between them, with Fatah leaning toward a corrupt rationality and Hamas leaning toward what I can only describe as a sort of insane integrity.

With this as the menu, I will cut Condi a bit more slack -- for now...