I'm rich!
Let's see, 20% of 20.5 million dollars is - yes! - over a million dollars! All I have to do is follow the instructions of this nice fellow from the Ivory Coast:

FROM :MR & MRS SENIOR TRAORE
EMAIL: tsenior1@zwallet.com

MY EFAX: +1-775-766-3513

KINDEST ATTENTION,

PLEASE PERMIT ME TO MAKE YOUR ACQUAINTANCE IN SO
INFORMAL A MANNER. THIS IS NECESSITATED BY MY URGENT NEED TO REACH A
DEPENDABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY FOREIGN PARTNER. THIS REQUEST MAY SEEM
STRANGE
AND UNSOLICITED BUT I CRAVE YOUR INDULGENCE AND PRAY THAT YOU TAKE MY
REQUEST VERY SERIOUS.

I AM MR SENIOR TRAORE, A REKNOWNED BUSINESSMAN IN
ONE OF THE REBEL-HELD TOWNS, BOUAKE (ONE OF THE WAR
ZONES IN IVORY COAST) I RECEIVED INFORMATION FROM A
RELIABLE SOURCE WHO DESCRIBED YOUR COUNTRY
AS BEING ECONOMICALLY CONDUCIVE FOR INVESTMENT AND
HER PEOPLE AS TRANSPARENT AND TRUSTWORTHY TO
ENGAGING BUSINESS WHICH MADE ME TO WRITE YOU. AS YOU MAY WANT TO
KNOW
AND TO MAKE YOU LESS CURIOUS,I GOT YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS FROM
AN INTERNET SITE THAT PORTRAYED YOU (YOUR ESTABLISHMENT) IN GOOD
LIGHT.

ON THE 17TH OF SEPTEMBER 2002. THE REBEL LEADERS,UNTIL THEN WERE
LOYAL
SOLDIERS TO THE GOVERNMENT OF PRESIDENT LAURENT GBAGBO
CONTACTED ME IN MY OFFICE WITH THE BUSINESS OF IMPORTATION OF
ARMOURIES. WITHOUT THE PREMONITION OF WAR, I ACCEPTED THE JOB. THE
SOLDIERS
PAID ME THE SUM OF TWENTY MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES
DOLLARS (US$ 20.5) ON THE SPOT AND TOLD ME TO EXPEDITE ACTION. SINCE
I AM
NOT INTO IMPORTATION OF ARMUNITIONS AND BECAUSE OF THE URGENCY, I
IMMEDIATELY STARTED MAKING SEVERAL CONTACTS WITH
BUSINESSMEN ACROSS THE GLOBE.

TWO DAYS LATER, HEAVY FIGHTING BROKE UP IN CENTRAL BAOUKE AND
KORHOGO,
EVERYWHERE WAS IN DISSARRAY AND I LOST EVERYTHING THAT TOOK ME SO
MANY
YEARS TO ACQUIRE. I HAVE NO OPTION THAN TO DO AWAY WITH THE US$20.5M.

MY WIFE AND I QUICKLY MADE AN ARRANGEMENT WITH A RED
CROSS RELIEF WORKER WHO USED HIS OFFICIAL VAN TO
MOVE THIS MONEY TO ABIDJAN, ALTHOUGH HE DID NOT KNOW
THE REAL CONTENT OF THE BOX. PRESENTLY, THIS FUND
HAS BEEN DEPOSITED WITH A SAFE RELIABLE SECURITY
COMPANY IN ABIDJAN WHERE I AM HIDING FROM THE REBEL
WHO DECLEARED ME WANTED. I DO NOT WANT TO INVEST
THIS MONEY IN ABIDJAN DUE TO UNFAVORABLE ECONOMIC
CLIMATE. AS A RESULT, I KEPT THE MONEY IN A CUSTOM
BONDED WAREHOUSE WITH THE SECURITY COMPANY. SO THAT
I CAN NOT LAY MY HANDS ON IT UNTIL IT GETS TO YOUR
COUNTRY, WHERE I WILL COMMENCE INVESTMENT.

THE ONLY ASSISTANCE WE NEED FROM YOU WHICH I BELIEVE
YOU WOULD DO FOR US ARE THE FOLLOWING:

1. MAKE IMMEDIATE ARRANGEMENT TO TAKE THE DELIVERY
OF THE CRATE (FUND) AT THEIR EUROPE OR ASIA
COMMISSION AGENTS.

2. ASSURANCE FROM YOU THAT YOU WILL NOT SIT ON OUR
SHARE WHEN THIS FUND GETS TO YOUR COUNTRY.

MY WIFE AND I AGREED THAT YOU SHALL BE ENTITLED TO
20% OF THE TOTAL AMOUNT WHILE THE PRINCIPAL SUM WILL BE INVESTED IN
A
VIABLE BUSINESS VENTURE WITH YOUR ADVICE. MOST IMPORTANTLY, I WILL
LIKE TO BUY A PERSONAL HOUSE WHERE MY WIFE, MY TWO SONS AND I WILL
RESIDE.

UPON CONFIRMATION OF YOUR INTEREST TO HELP US AS OUR
FOREIGN PARTNER TO CLAIM THE CRATE FROM THE SECURITY
COMPANY ON OUR BEHALF AT ANY OF THEIR COMMISSION
AGENT CLOSER TO YOU, I SHALL FURNISH YOU WITH THE
DETAILS OF THE MOVEMENT OF THE CONSIGNMENT TO BE
SCHEDULED IN YOUR FAVOUR BY THE SECURITY COMPANY
PREPARE AN AIRWAY BILL AND TAG THE CONSIGNMENT IN
YOUR FAVOUR. YOUR PRIVATE FAX AND TELEPHONE NUMBERS
ARE NEEDED TO ENHANCE THE SPEEDY CONCLUSION OF THIS
TRANSACTION (OUR ONLY HOPE IN LIFE NOW) URGENTLY.

KINDLY TREAT AS URGENT AND CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY
THROUGH THE ABOVE E-MAIL ADDRESS (tsenior1@zwallet.com
)
I HAVE NOT ACQUIRED A NEW PHONE AS I LOST ALL MY PROPERTIES IN BOAUKE

YOURS FAITHFULLY,

MR SENIOR TRAORE


Hey, Ivory Coast! He must have been reading Conundrum! No blood for cheese OR cocoa! Á bas les Froggies! I would be a hero to this poor oppressed African fellow, who could also be a valuable business partner, dealing in arms all over the world. Ha! My fortune is made. He did say he would be taking my advice on the best way to invest the money. Boy, have I got some ideas! Must get right back to him before the French track me down. Or, more worrying, before the Burkinabes or Gbagbo's people get on to me. Isn't international currency smuggling a profitable and fun business? I'll be busy for a while. Let's see, where can I hide that crate of money, just for now? I know, it's tempting just to run off with the whole 20.5 mil, but I'm not like that. I want a long-term profitable business relationship. There are SOME ethical people left in the world. Thank you, truth and light and justice, you've found your boy!

Nietzsche would be proud
Friedrich Wilhelm always said he was proud to be Polish rather than 100% German, so we are following his lead in, possibly, according to this article, moving a ton of USA GIs from German to Poland in the next few years. The Poles are all for it. It may be the death blow to the German economy, or at least the prospect of such a blow may destroy whatever chances Schroeder still has of surviving politically after his crushing defeats today in Niedersachsen and Hesse. Not inconsiderable parts of Deutschland, by the way.

It's Oil Over
Have the leftists miscalculated? What if the US DOES take over the oil of Iraq? What happens then? Can Kuwait and Saudi Arabia be far behind? What if the disposition of the entire oil resources of the Middle East is dictated from the Oval Office? What's Chirac going to do when it gets cold and damp in the Elysee Palace then? Hainh? Do we now see why France, which gets half or more of its oil from the Middle East, is so desperately opposed to the US conquest of Iraq? Do we now see the future Chirac sees? OPEC replaced by the Republican Party? If I were he, I'd be worried.

War and truth

Had an interesting exchange with Emperor Misha over on Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. Lots of suppressed feelings and memories about my days opposing the Vietnam War are bubbling up. Here are a couple of points I made:

A lot of us who fiercely opposed the Vietnam War, to the point of not allowing ourselves to be drafted for any reason, and are now in favor of taking out today's true enemies of freedom in Iraq are being called chickenhawks by the same people, in some cases, as those who went to Vietnam with their eyes and mind closed, because they didn't have the guts to oppose the war.
Misha replied, in part:
"All the Vets of that war that I know thought they were doing the right thing..."
So I riposted:
I can't completely agree, oh mighty imperial one. Some of the "gung-ho, Kill Cong!" Nam vets were blind to what they were doing, especially after 1968. Or they didn't care and didn't want to know. Getting your ticket punched on the way to a military - and political - career was NOT a good reason to participate in a totally screwed-up mess like Vietnam. That said, my opposition to the Vietnam war, I now realize, was not as grounded in knowledge and justice as I thought at the time. I let too much emotion get in the way, as the killing fields of Cambodia and the 1977 China-Vietnam war showed clearly. But you're right that a certain proportion of Nam vets really thought they were doing the right thing. It was the Lyndon Johnsons and Robert MacNamara's and Ho Chi Minhs and Maos who caused all the needless suffering. I just hope we can trust our leaders this time to take the ball all the way down the field, as they should have in 1991.

Qaddafi seeks a queen
This story shows the tender side of the Libyan madman Qaddafi. Then as you read on you discover oil may be involved. Who could have imagined? But, then who knew there was a kingdom in Uganda called "Toro" with a ten-year-old king? Maybe Muammar can teach the sub-Saharan Africans how to blow their money on armaments and turn their nations into international pariahs. That's about all he's ever done for Libya. I wonder what Orianna Fallaci would think? She had an interview with M.Q. back in the Seventies, I think, her first big exclusive. I even seem to remember it was in the New York Times Magazine.

Not so sad
I felt as shocked as anyone else when I heard about the Columbia tragedy. The name will now be ranked with Challenger when we talk of American bravery and accomplishment. But it struck me that the astronauts were all doing exactly what they wanted to do, they had been in space and conducted a lot of experiments. And their lives were in a real sense fulfilled. So what they did was not a sacrifice, but a dedication. It's comparable to those of us who commute to work dying in a car accident. Or, say your company sent you overseas for a mission that tested all of your skills, broadened your experience and heightened your love for your work. And it had worked wonderfully, you had brought back the big contract or made the big scientific discovery or signed the big star and you had had a good time. If you died in an airplane crash on the way back, would that really be so bad? I know it's banal to say it could happen to anyone, but it could. The difference is, especially now that we've had two serious, major catastrophic failures in space, that the element of danger is much closer than anyone had thought for at least the last ten years. So the risk from now on will be considered to be at a much higher level. But the program will go on, with a new sense of commitment. And each time a shuttle, or whatever other craft we come up with, touches down on that runway after screaming in all the way from space, we will all breathe a big sigh of relief and thanks.

No Blood for Cocoa!
The International Herald Tribune has the oh-so-sad story of the French coming a-cropper in the Ivory Coast. (via Instapundit) And good old Glenn also links to a Reuters story about the peace accord, signed to so much acclaim at Marcoussis, falling apart. Hmm, what is that on those signs? "Chirac - murderer, criminal, terrorist?" They must mean Bush. And, gee, who would have thought the agreement would have been drawn up so totally incompetently, when the UN, in the person of Kofi Annan himself, was present at the signing and blessed the whole thing? Since it was the French, of course, they didn't have to go through that messy and inconvenient business of convening the Security Council and voting for a resolution and forming a coalition. And, not-oddly enough, neither IHT or Reuters mention the THIRTY DEATHS of Ivorians - black Africans - at the hands of French soldiers reported here on Conundrum a couple of weeks ago. Those darn Africans, they are so ungrateful for all the blood and treasure France has dedicated to their welfare for so many years. Just like the Algerians, Senegalese, good old Emperor Bokassa in Congo-Brazzaville, those lovely boys in Chad, the pious Algerian killers, the Malagasys and all the other wonderful successes French policy has had in Africa. What can you expect from Africans, after all? A people who don't see "la gloire" in remaining part of France can hardly be expected to act in a civilized fashion. Eh, bien, vee vill just haf to go criticize zee cowboy Americaines!

Frogs go home! Save us, U.S.A!
Why do I feel these protesters in the Ivory Coast are going to be disappointed? But why do we even have a State Department if it can't stand up to the French when they've been colonialistically oppressing black Africans for weeks now and are turning around and trying to force their former puppet government to accept an agreement that will not do anything to stop the civil war? Maybe the French habit of surrendering is so ingrained they are forcing it on their former colonial client states. Oh, and did I mention the French sent troops? Without asking the UN? And killed thirty Ivorians? And now are telling their puppets to surrender! It's a tour de force!

"Old Rumsfeld"
Rumsfeld certainly seems to have got LeMonde's attention by his statement that France and Germany are the "Old Europe" and, impliedly, the "New" and more important Europe supports US aims in Iraq and the war on terror. Despite calling him "brutal in a typically Midwestern way", LeMonde actually agrees with Rummy but protests that France and Germany are still important (pathetic, isn't it?). But the editorial also points out, correctly I think, that Scandinavia still opposes the war and American hegemony. The EU hates to see the potential new members all through Eastern Europe are less afraid of American power than they are. Kind of undermines their whole globalization/socialism world view, doesn't it?

Still no global warming
Fourteen degrees - or was it eleven? - in Tallahassee today and global warming is sinking fast as a respectable topic of discussion. Here's a thorough debunking from several years ago. Like that will make any difference to the natural disaster crisis people whose whole livelihoods and ideologies are driven by the need to find something wrong with the way people are living, something they can be paid to make people feel guilty about, from SUVs to fatty foods to plastic shopping bags to cigarettes. When I lived down by the Kennedy Space Center, old-timers used to say that the thunderstorms were much stronger and more intense since the space shuttles started going off. Right. The global warming article reports that Drake in the 1500s sailing along the Florida coast saw fires everywhere. No doubt wildfires for millions of years have been putting huge amounts of "greenhouse gases" and soot into the atmosphere. In recent decades wildfires have been reduced to a fraction, at least temporarily, of their usual reach and power. Ever hear the global warming geeks talk about that? Not hardly.

Collin May on Europe, or, at least, "Old Europe"
"Innocents Abroad" has all the dirt you just knew was under the "Axis of Weasels'" carpets. Read the whole blog. You'll love it.

Comment from Mrs. DuToit's blog on the AIDS discussion.

Thanks for the permission. I wonder if you understand that I don't see the relevance of promiscuity to the Duesberg theory, except in that it transmits many other debilitating diseases that could 1) suppress the immune system and 2) kill, without the necessity of HIV doing anything. This would support, not undermine, Duesberg's theory by explaining how AIDS could be restricted to a particular, notoriously promiscuous community. That community is also notably reluctant to be honest about illegal drug use. The enhanced status that goes with being an "HIV-positive" victim rather than a suicidal promiscuous drug user is responsible for a lot of the blindness associated with the AIDS syndrome.

Duesberg and Mullis would probably be interested in statistics about death rates before AIDS was "discovered" in the early '80s among the target groups.

More from the Ivory Coast
Those great humanitarian French have been doing their compassionate thing in the Ivory Coast again. I guess they forgot to apply for a UN resolution and find some allies, but, hey, they're socialists so of course THAT doesn't matter. And I notice the UN is on the job there, so the whole situation will be peaceful and the nation will be on its way to health and prosperity in a matter of days.

Hmmmm.
Does anyone who has seen this story about whites and blacks in the military and the higher proportion of whites in the front-line units think maybe this could be linked to the high proportion of black women in the military? It seems to me that a lot of black women see the military as a way up and out. And black women, like all women, have always been more conventional and achievement- (read: survival-) oriented than black men. Also, with one quarter of black men having criminal records, they must find it harder to get into today's ridiculously zero-tolerant armed forces. But women do not serve in front-line combat units, at least in the infantry. I would be interested to see the proportion of black women as compared to white women in the military. I seem to remember seeing some figures suggesting the figure might be as high as fifty-fifty. This fact could account for the high proportion of blacks in rear echelon units. It also makes sense that black men and women would tend to stay in the military longer, since they don't have as high a rate of education as whites and must therefore find it harder to find worthwhile jobs in civilian life. Spending less time in the military, whites would therefore have less time to rise in the ranks and learn a skill valuable at least to the military. Makes sense to me.

Another UN success story
The Western Sahara mess gets messier. The UN has been monitoring a ceasefire here since 1991, with no movement toward resolving the situation. How are the UN and the IMF the same? They get lots of money, blow it on bureaucrats and conferences and accomplish nothing. Western Sahara used to be owned by Spain, called Spanish Sahara in those days. Rio de Oro and Ifni, ifni I remember right, were two little enclaves on the coast that were considered part of metropolitan Madrid or something. Then in the early Seventies Hassan of Morocco had a Sand Revolution and occupied Spanish Sahara and refused to leave. The Polisario Front has been fighting for "self-determination",(meaning "we get to make the rules") since at least 1976. UN intervention has done, predictably, nothing except put the problem off to the next bureaucrat's tenure. Ah, retirement on an international organization's salary is so nice. The best thing is you never have to go home to the hellhole that gave you birth. Let's see, Cambodia, Suez, Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, in no particular order and I've left out dozens. Nothing ever gets accomplished. Hey, now I know where Klintoon's next job is going to be!

Andrew Sullivan, Euroweenie?!
Can Sullivan possibly mean, in his latest column from the Sunday Times, that socialism or Marxism is a "positive element" and a "credible alternative" to capitalism and democracy? Then there's this:

Abandoning Kyoto was forgivable, given what the treaty would have done to the U.S. economy. But proposing no credible alternative wasn't.

Am I reading this wrong, or does he really think global warming is anything other than transparent nonsense designed to destroy economic success? Why does one need a "credible alternative" to dealing with a non-existent threat? Combine all this with his adamant refusal to even consider the possibility that HIV does not cause AIDS, as laid out here and here and I am starting to get a picture of an intolerant, blindered, knee-jerk compromiser. Or maybe he's just been alone too long out there in Provincetown.

MLK on Zionism
I know most of you have already read this via Instapundit, but I just HAVE to link to it, especially since tomorrow's MLK day.

George W. Bush Day
I had a vision today. Some years in the future, say 2020 or so, the USA will establish a special holiday. Everyone will get September 11 off. It's George W. Bush Day. It's a slam dunk. He freed Iraq in 2003, forced the Palestinians to the negotiating table after the Second Iranian Revolution and the liberation of the Republic of Arabia from the dark and bloody House of Saud, assuring the survival of Israel. After a long but determined diplomatic campaign backed by the threat of military force, he cut the first wire on the Korean Demilitarized Zone and the peninsula was reunited under democratic capitalism in 2004. It took until 2007 for the last remnants of Al Qaeda to be rounded up, headed by one of bin Laden's (ptuh!) sons, who had been pretending to be his father in various audio tapes and videos released every few months to give the illusion he hadn't really died at Tora Bora in December 2001, an event which was finally confirmed in 2006 by DNA matching. The terrorists had managed to severely damage the Eiffel Tower and close the Tower of London for several months, but had never successfully mounted a major attack in the US after Sept. 11, 2001.

The stock market had slowly but surely regained the highest levels of the Clinton years and then moved steadily beyond, helped by the dividend tax cut and continuing reductions in capital gains taxation. GDP, productivity and per capita income all showed healthy yearly increases, with low inflation and almost non-existent unemployment. Europe, meanwhile, had experienced its worst economic decline since the Great Depression and WWII. Bush in 2006 proposed and implemented the Second Marshall Plan, helping European conservatives, who had won major electoral victories, to restructure their economies. By the time of Bush's valedictory speech in 2009, Europe had started to move back toward prosperity. When Bush turned over the reins to the first black president, Condoleeza Rice, on January 20, 2009, he had arguably accomplished more in two terms than any president. He had managed all this without antagonizing any major group, increasing in the 2006 mid-term elections the Republican hold over the Senate by ten seats and the majority in the House by 30, while garnering forty percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide and an amazing twenty percent of the black vote. After his Presidency, Dubya remained active in diplomacy and literature, writing memoirs that established new theories of democratic governance that maximized individual freedom while assuring a strong and compassionate society. Offered the presidency of Harvard, he declined, saying he preferred to stick to his roots in Crawford, Texas.

By 2020, the Democratic Party had been disbanded, replaced by a healthy opposition in the form of Objectivist and Libertarian parties. Remnant Green and Socialist parties were regularly derided in the revamped New York Times. In Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a white-haired but still fit and smiling Dubya, receiving the thanks of the Prime Minister of Sweden, elected recently on a program of tax cuts and smaller government. As he waved to the crowd, another event occurred in Harlem, which would be noted by a surprised obituarist in an obscure article in the Times. He had to look up the history to make sure the facts in the file were right. How come he'd never heard of this guy? A former president who had suffered mental reverses after seeing Dubya's legacy outshine his year after year keeled over from an advanced case of self-pity. William Jefferson Clinton died in the gutter, forgotten and alone.

NY Times spins the story
The New York Times has an editorial about the Frogs' military intervention in the Ivory Coast. They stress the peacekeeping role, and French efforts to bring the parties together. They opine, with a straight face that the French have been "forced into direct involvement". They say that the French will need help and support from the US and other allies. They don't mention that this "involvement" is completely unilateral. No UN or even OAU resolutions authorize or justify this intervention into what even the Times admits is a "civil war". They also conveniently forget to mention, as I reported here back on January 6, that French troops had killed thirty Ivorians. Thirty! Can you think of any situation where, if, the US sent troops into a third-world country with NO UN resolution and NO allied support and killed THIRTY locals, the Times would fail to mention those facts? Hell, the story would be on the front page for weeks and demonstrators would be besieging the Pentagon. But of course the Ivorians are Africans and the French have a "special relationship", called being the former overlord. And the dead were "rebels", kind of like the Palestiniandians. Of course, the US doesn't have any "former colonies" with handy puppet governments we can terrorize. We even withdrew our military presence from the Philippines, the only place that ever resembled an American "colony", when requested. And the French have such good food and wine and such excellent relations with the "Islamic community", they couldn't possibly be colonialist oppressors. Could they?

Recycling IS Garbage!
Alan Caruba has hit the nail right on the head about recycling, one of my pet peeves. It has been clear for a long time that recycling is a fraud and a net loss for everyone except those liberal con men working in the recycling promotion industry. It's the quintessential neo-Puritan guilt trip.

You dirty man! You can't just throw that dirty stuff in the garbage! Clean it, fold it, sort it, put far more time and energy into it than it's worth and only then will you make up for having produced that filthy stuff, you ignorant pervert!

How anyone with a smidgeon of intelligence can think that it makes any economic sense to have two - in some cities three - big trucks with unionized drivers come around to everyone's house to pick up bottles and little bits of string and cloth and old paper is utterly beyond me. How can the cost of producing the trucks, not to mention fueling them and paying the drivers EVER be recovered; especially when there is no unsubsidized - i.e., free - market for anything recycled with the possible exception of aluminum cans? And even though you can make money by saving your aluminum cans and turning them in every year or so, I guarantee you the city does not clear a profit even on them. And Caruba mentions that in most cities recycled goods end up in the same landfill or incinerators as all the other garbage, so the recycling trucks are a dead loss, even with the partial federal and state subsidies that make recycling programs seem like a good idea. Hey, it's not our money, it's the government's! Intelligent, eh? But it's not about intelligence. It's about power and shame and self-loathing liberals. Caruba goes on to hook up with the bias of the news media, which are and have been for thirty years willing co-conspirators in the recycling deception. Recycling is not attacked often or strongly enough. It strengthens the hand of government and social engineers and taxes the heck out of the average guy for no reason. It needs to go.

Palestiniandians
Just happened to think. When in the 1800s Indians were attacking white settlers throughout the West, we took care of the problem. We negotiated with them when we could, killed them when they committed acts of terrorism and removed them from land we wanted. We saw that the West would not be properly developed until the terrorism waged by the Indians was brought to an end. So we ended it, at great cost. Now the descendants of the warlike tribes, who, by the way, number more than the likely population when Columbus landed on Watling's Isle, are trying to whine their way into a victory they could not win on the battlefield. But our victory sufficed to create the greatest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world.
Israel is trying to safeguard themselves from the same sort of terrorism we experienced from the Indians. Maybe the solution should be the same. If they negotiate in good faith, let them coexist. But the minute they try terrorism, kill or expel them. Luckily for us, Sitting Bull and Geronimo didn't have the EU and the UN to whine to.

Bobbie killed
A British policeman has been killed in a raid on terror suspects. Doubtless those Religion of Peace do-gooders are at it again. LeMonde has the story. The Times of London has a blurb on it, but no one over here seems to have picked up on it yet. Maybe the murdered man's family can take some solace in the possibility that his death may change some minds in Europe about the necessity for fighting terror. Oh, yes, the French also found a bomb in the basilica at Sacre Coeur, one of the most visited sites in Paris, and one of my favorites. Maybe when the tourist business starts to decline, the French will have a sudden conversion to the WAT. Can't scare away all those rich Americans, however disgusting the French elite may consider them to be.

Death in Illinois
The idiot outgoing governor of Illinois has commuted the sentences of everyone on Death Row. Isn't this kind of like George Washington freeing all his slaves right after he died? Well, geez, you don't expect him to cut his own tobacco and wash his own dishes when he's still alive, do you? And Ryan wouldn't want any murderers escaping from jail while he was still living in Illinois. But now that he's gone, who cares? And he gets to look like a good guy to the liberals. I commented on this matter over on LittleTiny Lies:

Nobody has mentioned the fact that prisoners on death row did not get there via plea bargains. The most obviously guilty go for a plea bargain right away in order to avoid the death penalty. Now sometimes the prosecutor will not bargain because he figures he has a strong case and can convict and get the death penalty. But sometimes he is wrong and it would have been better for society to take a bargain for life in prison without parole. No case is 100% stupid-jury proof. So some very bad guys go free. But sometimes the convicted are, if not innocent, not as guilty as one might think. They get bad advice not to go for a plea bargain and wind up on death row, when more obviously and provably guilty offenders get life sentences. So there are many inconsistencies in the system. In general, though, we provide so many opportunities for review that I would be very surprised if ANY truly innocent murderers are executed. Remember the Gary Gilmore flap? He admitted his guilt and wanted to die and they STILL wouldn't execute him without all sorts of hand wringing. Just like in the old days out West when they hung horse thieves because they had no secure jails, the main reason to kill murderers is so they will not kill again. Commutations and pardons are extremely dangerous when you are dealing with human monsters.

Those Krazy Krauts
My German is worse than my French, but I understand what this magazine cover is trying to say. I also know that "Spiegel" in German means "mirror". I just have to wonder whether any of the dummkopfs who put that slogan and image on a major magazine cover have looked in a spiegel lately. Probably not. Too painful.

The Aussies have their own morons to be apologetic about. Here's a new one. Watch out, Margo Kingston! What rathole do these idiots crawl out from?

Update - Splendid, Bunyip, Splendid!
The inimitable Bunyip has nailed the Rat Holding. And, astonishingly, he turns out to be a Socialist! A member of the Australian Labor Party's Socialist Left Faction. Who'da thunk it? And guess what he is? A lawyer! And guess what he was arguing in favor of in the article Bunyip links to? Unlimited personal injury recoveries! John Edwards, you've been cloned in Oz!

Ice in St.Petersburg!
Global warming proceeds on its merry way to the next ice age. "Several dozen ships - fifty or more - were stuck in the ice outside St.Petersburg," reports LeMonde. As with most things in Russia most of the time, the port-master calls the situation "complicated but not catastrophic"! It's taking ice-breakers a week or more to get ships in and out of the harbor. Wait a minute. St.Petersburg used to be Leningrad, right? The only ice-free port with ocean access the Soviet Union had west of Vladivostok, right? And it's blocked with ice and people are still talking about global warming? The ice has not been so bad, apparently, since 1941. Let's see, that's 62 years of merry "greenhouse gas" production and our best efforts can't even keep the Bay of Finland from freezing over. We'd better crank out a lot more SUV's if we don't want to freeze to death!

Norks' nukes
Well, do the North Koreans have any nukes or not? Everyone around the blogosphere seems to assume they do have one or two. And this story from Fox News reports that the "US" (who? the Pentagon? The State Department? The White House? They don't say) thinks the Norks have one or two nukes. But I haven't seen anything definite. And the Norks, in their usual psychotic - or is it schizoid? - but definitely pathological way say in one place that they have no nukes and anyone who says they do is the spawn of Satan, but then they threaten any attackers with being met by a "sea of fire". OK. So how are they going to do the "Sea of Fire" thing without nukes? Really angry phosphorescent jellyfish?

Love that global warming!
Reports keep coming in of colder than usual weather from Europe to the Siberian north. Apparently you can walk from Finland to Sweden over the Gulf of Bothnia. Next we'll be skating on the Thames, as Pepys reported, in "hard, frosty weather". (The Thames skating post is not up yet) Don't the whines of the global warming fanatics remind you of those doomsayers who always say the stock market will go down, or the gold bugs who say a crisis is right around the corner that will boost the price of gold through the stratosphere? And whatever happened to the "The ozone hole is growing, we'll all get skin cancer" dorks? At least Cassandra was right! The problem with hoping that bad things will happen is that, even if you're right, things will, by definition, be bad.

He lies
Does anyone actually believe this idiot? Are there even any Democrats, former Carter/Clinton diplomats or Nobel prize electors who really believe that North Korea is not going to do everything they can to produce nuclear weapons? And sell them to anyone who can pay? Maybe I'm just an incurable optimist, but I can't imagine anyone so naive and stupid could be competent enough to breathe regularly.

Double Dumbass
Some academic idiot is accusing the government of overfeeding the poor. !! !! Yes, you heard me right. The Food Nazis care so much about the poor that they are criticizing the Food Stamp program for letting the eligible unfortunates and losers and parasites - that should cover everyone - buy any food they want and making them get fat. Just imagine. Those stupid poor can buy potato chips instead of celery, soda pop instead of Evian water, Twinkies instead of carrot cake! The Horror!! They don't mention there are already severe restrictions on what can be bought with food stamps. No alcohol - even though recent studies have shown that a drink a day can reduce the incidence of heart attack. No prepared food, although many food stamp recipients have minimal or no facilities to cook food and are WAY too dumb to watch Julia Child on Public TV and learn how to cook properly. WIC, a supplemental program for mothers with young children, has the most incredibly Byzantine set of restrictions on exactly what can be bought with WIC checks. Many's the time I've rolled my eyes and drummed my fingers while a young unfortunate or whatever mother in front of me has her WIC selections examined by the cashier to make sure nothing but eggs, orange juice, milk and the PROPER cereals are paid for by the WIC check. It can take hours. Well, OK, minutes anyway. Now the FN's want me to wait even longer so everything being bought with food stamps is scrutinized to make sure it meets some PC standards that are both irrational and obsolete. Next thing you know they'll be demanding the poor eat only organic foods, at three times the cost, no nasty oppressive masculine meat and only the best imported olive oil. Just because they're poor, why should they have to have less money to spend on food? And if they're stigmatized by the delay letting everyone know they're using food stamps, well, why don't we just make everyone use food stamps? Then we could control exactly what everyone ate. Wouldn't that just be the best thing? Morons.

Dumbass
This UN moron (but I repeat myself) not only has the stupidity to wring his hands about a non-existent disease, but has to throw in a gratuitous slap at the end of the article about the horror of the coming war in Iraq. And he's talking about Africa, where wars are going on all over the landscape. Pigmies are being eaten, for God's sake, in the Congo. Algeria hosts an AlQaeda-linked rebel movement that kills more innocent Muslim civilians in a month than have been killed while being used as human shields by Hamas and Fatah cowards in the West Bank and Gaza for the last ten years. Robert "Crazy-ass" Mugabe in Zimbabwe is dispossessing the only people in the country who know how to grow food and simultaneously rejecting "Genetically modified" food on the advice of his Euroweenie PC friends, who are not - yet - starving to death. Nigeria is stoning women to death for adultery and threatening death to beauty pageant managers. And HE'S UPSET ABOUT THE LIBERATION OF A COUNTRY FROM A BLOODY DICTATOR ARMED WITH POISON GAS AND ANTHRAX!!! Ok, now he's got me upset. Deep breath. Focus. What can be done to destroy, eliminate, bankrupt, reduce to a nullity the United Nations? Any ideas?

Thanks
Thanks to Inoperable Terran - one of my favorite news-link sites - for a link to my article on the LeMonde editorial. Now let's see if anyone wants to get a comments discussion going. I have such comment-envy when I go to Rachel Lucas and Asymmetrical Information. I wouldn't even mind a troll or two.

Many marriages are like this:

It’s as though you had two people who were hitting themselves over the head, repeatedly, each hitting himself, and neither of them realizing they were doing it. Then all of a sudden one of them realizes what he’s doing and that it hurts and that he can stop if he wants. Now would it make sense for him to turn to the other one and say, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea! If you stop hitting yourself on the head, I’ll stop hitting myself. How about it?”
Does that make sense? What should the man who realizes what he’s doing do? Right! He should STOP HITTING HIMSELF ON THE HEAD! Despite what anyone else is doing.

Verbum supra!
Clinton is being mentioned as a possible Chancellor of Oxford (I told you Europe was doomed!) So the dog Latin specialists over there have come up with a celebratory poem.(via the International Sentinel) You really need to read this. I'm not going to try to translate it. You need to. "Togam maculatam" to you!

Hyphenated fuzzy thinking
The recent use by women of hyphenated names, their maiden last name and their husband's last name, has always bothered me, for a number of reasons.

The first is that the women who tend to do this are leftover hippie-dippy chicks who, unlike myself, have not managed to shake off the effects of narcissism and resentment at the nature of reality.

The second is that it doesn't make any sense, because it can't be carried on very long. Say if Mrs. Rainbow Smith-Jones (her maiden name was Smith) and Mr. Peacepipe Jones have a daughter, Nebula Smith-Jones, what will her name be if she gets married to the son of Jane Roe (now Roe-Doe) and John Doe? Nebula Smith-Jones-Roe-Doe? You can see this doesn't provide a solution to the non-problem of perpetuating male oppression for very long. Few people are going to want to carry around their entire genealogy on their business cards.

The third problem is that the use of conjoined names was and is a legacy from the aristocratic practice of marrying to unite two families and those rich people could have names as long as they wanted because they had servants. Both names were retained so that the offspring could boast that they belonged to two important families, or at least one important one and one whose patriarch - with a lot of help from the matriarch - had the smarts to marry his daughter off to an important one. Take, for instance, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (although she at least eschews the hyphen). But in the modern world, the practice ended because people didn't want to be pretentious. And it doesn't help that the arranged marriages commemorated by these compound names were hardly examples of individual choice and feminist freedom. The users of these odious hyphens seem to be totally oblivious to the historical context.

The fourth problem, that I just realized today, is that the use of such a name makes it obvious that you're married. If you're unmarried and your name is Debbie Goodman and everyone knows you're Debbie Goodman and then all of a sudden you're Debbie Goodman-Gates, your patriarch having made a VERY shrewd deal with a scion of the modern nobility, everyone knows you're married. But the whole point of keeping on using "Ms" instead of switching to "Mrs." when you get married is to hide the fact that you did something so bourgeois and dated as getting married and also not to make the single girls feel bad right away. But if you keep your maiden name, all the trouble of hooking your man will have been entirely for naught. I should have known the essential characteristics of feminity would have found a way around PC-ness. My faith in human nature is restored.

Europe not only doomed, defeated
OK, I don't have my French dictionary with me, but I managed to struggle through this editorial in LeMonde and they seem to be saying that Europe is "defeated" (defaite). Does this go beyond "doomed"? Probably. They also seem to be assuming that Bush's tax cut plan will lead to bigger deficits, in the range of 4%. So they are also assuming that spending will not be cut. I don't know. Jeb Bush in Florida seems to be dedicated to cutting spending. In his inaugural speech yesterday, which I attended briefly, he actually said that he'd like to see the government buildings that surround the Capitol in what passes for downtown in Tallahassee empty in a few years. I could feel a shiver of fear pass through the gangs of state workers listening. George W. has broken with Ted Kennedy about paying off the teacher's unions. Not a bad idea politically, since they're not going to support Republicans anyway. So maybe we'll get lower taxes AND lower spending and more prosperity and can watch the Europeans raise taxes and ratchet up spending and disappear down the rathole they so richly deserve. Life is good.

GOOD!
One narc fewer.

Attaque Generalisee sur le Fromage!
The rebels in the Ivory Coast are threatening to attack French forces on all fronts if the Imperial French Army doesn't stop interfering in the Ivorian Civil War. How can the French be so stupid and bloody-minded? Don't they have enough cheese at home? Maybe we should send some military aircraft and then, when French troops are under fire and calling on us for help, we can change our mind and say that we don't think we should take part in their racist oppressive war. When will the world put a stop to the globalization of the French cheese industry? Don't they realize a lot of people don't even like cheese?

Europe is still doomed

Bloomberg has the latest gloomy statistics from the European economic tailspin. The only problem I can see with this situation is that if France goes defunct I won't be able to get my favorite wines any more. But I suppose the vineyards will be the last resource to be surrendered. With the imposition of Shari'a law in France, though, they'll have to stop producing alcohol. But maybe they'll start smuggling out immense quantities of hashish and heroin like the other Islamic states. Then with their luck we'll come to our senses and decriminalize. Serves them right!

More Vernon Howard

The Difference Between You and Me

by Vernon Howard

You are as stubborn as a mule, but I am loyal to my noble beliefs.
You are a blabbermouth, but I am endlessly generous in contributing my wisdom to others.
You are pushy, but I take constructive initiative.
You are a shameless glutton, but I am a daring explorer in the world of food and drink.
You have cunning greed, but I have admirable ambition.
You express childish anger, but I firmly denounce all forms of injustice.
You are rude, but I am not afraid to say what I think.
You indulge in petty gossip, but I discuss other people in order to sympathize and help them.
You are lazy, but I possess relaxed patience.
You think the world owes you a living, but I wish only my rightful rewards so richly deserved.
You have an evil lust for power, but I have a natural talent for social leadership.
You nervously run from one foolishness to another, but I happily pursue many meaningful activities.

New Life Foundation • PO Box 2230 • Pine AZ 85544
(928) 476-3224 • Fax (928) 476-4743
E-mail: info@anewlife.org

— A Nonprofit Organization —

Vernon Howard, Founder ……… Richard Wooldridge, Director

Copyright © 2003 New Life Foundation. All rights reserved.
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No Blood for Cheese!!
The Imperial French Army, with no consultation with the UN or anyone, has moved troops into the Cote d'Ivoire to suppress a rebellion. They call it "enforcing a ceasefire"! The only possible reason for such an unprovoked aggression must be the presence of something in the Ivory Coast that the French want. Of course, the US aggression against Iraq - which will surely happen someday if organisms of good will don't stop it - is to get oil. Now as I understand it, Ivory Coast produces coffee, but that couldn't do it. The price of coffee is at all-time lows on the world market. So what else would the French fight for? Snails? Cheese! It's got to be cheese! That's the only thing they wouldn't surrender for. The untapped cheese resources of Western Africa must be immense to inspire such ferociously barbaric attacks. I'm confident, though, that the Chomskys, Ralls and Fisks of the world will organize huge anti-French war demonstrations to stop this raping of Third World wealth. You can help by going down to the local French cheese shop and burning all the Camembert you can lay your hands on. Be careful. The proprietor may pretend not to have any Camembert, or Brie, or Roquefort or, perhaps, any cheese at all. But you know what to do. Hit him with a dead parrot and he'll surrender.

Update - Burkinabesque aggression!
The foreigners are of course responsible for the fighting in Ivory Coast. Westerners? No, Northerners, immigrant Burkinabes from Burkina Faso, to be exact. The government's totally logical response, to throw out the immigrant invaders, will, I am sure, be roundly criticized by France and the EU. I mean, we can't have people restricting immigration and threatening to expel millions on the basis of country of origin. That would make us just as bad as those nasty xenophobic Americans. Wouldn't it?

Update - Genocide!
The Imperial French Occupation Force has struck again, killing 30 Ivory Coast residents. No doubt they were unarmed and on their way to church.

The BBC has a statement from a patriotic Ivorian resisting this foreign aggression:

"There was a sort of joy and satisfaction when they spoke of the deaths of young Ivorians killed by French bullets," MPCI spokesman Sidiki Konate told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

When will the oppression of the Third World by the frog-eating murderers end? Where is the UN? Michael Moore??

Vernon Howard
I've been a self-help enthusiast for years. I've got shelves of books by everyone from Napoleon Hill to Anthony Robbins to David Schwartz to Shad Helmstetter. Yeah, I know and what do I have to show for it? Well, my new enthusiasm is Vernon Howard. And he's really something. You know how a blogger is posting diet results on his blog? Maybe I'll start posting results from my implementation of Vernon Howard's principles. Mostly he says, "trust yourself", a mind-boggling notion in this era of conformity to authority and kowtowing to celebrity. Some quotes:

“There is a way out of the human problem and anyone can find it.”

A warring world has no power to injure your real nature any more than darkness can shake a tree.

Men who fall from a canoe while standing up to attract attention always claim someone pushed them.
(OK, I'm not saying I completely understand that one yet!)

Like an army doctor treating enemy soldiers, truth is patient and kindly toward the parts of us which resist correction.

Isn't that great? Like an army doctor treating the enemy. Like the Israelis offering their hospitals to terrorists who are trying to kill them. It may seem foolish, but has a higher, nobler purpose, a self-interest thought out more deeply than simple barbarism.

Speaking of the Israelis, the blogosphere has had it totally with the latest "Palestinian" outrage - I use quotes from now on to show the sham and hypocrisy contained in the notion of a "Palestinian people". Lileks and The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler are especially lucid and forceful.

Update - more violence against Muslims - by Muslims
How long before some idiot blames this on Sharon? (Link via LGF) And let's not forget the million dead in the Iran-Iraq war and Afghanistan and the thousands that continue to die in Iraq and Indonesia and Pakistan and Kashmir and the Sudan. It's not just Arabs. Let's see, what do all those places have in common?

Cotterell
I suppose I should comment on the first Tallahassee story since the 2000 elections to make the big time. The Tallahassee Democrat, the local liberal rag, has suspended one of their columnists for what he said in an email. The Democrat is the kind of paper where, when you buy it on Sunday for the TV piece and comics, you flush the news and comment sections down the toilet so they won't infect the trash. I've been feuding with them for years. Their columnists were trying like crazy - still are - to find excuses for the bin Ladens of the world. So they keep this Cotterell guy around to give the place atmosphere. Cotterell had the effrontery to say that the Arabs had not been sincerely trying to negotiate with Israel for peace. Haven't they seen Arafat's box of baby wipes that he keeps around just to soothe his face from the effects of crying over all the innocent Israeli lives he has snuffed out? Here's Cotterell's statement from the Democrat story:
"OK, they can squat around the camel-dung fire and grumble about it, or they can put their bottoms in the air five times a day and pray for deliverance; that's their business," Cotterell wrote in his e-mail. "And I don't give a damn if Israel kills a few in collateral damage while defending itself. So be it."
Right on, Bill. Obviously, though, in this day and age, any reporter who mentions the fact that camels produce dung, or that Arabs burn it for fuel, is being culturally insensitive and probably speciesist as well. Why don't camels burn our dung? Hey, makes about as much sense as criticizing Cotterell! On a side note, I don't understand why the wire services and Drudge didn't pick up the Democrat story. Drudge went with one from the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

Gun control at work
Draconian gun control laws are having the predictable effect. Even the Independent cannot help remarking on the surge of gun violence around Britain. Wonder how many of these goblins would be dead if the reported attacks had happened in Texas? The Birmingham attack involved "sub-machine guns"! If all guns are outlawed, outlaws might as well arm themselves with the heaviest artillery they can lay their hands on.

Update
Say, you don't think sentences like this from British judges could have any relation to the outbreak of deadly violence? Nah. He's trying to be a poet, after all. The machete was obviously an artistic statement. Three strikes and you're a piece of cold dead meat, anyone? Now there's an artistic statement!

Warming blanket
Nights are getting cold here in Tallahassee. I'm getting tired of having either not enough or too many blankets on the bed, so I determined to buy what we used to call an "electric blanket". Down at Target, I looked in vain. Then I noticed a couple of packages that looked like electric blankets, but were called "warming blankets". The hairs went up on the back of my neck. Has our language, our culture, degraded to that extent? Are we so afraid of being fried in our beds that we wish away the horror by avoiding the dread word "electric"? In my mind that's always been a good word. And note the flabbiness of the new locution. Is there any such thing as a "non-warming blanket"? Do we actually have to resort to redundancies to reassure ourselves that the demons Spark and Fizzle will not spring out of our bed covering in the night, launch themselves on us and overstimulate our dreaming neurons to produce brain-destroying circuit overload?
Wait a moment. Non-warming blanket. Cooling blanket. There's an idea. It gets pretty hot and humid around here for eight months of the year. Maybe one could have a blanket with ice water or Freon - ha! to the ozone hole - running through little tubes in it to keep you cool. No need for air conditioning all night. Think of the savings. But then we'd have to think of something to call it. "Refrigerating blanket" might not be quite right. People are SO sensitive! They might get visions of waking up in the morning frozen into a block. Malfunctions are the stuff nightmares are made of - or was it "on"? So maybe "cooling blanket". But that doesn't sound quite right. A blanket is supposed to keep you warm, not cool. "Cooling cover" - too alliterative. "Cooling spread" - sounds like something you eat on toast when it's a hundred degrees out - hey, now there's an idea! "Chill sheet" - Jeez, makes you think of the morgue. I know! The Refresherator! Ho! You can't have it! I had it first!

Ingrates
The Independent is whining, like that's not obvious, that Australia didn't immediately go to the help of the Solomon Islands, in a remote region of which a cyclone has struck two small islands, when the Solomons government did not ask for help and didn't give permission for Australian aircraft or ships to even go to these islands. Australia gives twelve million pounds to the government every year, which apparently has few other assets and has blown every asset it has. And now the Euroweenies are complaining that the Australian taxpayer is not taxed further to rescue the oppressed citizens of this jerk government. What would the Independent say if there was an earthquake in Iraq, the Iraqi government did nothing and the Israelis went in to help without asking the Iraqi government? What if a hurricane hit Cuba and the US sent a fleet of airplanes from Florida, loaded with relief supplies, without getting Castro's permission? The yowls of protest would resound for years. There's no point to reading the Independent. It just raises the blood pressure. And nothing you could ever do will appease them. Impoverish yourself, give up every right you can imagine, flagellate yourself, praise their every action and they will just spit on you. The hell with them.

Wake up, Andrew!
Andrew Sullivan said a couple of things today that I disagreed with, so I sent him a little message. Lot of good it will do me.

Dear Mr. Sullivan,

About your post on the lesbian "parents", it is only
necessary to say that no man has or ever has had two mothers. The
concept is clear and has been for thousands - nay millions - of
years. To redefine something as simple as motherhood is arrant
self-deception. Even adoptive parents are always aware there's
someone called the "biological mother" - and father - out
there somewhere. What a redundancy! What sort of mother is a mother
who is not biological? The "legal" mother? The
"love" mother? What does "mother" mean, anyway?
I favor restricting meaning to the natural concept. Next thing,
you'll be redefining apple pie as "legally acceptable
apple" pie when it contains only Ritz crackers, the famous
"mock apple pie". What gay people have is a mock marriage.
It mocks itself.

To treat gay relationships as marriages is to destroy meaning and
create nothing new. The ties of blood will always be reliable. They
will always trump the thrill of mockery.

And about Herb Ritts - he did die of pneumonia because no one has
ever died of "AIDS". That's another mockery of logic,
cobbled up by the medical establishment to justify research grants.
But that's an old story, known to all who will open their eyes to
see. You obviously prefer blindness.
--

Update - now I'm ticked off
Maybe I'm going over the edge, but Andrew Sullivan has enraged me again by opining that Herb Ritts did after all die of "AIDS". So I launched a salvo of indignation:

Dear Mr. Sullivan,

You have said on your blog that Herb Ritts "...died because his
immune system was severely compromised by HIV." I challenge you
to support this statement with scientific evidence. Unless you can,
your assertion is false. And if you find such evidence, you might as
well send it to researcher Peter Duesberg and Kary Mullis, the Nobel
Prize winner. They would be very surprised to find such proof.

Put up or stop lying.

Oh, dear, I guess I won't get invited to any of his cocktail parties!

Have a PC New Year's!
Isn't it a relief not to have to worry about whether you're going to be attacked for saying "Merry Christmas"? Nobody minds a "Happy New Year!" But why is that? After all, our New Year has not always been universally recognized. Jewish New Year is not on January 1, nor is Chinese New Year. And the year numbers are all different. Islam's calendar started fourteen-hundred odd years ago, not 2003. I think the Chinese and Jews are over four thousand. This "Year of our Lord" bit is based on our oppressive Western Christianity, after all. How come no one gets upset about it the way they do about Christmas? You would think that the response to "Happy New Year!" would be, "Maybe it's YOUR New Year, capitalist Western pig, but don't assume it's mine. My cult doesn't even recognize the passage of time. How can you be so offensive!! Go invade Iraq for oil or something! I'm gonna sue!!" Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it. Maybe next year, everyone having been cowed into saying "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", the PC crowd will target the New Year thing and try to get us to recognize all the time-keeping systems as morally equivalent. Then calendars will be attacked for using Roman months, those nasty Romans who beat up all those nice Oriental countries. Publishers will make money flogging "multicultural" calendars, bearing all the year systems, in lunar and sidereal months, to the total confusion of everyone. Better enjoy the relative clarity while we can.

Benefits of Socialized Medicine

I've been reading Mendelsohn's Confessions of a Medical Heretic. It's a good book to read if you're feeling sick. Then you don't make the terrible mistake of going to a doctor so you can feel better. Reading through this thoroughly sensible treatise, I had a revelation about the real underlying purpose of socialized medicine. The proclaimed purpose of socialized medicine is to make it possible for anyone, no matter how poor, to have "access" (a loaded word if ever there was one) to medical care, translation, to go to a doctor or a hospital if he feels the slightest bit ill. The reality of socialized medicine, of course, is that the system is always overloaded, doctors and other staff have no incentives to treat you well and you have to stand in long lines to get anything done, even if you're nearly dying. So the net effect can be to keep anyone with any sense away from the medical system entirely. Who would queue up with contagious children and rheumy elderlies unless he absolutely had to? And that's just what Mendelsohn's saying. More people die because they go to the doctor or the hospital than die because they can't find or afford medical care. The way socialized medicine works out, sensible people go to the doctor LESS frequently than they would if they had health insurance or if the rabble were kept away from the medical system by high prices. So, according to Mendelsohn, sensible people are healthier under socialism than they would be under capitalism. A side benefit is that the silly poor folk who throng into the hospitals are being used as guinea pigs, given unnecessary and harmful prescription drugs and suffering unnecessary and often harmful surgery (M calls it "ritual mutilation"!). A good percentage, therefore, are keeling over who wouldn't have if they hadn't gone to hospital. And natural selection proceeds on its merry eugenic way. All hail Marx and Lenin!

Update - Life imitates life
Mindles Dreck, in Asymmetrical Information, reports on and analyzes the reasons for doctors' strikes in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. But my comment points out that they missed an important aspect of having fewer doctors messing with your life:

Robert Mendelsohn, in his book "Confessions of a Medical Heretic" documents several instances where strikes by doctors led to massive decreases in the death rate. Maybe Pennsylvania and West Virginia should try to drag this dispute out as long as possible. For the children and the sick!

Alternative Palestine
My sister sent me some generic article about the oppression of the poor Palestinians by the nasty Israelis. I won't bother you with it. But I think my response is on point:

While in a state of war with a stateless rabble of murderers, Israel would have to be insane to let millions of them back into areas they left voluntarily, hoping to return to a Judenrein "Palestine". The miracle is that Israel has tolerated terror attacks from Judea and Samaria and Gaza for decades. If the Arabs had won in 1948 or 1956 or 1967 or 1973, would they have created a Palestinian state? No. The Ottoman province of Palestine would have been split up among the Jordanians, Egyptians and Syrians, who would probably still be fighting over the worthless spoils. If a native "Palestinian" movement had started terror attacks on Damascus or Amman or Cairo to create Jew-less Palestine as a state, the Arabs would have massacred them to the last man, woman and child. Remember, the West Bank was part of Jordan in 1967. Gaza was "occupied" by Egypt. Israel liberated those areas and began negotiations that would have, if the Palestinian leadership had been half sane, resulted in the very first state of Palestine. But Arafat took the opportunity to miss yet another opportunity.

And how can "ethnic cleansing" exist when the "Palestinians" are not a separate ethnic group and never have been?

Where'd that come from?
Do you have anything in your house that seems to have popped up from nowhere? In my case it's a spheroid wicker overhead lamp suspended by a chain over my reading chair that I've been using for the last five years at least. I looked up at it today and thought, "Hey, wait a minute! Where did THAT come from?"
I don't remember buying it. I never would have. Was it here when I got here? Not that I remember. I checked with the little woman: " I thought you bought it" Nope. You know the kids wouldn't have let it in the house if they had the chance. So there's only one possibility left. It snuck in by itself. It was rolling along, perched on a truck loaded with moving stuff and fell out on the corner outside my house. It rolled down the driveway and, awaiting its opportunity, popped into the garage and tried to look natural, like it had always been there. And I, foolish I, picked it up and suspended it by a hook mere inches from where I have been soaking up everything from Objectivism to flying saucer lore. It's got a complete record of all my reading, for years. And, oh yes, we all know what it is. We all know that when the time is right it will extend a scrawny little green hand from the top of the wickerwork and detach itself from the chain and roll out through the garage door and with a "pfft" take off for the sky, kick into warp drive and arrive at its home planet in mere seconds. Then, when the authorities on ssxxqplgitt see what passes for thoughts in the minds of men, then can anyone doubt they will attack? Oh, yes, they will attack and destroy and cleanse the universe of our noxious beings. But wait a minute. Back in '96. Didn't I read some Wodehouse? I did, I did! Jeeves and Wooster and Psmith! They'll read it. And, to a noid, they'll die laughing. Hey, you know what I did? I saved the universe! That deserves a Scotch.


Hell for actors

What if, after they were dead, actors and actresses had to adopt the parts that they played on Earth for, say, all eternity? It would be up to God, of course, which parts and for how long. If God liked Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life", ol' Jimmy would be running a failing savings and loan for the next few millennia, chasing after Uncle Billy, crying, "Where's that eight thousand dollars, you old drunk!!" with Lionel Barrymore chortling in the background.
Oh, how the angels would laugh. But they'd get bored eventually. Then maybe they could pick on Bogart and make him play Sam Spade alternating with Cap'n Queeg: "You're taking the fall, baby, just as soon as I find those darn strawberries!"
Schwarzenegger, may he live forever, if he does die some day, will have a peculiar burden, having to worry whether he is to play Danny deVito's twin brother, a kindergarten cop, a Martian colonist secret agent rebel or Conan the Barbarian. Now that's diversity! A most interesting moment will occur when, one hopes not too soon, Charlton Heston knocks on the pearly gates. I can see the sweat starting to form on God's massive forehead already. He has to let him in. You can't consign God and Moses to the Evil One. But if Heston does come in, how could He refrain from letting him play God some day, some time? And maybe, just maybe, the angels would prefer Heston's performance.

123

Rethinking the War on Terror
Scrappleface, one of the funniest sites on the web, had a great bit about the Republicans' decision to adopt segregationist policies to appease Democrats angry about the Trent Lott tempest in a teacup. I just had to drop in the following comment:

In foreign relations, the Republicans have declared that they have decided that Osama bin Laden is not really as bad as they had thought.
"After all", a party spokeseunuch opined, "he did build all those day care centers, bar-b-que restaurants and discos in the third world. If we had only done that, he wouldn't have had to attack us on September 11, 2001."

Late news that bin Laden has been captured by the Sudanese police and offered to the Bush administration for prosecution brought this response: "We don't really think we have the authority to accept him. Millions of Frenchmen have bought a book declaring that the Pentagon attack never happened and the Jews were behind the WTC attack. That's reasonable doubt as far as we're concerned. We need to get on to the real business of the country, like making sure anyone who declares he's been persecuted gets lots of money and nailing down that thirty-five hour week and six weeks of paid vacation thing the French and Germans have been so successful with."

The Kabul Declaration
Has anyone else in blogdom, or in the regular US media, remarked on this agreement in Kabul, reported by the Tehran Times involving many countries surrounding Afghanistan promising to stay out of Afghan affairs? It sounds like, skeptic that I am, that this may be a major break in the centuries, nay, millennia of interference of every Asian potentate in Afghan politics. Maybe, just maybe "nation-building" or just plain allowing the Afghans to be free of outside influence, has begun in earnest. Come on, Fisk, Pilger, Chomsky, why don't you celebrate this evidence of independence and territorial integrity in Central Asia, by Central Asians? Hope rears its shining face.

Iraqi Darwinism
Vodkapundit has been opining that if we invade Iraq and topple Saddam, we need to be prepared to hang around for years and guide the Iraqis through the strait gate and down the narrow way to parliamentary democracy, capitalism and, presumably, pressure-group politics. All they really need is capitalism and the freedom to make it work. So I posted a comment:

The same people who say we shouldn't topple Saddam unless we are willing to nursemaid the Iraqi people for thirty years would scream the loudest if we refused to leave when the Iraqis said they were ready to go it alone. And that might be in five years, or six months, after the toppling. I think we should have done a lot more "nation-building" in Kuwait after the last war. Why leave a corrupt Sheik in power? But you don't hear anyone complaining about that. The fact is we can't control the political evolution of Iraq. We would be stupid to try. What we can do is make sure Saddam has no access to nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
***
I have a vision of a post-war Middle East where the Iranian students have installed a Turkish-style political system, including some power for the mullahs, and the Saudis have been dethroned. Assad in Syria and Mubarak in Egypt must also open up their political systems. The first Arab democracy is key, though. Turkey's democracy has not had an appreciable effect on Arab politics. Neither have Iran's spasmodic bouts of parliamentarianism. But a real functioning Arab democracy would spread freedom and individualism with blinding speed. The Arabs have always looked at the Turks and Persians as overlords, not models. But a true Iraqi democracy that was not seen as totally imposed by the US would make a real difference. Why, the Arabs might even realize that all of their people aren't more concerned with pushing the Israelis into the sea than they are with feeding their children and freeing their economy.

Christmas Contentment
Feeling pretty good about Christmas this year. My daughter's birthday is today. That always gets the celebrations started. We got our tree weeks ago, so the dreaded task of decorating is behind us. The house is full of food and presents. I gave myself an early Christmas present in the shape of Terry Teachout's biography of H. L. Mencken, which I am enjoying very much. I didn't know that Woodrow Wilson was such a monster. It makes sense, now that I think of it. How could anyone who could push the precursor of the United Nations and the Federal Reserve Board and prohibition be anything other than a contemptible fool?

I also finished Kary Mullis's "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field", an autobio by a Nobel winner that confirms all my prejudices about myths like global warming, the ozone hole and HIV not causing AIDS. The only jarring note in Mullis is his advocacy of astrology. Come on, Kary, we can give up all of the illusions left over from Sixties hallucinogenic fantasies. We don't have to hang on to any for nostalgia's sake. Astrology is worthless. Do you hear me? Fake, stupid, ineffective, non-functional, pointless and boring. Get over it. Go see Randi if you need help shaking the monkey off your back.

Message from the Levant

My sister in Egypt sent me a column from AlAhram by Edward Said that had a few interesting points about the Middle East. I can't find a link to the original article, so I've reproduced it below. Here's my response to her:

Well, what do you know? I actually agree with a lot of what Said has to say about Saddam and Arafat. They are thugs. And I share his rejection of suicide bombing and other attacks on civilians. But Said's basic mistake is to maintain that the Palestinians are a "people" rather than just an ad hoc group of refugees from the Arab world's obsession with destroying Israel. The security of Israel is and has been in so much doubt that it overwhelms the problems Palestinians have in getting their plutocrat mafia to share its Saudi and EU and even American wealth with them. I also disagree strongly with his picture of the "unrestrained" IDF. No army in the history of the world has been under such provocation and suffered such losses for so long and acted with such restraint. Any Arab autocrat suffering attacks from a group like the Palestinians would wipe them out to the last man, woman and child. Ditto for collectivists like Stalin, Mao, Kim, Ho, Castro and every minor Commie potentate. Also the French. I don't even want to think of what the Germans would do to them. What I find unbelievable is the leeway that leftists afford to Arafat and their shrillness towards the Israelis, who are only trying to survive. And of course, as Said well knows, the "occupation" is NOT illegal. Hostilities with the Arabs have never ceased for fifty-plus years and international law does not require a power suffering attacks from an area to allow those attacks to proceed unchallenged.
So Said is lying through his teeth as well. He and many others could well be surprised if, as I think likely, Bush manages to disarm and drive out Saddam without launching a full-scale war. Will he get credit for that if it goes well? Duh. And what other plan does Said have for relieving the Iraqi people of their oppression, which costs them far more lives every month than even the most ham-handed bombing campaign could?
Israel has freedoms, and economic success, in desperate wartime, that no Arab country has ever enjoyed. In sum, is Said blaming Arafat and the other mafiosi or Israel for the parlous state of the average Arab citizen? He can't have it both ways. I can't understand why he doesn't see that the campaign against Israel is and has been only maintained to keep thugs like Arafat in power. He should be for stopping the war orchestrated by Arafat but he can't bring himself to give up his reflexive anti-Semitism or the cherished myth of a "Palestinian nation" which has no historic or cultural reality. Otherwise, he's right. Eliminate Arafat. And Saddam and Assad and the entire Saudi royal family and Hamas and Hezbollah and Qaddafi and bin Laden, if he's not already a cinder, and the Israelis would with a great sigh of relief come to an accommodation with the Arab world and help them make their way to rationality and prosperity.

Note: I'm going to remove the Said article, because it seems to be knocking me off Blogger. I'll put it back in when I get a chance. RS.

Turkey and TAFTA

Jim Bennett has another column (via Instapundit) about Turkey and the European Union and how Turkey would be a much better fit in an economic union with the US and parts of Eastern Europe that aren't particularly thrilled with the idea of union with the declining social collectivists of Western Europe - see my Estonia post about four posts down. Maybe this idea will have some legs. I remember my sister telling me, after her visit to Istanbul last spring, that the Turks have a sphere of influence of their own in Central Asia that has unique cultural attributes. It's not Arab, not Russian, not Persian, but Turkic. With the discovery of oil and natural gas in many of the new nations with traditional ties to Turkey, we may see the emergence of a rival to the sclerotic states of the Gulf and OPEC. Perhaps in a few years the Palestinian psychosis will abate for lack of wealthy patrons. One can only hope.

La Fee Verte

Ken Layne has an interesting link to an absinthe website with all kinds of info about the "Green Faery". The description of what happens to you when you drink a bottle is fascinating in a macabre way. I'm thinking of trying it someday. The smoked caviar and snail eggs are calling my name, as well.
So, two new hobbies to try - shooting and drinking absinthe. Just as long as I keep them separated....

Whittle-ing the anti-gun nuts down to size

Rachel Lucas has posted a long but eloquent defense of gun ownership by a Bill Whittle. It's worth the time to read and print out and pass out at your next PTA meeting or gun nut convention or Republican Caucus. I have a sudden strong desire to go to the local range and learn to shoot. Think I will.

Restau-rant

What is it with restaurants that want you to do all the work?

For instance 1, Subway and Subway clones: I am sick and tired of ordering a specific sandwich from a menu, with a specific price on it and having people ask me what I want on it. Bread, please. Even though I know I shouldn’t, loving the Atkins diet as I do. Then fill the bread with the stuff that has to do with the sandwich you advertised. Don’t ask me if I want tuna salad when I ordered a fake crab sandwich. How many times do I have to say I want fake crab?

Then you do the work. Put on mayonnaise, mustard, relish, peppers, whatever makes the sandwich a good fake crab sandwich. Oh, OK, maybe you can ask me whether I want hot peppers or not because there are so many wussies out there who would faint if they got anything hotter than a tomato in their prissy little gullets. But that’s it! None of that “how much lettuce do you want?” nonsense. You’re the darn sandwich professional. You figure it out and do it right. Don’t do it right and I won’t be back and I REFUSE to guide you through the process, to train you in how to make a sandwich. For six bucks a sandwich you can train your own sandwich makers!

For instance 2, buffet restaurants: Terminate them with extreme prejudice. I do not want to go into a restaurant and pay ten bucks for lunch and have to work for half an hour in a kitchen putting together my own plate of food. Only in America! Oh, and maybe smorgasbrod-addicted islamofascist-coddling Scandinavia. I will not take a new plate every time I go up. I know your plan. You want to be able to bring over all your non-English-speaking buddies and let them work setting out food and clearing tables because with a buffet they don’t actually have to know any English to talk to people and serve their needs. Heck, the ones I’ve run into don’t even know the difference between a beer and a coke. All they say is “Go ahead, go ahead! Buffet for you! Leave me alone! Fill up your own plate, silly American! What you think I come all the way from Myanmar to figure out how to actually cook food the way you want it and serve it to you when you’re ready. Hah!”

Which brings me to the point. Meals should be civilized occasions. Civilized men take a civilized break and talk about civilized subjects. Like in Nero Wolfe’s brownstone. Or in that movie, “My Dinner with Andre”. Remember that? Would that movie even have been possible if Wallace Shawn and Andre had to get up every ten minutes, get a clean plate and decide what kinds of sushi to load up on and oh, yeah, let’s pile on some raspberry Jello, macaroni salad and a plate of soup. They wouldn’t have had any time to talk. These ridiculous restaurants only work because modern barbarians are more afraid of sitting at a table with nothing to talk about than anything that could happen to them at the buffet table. They’d rather ooh and aah about the six kinds of sushi than concoct an opinion about whether we should invade Pakistan or just let it implode.

Dream come true or nightmare?
Lots of stories on EU enlargement are popping up like mushrooms after the rain. John O'Sullivan has a dyspeptic view. The International Sentinel has another article, walking the sunny side of the street. The comments are interesting. The Telegraph is reporting, (via Drudge) that the EU is bulking up militarily. Sure. Give them twenty years with Hitler in charge and they might be able to take on one of our aircraft carriers. Let's see, the Ark Royal is 20,000 tons. The Nimitz is 95,000 tons. The Ark Royal can launch Harriers, subsonic but, oooh, they can land straight up and down! That's really going to help them up against F-15s!

Update - paradise in Estonia?
At least one potential Euro-borg absorbee is not that happy about the prospect. (via News Forum) And the information about Estonia's economy makes it sound decidedly like my kind of place. Maybe we can emigrate! Mmm! Lynx stew with a side of bear!

Europe is doomed - still
I'm going to keep on beating this drum until France petitions to become a state of the Union. In this story about Germany, the Financial Times is banging the drum for me (via Drudge). Schroder's tax assault on savers is seen as a threat to industry and investment in general. Duh. Why is it in times of financial crisis, governments think first about raising taxes? Oh, I know. The alternative is reducing the size of government by, in Deutschland's case, at least half, for starters, as well as lightening the regulatory load. But no. Charge right into the machineguns for the Vaterland, dummkopf!

I could have used a few more details. What is a "unitary savings tax" of 25 percent? Do they take a quarter of your savings account? Or do they tax money that goes into savings at a 25 percent rate, compared to a higher regular rate? Even I could think of ways around that. I'd just put all my money in savings and borrow on it. Net gain to the economy: nichts.

Burger imperialism
If we would only stop sending a battalion of Marines along every time a new McDonald's opens, to force people to buy the burgers, maybe the world wouldn't stop the restaurants from opening. I mean, if it were up to the free will of the people whether they bought food there, who could possibly object? If a lot of people didn't like having a McDonald's around, they could just not buy the burgers and it would go out of business and leave (see Update story). So it must be the soldiers running around forcing campesinos at gunpoint to part with a month's income for a Happy Meal that gets people upset. That's the only sane reason I can see for a country so poor millions of its people cross deserts at the risk of their lives to get to California to find jobs, for god's sake, to reject employment opportunities right in their own cities.

Update - You just can't please everybody
In another country people are complaining because McDonald's is leaving. But it only catered to the rich anyway. A school teacher had to "save up for a week" to afford a burger meal. A week? Heavens. I don't know that many people in America who go to McDonald's every week. I guess The Bush Tyranny must have decided to redeploy the burger-extortion battalions from Bolivia to Mexico. Now maybe Jose Bove or Michael Moore will lead a demonstration to force McDonald's to stay in order to save jobs.

Yay!
Minor victory. I passed the MPRE, prelude to the Florida Bar examination. Of course, I took and passed it seventeen years ago in New Hampshire, but the Florida authorities made me take it over. A New Hampshire license isn't much good in Florida and anyway I let my good standing lapse by the simple expedient of not paying my NH bar dues for ten years! It's actually costing me less to register for the Florida exam than it would to reinstate myself in NH. Now on to the bar exam itself, in February. A colleague at work is kindly allowing me to study with her materials. I'm energized! Right now I plan to practice immigration law. I am looking forward to it. The challenge is to ignore the inconsistencies and outright errors of the law to get the score I need to practice. No, don't think about the drug war or the draft or the overwhelming size of government that is supported by the legal system. Perhaps I can be a force for change.

Loves his People???!!
If Mandela "loves his people" so much, why is he killing them with AZT and other anti-retrovirals? Ah, I see the key phrase: "Lots of money". Hmm, I wonder where that's going to come from? How blind can people be? But as long as they love the poor, how can they ever go wrong?

Any which way but slantwise
Hey, that's right, this is supposed to be a blog about cryptic puzzles. I did the latest from Richard Maltby in Harper's, "Quo Vadis". It's quite challenging. I thought for the longest time I was going to have to leave it undone. I hate it when that happens. But it finally "broke" and I was able to fill in every blank. The only problem is, I'm not exactly sure why I got some of the answers. I know the letters entered are correct, but I just don't get the exact explication of the clue. That's bothersome, too, because I hate to think I've actually completed the puzzle when some answers are incompletely analyzed. Guess I'll have to live with it. Wake up screaming, I will.

Sigh-prus
How many times do I have to say it? Cyprus should become a US state and Turkey should join an expanded NAFTA. The EU is the wave of the past. Turkey deserves better.

Iron Curtain - not
This article will be used, I predict, to equate the Israel Defense Forces to the East German Stasi shooting people going over the Berlin Wall or through the Iron Curtain borders separating West Germany from East Germany during the Cold War. There's one big difference, though. The Palestinians killed were trying to get INTO a country which offered them opportunity, perhaps even survival, when they were killed by agents of the country they were trying to enter. The only similarity is that East Germans who went over the Wall, like these Palestinians, were trying to escape a collectivist hellhole. But why are the Palestinian areas so economically wretched that men would risk their lives to get out? Arafat has billions in Switzerland. The Israeli Government just gave the Palestinian Authority $35 million. As with Iraq, there's plenty of money to keep all the Palestinians quite comfortable, even if their idiot government keeps them in wretchedness by refusing to enter into real peace negotiations indefinitely.

And the reason the intruders were killed is clear. Hundreds of Jews have been killed by terrorists coming over and through borders into Israel stealthily by night. I don't blame the IDF, in this situation, for shooting first and confirming later that the intruders were not carrying weapons or wearing explosive belts. They really don't have any choice. The Stasi were in no such dilemma.

Negotiating terror
I've been reading Herb Cohen's book, "You Can Negotiate Anything" and it struck me that this war on terror is essentially a negotiation. One of Cohen's principles of negotiation is that if you know the other guy has a deadline and he doesn't know yours, you have an advantage. So maybe W's declaration of an open-ended war on terror, with no deadlines, just goals to be accomplished, is quite intelligent. Because Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein do not know our deadlines. They don't know when we have to capture bin Laden or overthrow SH. Do we have a deadline? Well, in a way. It would be good to make major progress in the war by the next election, November 2004. But even that is squishy. We don't have to capture bin Laden ever. We can keep saying he's dead. Who knows? Maybe he is. He has a deadline (so to speak!) If he doesn't show up and do something heinous in a couple of years, he's lost his power. We don't have to overthrow Saddam before the election, if we can keep him pinned down, using something like, oh, for instance, interminable UN inspection regimes.
And maybe with each day that goes by we get stronger and Saddam and Al Qaeda get weaker. Look at the latest document dump Saddam did. What did it show? They have and have had a nuclear program. Duh. But they've admitted it. They're dealing with European firms to get weapons. Double duh. But it's on the record. Major Euro-weenie embarrassment. So OK. Are we weaker or stronger than last week, in terms of negotiating position? Triple duh!

Middle East Arms Conundrum

The Washington Post reports that a ship has been intercepted off Yemen carrying a dozen North Korean Scud missiles. So now the guessing begins. The location was interesting - "600 miles off the Horn of Africa". The ship was nominally bound for Yemen, but was it really going there? That's awfully far out into the Indian Ocean. It could well have headed into the Red Sea, like the Karine-A, or even into the Persian Gulf. Which leads to some interesting possibilities. After all, what would Yemen do with Scuds? Or even Al-Qaeda in Yemen? Fire them at US ships offshore, or at an oil tanker? From what I understand, the Scuds are so inaccurate this would be like throwing a rock at a mosquito. But it would cause a bit of terror. More likely, though, is that the Scuds were headed to Palestine, to the PLO or Hamas or Hezbollah, for use against Israel from close up. But why Scuds? They're much longer range. OK, then Iraq? In the middle of UN inspections? Would Hussein be that stupid, and that desperate for missiles? I think not.

Iran seems a much more likely destination. I can see the Iranians being very concerned about the prospect of a last-ditch Hussein spasm of destruction. Maybe they thought they could get the first lick in.

They're not telling the nationality of the patrol boat that first intercepted the ship. How about Omani? Sultan Qaboos would love to make some points with the Americans and discomfit his traditional Yemeni foes. Developing, as they say on Drudge.

Hmm. Looking back, I see that this is not the first shipment of Scud stuff to Yemen. Maybe the real story is that the shipment was stopped. Why now? Is Rumsfeld getting ticked off at the Yemenis? About time. Seventeen dead sailors testify to the incompetence of the Sa'naa government at fighting terrorists.

Update - Curiouser and curiouser

The ship that stopped the missile ship was a Spanish frigate. Spanish? Huh? Que pasa? In the Arabian Sea or Indian Ocean? And a CNN article (via Instapundit) says there's every indication it was headed for the Horn of Africa, which makes no sense. The ship bore no flag, which is weird to say the least. It went through the straits of Malacca, across heavily patrolled seas bearing ballistic missiles, with no flag, for thousands of miles without being stopped? I don't believe it.

Lott and justification

I don't like Trent Lott. Oh, not just because he's from Mississippi or because he's in favor of the drug war - what politician will say he isn't? I just think he's stupid and he's got a tin ear and he lets the Democrats get away with too much. And that makes me less free. This latest hassle about Lott's comments at the birthday bash for Strom Thurmond makes me crazy, though. It's all over the blogosphere, but Instapundit is the ringleader, as always. The basic idea is that Lott said, "We'd all be better off if Thurmond and the Dixiecrats had won in 1948." And gasps of horror arise, because the Dixiecrats were segregationists and anti-anti-lynching and all sorts of horrible things. But hey, in those days, most of the Democratic Party was too. And it changed. This seems to be what people are missing. Lott may not be saying, "Yeah, it would be better if the Dixiecrats had got in and had ruthlessly suppressed the civil rights movement and kept those otherly-colored Americans in their places."

I know a lot about 1948. I was born that year. You know what the main characteristic of 1948 is? It was one hell of a long time ago. And a lot of things have changed since then. Why, even the Democratic Party of George Wallace and Orval Faubus has become the champion of the oppressed otherly-colored. So what WOULD have happened if Thurmond and the Dixiecrats had been elected instead of the party of George Wallace and Orval Faubus - and Bull Connor? They would have changed, too. And all Lott may have been saying is that they would have managed the transition to a freer society better than the Democrats or Republicans did. And specifically I think he was saying that the government wouldn't have grown as large and out of control as it did if Thurmond had been in charge for a while. Or maybe he was saying we wouldn't have got involved in Korea or would have won the Cold War sooner or any number of other things. Everybody just jumped on the race thing.

I may be giving Lott too much credit. I am certainly not saying it wasn't politically stupid for Lott to say what he said, because it left him vulnerable to attack as a racist. But maybe, just maybe he was speaking from the heart and saying, you know, we thought some wrong things back then, but we would have handled the changes better than the establishment parties did. And God knows a lot of people would agree with him today about the competence of the Democrats and Republicans.

Make my point for me, Mary
Mary Robinson, the UN's chief whiner on human rights, is crowing in the Boston Globe, that, now that AIDS is a "pandemic", the rich countries will "have to do something". But Mary. The West has fought its "AIDS epidemic" to a standstill. There's no risk of reinfection from the Third World to the West, especially since the HIV virus never hurt anyone. So why should the West do anything about the problems of the Third World? Oh, to avoid revolutions and chaos? But those already exist. The lack of sanitation, food and civil peace that typify the Third World are the cause of the diseases that the AIDS mafia call "AIDS". But they are nothing new. Places like South Korea, Japan, Israel and large parts of Eastern Europe have successfully climbed out of the gutter without killing their people with AZT. Robinson's article, though, is a perfect example of how AIDS hysteria is used by leftists to assert a right on the part of hopeless, helpless, tyrannized and brutalized populations to the wealth of productive democracies like the US.

This brings up a weird objection that was brought up to Peter Duesberg to stop him from pointing out the truth of the HIV virus's innocence.
"But, Peter," the establishment would say,"You may be right, but if this point is publicized, vulnerable populations will stop using condoms, will stop being sanitary and sexually restrained. You wouldn't want to be responsible for that, would you? Let's just sell them - or sell the US government to give them free - some AZT instead." OK, so I added that last part myself. Duesberg's sensible response is, (my interpretation) "If they've got TB, treat them for TB. If they've got Kaposi's sarcoma from using "poppers", treat them for that. But for God's sake don't make up a whole new scary disease. It's like the drug war all over again. When, eventually, it comes out that there is no such disease as AIDS caused by the HIV virus, no one will ever believe the medical establishment about anything again."
Hey, wait a minute. Is that really such a bad thing?