"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...

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...

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...