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...

Touchstone

If this doesn't make you re-think appeasing ICEA nihilists, you are truly beyond the reach of reason. (WARNING: Not for the squeamish.)

Or on the other side...

ICEA? Peters missed something critical in his CEA acronym:
Insane Criminal Enterprise Army.

And just to get everyone's attention -- including the makers of some of my favorite large box store cafeteria meatballs -- I'm going to pronounce it I-KEE-A.

As in the war on terror ICEA.

Got to have some small amusements to go with our front row seats at the Apocalypse...

McQ provides today's CEA update on PALLYWOOD-land ... while Roger points out Iran's breathtaking synthesis of Orwellian Narco-State with a "diplomatic policy" of being a borderless CEA. Did I mention it's breathtaking? Read. Them. Both.

Ready for Rita!

No Love In Appeasing Apocalyptic Work Accidents

Criminals. Check. Stupid. Check. Did I mention delusionally cuckoo yet?

A pickup truck carrying rockets exploded on Friday at a large Hamas rally as the group paraded its weapons through a densely packed refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. At least 15 people were killed and dozens were wounded, Palestinian medical officials said.

The powerful blast sent a plume of white smoke into the sky and unleashed pandemonium in the sprawling Jabaliya refugee camp, a Hamas stronghold just north of Gaza City. Body parts were scattered on the ground as ambulances rushed to the scene, and people in the crowd wailed in grief. The casualties included a number of children.

The blast appeared to be accidental, and the Palestinian Interior Ministry issued a statement that called on Hamas to "shoulder its responsibility" for the explosion.

Hamas shouldered the responsibility by claiming it uses duds for parades and that the Israelis must have fired on them from above to cause the explosion. Israel, which has no problem acknowledging such attacks, denied having had anything to do with the explosion. The homemade Katyushas have a notorious reputation for unreliability and instability, and taking them into a large crowd like the one seen in the AP photograph amounts to criminal stupidity.

Or should I throttle way back and point out that these people are quite simply dangerously insane?

This idea of parading live and known to be unstable weapons through a crowd filled with children is simply incomprehensible without being positive confirmation of either criminal insanity, basic mental infirmity or both. The thought of doing such a thing would no more enter my mind than the idea that I could simply flap my arms and fly off a cliff.

Unfortunately, these people have become no more capable of raising their children to be rational actors than they are of truly loving them. This is just one more example in an unending series of evidence for Golda Meir's prophecy: "We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us."

(BTW: Golda also said: "When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons." If you want to know what TRUE SANITY looks like, look no further!)

The fascifist liberals want to appease these people nihilistic nutters to assuage their own guilt for not being brave enough to apply the hard slog of tough love it will take to dig the Arabs out of the cultural and mental cesspool they have sunk to over long centuries of primitivism.

And these same fascifists become unremittingly insane in their opposition to taking on Iraq because they know that whether by design or luck we have got our finger on the only fault line in the Arab M.E. that has a chance of delaying -- or I pray reversing -- the apocalypse. The alliance between the Kurds and Shia based on their mutual bond of escaping the true Arab oppression of Saddam and the Wahhabist loons is really the last best chance to reverse the tide before Hamas "work accidents" evolve to involve nuclear weapons.

Because of my thesis of the Tinfoil Apocalypse, I am not sanguine.

But I refuse to surrender to nihilism through appeasement. And neither should you.

The Euros did appease Hitler with nearly incalculably disastrous results -- and Arafat's mentor was their insane ally. We were extremely lucky that Hitler never came close close to the bomb.

But anyone with more than a handful of neurons and few moments of reflection knows that the march of technology that we westerners have initiated will inexorably give the tools of nihilism to Hitler's modern progeny without extraordinary measures on our part. We have violated the "Prime Directive" and have now stuck our heads in the sand about it so firmly that an ostrich could only be green with envy.

You can go into de-nihilism if you want. But this is what you look like to me if you do so:



Oh, yes. And Lance Mannion is wrong about us neo-cons and the Prime Directive. Many of us understand the situation well. Much too well.

ImpenetrABLE frustration.

All The Senator's Staff Men: Upgraded to a Cat 2

Hugh has some questions:

Senator Schumer, how long have you known Katie Barge?
How about Lauren Weiner?

How did you meet Barge? Weiner?

Did you know they had worked for David Brock?

Did you ever discuss them with George Soros?

Who first told you about the theft of Lt. Gov. Steele's personal data?

What did you do?

Did you call FBI Director Mueller?

Do you ever call FBI Director Mueller?

Would FBI Direcor Mueller have taken your call?

Have you spoken with Barge since you learned she was the target of an investigation? Weiner? Not even to say that they'd stay on the payroll? Not even a brief conversation in the hall?

And it keeps going for the new Nixon...

Splattering Koolaid

Jon has some comments on Andrew's latest snuggling with the huge koolaid drinking echo chamber and his assessment of us righties as noncritical. Did I forget to mention that the Julie Myers appointment should be withdrawn?

Apocalypse of the Lying Tricksters

Ledeen rocks today:

Our policymakers have thus far utterly failed to design anything worthy of the name of an Iran policy, even though it is arguably the single most important challenge we face. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley recently answered a question about Iran policy by saying that we did indeed have a policy, but we hadn’t yet written it down. This is reminiscent of the old riddle of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it: can there be a policy if nobody can define it?

Lacking any defined policy, we can only judge the president and his aides by their actions, and there aren’t any, aside from the occasional speech or offhand remark at a press conference. The mullahs see that, and treat it with the contempt it deserves. We are currently indistinguishable from the Europeans, who run whenever the Iranians snarl at them.

This is not a war on terror, it is paralysis at best, and appeasement at worst. The hell of it is that it is costing thousands of lives, and will cost many more until the terror masters are destroyed, or we surrender. Those words were inconceivable for many years, but it is a sign of our present fecklessness that they are now entirely appropriate. We can still lose this war. And we cannot win it so long as we are blinded by our potentially fatal failure of strategic vision: we are in a regional war, but we have limited our actions to a single theater. Our most potent weapons are political and ideological, but our actions have been almost exclusively military.

Our main enemy, the single greatest engine in support of the terror war against us, whether Sunni or Shiite, jihadi, or secular, Arab or British or Italian or Spaniard, is Iran. There is no escape from this fact. The only questions are how long it will take us to face it, how effective we will be when we finally decide to act, and how terrible the price will be for our long delay.

Would that he had a morsel of optimism. RTWT.

UPDATE: ... a nuclear Iran, and all of the misery that will most certainly accompany it. (HT LGF)

Eurabian Memory Hole Update

Strategy Page hits one out of the park again. It ends like this:

All those refugees were very unpopular in Europe. But intervention would only happen if the U.S. joined in. Most Americans were perplexed. This was a European problem, why couldn't the Europeans take care of it? But the Europeans needed American help to keep the Russians (who wanted to keep Yugoslavia together) in line, and wanted American armed forces to take the lead (because European armies were not really up to the task of doing it themselves.) So American went in, with the understanding they would be there for only one year. American troops are still there. The independent states of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia were established. Then, in 1999, Serbia was chasing a million Albanians out of Kosovo, and Europe wanted to use military force against the Serbs to prevent this atrocity. But only if the Americans took the lead. This time, even the UN would not lend moral support. But the Europeans were insistent (they didn't want hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees descending on them). America went in, with airpower, and, more importantly, enough clout to get the Russians to withdraw their support from the Serbs. The Serbs folded, and Kosovo is also still occupied by American and European troops.

But many Europeans see Iraq as different. Foreign troops should be pulled out of Iraq immediately, leaving the Iraqis to fight it out among themselves. There will be no refugee crises. Sunni Arab refugees will flee to Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Kurdish refugees will head for Turkey, Shia Arab refugees will run for Iran. Europeans will avert their eyes and change the subject. If there is interruption to oil shipments from the Gulf, American will be blamed for removing an Iraqi government that knew how to keep order in a troubled part of the world.

Most Europeans looked the other way and changed the subject while the nazis and communists slaughtered tens of millions. So what's a few million more Arabs? It's a European tradition. Old habits are hard to break. Better to tolerate tyrants than to try and change the natural order of things.

My, my, my. Yugoslavia? Clinton? War? No U.N. support? Down the Memory Hole it goes my good fascifists!

And while I'm remembering things, I seem to remember this over on the right side of the page:

The Last Jaw Dropper
"When my grandfather left Europe in 1937, the graffiti on the walls read, 'Jews go to Palestine'. Today the graffiti reads, 'Jews out of Palestine'. How soon Europe forgets."

Of course, all this forgetfulness works a lot more smoothly once you have flushed Orwell himself down his own Memory Hole...

The Fault (-line) Of The Apocalyptic Cuckoo Clock

Wretchard has a nice little piece today on the why of Iraq after Afghanistan -- instead of say the Saudis. It's mostly a repeat of the point that we needed someplace where at least some elements of the population would have reason to welcome us as a means to escaping oppression. Of course, we got this in spades with the Kurds and Shia comprising 80% or so of the population.

And it was right next door to the Saudis and their Wahhabi hate factory.

All well and good. And of course it's going a lot better than the MSMemory Holers would have you believe -- as Wretch also just pointed out in "The News Magazine of the Mysteries". (Did I mention that he's good?)

And then there's this game-ending little interview item brought to our attention from one of Wretch's readers with the author of the "Chasing the Ghosts" piece referred to in "Mysteries":

TONY JONES: Michael, why are they letting you get behind this curtain? Is there a message they are wanting you to get out through Time magazine to the rest of the world?

MICHAEL WARE: Clearly, these men, just like the American military I deal with and the public affairs officers who stick to me like glue and only let me see what they want me to see when I'm with them, so it is with the Jihadis. They're showing me what they want me to see, which is, to be truthful, quite a lot, but they know anything I see or hear is public record. It's their responsibility to confine their information.

This is what I do. Yeah, they do want to get a message out.

They're so media savvy. If they weren't before, they've learnt it, they've polished it.

Even a year ago when I was meeting these nationalist guerrillas who then were ill formed, not yet in clear command and control organisations, even then they were saying to me, "This war is not going to be won on the battlefield. We can't hope to defeat the Americans. It's going to be won in the living rooms of Iraq and Middle America, it's going to be won on television."

They were saying, "We can maintain this, we can, we have, we can sustain this longer than your political will will last. Before your people call you home." Again, that's a part of it now, they're saying, "We're here and we're not going away," and they want to say that to the West. They can tell Arabic channels this until the cows come home, but to have it coming through an American iconic publication like Time magazine, people will listen.

And look, the fact is it's true.

Whoops. D**m that infernal internet anyway. How can one run a decent MSMemory Hole nowadays anyway?

And d**m that PALLYWOOD too!

But then we have a commenter that puts it all in Apocalyptic perspective:

Wretchard, the more you study history, the more you wonder how the idea that humans are largely rational beings emerged in the first place.

'Tis a fascinating question as the Apocalypse materializes before our very eyes.


Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.

The Cuckoo Clock tolls for thee.

A study in buses.

Walpurgisnacht.

Luckily they are dead MSMen walking...

A dead MSMen walking update.

The fascifist dupes argue that there are no absolute standards for being crazy -- everything is relative. I beg to differ: Cuckoo! (HT Drudge)

Welcoming Schizophrenia At (C)BS

(C)BS has a brain fart today and does a video covering the Iraqi Army that doesn't exist. And of course it ends with at least a touch of the standard MSM negativity. But the remarkable thing was that they didn't try to stuff the local's relief at being rescued from the insurgents bloody thugs down the MSMemory Hole -- they actually interviewed them!

When compared to (C)BS' risible work exposed so stunningly in PALLYWOOD, this is some really impressive schizophrenia.

(HT MoonBatCentral)

P.S. You did get the clue that you REALLY need to invest the 20 minutes to watch PALLYWOOD, didn't you?

Eurabian Update: "A third of Germans under 30 think America ordered the 9/11 attacks."

Did I mention that THE END ...
... is not in sight [of the gullible fascifist dupes]... ?

Canucksuts. I finally understand the wisdom of getting out of the oppressive W-land and heading up to the land of "Eh?". Where else can you steal a cool $1.5 mil and get to keep a third of it for the truly dastardly additional burden of having to serve your time in the "community". Why at that rate, one could retire handsomely on a steady diet of fraud. Oh, Canada! I didn't know I love ya' !

Today's apocalypse update. And did I mention that they were just kidding? The playful hijinx just never ends, does it?

UPDATE: "this time we really, really mean it."

Death Cult Pallywood

How is it again that liberal pacifists can believe that a "religion" founded by a warrior can possibly be legitimate? What more perfect predicate can we find for what is in fact a death cult?

Viewed in this light, Pallywood may in fact be a step forward! The closest the Palis have gotten to Moslem Methodism, if you will.

I would almost be sympathetic with them if there were not so many Jewish baby body parts littering the streets of Israel.

PALLYWOOD: One picture can be worth a thousand weapons...

Heads you win, tails I lose...

About that Apocalypse. (HT Roger) Too much technology in the hands of the too very intensely insane can only end badly. Very badly.

"The kind of angry left-wing politics promoted by the Daily Kos and Howard Dean seems to dominate the Democrats' political dialogue. But when real things are at stake-like the value of your Manhattan co-op, a lot of Democratic voters know better."

Of Course It Would Be Destroyed In The Next Hurricane...

"There's an old adage that no one in Washington can tell the difference between $1 million and $1 billion. Seldom has that Beltway learning disability been more vividly demonstrated than in the weeks since Katrina.

When President Bush announced last Thursday that the feds would take a lead role in the reconstruction of New Orleans, he in effect established a new $200 billion federal line of credit. To put that $200 billion in perspective, we could give every one of the 500,000 families displaced by Katrina a check for $400,000, and they could each build a beach front home virtually anywhere in America."

"If I am forced to leave Lebanon, I will leave ruin and destruction behind me." Now there's a big surprise...

It's just an Orwellian kind of day what with Allah sucking ice cream cone graphics down the memory hole...

Dept. Of WW I Never Ended

"Well, the Nazis got experience on the battlefield." Thank you, Condi! Finally someone in the administration has a whiff of backbone! Did I mention that if we started giving them some battlefield experience right after Hitler's January, 1937 speech rescinding the Treaty of Versailles that WWII likely would have turned out a bit differently? Instead, we got about 70 million more experiences from them than we should have.

Of course, Monica-gate was different. That was some real urgency requiring Desert Fox. I had some minor optimism that Clinton might move toward recovering his place in history. With this he irreparably hugs the excreble Jimmy Carter.

UPDATE: Power Line engages warp drive:

Clinton's assertion that there was "no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction" is a flat-out lie. The Consensus Estimate of the American intelligence agencies has been made public, and we have quoted from it and linked to it on many occasions. America's intelligence agencies said, with a "high degree of confidence," that Saddam possessed both chemical and biological weapons. These were the same intelligence reports that Clinton received as President, so he is well aware of them. His statement was not a mistake, it was a lie.

And then there's this little Clinton quote from 03:

"[I]t is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons."

RTWT.

Let's crescent roll! I think George O would have a few choice words that he would pull out of the memory hole just for this occasion. (HT Jeff and Glenn)

Even I have trouble believing al-Reuters could actually stoop to fake pee. This would make "fake but accurate" look like rigid rationality...

Venal organizations doing illegal things? That's such a MSMajor surprise to me. I'm shocked, just shocked... And speaking of the good ol' MSM, you might want to keep scrolling while you're over at Mickey's -- I should link to him more and will try to rectify my sin... (HT Glenn)

It still may not be true -- but you would expect them to shoot now if they could...

Unfit to face the truth. Did I forget to mention why?

I'm feeling like a classic redux on a post that has held up well: What French bashing?

No so fast -- they might have a few bazookas.

We will probably disagree on how to rebuild, but good for Donna.

1997. 1999. Well everyone knows that BusHitler stole that election in '92, didn't he? (HT Drudge)

Of Course It Wouldn't Have Fit The Storyline ...

... for the LA Times to have brought this up during the early critical impression phase of the "racist Dubya/get Mike Brown/what buses?" MSM campaign:

Senior officials in Louisiana's emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste, mismanagement and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina struck.

Remember the REAL BLAME NAME? Even more hilarious:

The day before the report was issued, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Louisiana obtained an indictment against Michael L. Brown, deputy director of the Louisiana office of emergency preparedness. (Brown is no relation to former FEMA director Michael D. Brown who resigned this week.) Louisiana's deputy director oversaw the state's Hazard Mitigation program.

So either a) the MSM either had a story in pocket about the charges against the Louisiana FEMA's Michael D. Brown and suppressed it so as not to confuse the message in their biased attack on Dubya's Mike Brown -- or b) they're totally incompetent. Or c) all of the above.

Interesting about how questions about the MSM typically end up in a form like this isn't it?

I pick (c) of course.

Remember this?

4. We do not yet have teleporter nor replicator technology like you saw on "Star Trek" in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grownups actually engaged in the recovery effort today were studying engineering.

I'm thinking of promoting it to a Jaw Dropper. This idea that people with better than average writing skills -- but typically no other professional qualifications -- are somehow better qualified to understand and honestly communicate a wide range of complex subjects than professionals is one of the most risible ruses of all time.

As a society we have ceded entirely too much power to the "4th estate" in our quest for the material benefits of specialization. Absolute power has corrupted them absolutely as well as allowed them to brainwash their way to entirely too much respect. (And I say that in knowledge of how poorly the MSM is regarded by much of the public.)

Blogging has opened up a critical avenue for the re-engagement of citizenship -- and none too soon! All of a sudden, subject matter experts can gain a foothold against the venal and stupid MSM.

And it's also our unthinking trust in specialization along with violating the "Prime Directive" that has been key in leading us to the verge of the Tinfoil Apocalypse. Too much technology is leaking into the hands of nihilistic, bloody, brutal serial murderers.

I hope it's not too late to avoid it. But the evidence in favor of Apocalypse is getting pretty ugly.

SHHHH! This Strategy Page 9/16/05 update doesn't exist.

WHOOPS!

"There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourself as having leftist revolutionary credentials,” he said, in a discussion of Kurdish and Iraqi opponents of Saddam’s regime. "And, in fact, I can tell that you do by the zoo noises you make and the scars you can demonstrate from your long underground twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you’re masturbating in that manner, the Iraqi secular left…[is] fighting for [its] lives against the most vicious and indiscriminate form of fascist violence that any country in the region has seen for a very long time."

Daffy Durbin and Atticus Finch.

Now THERE's Some Excellent Food For Thought

"fascist-fellating fraud"

--- AND ---

Tom Grey: "The myth that the weak are morally superior because they are weaker. But they're not always."

Now THERE's some excellent food for thought. I'm gonna chew on that one for awhile...

The interminable 15 minutes.

Did I forget to mention Barges? Well at least one anyway.

It's enough to make me want to believe in Revelations as a saner apocalypse. But I've been predicting it of course...

Danger! Danger! Will Robinson Jamie Gorelick!

"An employee of the Defense Department says he was ordered to destroy documents identifying Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks on the U.S., Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., announced today. "

Could it be possible that the risible 911 Commission will finally come out stinking like NOLA?

The face of moderate Islam -- or just plain nuts? And lucky for us, we all know that loons are never prone to violence...

"This response goes to the heart of the beliefs of the left—the socialist ideal of equality. In their world no one can have what everyone can’t have. (Well, an exception is always made for the elites but that’s another story.) Therefore, since they couldn’t evacuate everyone they shouldn’t even attempt to evacuate anyone." (HT Glenn)

48 would be gr8. Well, at least as long as the buses have drivers and armor plating. (HT Glenn)

When does reality become fake? When al-Reuters covers it...

Whoops

"Regular reader who just got internet access in South Mississippi tonight! I hope it does not go out before I finish this email. I live in Gautier, just north of I 10 on the gulf coast. Unlike many, I can plead personal knowledge.
...

There was literally no way into the area for convoys that did not involve clearing hundreds of miles of roads. The bridge between Mobile and Pascagoula was closed, due to fear that it would collapse. It is still only one lane each way. I 10 was, in places,under water until Tuesday.

So where did this idea of a slow response originate? I believe it came from fearful local politicians, mostly in Louisiana, eager to deflect blame to anyone else. It was picked up enthusiastically by the media. The Cindy Sheehan story was rapidly fading, so this was simply another attack by the media, beleieving they have finally got Bush. The Plame story, the Rumsfield story, Cindy Sheehan, Abu Graib, etc… etc…

I saw emergency personnel on Tuesday evening, and I was quite happy with the response."

RTWT.

"And now the maggot of Holocaust denial has emerged from within this filth finally to reveal, to those who would not believe it, just what it is that we are up against." (HT Glenn)

AT LAST: The real blame name.

Intro And Kipling Redux

"From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

This is garbage. ...

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise..."

Glenn Bus(ts) WaPo

"Fully evacuate?'' Yes. As Brendan Loy noted, even 48 hours is really too late -- though Nagin waited much later than that. (I've seen people doing math to the effect that you could have gotten everyone out in 24 hours, but I doubt that New Orleans could have mustered the necessary degree of organization for that.) But certainly a lot of people could have been evacuated who weren't, and that would have improved conditions for the rest, and reduced the burden on relief services. And if Nagin had gotten the buses out, they would have been available for further evacuations after the storm had passed, instead of him having to call for Greyhounds.

This is, of course, all water over the dam in the most literal sense, but given all the finger-pointing going on, it's hard to ignore this issue. Had more people been evacuated, as they should have been, before the storm hit, conditions in the city would have been better, and relief services less stressed, afterward. [My emphasis]

The Smartest Man In America

Thomas Sowell is not only smart but concise:

People who talk about a need for "change" in the law are off on a tangent, if not cynically confusing the issue. Nobody denies the need for change. The Constitution itself provides a process for its own amendment.

The real question is who should make those changes -- "we the people" through elected representatives or unelected judges?

Those who think that judges need to update the law have claimed that it is hard to amend the Constitution. But what is the evidence for that? That it hasn't been done very often?

People don't often put on one red shoe and one green shoe. But that doesn't mean that it is hard to do. It just means that they don't want to do it.

To show that it is hard to amend the Constitution, you would first have to show that the public wants it amended more often but somehow just can't seem to get the job done.

There are 27 amendments to the Constitution, which is to say 17 have been added since the original ten in the Bill of Rights. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were all ratified within 5 years of one another. The 16th and 17th were ratified the same year.

There is far less evidence that the public is dying to amend the Constitution, and just can't do it, than there is that they resent judges amending it by "interpretation."

The fact that judges feel a need to deny doing this suggests the same thing. The time is long overdue to stop repeating shopworn sophistries in defense of lawless judges.

RTWT.

A Nerdly No

Glenn points out that us nerds have an even stronger opinion than the rest of the country:



But realistically, the insurance companies are the only ones who can stop the rebuilding -- the politicos certainly won't. Including W of course...

NYeT Again

So the latest hit piece on W from NYeT begins:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 - American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission. The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.

And we all know that BusHitler won in that election mess in Florida in 1992, right?

Hellloo-ooo!!??

Slick who?

"The real wealth of nation lies with its people, who are forged in part by the expectations we hold of them. The Left has expected so little of those they've named as victims: they will not be disappointed."

Bus(ted) again.

UPDATE: Be sure to follow the link to the Superdome survivor's perspective.

QOTD: "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." --Albert Einstein

I passed neo's surprising test -- can you? And while you're at it you might want to examine whether Jews are generic...

Barging Out Of The Levee Canal Wall MSMemory Hole

Imagine just how amazed I am to discover this story in something vaguely resembling the MSM:

Barge could have crashed through canal's floodwall

Tuesday, September 06, 2005
BY JOHN McQUAID
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
A loose barge may have caused a large breach in the east side of the Industrial Canal floodwall that accelerated Hurricane Katrina's rising floodwaters in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and adjacent St. Bernard Parish, Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi said yesterday.

Naomi said the barge was found on the land side of the floodwall, leading Army Corps officials to believe it could have crashed through the wall and sent a huge amount of water -- which was already pouring over the top -- into the neighborhoods immediately downriver.

"We have some pictures that show this very large barge inside the protected area. It had to go through the breach," Naomi said. "The opening is a little bit wider than the barge itself. One would think it's the barge that did it." ...

Amazingly, we have here an entire story dedicated to the barge theory! And even some speculation at the end of the story that the 17th Street canal breach was caused by a barge:

Leonardo Ramirez, a construction worker and Metairie resident who lives on the Jefferson Parish side of the 17th Street Canal near the breached area, said he thought he heard a barge hitting the levee early Aug. 29, though he did not see it happen.

"At quarter to six in the morning we heard a huge bang, and then we heard another," he said. "It was so loud. It scared us."

Check it out!

And there are now some other MSM stories that actually contain barge references. But nothing from the NYeT al heavy MSMajors.

And as near as I can tell, The Rail was on top of this very early:

A prediction, levees and the levee breaks are going to be extremely big news in the next few weeks.

We’ve already heard some of it. And frankly a lot of the news will likely criticize the failure to upgrade them. But, the levees are going to be big news because the body count will be significant. And the outcry will grow, as tragic discoveries of people drowning in their homes will be trumpeted by an outraged media.

We will learn, as if it is new news, that the major levee failure was the result of empty barges broken free by the hurricane ramming the concrete retaining walls. Survivors in Baton Rouge who relayed the stories to reporters in the evacuation centers have already reported it.

And there's a very interesting comment there by an ex-FEMA employee too.

But you've got to do some serious Googling to find this stuff.

NYeT/(C)BS/CNN doesn't want you to know that even the proposed Cat 5 flood wall wouldn't have helped since it wasn't going to be built where the canal walls broke! Much less that even if Bush was clairvoyant and made everything including canal walls Cat 5 reinforced (why everyone knows that Slick Willy was going to get right on that if he could have just had ANOTHER term!) little details like barges cause just a slight complication to the "W eats babies for breakfast" narrative.

But yall just go right ahead and turn your brain to risible MSMush.

And while youre at it don't forget: I control Karl Rove.

"No doubt all of this will appear in the New York Times tomorrow." NYeT!

ABLE CONDI may not be true after all? If not, then what on earth DID Sandy stuff down his pants anyway that he'd be willing to risk that horrific $50K fine???

Karl homers agin': "But in what solar system would a four-day job interview include a solid day in which the interviewer talks about himself?"

Re-Hijacked and praying to Mecca.

Those poor, oppressed drone pilots. And you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out who supplied them...

TIMELINE OF HELL.

Oh yeah, I remember that.

The “journalism” continues -- Jeff has the takedown. (HT Glenn)

NEVER FORGET WHAT?

Why The MSMedia Are The Enemy

Terrorists can be a very small group of people or a politically weak organization. What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists’ capabilities. This suggests that winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means accomplishing two things: denying the terrorists’ weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is currently Al Qaeda’s greatest strategic capability: media magnification and occasional media enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

(HT Glenn)

Check out my update to "Intent On Burying Drowning The Lede Leader". It gains new relevance with the emerging "breaching vs. overtopping" meme.

Steyn Rolls

And, as the years go by, it becomes clearer that the war aspects -- the attacks in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London -- are really spasmodic flashes of a much more elusive enemy. Although Islamism is the first truly global terrorist insurgency, it shares more similarities with conventional terror movements -- the IRA or the Basque separatists -- than many of us thought four years ago. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. That's what the Islamists have bet.

Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority that he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.

RTWT.

Yahoo - A Good 1940s German Company

I Would Call This Devastating

... except that would be a vast understatement:

Did Louisiana and Governor Blanco follow any of its plan? Based on the report we read in the New York Times yesterday, it appears that Blanco didn't even know what the plan required, or even have any knowledge of the resources and responsibilities that the state government had.

Also note the date on Lousiana's EOP. Its last revision came in January 2000. No one in Louisiana has updated this plan despite the events that followed after that date:

* 9/11
* Hurricane Ivan (Sep 2004)
* Natural Hazards evaluation of LA/NO response (Nov 2004)

Florida officials have called this correctly. The response to Katrina and its unnecessarily deadly consequences started years ago, when Louisiana and its officials refused to take emergency planning seriously and neglected to make what slight planning did take place known to the various agencies expected to respond. No amount of federal intervention could have overcome the mistakes made by state and local response agencies in the days and hours before landfall, and even afterwards the reluctance of Blanco to allow federal authority to take over the area cost more time and lives while she dithered.

Sheer incompetence. Louisiana needs to ask itself why their elected officials left them so vulnerable to this kind of disaster.

RTWT. Of course, Florida doesn't know anything about hurricanes so why listen to them?



UPDATE: Did I mention ghost trains and liability yet? (HT Glenn)

All You Need To Know About The War's Progress Since 911

... is contained by the fact that CNN's photo 911 photo gallery contains no pictures of what the end of life was like for 911 victims:



But they're eager to show dead bodies in NOLA since they think they can hurt Bush with them.



After all, those pictures of buses were just Photoshopped by conservatives.



And doesn't everyone know that the leadership of the Red Cross and Salvation Army are just right-wing shills?

Their puerile fascifism is never ending. They believe that just as they have for now stuffed Orwell into his own Memory Hole, they will be able to do the same with 911.

The venal vultures of the MSM and their Gramscian Neo-Syndicalism is part and parcel of the enemy. Now it is true that many of them are unwitting, brainwashed dupes of Gramscianism.

It's an "arc of embrace", not a crescent! Never mind that we call it a crescent. You're just taking us too literally. What's the matter with you?

Nothing's the matter with me. But the MSM needs to become unemployed from any position shaping public opinion forthwith...

4. We do not yet have teleporter nor replicator technology like you [MSM'ers]
saw on "Star Trek" in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your
worthless communications degree while the grownups actually engaged in the
recovery effort today were studying engineering.

As I pointed out just a few posts ago, Scrappleface has the best remembrance of 911 in the midst of the continuing insanity.

Let's roll and honor their bravery and sacrifice.

And turn off CNN for good.

Katrina Takes On The Tinfoil Apocalypse

Here's some perspective on just how massive Katrina was:



This is taken from the Katrina Information Map -- it's pretty cool. (Don't abuse it by adding garbage notes of course! There seem to be too many on it already.)

Now here's the same map with the effects of a small fission nuke (Hiroshima sized) superimposed in red:



When you consider how much infrastructure was taken out fairly far inland and the extent of power outages in the immediate aftermath, and then pile on the flooding of NOLA you get something that in many respects humbles the Apocalyptic effects of a small nuke.

In fact, the only small nuke hit that would even rival this would be one in NOLA that would (of course) have flooded the city. At least then folks would have realized not to pump the water out into the lake since it would be radioactive. (This idea of pumping the NOLA witch's flood brew out into the lake is going to end very badly I think; but that's a topic for another post.)

But for most cities that would be nuked, you just have to think about a nanosecond to realize that while the death toll would be hugely higher given the likelihood of no warning at all (it's now looking like the low thousands at worst), it would actually be a lot easier to get help to the survivors on the fringes since the damage would extend only to approximately the outer red ring rather than the huge rounded rectangle of the Katrina map. In general, you could get there from wherever the supplies were since the infrastructure damage would be much more localized.

Aside from the whole issue of Federalism and whether W should have invoked the Insurrection Act -- and perhaps also aside from the general pychological effects of nuclear weapons -- it would be easier to get aid to the survivors of a nuke than those from Katrina.

Tinfoil Apocalypse? Yes, the Apocalypse is coming folks. But not in the fantasmagorical imagery of Revelations. In the form of insane, nihilistic Islamic lunatics wearing "Tinfoil Hats" finally getting their fingers on the "red button" and treating it like a door knocker.

It might take Iran a number of years to develop them themselves. Or maybe OBL has already acquired them from the NorKorComs or the Russian Mafia.

Who knows? Certainly not the CIA, that's for certain.

But too much technology in the hands of the too very intensely insane can only end badly.

Very badly.

But, surprisingly, in many ways possibly not as badly as Katrina...

Let's Roll!

Today In The Memory Hole

"Four years after 9/11 the postmortem of that disaster continues to focus on the institutional failures of our intelligence agencies and government bureaucracies. Yet the larger intellectual and cultural corruption that in part made possible many of those misjudgments and mistakes does not receive the public attention it deserves. The politicizing of the academy, for example, that accelerated in the sixties had compromised the study of Islam and the Middle East long before Islamic terrorism appeared on our cultural radar. Because of this ideological distortion, centuries of consensus about the aggressive, intolerant, and expansionist nature of Islam — an agreement reflecting both the facts of the historical record and the words themselves of the Koran and Muslim theologians and jurists — were discarded in the service of an anti-Western political and ideological agenda."

And where else would an incompetence distillery be found than at the NYeT?

Head-On In Iraq

As Wretchard points out, there is a critical aspect where Iraq IS like Vietnam: focusing on the US electorate:

The enemy has not been without successes, proving tactically adaptable and ruthless. Yet at heart his strategy was static: it was to inflict a low but continuous rate of casualty on US forces and broadcast that fact to the world. The enemy center of gravity was the US electorate. They attached video and camera crews to their striking units in the same way that US forces attached supporting weapons to theirs, creating the first combined media-military arms in history. Using these new type of formations they relentlessly projected the message, 'we are in charge'. And people believed them.

Those two competing strategies met each other head-on in Iraq. The US strategy was far superior in the conventional sense. The enemy strategy was arguably the more creative and daring; with a far larger "information" dimension than the American. Each approach had its strengths and weaknesses. The American approach emphasized changing reality and letting perception follow. It played to American strengths: logistics, training, advanced weapons, tactical speed. The enemy approach was to manage perception, both among its own base and in the field of public opinion, while striving to inflict as much damage as it could on US forces. Although it was America that first used the term, it was the insurgents who truly perfected the process of "shock and awe": the mind-altering application of battlefield force. But shock and awe are evanescent while dying tended to be permanent. My own guess is that the issue is no longer in the balance. While some combination of political or military blunders could still save the insurgency the fundamentals are against them.

Luckily, the enemy hasn't yet converted to Christianity -- so dying does tend to be permanent for them. And better yet, they still seem to be stupid enough to be striving for it.

Lefties and their Islamofascist idols are just are too dense to understand the wisdom of Patton and how seriously the American military has come to take it:

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country fantasy caliphate."

You need to read this perspective on the CNN ghouls from Charles. And Power Line points out Glenn has it right. If you don't know now that the MSM has to be utterly put out of business, I would suggest you may look like a human -- but you're really a "Kodak fiend" with no human decency.

No surrender. But can you afford the new insurance premium?

Keep Those Hoods On Boyz!

Did I forget to mention that it's no coincidence the KKK and the Islamofascists all seem to be wearing the same fashionable hoods?

In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Kreis [head of the Aryan Nations] said of al Qaeda, "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah." Going a step further, Kreis told CNN that he had a message for Osama bin Laden: "The message is, the cells are out here and they are already in place. They might not be cells of Islamic people, but they are here and they are ready to fight."

...

Ummm -- well, actually no, I didn't forget to mention it. Look over right at "The Previous Jaw Dropper":

"I was stunned to learn the story of Haj Mohammad Amin al-Hussein, which I tell at great length in Preachers of Hate. Not only did he meet with Hitler in Berlin in 1941: he became the Arabic voice of Nazi Germany in all their broadcasts to the Arab world, exhorting Muslims to murder Jews and enact Hitler’s final solution. Not by coincidence, one of his greatest students is Yasser Arafat, who in moments of weakness claims (wrongly, I believe) that he is Haj Mohammad Amin’s nephew."

And in one of God's great jokes on the violently insane, the Islamofascists are heavily recruiting from yet another type of hoodz that may have been related to just a wee bit of an evacuation failure recently. (Hint: Buses were NOT involved.)

The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.

It will be very interesting to see if THIS circle can remain unbroken.

I'm guessing only if they never take their hoods off in private...

UPDATE: A commenter over at Roger's adds some relevant perspective about just how bad NOLA's "third world" neighborhoods were:

the laissez faire attitude doesn;t end with thje cops; it PERMEATES the whole city. it's like this:

i remember a few weeks back, somebeody somehwere published results of an experiment in which they fired 700 rounds of blanks in bad nola neighborhoods to see how many calls the NOPD would get about gunfire.

they got NONE. bupkus. Zilch. nada.

this says a few things: (1) the people in these criminal infested neighborhoods have (a) no faith in their police, and (b)they have stopped fighting back, and (2) these are PROBABLY the SAME people from the same neighborhoods who "acted out" so badly in the Superdome and Convention Center.

Sounds about right to me... (Not that Nagin and Blanco shouldn't have allowed them resupply!!! Du'oh!)

UPDATED AGAIN: Welcome COTV readers! If you liked this, you might want to take a look at "Katrina Takes On The Tinfoil Apocalypse", "NOLA Machine No Go", "Projections From The MSMemory Hole" and "Barging Out Of The Levee Canal Wall MSMemory Hole".

And yes, Fascifism, Gramscian neo-Syndicalism, Islamofascism, the MSM, Totalitarianism and generally all things leftist corrupt take quite a licking here even on a slow day...

What Buses?

Glenn has the best FEMA roundup.

This has me thinking about the big picture. Us righties, being the last refuge of the analyticals, have process improvement and self analysis as one of our SOPs. So when the lefties throw the usual blizzard of FUD to distract us, we laugh most of it off but when we find one of them to be a possible chink in our armor we actually dissipate some of our resources taking a look so we don't do that again.

Then when we actually admit we may not be perfect in all respects the lefties use their MSMegaphone to translate that into us righties being the corrupt scum of the earth.

All the while those buses are left there by the left in plain view...


UPDATE: More evidence on what we face. It would be sad if it weren't so predictable....

The Old Jew strikes again.

NOLA Evacuation Watch

It starts like this:

New Orleans ignored its own plans
By Audrey Hudson and James G. Lakely
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 9, 2005

The city of New Orleans followed virtually no aspect of its own emergency management plan in the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans officials also failed to implement most federal guidelines, which stated that the Superdome was not a safe shelter for thousands of residents.

The official "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" states that the mayor can call for a mandatory citywide evacuation, but the Louisiana governor alone is given the power to carry out the evacuation, which Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has yet to do.

This is jaw dropper material folks.

What is this? Day 13? And Day 15 from when she should have declared a mandatory evacuation?

AND THERE'S STILL NO MANDATORY EVACUATION?????????

With this kind of performance I guess I now have to agree that W should be impeached -- for not invoking the Insurrection Act...

(HT Power Line)

Oil for Food offered a lifeline of cash and influence to a regime that was starving its people. The program did not corrupt the U.N. so much as exploit its essential nature. Now Mr. Annan wants to use this report as an endorsement of his "reform" proposals. Only at the U.N. could he dare to think he could get away with this. (HT Roger)

Chickenbeavers!

It's Not Just Africa

Tim Worstall has a nice little summary of some work Bill Easterly is doing about the real root causes of poverty in Africa:

I think of this as a simple descriptive exercise to compare two alternative hypotheses: (1) Divergence Big Time was due to a savings/technology poverty trap or (2) it was due to bad government/institutions. The stylized facts emerging from this exercise support (2) strongly over (1), confirming previous literature on institutions and development.

I use three widely used measures of institutions: (1) the Polity IV measure again, now averaged over 1960-2002, (2) the Freedom House measure of political liberties (with the sign reversed, since an increase in this measure means less liberty), averaged over all available years, which are 1972-2002, and (3) Economic Freedom in the World from the Fraser Institute, averaged over all available years, which are 1970-2002. All measures of institutions are strongly significant predictors of growth 1960-2002, and make initial income negative in the regressions (significantly so in the IV regressions). The institutions story makes Divergence go away in the more recent data as well.

So which is it, bad government or the poverty trap? When we control for both initial poverty and bad government, it is bad government that explains the slower growth. We cannot statistically discern any effect of initial poverty on subsequent growth once we control for bad government. This is still true if we limit the definition of bad government to corruption alone. The recent stagnation of the poorest countries appears to have more to do with awful government than with a poverty trap, contrary to the Sachs hypothesis.

What do I mean it's not just Africa? For openers, I'm a believer in Strategy Page's long running take that corruption in the Middle East is at least a comparable obstacle to the terror masters themselves to the progress of freedom and democracy there.

And NOLA has a long and well-earned reputation in the U.S. as a corrupt gangland. Is the long-term poverty and recent abysmal leadership just a coincidence?

They Were

Cell Phones Of Smart Death

While we realized with Katrina what trouble we get into when our cellphones go down, it turns out they work to our advantage pretty nicely in Iraq in a way you may not have considered:

September 8, 2005: There’s an elaborate chess game going on in central Iraq, and along the Syrian border. Actually, it’s more of a “chase game,” as the al Qaeda and Sunni Arab terrorist groups attempt to maintain control of the shrinking number of areas where they can establish their safe houses and bomb making workshops. This process began last Fall, with the battle for Fallujah. While this left several thousand terrorists killed or captured, at least two thousand, including most of the terrorist leaders, fled Fallujah before the city fell. Over the next few months, the terrorists tried to take over another town, or portion of a city, like Mosul. This didn’t work, although it generated some great headlines about a terrorist "comeback". If the terrorists tried to hold ground, American troops came in and killed or captured them. Increasingly, the Americans arrived with Iraqi police or soldiers along, who were able to quickly canvass the liberated area to find out who might be pro-government. There were always a few. Names were taken and phone numbers given out. Sometimes, cell phones were given out as well.

The enemy became like nomads, with their caravans of cars, SUVs and pickup trucks moving at night from one sort-of-safe area to another. Increasingly, the caravans of gunmen rolls into areas containing a higher proportion of people hostile to them. The Sunni Arabs have become anti-terrorist for very pragmatic reasons; money. When the caravan of gunmen shows up, they bring with them bullies, religious fanatics and, eventually, American smart bombs. But the terrorists, and their attacks on reconstruction efforts, have also brought over two years of poverty. The Sunni Arabs used to get most of the oil revenue, now they get practically nothing, because the terrorists won’t let any goodies in. Sunnis Arabs note that when the Americans come, they bring goodies. If the Americans stay, they bring in Iraqi cops and money for jobs and building things. This is another case of money as a weapon.

The terrorists fight back by making raids of their own. They will drive into a town or neighborhood in strength, usually a few dozen gunmen. They will stay for hours, days, or even a week if their presence is not reported (which quickly brings American or Iraqi troops, and damn smart bombs.) The terrorists will try to intimidate people, to encourage them not to call the government and report where the terrorists are. More and more Sunni Arabs know the Americans will pay for information, and what the phone numbers are to call. For this reason, the terrorists are very hostile to the spreading cell phone service. Cell phones too often mean death for terrorists, as they are used by angry Iraqis to report where the terrorists are hiding. Terrorists have long used cell phones in Baghdad to set off bombs, but in the towns outside of Baghdad, and along the Syrian border, where the terrorists like to hide out, cell phones are viewed with great suspicion.

The tips have led to more reports of smart bombs hitting safe houses in towns where there are not American troops or Iraqi troops. These 500 pound bombs often often arrive unexpectedly at night (to limit civilian casualties), and set off secondary explosions, as terrorist munitions explode. Another recent tip, from an arrested suspect, led to a hiding place for two kidnap victims, including an American contractor who had been held for ten months. Most of the kidnap victims freed are Iraqis, and these rarely get reported in the American media. But kidnapping rescues are big news in Iraq, because most of the victims are Iraqis.

Terrorists are spending more of their time running, and less time planting roadside bombs or attacking Iraqi police and government officials. In the last two weeks, attacks are down by about half. Some believe that the terrorists are massing their strength to try and disrupt next months voting. But on the ground, there are more and more towns are patrolled by Iraqi police, or pro-government tribal militia, and not al Qaeda or Sunni Arab terrorists. It's becoming more and more difficult for the terrorists to hold ground, much less build and use roadside or car bombs. The objective here is to turn central Iraq into an area where the terrorists are constantly on the run, and eventually run right into the ground and out of business.

Excellent.

You Know The MSM Story Line Is Falling Apart

When even the NYeT is running stories with graphs like this:

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.

"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.

being integral to the article rather than a buried lede!

WHOOPS. (HT WND)

And US News has an article claiming that this should have been easier to deal with than a large scale WMD event. Umm, not exactly. In fact the size of the affected area is much larger than that of most conceivable WMD scenarios -- including use of nukes. The only good news with Katrina is that the death toll is likely lower than we would see from a nuke -- but might have been fairly comparable if Bush hadn't prevailed to have Nagin and Blanco at least call for a (busless) evacuation.

More Tinfoil thoughts to come...