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February 28, 2007

Traitors and hypocrites

Patterico highlights the hypocrisy of those on the Left who would conceal the depraved, unpatriotic support amongst their fellow travelers for the terrorists who tried to assassinate Vice Pres. Cheney. Because, you see, it reflects badly on conservatives when they point out the bloodlust for our vice president present in the left side of the blogosphere.

Yeah, I am questioning their ethics, their honesty, and most of all, their patriotism.

I think Glenn Greenwald and his peers protest too, too much.

It's also rich that Patterico tags his post with the keyword: Scum. Classic.

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February 27, 2007

Cops and lessons learned from cop killers

There is something to be gleaned from talking to murderers, including valuable insights into the surprising vulnerabilities of experienced police officers.

New findings on how offenders train with, carry and deploy the weapons they use to attack police officers have emerged in a just-published, 5-year study by the FBI.

Among other things, the data reveal that most would-be cop killers:

--show signs of being armed that officers miss;

--have more experience using deadly force in "street combat" than their intended victims;

--practice with firearms more often and shoot more accurately;

--have no hesitation whatsoever about pulling the trigger. "If you hesitate," one told the study's researchers, "you're dead. You have the instinct or you don't. If you don't, you're in trouble on the street...."

Some of the findings mirror what I've read in books on police tactics dating back to the early '80s, but there's always something new to be learned from the latest, bloodthirstier crooks.

WEAPON CHOICE.

Researcher Davis, in a presentation and discussion for the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, noted that none of the attackers interviewed was "hindered by any law--federal, state or local--that has ever been established to prevent gun ownership. They just laughed at gun laws."

FAMILIARITY.

One [offender] spoke of being motivated to improve his gun skills by his belief that officers "go to the range two, three times a week [and] practice arms so they can hit anything."

In reality, victim officers in the study averaged just 14 hours of sidearm training and 2.5 qualifications per year. Only 6 of the 50 officers reported practicing regularly with handguns apart from what their department required, and that was mostly in competitive shooting. Overall, the offenders practiced more often than the officers they assaulted, and this "may have helped increase [their] marksmanship skills," the study says.

The offender quoted above about his practice motivation, for example, fired 12 rounds at an officer, striking him 3 times. The officer fired 7 rounds, all misses.

[...]

SHOOTING STYLE.

[A]s one of the offenders put it: "[W]e're not working with no marksmanship....We just putting it in your direction, you know....It don't matter...as long as it's gonna hit you...if it's up at your head or your chest, down at your legs, whatever....Once I squeeze and you fall, then...if I want to execute you, then I could go from there."

HIT RATE.

More often than the officers they attacked, offenders delivered at least some rounds on target in their encounters. Nearly 70% of assailants were successful in that regard with handguns, compared to about 40% of the victim officers, the study found. (Efforts of offenders and officers to get on target were considered successful if any rounds struck, regardless of the number fired.)

MIND-SET.

Davis said the study team "did not realize how cold blooded the younger generation of offender is. They have been exposed to killing after killing, they fully expect to get killed and they don't hesitate to shoot anybody, including a police officer. They can go from riding down the street saying what a beautiful day it is to killing in the next instant."

"Offenders typically displayed no moral or ethical restraints in using firearms," the report states. "In fact, the street combat veterans survived by developing a shoot-first mentality.

"Officers never can assume that a criminal is unarmed until they have thoroughly searched the person and the surroundings themselves." Nor, in the interest of personal safety, can officers "let their guards down in any type of law enforcement situation."

This last bit squares with another study I read years ago; it said that the greatest numbers of cops killed in the line of duty weren't rookies -- it was the experienced guys, proud of never having to draw their weapons, who became overconfident, too sure of their ability to read a situation.

Rookies, nervous, more than a little paranoid, had a much lower death-by-gunshot rate than their grizzled peers.

As Sgt. Phil Esterhaus of Hill Street Blues always said, "Hey, let's be careful out there."

Of course, Sergeant Stan Jablonski also said, "Let's do it to them before they do it to us."

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

That sounds like it hurts

This line is from an article in today's Wall Street Journal (page D-1).

He has had a couple of patients in the past who have ruptured their balls at home while sitting on them and doing exercises.

Ouch.

They must have been old guys; that's why Coach always told us to wear a jockstrap in gym class.

What? Oh, the article was about this and that?

Never mind.

By the way, reporter Anjali Athavaley had to have been laughing when he wrote that line; I know I was when I read it.

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

test

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Posted by Mike Lief at 10:47 AM

Michael Ramirez

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February 26, 2007

Israel wants peace; what do the Arabs want?

Saul Singer, the editorial page editor for the Jerusalem Post, has a pretty good guess, and it's not what the West -- or the Israelis want.

As hard as it is for us to comprehend, we must accept that in the Arab mind, peace with Israel — far from success — still represents capitulation, humiliation and defeat.

Since the 1967 war, which ended with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 establishing “land for peace” as the paradigm for ending the conflict, the West has assumed that the Arab world in fact favors such a deal. We tend to forget that in 1967, the Arab states were about to invade and destroy Israel, which at that time did not control a single grain of the West Bank, Gaza, and even east Jerusalem.

Resolution 242 essentially said to the Arabs, “you wanted to destroy Israel, you lost, so now make peace and be happy you are getting the land you just lost back.” Though the Arabs were defeated and weak, they said no.

What makes no sense is to forget that the Arab-Israeli peace that is a shining prize in Western eyes would be a source of shame and mourning for much of the Muslim world.

[...]

In Western eyes, peace is so obviously desirable that the idea that it could be seen negatively is rarely considered. But try, for a moment, to look at the situation through Arab eyes. Peace would be the ultimate ratification of Israel’s existence. It would be seen as an abject surrender to the West’s bid to dominate the Arabs.

[...]

Today, Hamas leaders openly say that their dreams of Israel’s destruction are closer to fruition than any time since 1967. They see the struggle as not only, or even primarily, one of military strength, but of legitimacy. And if it is suddenly and increasingly more legitimate to speak of a world without Israel, why should the Arabs, at this very moment, throw in the towel?

[...]

The most pro-peace policy is the one that most convinces the Arabs of Israel’s permanence. Even the U.S. is far from such a policy, since it will not routinely reject the currently favored backdoor means to Israel’s destruction, the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” to Israel.

When it comes to a “political horizon,” the problem is not that the Arabs cannot see a Palestinian state, but that they can see a Jewish one. The Arab world will settle for a Palestinian state only when it is convinced of the permanence of Israel.

It's the same mistake made by the peace-at-any-cost types in the 1930s, who assumed that what Hitler wanted was to avoid war, not make it; surely all reasonable, rational people wanted peace.

But diplomacy in pursuit of peace works only when both sides desire a bloodless resolution. And it seems that when it comes to Israel's survival, a peaceful resolution is the last thing their negotiating "partner" wants.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Messing with a good thing

Costco's return policy -- anytime, for any reason -- has been one of the best reasons to shop there, providing, in essence, an unlimited money-back guarantee for all the merchandise they sell.

But that's about to change.

Nuts.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently, wherein the membership shopping club's CEO said the company had no plans to tinker with the return policy, a major factor in the chain's popularity with customers.

I guess it's starting to cut into their bottom line, so the screws are being tightened.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 25, 2007

Do you know anyone who's been Zumboed?

Zumbo is a new verb, closely related to the noun, Fudd (pl.: Fudds).

To understand the etymology of Zumbo and Fudd, you'll need to read this great post, summing up the biggest grass-roots protest by gun owners you never heard about anyplace but on the web.

It's also a tremendous example of the power of the internet -- and the responsiveness of big corporations to the anger of their customers, made possible thanks to blogs and e-mail.

But if you want a thumbnail sketch, Tamara said it best.

On Friday evening, a gunwriter who was apparently tired of his 42-year career put his word processor in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Career suicide by blog. A cautionary tale, reinforcing the basic truth that freedom of speech does not carry with it a guarantee of freedom from the consequences of what you say.

Free speech: you said it, you own it.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Priorities of the Hollywood elite

In an article examining the relationship between Hollywood's dream factories, reality, and the ability to influence veiwers -- as well as 24, the military and torture -- Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting observation about what concerns people in the Biz.

Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, told an interesting story to a gathering of TV critics recently. Cherry had screened a scene for a network censor in which the character played by Eva Longoria beds her 17-year-old gardener. Afterward, she enjoys a post-coital cigarette. Cherry said the censor asked, “Does she have to smoke?” To which Cherry replied: “So you’re good with the statutory rape thing?”

And the answer is “yes.” Hollywood is good with the statutory-rape thing. But it’s not good with the smoking thing. And yet if I were to criticize Hollywood for the statutory-rape thing, the Hollywood crowd would whine about how I’m a prude and, ultimately, a censorious enemy of free expression. If I were to complain about the cigarette? They’d say, “Good for you.”

It's a really odd place, with some seriously misplaced priorities, assuming you haven't sipped the Kool-Aid from the moonbat punchbowl.

Clint Eastwood, nominated for an Academy Award for half of his Iwo Jima double-header, notably eliminated smoking from his WWII epics, because, what with the severed heads, arterial spray and steaming piles of intestines on screen, you wouldn't want to shock impressionable youngsters by letting them see GIs smoking.

Ain't Hollywood grand?

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This Bobbie's bloody mad

http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/

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The dysfunctional state

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_oh_to_be.html

How Not to Do It
Theodore Dalrymple

Nothing works in the omnicompetent state.

Last week, the British government announced—because the opposition in Parliament forced it to announce—that 70 prisoners, including three murderers and an unspecified number of burglars, drug dealers, and holders of false passports, had escaped from a single minimum-security prison this year alone. Twenty-eight of them were still at large.

That so many of them absconded suggested that they were not quite the reformed characters that justified lower levels of security in the first place; but as usual in Britain, temporary embarrassment soon subsides into deep amnesia. The fact is that the whole episode is precisely what we have come to expect of our public administration and was nothing out of the ordinary.

In the same week, my former colleagues, senior doctors in the hospital that I worked in until my recent retirement, received a leaflet with their monthly pay stubs. It offered them, along with all other employees, literacy training: a little late in their careers as doctors, one might have thought.

The senior doctors could take up to 30 hours of free courses to improve their literacy and numeracy skills, all in working time, of course. In these courses, they could learn to spell at least some words, to punctuate, to add and do fractions, and to read a graph.

“Do you have a SPIKEY [sic] profile?” asked the leaflet, and went on to explain: “A spikey profile is when a person is good at literacy but not at mathematics or visa [sic] versa.” The reader could address himself to one of no fewer than four members of the hospital staff who were “contact persons” for the courses, among them the Vocational Training Coordinator and the Non-Vocational Training Coordinator. In case none was available to answer the telephone or reply to e-mails, the reader could contact one of three central government agencies that deal with the problem of illiterate and innumerate employees.

Here, truly, was a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum; but there is more to the ignorance and incompetence pervading the leaflet than meets the eye. Such ignorance and incompetence are now so systematic and widespread in the British public service that if they are not the result of deliberate policy, they might as well be. In fact, there is now a profoundly catalytic relationship between the intellectual, moral, and economic corruption of the British public service and the degeneration of the national character. Which among all the various factors came first and is therefore ultimately causative is not easy to say; as usual, I suspect that intellectual error is at the root of most evil. But why such error should have found so ready an acceptance raises the specter of an infinite regress of explanation, which perhaps we can avoid only by invoking a dialectical approach.

Three new books give us an insight into the nature of the corruption that has sprung from the ever-wider extension of self-arrogated government responsibility in Britain, and they shed light as well on the effect that government expansion has upon the population. By the time you have finished reading them, you are unsure as to whether Gogol, Kafka, or Orwell offers the best insight into contemporary British reality. Gogol captures the absurdity all right, and Kafka the anxiety caused by an awareness of sinister but unidentifiable forces behind what is happening; but you also need Orwell to appreciate, and sometimes even to admire, the brazenness with which officialdom twists language to mean the opposite of what it would once ordinarily have meant.

Two of the books are by men who work in the front line of the public service, one in law enforcement and the other in education. Like me, they write pseudonymously. By describing their day-to-day routine, Police Constable David Copperfield and teacher Frank Chalk show how the British state now works, or rather operates, with devastating effect on the British character.

Copperfield, whose website is so annoying to politicians in power that they feel obliged to denigrate it in Parliament, and whose book is titled Wasting Police Time, is an ordinary constable in an ordinary British town. As he makes clear in his book, very little of his time at work is spent in activity that could deter crime, discover those who commit it, or bring them to justice. His induction into the culture of politically correct bureaucratic incompetence was immediate on joining up: he had naively supposed that the main purpose of his job was the protection of the public by the suppression of malefaction, instead of which he discovered that it was to “set about changing the racist, homophobic and male-dominated world in which we lived.” The first three days of his training were about prejudice and discrimination—in short, “diversity training.” There never was to be any training in the mere investigation of crimes, a minor and secondary part of modern police work in Britain.

The mandated, politically inspired obsession with racism is on view in the crawlingly embarrassing and condescending speech that the deputy chief constable (deputy police chief) of North Wales, Clive Wolfendale, gave to the inaugural meeting of the North Wales Black Police Association. He decided, Copperfield reports, to speak to the black officers in rap verse, which is about as tactful as addressing Nelson Mandela in pidgin. Here is an extract from Wolfendale’s speech:

Put away your cameras and your notepads for a spell.
I got a story that I really need to tell.
Bein’ in the dibble [police] is no cakewalk when you’re black.
If you don’t get fitted, then you’ll prob’ly get the sack.
You’re better chillin’ lie down and just be passive.
No place for us just yet in the Colwyn Bay Massive [police force].
That must have encouraged the black officers no end: if the (white) deputy chief constable, in his maladroit attempt to demonstrate sympathy with them, had called them a bunch of jungle bunnies, he could hardly have made his feelings clearer. His speech reveals what I have long suspected: that antiracism is the new racism.

It is also, and simultaneously, a job opportunity and work-avoidance scheme. Copperfield recounts how, in 1999, a police officer said to a black motorist, who did not answer a question, “Okay, so you’re deaf as well as black.” The report of the official inquiry into the subsequent complaint had 62 pages of attachments, 20 pages of witness statements, and 172 pages of interview transcripts. Legal and disciplinary proceedings took 19 months to complete.

Meanwhile, as the police devote vast energies (and expenditures) to such incidents, crimes such as street robbery and assault continue their inexorable rise and turn much of the country into a no-go area for all but the drunk or the violently inclined.

Copperfield, who joined the police full of idealism, soon notices (as how could he not?) that the completion of bureaucratic procedure is now more important to the police than anything else. All is in order if the forms are filled in correctly. A single arrest takes up to six hours to process, so many and various are the forms. He notices that there are more nonpolice employed in his police station than uniformed officers; and of the latter, the majority are deskbound. The station parking lot is full, 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, but the whole town has only three or four officers to patrol the streets—in cars, of course, not on foot.

The author describes the intellectual and moral corruption that all this bureaucracy brings in its wake. Take, for example, the so-called Administrative Detection, which allows the police and their political masters to mislead the public about the seriousness and efficiency with which the authorities tackle criminality. It works something like this: someone calls the police about a trifling dispute—one neighbor accuses the other of threatening behavior, say, and the accused then in turn accuses the accuser. The cops record the two complaints as crimes and take statements from every possible witness. This, of course, can take a very long time, because by the time cops arrive, the witnesses will probably have dispersed. They have to be traced and contacted, and—because the police are now so touchingly-feelingly sensitive to the wishes of the public—mutually convenient times have to be arranged for the taking of statements.

When finally the police have gathered all the information, they write it up; but of course, no prosecution follows, because by then the complainants have withdrawn their complaint, and in any case the prosecuting authorities would regard the whole business as too trivial to be worth a trial. But the two crimes go into the records as having been solved. And since the politicians in charge judge police performance by the proportion of crimes the force solves, cops do not devote attention to most real crimes, in which detection is difficult and very uncertain of success.

The uselessness of a police force that once excited the admiration of the world is now taken for granted by every Briton who calls the police only to obtain a crime number for insurance purposes, not in the expectation or even hope of any effort at detection. This is not because the individual policeman is lazy, ill-intentioned, corrupt, or stupid, though in the present system he might just as well be: for the system in which he works imposes upon him all the effects (or defects) of precisely those qualities. P.C. Copperfield is clearly a man who wants to do a good job, like most of the policemen I have met, but the system actively and deliberately prevents him from doing so.

I happened, while waiting to interview a man in prison, to be reading Copperfield’s book, and two plainclothes policemen in the waiting room saw it. They had read the work, and I asked them whether what Copperfield wrote was true. “Every word,” they replied.

Frank Chalk’s book, It’s Your Time You’re Wasting, tells essentially the same story, this time with regard to education. It surely requires some explanation that, in a country that expends $5,200 a year for 11 years on each child’s education, a fifth of children leave school virtually unable to read or write, let alone do simple arithmetic. It takes considerable organization to achieve so little, especially when the means by which practically all children can be taught to read to a high standard are perfectly well-known. A small local educational authority in Scotland, for example, West Dumbarton, has virtually eliminated illiteracy in children, despite the fact that its population is among the poorest in Scotland, by using simple teaching methods and at an additional cost of precisely $25 per pupil.

The intellectual corruption of the English education system is near complete (the Scottish system is rather better). For example, there is a government inspectorate of schools, charged with the maintenance of standards. However, it gives each school it visits several weeks’ warning of an impending inspection, ample time for even the dullest-witted school administrators to construct a Potemkin village. And then it criticizes all the wrong things: the inspectors criticized Frank Chalk, for example, for having imposed discipline upon his class and thereby having impeded the spontaneity and creativity of the children—which, in the circumstances of the slum school in which he teaches, they principally express in vandalism. The school inspectorate therefore appears to believe in the truth of the anarchist Bakunin’s dictum—that the destructive urge is also creative.

As an epigraph to his book, Chalk quotes the British deputy prime minister, John Prescott. In that great man’s immortal words, which tell you everything about the caliber of the British government that you really need to know, “If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there.” And that would never do.

In the looking-glass world of modern British public administration, nothing succeeds like failure, because failure provides work for yet more functionaries and confers an ever more providential role upon the government. A child who does not learn to read properly often behaves badly in school and thus becomes the subject (or is it object?) of inquiries by educational psychologists and social workers. As Chalk describes, they always find that the child in question lacks self-esteem and therefore should be allowed to attend only those classes that he feels he can cope with. The so-called Senior Management Team in the school—teachers who have retired into a largely administrative role—deals with all disciplinary problems by means of appeasement, for lack of any other permissible method available to them.

A perverse ideology reigns, in which truth and probity play no part. When marking the children’s work, Chalk is expected to make only favorable comments, designed to boost egos rather than to improve performance. Public examinations are no longer intended to test educational attainment against an invariant standard but to provide the government with statistics that provide evidence of ever-better results. In pursuit of such excellence, not only do examinations require ever less of the children, but so-called course work, which may actually be done by the children’s parents or even by the teachers themselves, plays an important part in the marks the children receive—and it is marked by the very teachers whose performance is judged by the marks that their pupils achieve. The result, of course, is a swamp of corruption, to wade through which teachers become utterly cynical, time-serving, and without self-respect.

A perfect emblem of the Gogolian, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian nature of the British public administration is the term “social inclusion” as applied in the educational field. Schools may no longer exclude disruptive children—that would be the very opposite of social inclusion—so a handful of such children may render quite pointless hundreds or even thousands of hours of schooling for scores or even hundreds of their peers who, as a result, are less likely to succeed in life. Teachers such as Chalk are forced to teach mixed-ability classes, which can include the mentally handicapped (their special schools having been closed in the name of social inclusion). The most intelligent children in the class fidget with boredom while the teacher persistently struggles to instill understanding in the minds of the least intelligent children of what the intelligent pupils long ago grasped. The intelligent are not taught what they could learn, while the unintelligent are taught what they cannot learn. The result is chaos, resentment, disaffection, and despair all round.

Britain now has more educational bureaucrats than teachers, as well as more health-service administrators than hospital beds. No self-evident or entirely predictable failure, no catastrophe they have brought about at the behest of their political masters, ever affects their careers, in part because they move from post to post so quickly that none of them ever gets held responsible for anything. The public hospital in which my wife worked as a doctor before her recent retirement built a $28 million extension, but what had been imperatively necessary for the health of the town’s population six years ago became equally superfluous four years later and had to be closed down with great urgency, though with the public assurances of the bureaucrats then in charge that they were “passionately” committed to the townspeople’s welfare. No one, of course, was ever held responsible for this expensive fiasco, which fully partook of the absurdity Gogol portrays, the menace Kafka evokes (employees were, on the whole, too frightened for their careers to speak out), and the mendacity Orwell dramatizes.

Insight into why expensive failure is so vitally necessary to the British government—or indeed, to any government once it arrogates responsibility for almost everything, from the national diet to the way people think—glimmers out from management consultant David Craig’s recent book, Plundering the Public Sector. Craig catalogs what at first sight seems the almost incredible incompetence of the British government in its efforts to “modernize” the public administration. For example, not a single large-scale information technology project instituted by the government has worked. The National Health Service has spent $60 billion on a unified information technology system, no part of which actually functions. Projects routinely get canceled after $400– $500 million has been spent on them. Modernization in Britain’s public sector means delay and inefficiency procured at colossal expense.

How is this to be explained? I learned a very good lesson when, 20 years ago, I worked in Tanzania. This well-endowed and beautiful country was broken-down and economically destitute to a shocking degree. A shard of mirror was a treasured possession; a day’s wages bought a man one egg on the open market. It was quicker to go to Europe than to telephone it. Nothing, not even the most basic commodity such as soap or salt, was available to most of the population.

At first I considered that the president, Julius Nyerere, who was so revered in “progressive” circles as being halfway between Jesus Christ and Mao Tse Tung, was a total incompetent. How could he reconcile the state of the country with his rhetoric of economic development and prosperity for everyone? Had he no eyes to see, no ears to hear?

But then the thought dawned on me, admittedly with embarrassing slowness, that a man who had been in power virtually unopposed for nearly a quarter of a century could not be called incompetent, once one abandons the preposterous premise that he was trying to achieve what he said he was trying to achieve. As a means of remaining in power, what method could be better than to have an all-powerful single political party distribute economic favors in conditions of general shortage? That explained how, and why, in a country of the involuntarily slender, the party officials were fat. This was not incompetence; it was competence of a very high order. Unfortunately, it was very bad for the population as a whole.

The scheme in Britain is, of course, rather different. (It is not necessary to believe that such schemes have been consciously elaborated, incidentally; rather, they are inherent in the statism that comes naturally to so many politicians because of their self-importance.) The hoops that bind the government to the consultants who advise it in its perennially failing schemes of modernization are those of gold. As Craig demonstrates (though without understanding all the implications), the consultants need failure in Britain to perpetuate the contracts that allow them to charge so outrageously and virtually ad libitum (Craig suggests that $140 billion has disappeared so far, with no end in sight); and, in turn, the government benefits from having this rich but utterly dependent clientele.

The beauty of the system is that dependence on expensive failure reaches quite low levels of the administration: for example, all those “civilians” (as nonpolice workers for the police are called) in P.C. Copperfield’s police station, as well as the educational psychologists whom Frank Chalk derides. The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

At the very end of the chain of patronage in the British state is the underclass, who (to change the metaphor slightly) form the scavengers or bottom-feeders of the whole corporatist ecosystem. Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they are nonetheless essential to the whole system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves. Both Copperfield and Chalk describe with great eloquence precisely what I have seen myself in this most wretched stratum of society: large numbers of people corrupted to the very fiber of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose, and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.

Of course, the corporatist system, at least in its British incarnation, is a house of cards, or perhaps a better analogy would be with a pyramid scheme. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed to perform tasks that are not merely useless but actually obstructive of real work and economically counterproductive. The bureaucracy insinuates itself into the smallest cracks of daily life. Renting out a house recently, I learned from a real-estate agent that the government sends inspectors, in the guise of prospective tenants, to check that the upholstery on chairs is fire-retardant. The inspectors have no other function. The regulations shift like one of those speeded-up meteorological maps on television, creating the need for yet more inspections and inspectors. Recent new regulations for landlords exceed 1,000 pages of close print; in the meantime, Britain does not remain short of decaying housing stock, while rents are among the highest in the world.

The government has to pay for all this activity, supposedly carried out on behalf of the population, somehow. It is simultaneously committed to huge public expenditure and apparent, though not real, control of the public debt. It reconciles the irreconcilable by not including the extravagantly generous pension obligations of the public service in its debt calculations—pension obligations that, properly accounted for, now amount to nearly 56 percent of GDP. Also not included is the government’s increasing resort to private finance of government institutions, which involves huge future expenditure obligations without the capital costs having to appear in the national accounts.

In other words, the government has turned the cynical last words of an eighteenth-century absolute monarch, Louis XV, into the guiding principle of its policy: après nous, le déluge.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 24, 2007

The fickle ACLU

Buried in a story on the new body-scanning technology making its debut in U.S. airports is this wonderful passage.

"The more obscure they make the image, the more obscure the contraband, weapons and explosives," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU in Washington, D.C. "The graphic image is a strip-search. You shouldn't have to be strip-searched to get on an airplane. Millions of Americans would regard them as pornographic."

Gotta love the ACLU; they'll fight for the right of Americans to avoid a non-invasive, virtual strip-search -- a search deemed "pornographic" by the civil liberties organization.

It may represent the first time in the ACLU's history that they've opposed any form of pornography.

Interesting.

In any event, the objections to this technology strike me as unreasonable. Contrary to the geniuses at the ACLU, the statement, "The graphic image is a strip search," is as far removed from reality as "a rutabaga is a passenger car," or "the death of Ana Nicole Smith is newsworthy."

A picture is not a strip search.

It's also not a cavity search, and here's the proof. Would you rather walk in front of an x-ray scanner, or have a guard rooting around in your colon?

The fact that you didn't hesitate in choosing the former over the latter would seem to be proof that you -- despite the handicap of not attending law school or working for the so-called premier protector of civil rights in the universe -- are better at tossing out stupid analogies than the professional civil libertarians.

In any event, I'd rather have a technician looking at a ghost-like image of my body than have him patting me down. It's certainly faster, and the thrill to be had from fleeting pictures of flabby and out-of-shape tourists is hardly worth noting -- and certainly less than the closet perv would receive from laying hand on travelers.

Posted by Mike Lief at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Lucky bloke

Harkening back to my newspaper-editing days, in my professional opinion this story opens with a great lead.

QUEENSLANDER Chaz White vividly remembers the steak knife flying straight at his eye.

"For a split second I could see the tip of the blade coming towards me," he said.

There wasn't time to duck and the sharp serrated blade plunged into the corner of his left eye, sliced its way behind his right eye and into his brain.

"I remember seeing the knife - I was yelling, 'I've got a knife hanging out of my eye'," Chaz, 21, said. "I could see it with my right eye and I was trying not to blink."

The knife, which penetrated 10cm into his head, narrowly missed vital arteries. Stunned medical staff marvelled at his millimetre escape from instant death.

An X-ray of Chaz's skull taken at the hospital shows how lucky he was to survive, the knife lodged in his eye socket. Another angle from above shows just how deep the knife penetrated his skull, into his brain.

Royal Brisbane Hospital specialist Lawrence Lee said Chaz could easily have been killed.

"He's really lucky the knife missed everything," the consultant opthalmologist said. "He would have been gone if the knife had hit the carotid artery and blind if it hit the optic nerve. It was only a fraction of a millimetre away. He's a pretty tough cookie."

Today, 10 months after surgery to remove the knife, Chaz not only has perfect vision, he doesn't even have a scratch or scar to show where the knife struck him. But there are other scars. He admits he still gets emotional when he relives the unprovoked attack at a Yeppoon party and the pain when someone tried to pull the knife out before a friend pushed the man away.

"I'll always think about it - it nearly cost me my life," Chaz said this week after the man who threw the knife, Douglas Gordon White, 24, was jailed for two years, suspended after five months, after pleading guilty to causing Chaz grievous bodily harm and assaulting another man in a separate incident.

Rockhampton District Court was told Douglas White - who is not related - threw one of two knives thrown at him by his girlfriend and was not aiming at Chaz.

Chaz was taken to two local hospitals before being taken by helicopter to Royal Brisbane Hospital - with the knife, covered only by a foam milkshake container, still lodged in his head. Chaz even survived the accidental puncturing of a lung in a pre-operative procedure in which a camera was inserted through his groin.

If this guy was a cat, I'd say he'd used up about 8.5 of his 9 lives. But it confirm my long-held belief, borne of my time in the navy, as well as in the district attorney's office, that no good comes from attending crowded, alcohol-soaked parties.

Countless stabbings, shootings, beatings and bludgeonings have one thing in common: the victim was in a crowded room with lots of inebriated people.

I'm not a teetotaler, but it sure seems safer to imbibe with a small group of friends. Especially if the steak knives are locked away.

And it doesn't hurt to avoid partying with carnies, too.

The sword swallowers aren't too bad, but it's the William Tell types that scare me when they've tied one on.

Posted by Mike Lief at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Career suicide

http://www.guntalk.com/site.php?pageID=15&newsID=12d

[Outdoor Life writer] Jim [Zumbo] basically committed career suicide. In short, he wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life web site that he had just learned (while on a hunt) that some people use AR-15 rifles for hunting. He offered his thought that this was a bad image for hunters. Okay, that's his opinion. But, he went even further, calling for game departments to ban the use of these rifles for hunting. After crossing the line and calling for a banning of those guns for hunting, he firmly planted his foot on a land mine and called AR-15s "terrorist rifles." The explosion from that misstep was heard throughout the firearms industry.

To listeners who took offense, I do apologize. The outrage by gun owners is completely understandable. To put it in context, Zumbo's comments came only days after we saw the introduction of a bill in Congress to bring back the Clinton Gun Ban (the so-called "assault weapons" ban). The final nail in the coffin was when-- Sunday afternoon -- the Brady Campaign (the leading group working to restrict gun rights) posted Zumbo's comments to several places on the net, saying, in effect, "See, even the top hunting writer says these rifles have no legitimate use."

At that point, it was all over for Jim Zumbo.

Thousands upon thousands of emails were directed to Remington and all the sponsors of Zumbo's television show on The Outdoor Channel. The emails were all pretty much the same -- dump Zumbo or I'll never buy any of your products. Remington first posted a message saying it was severing all ties with Zumbo. On Monday, the company said it was ending its sponsorship of him. Other companies followed, and it continues. Outdoor Life removed Zumbo's blog, and his apology. Each had generated thousands of comments -- almost all of them hugely negative.

We can take away from this experience several observations.

The first is that this attitude of "just let them take those ugly, black guns" is common among hunters and competitive shooters. Anyone with that attitude is a fool. Sit down with a hunter from England or Australia, hear him tell the story of what happened there, and watch the tears well up in his eyes when he says they never thought the government would take away their hunting guns. To gun banners, there is no such thing as a good gun. They want them all. When Tom Diaz, of the Violence Policy Center, was on Gun Talk, I forced him to admit that he would like to ban all guns. What about the police, I asked. Once we get all the other guns, he said, the police won't need their guns, either.

A ban on black guns, or "Saturday Night Specials," or 50-caliber rifles, is a ban on all our guns. There is no such thing as a bad gun or a good gun. We can't throw babies off the back of the sled, thinking it will keep the wolves away from us.

The next thing we learn from this is that the world has just changed. This entire episode took place inside of 36 hours, on a weekend -- a three-day weekend for President's Day. It happened...and this is important...entirely on the internet. The original posting was on the net, the reaction was on the net, the emails demanding that companies break off with Zumbo were on the net, and the reactions from the companies were all on their web sites. This was completely an internet event. It was a nuclear explosion, with tens of thousands of messages posted, spanning all the firearms-related web sites.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 23, 2007

This tip is a lifesaver

Actually, it's probably more correct to say that the tip is a killer.

Scientists say conclusive data shows there is no question circumcision reduces men's chances of catching HIV by up to 60 percent - a finding experts are hailing as a major breakthrough in the fight against AIDS. Now, the question is how to put that fact to work to combat AIDS across Africa.

The findings first were announced in December, when initial results from two major trials - in Kenya and Uganda - showed promising links between circumcision and HIV transmission. However, those trials were deemed so definitive that the tests were halted early.

"This is an extraordinary development," said Dr. Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization's AIDS department. "Circumcision is the most potent intervention in HIV prevention that has been described."

Circumcision has long been suspected of reducing men's susceptibility to HIV infection because the cells in the foreskin of the penis are especially vulnerable to the virus.

A modeling study done last year projected that in the next decade, male circumcision could prevent 2 million AIDS infections and 300,000 deaths. Last year, 2.8 million people in sub-Saharan Africa became infected with HIV, and 2.1 million people died.

Great news -- except if you're one of the anti-circumcision fanatics. But even for the anti-snip crowd, it's hard to argue with a relatively minor medical procedure that can save millions of lives.

But, if I may digress, there's a far more interesting question hidden within this article, one that goes to the "nature or nurture" debate that's raged for years.

Do we become the people we are because of our DNA? Is our destiny hard-wired into our genetic blueprints? Or are we shaped and molded by our environment, our upbringing, our diet?

Or even our names?

Was the head of the World Health Organization's AIDS department (mentioned in the passage quoted above) destined to work toward that lofty position, advocating circumcision to save lives when he was baptized?

If it wasn't true, you'd think I was making it up.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hewitt and Steyn

HH: All right, now I’m going to get to the serious stuff. Andrew Roberts, British historian, has a new book out called The History Of The English Speaking People Since 1900, a successor to the Churchill version, and there in the first five pages is a quote from Lord Salisbury at the turn of the century, warning his British colleagues that credibility, once lost, could not be regained, and that it was good to be feared around the world. He expected nothing less for the country that was the most powerful in the world, and that with fear comes hatred. I thought it sounded exactly like what we find ourselves in today.

MS: Yes, the interesting thing about the Marquis of Salisbury is that you look at the situation he was in, you know, just a little over a century ago, and all those sound bytes of his sound very familiar. There’s another one that Andrew mentions in that book, where he says Lord Salisbury says at one point, England is the only country in which during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belong to the enemy. Well, the only thing that’s changed in the course of the last century is that it’s not just England in which eminent men write and speak as if they belong to the nation’s enemies, but also America, and also Canada, and also Australia, and a lot of other places, too. And I think that’s what makes this book so relevant. You realize, I think, that it is very easy to squander your credibility for a kind of self-indulgence.

HH: I’m going to be talking with him for an entire show in the future. You wrote a column yesterday in the Chicago Sun Times, which I’m sure has earned you, well, about a truckload of venom. It had one line in it, “Nevertheless in the capital city of the most powerful nation on the planet last week, the political class spent it trying to craft a bipartisan defeat strategy, and they might yet pull it off.” A bipartisan defeat strategy, or as you said, the slow bleed Democrats joining the white flag Republicans. How was the reaction, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, it’s astonishing to me that essentially, I think a lot of people on the Republican side do not seem to understand. I mean, I expect nothing from the Democrats. I think they’ve…I think really, they’ve internalized this ludicrous thing, you know, where you just say we support our troops, we support our troops, and as long as you preface any absurd action with the words we support our troops, you know, it’s fine. We support our troops, even as we cut the legs out from under them, so that the mission is doomed to fail. That’s basically what the Democrat position has come down to. And I think, in fact, if you look at the logic of that, I mean, I don’t think you can support the troops if you’re opposed to the mission. You end up, if you divorce the kind of heroism of soldiering from the nobility of the mission, you end up with a thing like the John Kerry biography, a completely incoherent one, where a guy is running as the anti-war war hero. And I think the Democrats have become the party of that incoherence, but I expect better from the Republicans, and I’m deeply unimpressed by a lot of the behavior of prominent Republicans, too.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hewitt and Steyn

I've been touting Hugh Hewitt's radio show as "smart talk-radio," with compelling interviews with intellectual heavyweights -- as well as with lightweight pols. It's good stuff, light years away from the Hannity "No, you're a great American" blather. And his website is just as good, with transcripts of the interviews often posted the same day.

One of Hewitt's regular guests is the columnist Mark Steyn, who usually starts off the Thursday show.

This week, they began with a discussion of the Marquis of Salisbury.

No, not the guy that invented the steak.

HH: All right, now I’m going to get to the serious stuff. Andrew Roberts, British historian, has a new book out called The History Of The English Speaking People Since 1900, a successor to the Churchill version, and there in the first five pages is a quote from Lord Salisbury at the turn of the century, warning his British colleagues that credibility, once lost, could not be regained, and that it was good to be feared around the world.

He expected nothing less for the country that was the most powerful in the world, and that with fear comes hatred. I thought it sounded exactly like what we find ourselves in today.

MS: Yes, the interesting thing about the Marquis of Salisbury is that you look at the situation he was in, you know, just a little over a century ago, and all those sound bites of his sound very familiar.

There’s another one that Andrew mentions in that book, where he says Lord Salisbury says at one point, England is the only country in which during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belong to the enemy. Well, the only thing that’s changed in the course of the last century is that it’s not just England in which eminent men write and speak as if they belong to the nation’s enemies, but also America, and also Canada, and also Australia, and a lot of other places, too.

And I think that’s what makes this book so relevant. You realize, I think, that it is very easy to squander your credibility for a kind of self-indulgence.

As is depressingly obvious, we all-too-quickly forget the past -- the lessons learned and there to be referenced in countless books -- and therefore repeat the same mistakes that our forefathers did, ignoring the wisdom to be gained from their experience.

Some maxims remain true in every era, for all nations, beginning with "It is better to be feared than loved." Because when a nation is not feared by its enemies, it will inevitably be viewed with sneering contempt by those wish it ill.

Salisbury knew it then; who amongst our political class know it now?

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2007

Still gives me chills

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hJ-HI05NR0

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Why is Bill Maher famous?

Bill Maher is on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and he's proving that he's a cutting-edge political "humorist."

"How?" you ask. By saying six different ways that Pres. Bush is an idiot.

A moron.

A dolt.

A retard.

A fool.

Then, for a change of pace, Maher reminds us that the president is an alcoholic.

And did he mention that Bush is stupid, too?

Did you know that Gore and Kerry would have been better presidents than Bush? Because, Maher says, they read books!

Because Pres. Bush is too stupid to read. Get it?

Someone make him stop; I can't breathe!

Bill Maher is high-larious. If by high-larious, one means a boorish, mean-spirited dolt.

To the audience's credit, the applause and laughter is scattered and half-hearted.

What a maroon.

UPDATE

Now he's slagging on country music fans, because, you see, only idiots, rednecks and rubes listen to and like country music.

Wow. Now that's late-night entertainment.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 20, 2007

Profiles in judicial courage

Although my readers know that I often carp about out-of-control judges -- some of whom are black-robed poltroons prone to forgetting that they were appointed, not annointed -- the truth is that they are the exception to the rule. But there are truly terrible judges on the bench, who, for reasons of ego or the craven need to curry favor with a certain societal group, refuse to do the right thing, the just thing.

Judge Paul Paruck is not one of those judges.

What he is is a jurist uncowed by political correctness, unwilling to be bullied into allowing sharia to creep into our courtrooms, unafraid of the mullahs who demand that the American justice system grant special rights to those who would deny civil rights to women, homosexuals, and dhimmis, i.e., non-Muslims.

Last year, Judge Paruck refused to allow a Muslim woman, a plaintiff in a lawsuit, to testify in court from behind her veil. The judge ruled that she, like all other witnesses of all faiths, must show her face to the jurors and the judge, so that they might determine her credibility -- and know that the person testifying was who she claimed to be.

The judge left it to the plaintiff to decide: remove the veil, or the case would be dismissed.

She refused, and it was.

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group with ties to terrorist organizations, wrote an extraordinary letter to the judge, demanding a meeting, so that he might reconsider his ruling.

Judge Paruck's response to CAIR is worth reading in its entirety.

Bravo, Your Honor. Bravo.

Posted by Mike Lief at 06:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 19, 2007

Organic Farming causes global warming

Well, maybe that's overstating it a bit.

But only a little.

From the Independent comes this bit of delicious irony.

Organic food may be no better for the environment than conventional produce and in some cases is contributing more to global warming than intensive agriculture, according to a government report.

[...]

Tomatoes

* 122sq m of land is needed to produce a tonne of organic vine tomatoes. The figure for conventionally-grown loose tomatoes is 19sq m.

* Energy needed to grow organic tomatoes is 1.9 times that of conventional methods.

* Organic tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses in Britain generate one hundred times the amount of CO2 per kilogram produced by tomatoes in unheated greenhouses in southern Spain.

Milk

* Requires 80 per cent more land to produce per unit than conventional milk.

* Produces nearly 20 per cent more carbon dioxide and almost double the amount of other by-products that can lead to acidification of soil and pollution of water courses.

Chickens

* Organic birds require 25 per cent more energy to rear and grow than conventional methods.

* The amount of CO2 generated per bird is 6.7kg for organic compared to 4.6kg for conventional battery or barn hens.

* Eutrophication, the potential for nutrient-rich by-products to pollute water courses, is measured at 86 for organic compared to 49 for conventional.

* The depletion of natural resources is measured at 99 for organic birds compared to 29 for battery or barn hens.

Oh, that's good. I'm going to climb into my SUV and drive to the local mega-super-duper-giganta-market -- passing by the Gaia-raping Whole Foods ("We're all-natural, committed to diversity, really expensive, and much smarter than you red-state rubes!") -- and stock up on the latest factory-farmed animals and Con-Agra genetically-engineered-and-improved veggies.

It's the least I can do to save the Earth.

Heh.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Johnny Carson, as you've never seen him

Paul Mavis praises a just-released rarity: What were thought to be long-lost kinescopes of Johnny Carson's first TV show, broadcast by CBS in 1955, when Carson was a gangly, younger-than-he-looked 30 year old.

Although the series didn't last long -- Mavis notes the network wouldn't let the neophyte have any control -- the qualities that would make him the king of late-night TV were already on display.

The earliest episodes are the best in this particular collection; perhaps the network initially listened to Carson and tried to do it his way before the constant fidgeting with the format began.

On the premiere episode, there's a skit where TV-obsessed Johnny comes home to find his set is in the repair shop. At the beginning of the skit, the actors playing his family are frozen still, while Johnny essentially tells the entire joke to the audience before they see it. And right before he starts the skit, he backs up, and reminds them that the point of the gag is that he doesn't realize the TV set is missing. He pauses for a perfectly timed moment, and with just the faintest twinkle in his eye, deadpans, "Think about that."

It's as modern and funny a moment as any you've seen countless times since the supposedly "new" comedic sensibilities of the post-Firesign Theatre and Saturday Night Live era. And that's the Johnny Carson they should have nurtured in the various sketches of The Johnny Carson Show: the totally aware, self-commenting comedian who's cognizant of the gag and its intended silliness already, and who's willing to let you in on it – if you're hip enough.

If you're a Carson fan -- oh, what has Leno done to your show, Johnny? -- this sounds like a real treat.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dirty, lying cops, no-knock warrants and dead old ladies

Radley Balko examines the implications of the indictment of the cops responsible for the death of an elderly woman, shot during the execution of a no-knock warrant, signed by a magistrate who relied upon the lies told by the dirty detectives.

Balko believes the indictments should lead to a reexamination of our drug policies, too. Narcotics -- like alcohol during prohibtion -- always seem to play a part in police corruption scandals.

I last posted on these dirty cops here.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 18, 2007

Dispatch from Not-So-Great Britain, Part the Fourth

Donald Sensing points to the latest stupidity from our British cousins, commenting, "When gun-control laws don't work, the answer must be more gun-control laws."

Sensing was reacting to an editorial in the U.K.'s Telegraph, lamenting an upsurge in violence perpetrated by gun-wielding crooks.

We have, post-Dunblane, what are said to be the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns - either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe - with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.

[...]

The truth is that the laws relating to possession of guns are nowhere near tough enough. Possessing a firearm carries a minimum sentence (ministers insist on calling it "mandatory", but it is not) of five years. That means release, in normal circumstances, after 30 months.

For those aged between 17 and 21, the minimum sentence is three years, which means release after just 18 months. Such piffling sanctions hardly amount to an effective deterrent to these young hoodlums. The police want the five-year minimum sentence extended to everyone over 17 and the Government should not hesitate to meet that request.

The Telegraph goes on to call for more draconian police powers, as well as criticising the inability of Papa Gummint to solve all sorts of societal ills.

It's hard to disagree with stiffer sentences for violent thugs, but the reluctance to punish criminals is the least of John Bull's worries.

As Sensing rightly notes, law-abiding Brits are more likely to end up in the gaol if they fight back, than are the criminals who prey upon them, so why bother? He quotes the always-quotable Mark Steyn:

These days, even as he or she is being clobbered, the more thoughtful British subject is usually keeping an eye (the one that hasn’t been poked out) on potential liability. Four years ago, Shirley Best, proprietor of the Rolander Fashion emporium, whose clients include Zara Phillips, was ironing some clothes when the proverbial two youths showed up. They pressed the hot iron into her flesh, burning her badly, and then stole her watch. “I was frightened to defend myself,” said Miss Best. “I thought if I did anything I would be arrested.” There speaks the modern British crime victim.

It's a depressing thought, but Sensing is spot on when he says, "The British used to be a free people, but no longer."

See previous updates on the rot afflicting the once mighty U.K. here, here and here.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2007

Close call

Did you hear about the Icarus-like ordeal that nearly killed a champion hanglider?

Paragliding 2005 World Cup winner Ewa Wisnierska, 35, was lifted to 32,612 feet by a storm that apparently killed a Chinese paraglider in eastern Australia on Wednesday. The pilots were preparing for the 10th FAI World Paragliding Championships next week, event organizer Godfrey Wenness said.

He Zhongpin, 42, died during the same weather system, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold, Wenness said. His body was found 47 miles from his launch site.

Wisnierska described Friday how she attempted to skirt the thunderstorm and when that failed, repeatedly attempted to spiral against its powerful lift.

She said she could see lightning around her and decided her chances of survival were "almost zero."

She said she radioed her team leader at 13,123 feet.

"I said, 'I can't do anything,'" she told reporters at a news conference. "'It's raining and hailing and I'm still climbing — I'm lost.'"

Officials and Wisnierska's ground team used global positioning and radio equipment to track her altitude as she soared well beyond the 29,000-foot plus height of Everest, the world's tallest peak. Wenness said she went from 2,500 feet to the maximum in about 15 minutes.

She lost consciousness for more than 30 minutes while her glider flew on uncontrolled, sinking and lifting several times, he said.

She regained consciousness at about 1,640 feet and landed safely, but had ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite on her face.

The power of thunderstorms is mindboggling, with vicious microbursts slamming airliners into the ground, and updrafts that can hurl airplanes thousands of feet into the sky in seconds.

This woman's experience -- and survival -- rivals that of the WWII aviator who bailed out of a B-17 without a parachute, and walked away after plunging into a deep snowbank.

With luck like that, I hope she bought a lottery ticket.

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 15, 2007

Fey vs. Sorkin

NBC has two behind-the-scenes series airing, both focusing on the nuts and bolts of late-night comedy shows (SNL, anyone?). As I've said before, Tina Fey's 30-minute sitcom, 30 Rock, is very funny, thanks in large part to the tremendous performance by Alec Badwin.

Aaron Sorkin's one-hour snoozefest dramedy, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, features his trademark rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and long, uniterrupted tracking camera shots, ala West Wing, but it is, alas, unbelievably serious, and the sketches glimpsed are simply not amusing.

Perhaps the best knock on Sorkin's show comes courtesy of Tina Fey herself, quoted in the New York Daily News.

Tina Fey dissed archfoe Aaron Sorkin Sunday night at the Writers Guild Awards. The "30 Rock" star competes with Sorkin's "Studio 60": Both take place behind the scenes at a show like "Saturday Night Live," where Fey was head writer.

Wiggling around the Hudson Theatre stage in a party frock with plunging decolletage, Fey told the crowd, "I hear Aaron Sorkin is in Los Angeles wearing the same dress - but longer, and not funny."

Ouch.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Lost clues

Well, this is weird. And it even helps explain some of what's been happening.

Kinda sorta.

Posted by Mike Lief at 06:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 14, 2007

Coptalk

I'm continually amazed by the jargon-filled coptalk in police reports. Today's new term: self-terminate.

The reporting party said the suspect did not turn in his company credit card when he self terminated on November 31, 2005.

Posted by Mike Lief at 03:32 PM

Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning

Not a morning person? Maybe this alarm clock will help speed the transition from REM-state sleep to pants-soiling alertness.

If you don't disconnect the wires in the right order, it goes BOOM! Or at least makes a loud noise.

You have to disconnect the right wires to deactivate the alarm, i.e., shut the hell up. It changes every day, randomly picking the do-or-die wire.

Jack, I've downloaded the schematic to your phone; disconnect the blue wire. No, WAIT! Disconnect the red wire!

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Clint, what happened to you?

Clint Eastwood, who released two films about the World War II battle for the Pacific Island of Iwo Jima, said this about his reasons for making Letters From Iwo, showing the fighting from the perspective of the Japanese military.

Clint Eastwood said his acclaimed picture "Letters from Iwo Jima" aimed to show the futility of war, after its European premiere at the 57th Berlin Film Festival.

[Eastwood] said "Letters" and "Flags of our Fathers" were a response to the war movies of his youth.

"I grew up in the war pictures in the 1940s where everything was propagandized. (In) all the movies, we were the good guys and everybody else were bad guys," he said.

"I just wanted to tell two different stories where there were good guys and bad guys everywhere and just tell something about the human condition."

As I said when the trailer was released:

Based on the Japanese preview, it looks like it emphasizes the universal nature of war and the toll it takes on the troops, an unfortunate piece of post-modern moral equivalence.

The Japanese were not merely fighting for God and country, motivated by a sense of honor and patriotism in the Western sense. Rather, they exceeded the racial animus of the Nazis, viewing not just different races -- but all peoples who were not Japanese as subhuman.

The fascist regime inculcated a value system that held that nothing was more virtuous than dying in defense of the Emperor; that an enemy who died bravely was to be honored, but one who surrendered was to be held in the greatest contempt.

Well, Eastwood's muddle-headed moral equivalence is disappointing -- and confirms what I thought were the reasons for his cinematic two-fer.

The obvious response to the glib, "War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" refrain is the also-glib-but-true response, "War never solved anything, other than ending slavery, the Holocaust and the brutal Japanese occupation of China and the Philippines."

The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last agrees, pointing to the way Eastwood's noble Asian fighting men treated their Chinese subjects, and the kindness shown to Allied POWs.

He excerpts a passage from the diary of a Japanese officer.

9 September: Discovered the captain and two prisoners who escaped last night in the jungle and let the guard company guard them. To prevent them escaping a second time, pistols were fired at their feet, but it was difficult to hit them. . . .

The two prisoners were dissected while still alive by medical officer Yamaji and their livers were taken out, and for the first time I saw the internal organs of a human being. It was very informative.

And Last provides an eyewitness account of the Rape of Nanking, where the Japanese Army showed what it thought of their fellow Asians, killing between 150,000 to 300,000 civilians.

I also went down to the morgue in the basement and had them uncover the bodies that were delivered last night. Among them, a civilian with his eyes burned out and his head totally burned, who had likewise had gasoline poured over him by Japanese soldiers. The body of a little boy, maybe seven years old, had four bayonet wounds in it, one in the belly about as long as your finger.

Last also cites the mind-boggling statistic that after Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo -- the first American attack on the Japanese mainland in the months after Pearl Harbor -- the Japanese slaughtered 250,000 Chinese men, women and children, because they believed the Chinese had provided assistance to the Americans.

In fact, while failing to gear up for a genocidal campaign with the Teutonic efficiency of their German allies, the Japanese managed to exceed the sadism and cruelty of the Nazis in other ways.

As I've said before:

American and British POWs stood a good chance of surviving captivity if held by the otherwise monstrous Nazi regime, while the POWs in the "care" of the Japanese suffered an unbelievably high mortality rate. According to one source, the mortality rate for POWs held by the Germans was 1.2 percent; for those held in the Pacific Theater of Operations, an astonishing 37 percent.

The behavior of the Japanese Army during the war was entirely consistent with the values and ethics of Japanese society during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Geneva Conventions-defying executions of Allied airmen and soldiers -- photographed and featured in enemy publications -- helps explain the undying hatred many U.S. and U.K. vets held for their former enemies.

Notwithstanding Clint Eastwood's "deep thoughts," there was an objectively good side in the war. And an incontestably evil side, too. And, although I've said it before, if you have to ask which was which, then we're doomed.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 13, 2007

Iran and the Holocaust

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/271uktmd.asp

December 12, 2006, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad personally brought to a close the infamous Holocaust deniers' conference in Tehran. A strange parade of speakers had passed across the podium: former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the nutty followers of the anti-Zionist Jewish sect Neturei Karta, and officials of the neo-Nazi German National party, along with the familiar handful of professional Holocaust deniers. Frederick Töben had delivered a lecture entitled "The Holocaust--A Murder Weapon." Frenchman Robert Faurisson had called the Holocaust a "fairy tale," while his American colleague Veronica Clark had explained that "the Jews made money in Auschwitz." A professor named McNally had declared that to regard the Holocaust as a fact is as ludicrous as believing in "magicians and witches." Finally, the Belgian Leonardo Clerici had offered the following explanation in his capacity as a Muslim: "I believe that the value of metaphysics is greater than the value of history."

If this motley crew had assembled in a pub in Melbourne, nobody would have paid the slightest attention. What gave the event historical significance was that it was held by invitation, at the Iranian foreign ministry: on government premises, in a country that disposes of the world's second-largest oil reserves (after Saudi Arabia) and second-largest natural gas reserves (after Russia). And in this setting, the remarks quoted above provoked not dismissive laughter, but applause and attentive nods. On the walls hung photographs of corpses with the inscription "Myth," and others of laughing concentration camp survivors with the inscription "Truth."

The

Tehran deniers' conference marks a turning point not only because of its state sponsorship, but also because of its purpose. Up until now, Holocaust deniers have wanted to revise the past. Today, they want to shape the future: to prepare the way for the next Holocaust.

In his opening speech to the conference, the Iranian foreign minister, Manucher Mottaki, left no doubt on this point: If "the official version of the Holocaust is called into question," Mottaki said, then "the nature and identity of Israel" must also be called into question. The purpose of denying, among all the Nazis' war measures, specifically the persecution of the Jews is to undermine a central motive for the establishment of the state of Israel. Auschwitz is delegitimized in order to legitimize the elimination of Israel--that is, a second genocide. If it should turn out, however, that the Holocaust did happen after all, Ahmadinejad explains that it would have been a result of European policies, and any homeland for the Jews would belong not in Palestine but in Europe. Either way, the result is the same: Israel must vanish.

This focus explains why the conference's sponsors attached so much importance to the participation of a delegation from the Jewish sect Neturei Karta. Although it does not deny the Holocaust, the sect welcomes the destruction of Israel. That objective was the common denominator uniting all the participants in the conference. In his closing speech, Ahmadinejad formulated it with perfect clarity: "The life-curve of the Zionist regime has begun its descent, and it is now on a downward slope towards its fall. . . . The Zionist regime will be wiped out, and humanity will be liberated."

Holocaust denial and the nuclear program
Just as Hitler sought to "liberate" humanity by murdering the Jews, so Ahmadinejad believes he can "liberate" humanity by eradicating Israel. The deniers' conference as an instrument for propagating this project is intimately linked to the nuclear program as an instrument for realizing it. Five years ago, in December 2001, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani first boasted that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything," whereas the damage to the Islamic world of a potential retaliatory nuclear attack could be limited: "It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." While the Islamic world could sacrifice hundreds of thousands of "martyrs" in an Israeli retaliatory strike without disappearing--so goes Rafsanjani's argument--Israel would be history after the first bomb.

It is precisely this suicidal outlook that distinguishes the Iranian nuclear weapons program from those of all other countries and makes it uniquely dangerous. As long ago as 1980, Khomeini put it this way: "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."

Anyone inclined to dismiss the significance of such statements might want to consider the proclamation made by Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who stands even higher in the Iranian hierarchy than Ahmadinejad. A few months ago, on November 16, 2006, Rahimian explained: "The Jew"--not

the Zionist, note, but the Jew--"is the most obstinate enemy of the devout. And the main war will determine the destiny of mankind. . . . The reappearance of the Twelfth Imam will lead to a war between Israel and the Shia." The country that has been the first to make Holocaust denial a principle of its foreign policy is likewise the first openly to threaten another U.N. member state with, not invasion or annexation, but annihilation.

Yet it's all confusing. Why, if Iran wishes Israel ill, does it deny the Holocaust rather than applaud it? Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial has been especially well received in the Arab world, where it has won praise from Hezbollah, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas. Yet in the Arab world, Hitler is admired not for building highways or conquering Paris, but for murdering Jews. How can Holocaust denial be most prevalent in a region where admiration for Hitler remains widespread? To unlock this paradox it is necessary to examine the anti-Semitic mind.

Brother Hitler and Eichmann the Martyr

Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism at its most extreme. Whoever declares Auschwitz a myth implicitly portrays the Jews as the enemy of humanity: The assumption is that the all-powerful Jews, for filthy lucre, have been duping the rest of humanity for the past 60 years. Whoever talks of the "so-called Holocaust" implies that over 90 percent of the world's media and university professorships are controlled by Jews and are thereby cut off from the "real" truth. No one who accuses Jews of such perfidy can sincerely regret Hitler's Final Solution. For this reason alone, every denial of the Holocaust contains an appeal to repeat it.

Consider this passage written by an Egyptian columnist for the state-controlled newspaper Al-Akhbar, Egypt's second-largest daily, and published in April 2002:

The entire matter [of the Holocaust], as many French and British scientists and researchers have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government in particular and the European countries in general. But I, personally and in light of this imaginary tale, complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, "If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin."
Often, however, enthusiasm for the Holocaust is expressed unvarnished. In 1961, when the trial of Adolf Eichmann dominated the headlines, such enthusiasm became evident for the first time. The Jordanian Jerusalem Times published an "Open Letter to Eichmann," which stated: "By liquidating six million you have . . . conferred a real blessing on humanity. . . .

But the brave Eichmann can find solace in the fact that this trial will one day culminate in the liquidation of the remaining six million to avenge your blood." Arab writers such as Abdullah al-Tall eulogized "the martyr Eichmann," "who fell in the Holy War." In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt summarized the mood in the Arab world:

The newspapers in Damascus and Beirut, in Cairo and Jordan did not conceal either their sympathy for Eichmann or their regret that he "did not finish the job"; a radio broadcast from Cairo on the opening day of the trial even included a little sideswipe at the Germans, reproaching them for the fact that "in the last war, no German plane had ever flown over and bombed a Jewish settlement."
This heartfelt desire to see all Jews exterminated was reiterated in the Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar in April 2001 by the columnist Ahmad Ragab: "[Give] thanks to Hitler. He took revenge on the Israelis in advance, on behalf of the Palestinians. Our one complaint against him was that his revenge was not complete enough."

Obviously, from a logical point of view, enthusiasm for the Holocaust is incompatible with its denial. Logic, however, is beside the point. Anti-Semitism is built upon an emotional infrastructure that substitutes for reason an ephemeral combination of mutually exclusive attributions, all arising from hatred of everything Jewish. As a result, many contradictory anti-Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust can be deployed simultaneously: (1) the extermination of millions was a good thing; (2) the extermination of millions was a Zionist fabrication; (3) the Holocaust resulted from a Jewish conspiracy against Germany that Hitler thwarted and punished; (4) the Holocaust was a joint enterprise of the Zionists and Nazis; (5) the Zionists' "Holocaust industry" exaggerates the murder of the Jews for self-interested reasons; (6) Israeli actions against the Palestinians are the "true" Holocaust--and so on.

We are dealing here with a parallel universe in which the reality principle is ignored, and blatantly contradictory fantasies about Jews all have their place so long as they serve to reinforce anti-Semitic paranoia and hatred: a universe in which the laws of reason have been abolished and all mental energy is harnessed to the cause of anti-Semitism.

Amid the confusion, this universe is characterized by two constants: the refusal to come to terms with the facts of the Holocaust as it actually took place; and a willingness to find in the Holocaust a source of encouragement and inspiration, a precedent proving that it is possible to murder Jews by the million. This is why the precise content of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust tirades is not the issue. He is obsessed with the subject because he is fascinated by the possibility of a second Holocaust.

Why, then, did Ahmadinejad repeatedly and publicly embrace the ultra-orthodox Jews at the conference? Why did he personally greet every Jew present and say that "Zionism should be strictly separated from the Jewish faith"? Let us take a look at modern anti-Semitism in Iran.

Ahmadinejad and the Jews

Ahmadinejad's great inspiration, the Ayatollah Khomeini, not only recognized the mobilizing power of anti-Semitism in the struggle against the shah, he made use of it himself, as far back as the 1960s. "I know that you do not want Iran to lie under the boots of the Jews," he cried out to his supporters on April 13, 1963. That same year, he called the shah a Jew in disguise and accused him of taking orders from Israel. This drew a huge response from the public. Khomeini had found his theme.

Khomeini's biographer Amir Taheri writes: "The Ayatollah was by now convinced that the central political theme of contemporary life was an elaborate and highly complex conspiracy by the Jews--'who controlled everything'--to 'emasculate Islam' and dominate the world thanks to the natural wealth of the Muslim nations." When in June 1963 thousands of Khomeini-influenced theology students set off to Tehran for a demonstration and were brutally stopped by the shah's security forces, Khomeini channeled all their anger toward the Jewish nation: "Israel does not want the Koran to survive in this country. . . . It is destroying us. It is destroying you and the nation. It wants to take possession of the economy. It wants to demolish our trade and agriculture. It wants to grab the wealth of the country."

After the Six Day War of 1967, the anti-Semitic agitation, which drew no distinction between Jews and Israelis, intensified. "[I]t was [the Jews] who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present," Khomeini wrote in 1970 in his principal work, Islamic Government. "[T]he Jews . . . wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that . . . they may one day achieve their goal." Then in September 1977, he declared, "The Jews have grasped the world with both hands and are devouring it with an insatiable appetite, they are devouring America and have now turned their attention to Iran and still they are not satisfied." Two years later, Khomeini was the unchallenged leader of the Iranian revolution.

Khomeini's anti-Semitic attacks found favor with the opponents of the shah, both leftists and Islamists. His anti-Semitism ran along the same lines as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the turn-of-the-century hoax beloved of the Nazis that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. The Protocols was published in Persian in the summer of 1978 and was widely disseminated as a weapon against the shah, Israel, and the Jews. In 1984, the newspaper Imam, published by the Iranian embassy in London, printed excerpts from The Protocols. In 1985, Iranian state authorities did a mass printing of a new edition. Somewhat later, the periodical Eslami serialized The Protocols under the title "The Smell of Blood: Jewish Conspiracies."

Just two years ago, in 2005, at the Iranian booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was readily able to buy an English edition of The Protocols published by the Islamic Propagation Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Other anti-Semitic classics were also available, such as Henry Ford's The International Jew and Mohammad Taqi Taqipour's screed Tale of the "Chosen People" and the Legend of "Historical Right." The cover of the latter volume caught my eye: a red Star of David superimposed over a grey skull and a yellow map of the world. Obviously, even after the death of Khomeini in 1989, the worldwide dissemination of anti-Semitism by Iran continued.

The fact that 25,000 Jews now live in Iran, making it the largest Jewish community in a Muslim country, is not incompatible with the foregoing. The Jews in Iran are made clearly to feel their subordinate Dhimmi status. Thus, they are not allowed to occupy higher positions than Muslims and so are disqualified from the leading ranks in politics and the military. They are not allowed to serve as witnesses in court, and Jewish schools must be managed by Muslims and stay open on the Sabbath. Books in the Hebrew language are forbidden. Up to the present, the regime, which has time and again published anti-Semitic texts and caricatures, has prevented such hate-mongering from resulting in violence against Jews. Nevertheless, the combination of incitement and restraint leaves the Jewish community in a state of permanent insecurity. Today, the Jewish community serves Ahmadinejad not only as an alibi in his power game, but also increasingly as a deterrent: In the event of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, this community would find itself hostage and vulnerable to acts of reprisal.

Irrespective of the leeway that Ahmadinejad has, for the time being, left the Iranian Jews, his rhetoric is steeped in an anti-Semitism that is unprecedented for a state leader since World War II. Ahmadinejad does not say "Jews" are conspiring to rule the world. He says, "Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world." He says, "The Zionists" have for 60 years now blackmailed "all Western governments." "The Zionists have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural, and media sectors." "The Zionists" fabricated the Danish Muhammad cartoons. "The Zionists" are responsible for the destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque in Iraq.

The pattern is familiar. Ahmadinejad is not a racist social Darwinist who, Hitler-like, wants to eliminate every last trace of "Jewish blood." The term "half-Jew" is not used in Islamist discourse. But he invests the word "Zionist" with exactly the same meaning Hitler poured into "Jew": the incarnation of evil.

The Iranian regime can court the Jewish Israel- haters of Neturei Karta all it wants, but anyone who makes Jews responsible for the ills of the world--whether calling them Judas or Zionists--is clearly driven by an anti-Semitism of genocidal potential. Demonization of Jews, Holocaust denial, and the will to eliminate Israel--these are the three elements of an ideological constellation that collapses as soon as any one of them is removed.

Ahmadinejad inhabits a delusional world that is sealed off from reality. The louder the liberal West protests against Holocaust denial or the Islamists' demands for the destruction of Israel, the more conviced Ahmadinejad becomes of Zionist domination. In a conversation with the editors of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, the Iranian president reacted as follows to the remark that the magazine does not question Israel's right to exist: "I am glad that you are honest people and say that you are required to support the Zionists." Only when we too finally realize that the Holocaust is a Jewish lie--only when we too want to annihilate Israel--only then will Ahmadinejad be convinced that we are academically credible and politically free. It is this lunacy that makes the revolutionary mission of the Iranian leadership so dangerous.

Which brings us to the question of the broader significance of Iranian Holocaust denial. The Islamist mission is by no means restricted to Israel.

"Historical War"

In his first speech on the guiding principles of his politics, Ahmadinejad made this clear: "We are in the process of an historical war, . . . and this war has been going on for hundreds of years," he declared in October 2005. This is a war, then, that is not fundamentally about the Middle East conflict and will not end with the elimination of Israel. He continued: "We have to understand the depth of the disgrace of the enemy, until our holy hatred expands continuously and strikes like a wave." This "holy hatred" is boundless and unconditional. It will not be mitigated by any form of Jewish or non-Jewish conduct--other than subordination to sharia and the Koran.

In his letter to George W. Bush, the Iranian president described his objective: "Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems." The letter also tells how the liberal democracies will be shattered. Even here (if slightly diluted), the ideology of martyrdom--You love life, we love death--is propagated: "A bad ending belongs only to those who have chosen the life of this world. . . . A good land and eternal paradise belong to those servants who fear His majesty and do not follow their lascivious selves."

Shiite Islamism confronts us with an adversary who reviles the achievements of modernity as Satan's work, who denounces the international system created after 1945 as a "Jewish-Christian conspiracy," and who therefore wishes to overturn the accepted historiography of the postwar period. At the start of the Holocaust deniers' conference, Foreign Minister Mottaki explained that the problem is the "wording of historical occurrences and their analysis [are written from] the perspective of the West." As against this "Western" historiography, Islamism wants to create a new historical "truth," in which the Holocaust is declared a myth, while the Twelfth Imam is deemed real. Whereas the delusional worldview of Holocaust denial is elevated to the norm, any deviation from it is denounced as a symptom of "Jewish domination."

Even as he is conducting his religious war, Ahmadinejad is also playing the role of a global populist. He addresses his speeches to all the world's "oppressed." He cultivates good relations with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez and ingratiates himself with the Western left by using anti-American rhetoric. His use of the word "Zionist" is strategic. It is the Trojan horse by which he makes his anti-Semitism respectable, allowing him to be at once an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier and the ultimate spokesman for the "oppressed nations."

Of course, Iran would not have to rely on Holocaust denial to pursue its strategic objectives. Yet Ahmadinejad insists on the point, in order to provide ideological undergirding to his push to destroy Israel. He also speculates that this project might win the approval of the Europeans. After all, in Europe the delegitimization of Israel has been going on for some time--if for different reasons. Recently the BBC organized a symposium on the question of whether Israel would still exist in 50 years. In a poll taken four years ago in the E.U., 59 percent saw Israel as "the biggest danger to world peace." Even in the United States, a growing number of intellectuals are convinced that Israel and its American supporters are the real source of the problems facing American foreign policy.

The alarm cannot be sounded loudly enough. If Iran is not put under pressure without delay and forced to choose between changing course and suffering devastating economic sanctions, the only remaining alternatives will be a bad one--the military option--and a dreadful one--the Iranian bomb.

Matthias Küntzel is a Hamburg-based political scientist and a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: On the New Anti-Jewish War is forthcoming this year from Telos Press. This article was translated from German by Michael Bugajer and John Rosenthal.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:34 AM

Steyn on GW

http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/251601,CST-EDT-steyn11.article

Our Thought For The Week comes from the Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

That would be yours truly: the climate holocaust denier. I wrote last week about "global warming," or "cooling," or "climate change," or (the latest term) "climate disruption" -- for those parts of the world where the climate isn't really changing but you get an occasional blip: a warm day in winter or a flurry of snow in late April, or (for British readers) a summer's day where it rockets up to 58 and cloudy instead of being 54 and drizzling. As a result of my climate holocaust denial, I received a ton of letters along the lines of this one:

[...]

Not all of us are quite so hung up on credentialization. But, if you are, you might want to read the December issue of the Journal Of Atmospheric And Solar-Terrestrial Physics in which Cornelis de Jager of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Ilya Usoskin of the Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory in Finland test the validity of two current hypotheses on the dependence of climate change on solar energy -- the first being that variations in the tropospheric temperature are caused directly by changes of the solar radiance (total or spectral), the other that cosmic ray fluctuations, caused by the solar/heliospheric modulation, affect the climate via cloud formation. The Finn and the Dutch guy from the A-list institutions with the fancypants monikers writing in the peer-reviewed journal conclude that the former is more likely -- that tropospheric temperatures are more likely affected by variations in the UV radiation flux rather than by those in the CR flux.

Are you thinking maybe it's time to turn over the page to the Anna Nicole Smith "A life in pictures" double spread? Well, that's my point. Most of us aren't reading the science, or even a precis of the science. We're just reading a constant din from the press that "the science is settled," and therefore we no longer need to think about it: The thinking has been done for us. Last week's U.N. IPCC "report," for example, is not the report, but a political summary thereof. As David Warren wrote in the Ottawa Citizen:

"Note that the IPCC report's conclusions were issued first, and the supporting research is now promised for several months from now. What does that tell you?"

Indeed. However, when you do read the actual science, you quickly appreciate that it's not by any means "settled" -- that there all kinds of variables. To quote the Finnish-Dutch big shots:

"There is general agreement that variations in the global (or hemispheric) tropospheric temperature are, at least partly, related to those in solar activity (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Solanki and Krikova, 2003; Usoskin et al., 2005; Kilcik, 2005)."

Therefore: "Variations of the mean tropospheric temperature must include stratosphere-troposphere interaction." However: "A detailed mechanism effectively transferring stratospheric heating into the troposphere is yet not clear."

Whoa, whoa, come back. There's no point skipping ahead: The illustrated excerpt on page D27 from Roger Ebert's Anthology of Great Lesbian Movie Scenes was swiped by the delivery boy. The thing is there are still huge disagreements about the climate change that's already taken place: in Ellen Goodman Holocaust terms (and remember: This is her analogy, not mine), it's as if we knew a lot of people died but still had no idea who or what killed them. For example: increased monsoon activity off the central west coast of India in the wake of the Sporer and Maunder Minimas. Been following that one?

The record of experts in this field -- or, at any rate, the record of absolutist experts in this field -- is not encouraging. Just to cite Ellen's corporate masters at the New York Times Company, here (from Christopher C. Horner's rollicking new book The Politically Incorrect Guide To Global Warming) is the Times' shifting position on the issue:

"MacMillan Reports Signs Of New Ice Age" (Sept. 18, 1924)

"America In Longest Warm Spell Since 1776: Temperature Line Records A 25-Year Rise" (March 27, 1933)

"Major Cooling Widely Considered To Be Inevitable (May 21, 1975)

"Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons To Relax About Global Warming" (Dec. 27, 2005)

"Climate change" isn't like predicting Italian coalition politics. There are only two options, so, whichever one predicts, one has a 50 percent chance of being right. The planet will always be either warming or cooling.

By now you're probably scoffing: Oh, come on, Steyn, what kind of sophisticated analysis is that? It doesn't just go up or down, it could sorta more-or-less stay pretty much where it is.

Very true. In the course of the 20th century, the planet's temperature supposedly increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius, which (for those of you who want it to sound scarier) is a smidgeonette over 1 degree Fahrenheit. Is that kinda sorta staying the same or is it a dramatic warming trend?

And is nought-point-seven of an uptick worth wrecking the global economy over? Sure, say John Kerry and Al Gore, suddenly retrospectively hot for Kyoto ratification. But, had America and Australia signed on to Kyoto, and had Canada and Europe complied with it instead of just pretending to, by 2050 the treaty would have reduced global warming by 0.07C: a figure that would be statistically undectectable within annual climate variation. And, in return for this meaningless gesture, American GDP in 2010 would be lower by $97 billion to $397 billion -- and those are the U.S. Energy Information Administration's somewhat optimistic models.

And now Jerry Mahlman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says "it might take another 30 Kyotos" to halt global warming: 30 x $397 billion is . . . er, too many zeroes for my calculator.

So, faced with a degree rise in temperature, we could destroy the planet's economy, technology, communications and prosperity. And ruin the lives of millions of people.

Or we could do what man does best: adapt.

You do the math.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:33 AM

Unions hate secret ballots

Why do unions hate the secret vote, the most basic part of democracy? Because they keep losing in their attempts to unionize, when the workers casting the ballots don't have to worry about union goons knowing how they voted via the secret ballot.

So, naturally, the Democrats are proposing to abolish secret ballots.

This morning, a House subcommittee is scheduled to hold this Congress's first hearing on the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill would require employers to recognize unions formed by a method known as "card check," which involves gathering a majority of employee signatures. Under the proposed law, traditional balloting on unionization would still be possible, but it is likely to vanish as union organizers opt for the card check approach.

As part of their 2006 platform, Democrats promised quick action on the legislation. However, Republicans contend that the title of the bill is Orwellian because the measure would make workers subject to intimidation by union organizers who would know whether an individual worker signed the petition or refused to do so.

Yeah, having a couple of goons shove a clipboard in your face and hand you a pen while saying, "You wanna join da union, doncha?" certainly wouldn't be coercive.

Why do unions hate secret ballots? Why do they hate democracy?

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Insanity and the Minimum Wage

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
--Albert Einstein

The minimum wage increase that took effect in Arizona last month has brought with it some unintended consequences — many teenagers are losing their jobs. The Arizona Republic reports some employers say payroll budgets have risen so much since the minimum wage went from $5.15 per hour to $6.75 — they have had to cut jobs and hours.

The owner of one Phoenix pizza restaurant says his payroll has shot up 13 percent and he's had to lay off three teenagers and cut hours for others. Another shop owner said expenses rose by $2,000 a month.

A Federal Reserve study showed that for every ten percent increase in the minimum wage — there is a corresponding two to three percent decrease in employment.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:07 AM

Day By Day

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 12, 2007

Mercenaries or heroes?

Michelle Malkin profiles three American soldiers -- heroes all -- who willingly served, fought and died for you and me.

It's a sharp rebuke to Washington Post military affairs expert William Arkin, who called our troops "mercenaries."

Malkin writes:

What do you call these troops, William Arkin?

Not "mercenaries."

Not "arrogant and intolerant."

The word is "patriots."

Patriots.

In our house, we thank God for them every night.

Please, read about Marine Sgt. Joshua J. Frazier, Seaman Manuel Ruiz and Marine Cpl. Jennifer M. Parcell.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

GOP straw poll

The latest GOP straw poll is up, and the results are interesting.

Newt Gingrich is making an early strong showing, a result of his impeccable conservative credentials, as well as his having given great thought to the issues that matter the most: war, terrorism, and civilizational conflict.

Although Giuliani is in first place, his positions on gun control threaten to rob him of a significant portion of the GOP base. He says things like this, that make NRA members want to stay at home and watch the Outdoor Channel on Primary Day.

"I used gun control as mayor," he said at a news conference Saturday during a swing through California. But "I understand the Second Amendment. I understand the right to bear arms."

He said what he did as mayor would have no effect on hunting.

Because, as we all know, the Second Amendment is about the right to go hunting.

Sigh.

On the other hand, Giuliani also says things like this about the non-binding resolutions kicking around Congress.

"In the business world, if two weeks were spent on a nonbinding resolution, it would be considered nonproductive," Giuliani told the lunch crowd, setting off a burst of laughter.

He called the concept "a comment without making a decision." America, he added, is "very fortunate to have President Bush."

"Presidents can't do nonbinding resolutions. Presidents have to make decisions and move the country forward, and that's the kind of president that I would like to be, a president who makes decisions."

He's good.

As for John McCain -- who?

Take a look at this breakdown of positives/negatives.

This doesn't bode well for the media's favorite Republican candidate.

What do you think?

Add your vote to the polling.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 11, 2007

A message to Americans, from an American fighting man

UPDATE

A commenter on Kim Du Toit's blog writes:

I sent Sgt Jeffers an email. His father is checking his account and forwarding emails to him in Iraq. He says the response has been overwhelming. He’s also starting a list of emails to keep people updated about the Sgt’s status. He came to this site and was amazed at the amount of support his son is getting.

If you wish you can email Sgt Jeffers at jeffers221 [at] bellsouth [dot] net.

Why not send a note to Sgt. Jeffers father and tell him "Thanks" for his son's service?

As Congresscritters mewl and wail in what passes for thoughtful debate over the war in Iraq, allow me to present you with a letter from U.S. Army Sgt. Eddie Jeffers, currently serving in the sandbox, i.e., Ramadi, Iraq.

I stare out into the darkness from my post, and I watch the city burn to the ground. I smell the familiar smells, I walk through the familiar rubble, and I look at the frightened faces that watch me pass down the streets of their neighborhoods. My nerves hardly rest; my hands are steady on a device that has been given to me from my government for the purpose of taking the lives of others.

I sweat, and I am tired. My back aches from the loads I carry. Young American boys look to me to direct them in a manner that will someday allow them to see their families again...and yet, I too, am just a boy....my age not but a few years more than that of the ones I lead. I am stressed, I am scared, and I am paranoid...because death is everywhere. It waits for me, it calls to me from around street corners and windows, and it is always there.

There are the demons that follow me, and tempt me into thoughts and actions that are not my own...but that are necessary for survival. I've made compromises with my humanity. And I am not alone in this. Miles from me are my brethren in this world, who walk in the same streets...who feel the same things, whether they admit to it or not.

And to think, I volunteered for this...

And I am ignorant to the rest of the world...or so I thought.

But even thousands of miles away, in Ramadi, Iraq, the cries and screams and complaints of the ungrateful reach me. In a year, I will be thrust back into society from a life and mentality that doesn't fit your average man. And then, I will be alone. And then, I will walk down the streets of America, and see the yellow ribbon stickers on the cars of the same people who compare our President to Hitler.

I will watch the television and watch the Cindy Sheehans, and the Al Frankens, and the rest of the ignorant sheep of America spout off their mouths about a subject they know nothing about. It is their right, however, and it is a right that is defended by hundreds of thousands of boys and girls scattered across the world, far from home. I use the word boys and girls, because that's what they are. In the Army, the average age of the infantryman is nineteen years old. The average rank of soldiers killed in action is Private First Class.

People like Cindy Sheehan are ignorant. Not just to this war, but to the results of their idiotic ramblings, or at least I hope they are. They don't realize its effects on this war. In this war, there are no Geneva Conventions, no cease fires.

Medics and Chaplains are not spared from the enemy's brutality because it's against the rules. I can only imagine the horrors a military Chaplain would experience at the hands of the enemy. The enemy slinks in the shadows and fights a coward’s war against us. It is effective though, as many men and women have died since the start of this war. And the memory of their service to America is tainted by the inconsiderate remarks on our nation's news outlets.

And every day, the enemy changes...only now, the enemy is becoming something new. The enemy is transitioning from the Muslim extremists to Americans. The enemy is becoming the very people whom we defend with our lives. And they do not realize it. But in denouncing our actions, denouncing our leaders, denouncing the war we live and fight, they are isolating the military from society...and they are becoming our enemy.

Democrats and peace activists like to toss the word "quagmire" around and compare this war to Vietnam. In a way they are right, this war is becoming like Vietnam. Not the actual war, but in the isolation of country and military. America is not a nation at war; they are a nation with its military at war. Like it or not, we are here, some of us for our second, or third times; some even for their fourth and so on. Americans are so concerned now with politics, that it is interfering with our war.

Terrorists cut the heads off of American citizens on the internet...and there is no outrage, but an American soldier kills an Iraqi in the midst of battle, and there are investigations, and sometimes soldiers are even jailed...for doing their job.

It is absolutely sickening to me to think our country has come to this. Why are we so obsessed with the bad news? Why will people stop at nothing to be against this war, no matter how much evidence of the good we've done is thrown in their face? When is the last time CNN or MSNBC or CBS reported the opening of schools and hospitals in Iraq? Or the leaders of terror cells being detained or killed? It's all happening, but people will not let up their hatred of President Bush. They will ignore the good news, because it just might show people that Bush was right.

America has lost its will to fight. It has lost its will to defend what is right and just in the world. The crazy thing of it all is that the American people have not even been asked to sacrifice a single thing. It’s not like World War II, where people rationed food and turned in cars to be made into metal for tanks. The American people have not been asked to sacrifice anything. Unless you are in the military or the family member of a servicemember, its life as usual...the war doesn't affect you.

But it affects us. And when it is over and the troops come home and they try to piece together what's left of them after their service...where will the detractors be then? Where will the Cindy Sheehans be to comfort and talk to soldiers and help them sort out the last couple years of their lives, most of which have been spent dodging death and wading through the deaths of their friends? They will be where they always are, somewhere far away, where the horrors of the world can't touch them. Somewhere where they can complain about things they will never experience in their lifetime; things that the young men and women of America have willingly taken upon their shoulders.

We are the hope of the Iraqi people. They want what everyone else wants in life: safety, security, somewhere to call home. They want a country that is safe to raise their children in. Not a place where their children will be abducted, raped and murdered if they do not comply with the terrorists demands. They want to live on, rebuild and prosper. And America has given them the opportunity, but only if we stay true to the cause and see it to its end. But the country must unite in this endeavor...we cannot place the burden on our military alone. We must all stand up and fight, whether in uniform or not. And supporting us is more than sticking yellow ribbon stickers on your cars. It's supporting our President, our troops and our cause.

Right now, the burden is all on the American soldiers. Right now, hope rides alone. But it can change, it must change. Because there is only failure and darkness ahead for us as a country, as a people, if it doesn't.

Let's stop all the political nonsense, let's stop all the bickering, let's stop all the bad news and let's stand and fight!

Isn't that what America is about anyway?

Keep Sgt. Jeffers and his fellow soldiers in your thoughts -- and prayers, too. And support the mission. Those who claim to support the troops but oppose the war are telling the GIs they fight and die for nothing -- hell, worse than nothing: a mistake.

Is there anything more damaging to morale?

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Turning trash into power

This is interesting:

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A group of scientists have created a portable refinery that efficiently converts food, paper and plastic trash into electricity. The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power and could have widespread civilian applications in the future.

The "tactical biorefinery" processes several kinds of waste at once, which it converts into fuel via two parallel processes. The system then burns the different fuels in a diesel engine to power a generator. [T]he machine's ability to burn multiple fuels at once, along with its mobility, make it unique.

The U.S. Army subsequently commissioned the biorefinery upon completion of a functional prototype, and the machine is being considered for future Army development.

The tactical biorefinery first separates organic food material from residual trash, such as paper, plastic, Styrofoam and cardboard. The food waste goes to a bioreactor where industrial yeast ferments it into ethanol, a "green" fuel. Residual materials go to a gasifier where they are heated under low-oxygen conditions and eventually become low-grade propane gas and methane. The gas and ethanol are then combusted in a modified diesel engine that powers a generator to produce electricity.

These units would be good to have in disaster-prone regions of the country, like the hurricane-battered South and the sure-to-be-shaking West, overdue for a massive temblor.

Posted by Mike Lief at 03:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 10, 2007

Another moonbat moviestar

Proving that her film portrayal of doomed lunatic film femme fatale Frances Farmer cut uncomfortably close to home, comes this profile in the Belfast Telegraph of Jessica Lange.

The actress, who charmed moviegoers in "King Kong," "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "Tootsie", has quite a bit to say, much of which will detract from the thinking-viewer's ability -- or willingness -- to suspend disbelief.

Here are a few highlights from an interview ostensibly about her return to the London stage, where she stars in The Glass Menagerie.

[Bob Dylan's] latest album is her constant companion: "It's uncanny," she says, "how each album absolutely connects to that exact moment in your life, whatever your age or experience. He's my idol. So is Che Guevara."

Whoa there; this might be too much information already. Next stop, George Bush - but he's definitely not on the dinner-party list: "Being at the mercy of that President for the next two years is going to be really frightening."

Before going on, I have to say a few things about Lange's "hero."

According to liberal American writer Lawrence Osborne, Guevara's political writing contained a "puritanical zeal and pure and undisguised hatred" that verges on the pathological. "This was a guy who preached hatred, who wrote speeches that were almost proto-fascist," Osborne said, quoting a Guevara speech that ends, "Relentless hatred of the enemy impels us over and over, and transforms us into effective and selective violent cold killing machines."

But it wasn't just words; Che personally murdered not just enemies of the people, but peasants, too, as he noted in his diaries. And when Castro swept aside Batista and seized power, he put Guevara in charge of the main prison, where Guevara oversaw the extra-judicial execution of more than 500 political prisoners.

Furthermore, he often administered the coup de grace himself, firing a bullet into the brain of the condemned man, after the firing squad had done their work.

Some hero.

And now, back to our esteemed deep thinker, Jessica Lange.

"George Bush really has whipped up the most poisonous scenario of neighbour against neighbour over the war in Iraq. It's disgusting. I can't tell you." But she does. "There were times when it was really lovely to be out there and against the war. But then I had anti-war stickers on my car and some big fucking pick-up with an American flag tried to drive me off the road. It was scary and I was scared."

I suggest that her mood was the result of her rather soft, hippie-liberal Democratic anti-patriotic fervour, and that perhaps she would be a whole lot worse off if President Bush wasn't defending her "way of life" and "civilised" (read privileged) values against the Islamic threat. The suggestion, I have to say, does not go down well.

"What? What are you saying here? I thought you were a nice person. My anti-war work started four years ago when the drums were beating. The few of us who really spoke out at the time took such a beating in the press - even the liberal press - and on CNN; I was on a CNN news programme with an arms inspector who had been in Iraq, and we were treated like shit. Everything he said - and it was all factual - has come to pass.

"There was talk at the time of blacklisting - it was the McCarthy era all over again - and a horrible, poisonous atmosphere. Now we are into an escalation of the war, and it's Vietnam all over again. It's gone beyond right or wrong. It's just become lunacy and danger. Especially now they're talking about Iran as the third front. You begin to wonder why we bring children into this world. We're on the precipice. No question."

[...]

"We've come to a dangerous spot, in more ways than one. Everything Al Gore is working for now [on environmental issues] is worthwhile and worth paying attention to." Really? "Oh yes. I don't have a car any more, for instance." She arrived at the hotel, of course, in a chauffeur-driven car.

[...]

"And I still really hate that stupid bastard George Bush!" she cries.

I'm most impressed; aren't you?

All the other nuttiness aside, I can't get past her moral depravity. While Pres. Bush is the object of her scorn -- hatred, really -- she cites Che Guevara as her hero. Given his role in the pantheon of the Left, and his function in the Cuban Revolution as the master of the abattoir, it's simply incredible that anyone who pays even the most token lip service to "human rights" would idolize this psychopath.

And that Lange is willing to proclaim her admiration for the murderous Guevara without hesitation -- and without consequence from her peers -- is an indictment of the entertainment biz, too.

Lange is either shamefully ignorant, or shamefully immoral; either way, she ought to be ashamed.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 09, 2007

Everything bad is good

Did you know that playing videogames improves your vision?

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.

In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart.

"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

But to see these improvements, you've got to be shooting things and blowing stuff up at a rapid pace; more sedate -- read: boring -- games without the action do nothing for honing your Spidey Senses.

After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test, but the Unreal Tournament players could tell which way the "T" was pointing much more easily than they had just a month earlier.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," says Bavelier. "These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

Next up: chocolate and steak cure heart disease.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

No, you're hogging the bed

Finally a way to settle the age-old argument bedeviling couples: who's sleeping on more than their fair share of the bed.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 08, 2007

Best thing about 30 Rock

Word on the street has it that NBC may have cancelled 30 Rock, which is a shame, because Alec Baldwin is just hilarious as the "NBC head of East Coast television and microwave programming."

Take a look at this video, released by the network, highlighting why Baldwin snagged a Golden Globe for his performance.

And, as long as we're discussing funny, take a gander at another clip released by NBC, bringing together snippets from several of their comedies, linked by the common thread, "That's what she said."

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

When cops cross the line

What happens when you're a narcotics detective and you lie to get a search warrant signed?

Well, in Atlanta, you could end doing 50 to life.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard will seek criminal charges, including felony murder, against three Atlanta narcotics officers involved in a botched drug raid that resulted in the shooting death of an elderly woman, according to a proposed indictment.

The proposed indictment drawn up by the prosecutor's office names officers Gregg Junnier, Jason R. Smith and Arthur Tesler. Howard accuses them of felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, burglary, making false statements and violation of oath.

[...]

Those three officers were involved in securing a search warrant on Nov. 21 for the home of Kathryn Johnston. Shortly before the raid, Smith told a magistrate he and Tesler had a confidential informant buy $50 worth of crack at 933 Neal Street from a man named "Sam."

But, according to the proposed indictment, no informant went to the house.

On Nov. 21, narcotics officers went to Johnston's home in northwest Atlanta to execute a "no knock" search warrant. Johnston was killed and three officers were injured in an ensuing shootout.

Officers Gary Smith, Cary Bond and Junnier were wounded by either "friendly fire" shrapnel or by Johnston. No cocaine was found in her house.

Junnier later told federal investigators that officers had lied to a magistrate judge about sending a confidential informant to Johnston's house to purchase drugs in order to get the warrant.

And, if the warrant to enter Johnston's home was based on deceit, all actions that occurred after police broke down the door could be considered criminal, legal experts said.

Junnier and Smith allegedly tried to cover up the botched raid by trying to persuade Alex White, a confidential informant they had previously used, to lie to investigators, according to proposed indictment. White came forward shortly after the shooting to say officers told him to lie and say he purchased crack cocaine at the home.

Police apparently were led to the house that day by an alleged small-time dealer who was arrested nearby on drug charges.

According to a report by Tesler, the suspect "wanted to take us to a house that had a kilo of cocaine. [He] directed us to 933 Neal Street N.W. where a buy of crack cocaine was later made and a search warrant drawn up for that location."

I back honest cops 100 percent. Honest cops.

If I don't believe a cop is telling me the truth, I won't -- hell, can't -- prosecute the case, if the investigation is held together by his version of events. I routinely argue to juries that the cops have no reason to lie, and I mean it.

In more than a decade of doing this job, there's only been one instance where I didn't believe the arresting officer's story, and I dismissed the case.

These cops bring dishonor to their brother officers, and cast doubt upon the entire criminal justice system. They killed an old woman, and if this story is accurate, they deserve to rot in prison, until such time as Mrs. Johnston forgives them.

Which could be a while.

Posted by Mike Lief at 12:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 07, 2007

Profiles in critters

Posted by Mike Lief at 03:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Smart marketing

This is possibly the funniest promotional website ever produced by a major manufacturer -- although the wife was not amused, so it may be a guy thing.

I salute Norelco (and its parent company, Philips) for having the ... ahem, courage to have a little fun with, er, male grooming.

Make sure to click on the razor in the lower left of your screen -- after watching the intro, first, of course -- and then work your way through the menu.

Good stuff.

Posted by Mike Lief at 02:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mexifornia, redux

Victor Davis Hanson has revisited his provocatively titled screed, Mexifornia, five years after its publication as an article in City Journal, and things have not changed for the better.

Hanson notes that "Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally."

The numbers are staggering, and it only gets worse.

Since 1990, the number of poor Mexican-Americans has climbed 52 percent, a figure that skewed U.S. poverty rates. Billions of dollars spent on our own poor will not improve our poverty statistics when 1 million of the world’s poorest cross our border each year.

The number of impoverished black children has dropped 17 percent in the last 16 years, but the number of Hispanic poor has gone up 43 percent.

We don’t like to talk of illegitimacy, but here again the ripples of illegal immigration reach the U.S.-born generation. Half of births to Hispanic-Americans were illegitimate, 42 percent higher than the general rate of the American population. Illegitimacy is higher in general in Mexico than in the United States, but the force multiplier of illegal status, lack of English, and an absence of higher education means that the children of Mexican immigrants have illegitimacy rates even higher than those found in either Mexico or the United States.

Education levels reveal the same dismal pattern—nearly half of all Hispanics are not graduating from high school in four years. And the more Hispanic a school district becomes, the greater level of failure for Hispanic students.

In the Los Angeles district, 73 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of the students are not graduating. But the real tragedy is that, of those Hispanics who do graduate, only about one in five will have completed a high school curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. That partly helps to explain why at many campuses of the California State University system, almost half of the incoming class must first take remedial education.

Less than 10 percent of those who identify themselves as Hispanic have graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. I found that teaching Latin to first-generation Mexican-Americans and illegal aliens was valuable not so much as an introduction to the ancient world but as their first experience with remedial English grammar.

Meanwhile, almost one in three Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 recently reported being arrested, one in five has been jailed, and 15,000 illegal aliens are currently in the California penal system.

Statistics like these have changed the debate radically. While politicians and academics assured the public that illegal aliens came here only to work and would quickly assume an American identity, the public’s own ad hoc and empirical observations of vast problems with crime, illiteracy, and illegitimacy have now been confirmed by hard data.

The rest of his article is no more encouraging.

Of some interest is the growing class divide when it comes to restrictions on immigration. Hanson notes that blue-collar Americans -- heretofore the mainstay of the Democratic Party -- are opposed to low-wage illegal aliens gaining unfettered access to the job market, while it's the business interests (and the wealthy) who promote the importance of cheap labor -- and open borders.

Read the whole thing.

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You don't have to speak German ...

To know that these folks don't have what it takes to be the next Deutsche Idol.

It's odd, seeing Germans (!?) playing essentially the same roles as Simon, Paula and Randy.

And I notice that I can understand a smattering of the comments, as in, "Das ist nicht gut."

Must come from watching all those episodes of Combat! when I was a kid.

Bottom line: Absence of talent, and an excess of undeserved confidence, requires no translation.

Posted by Mike Lief at 02:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The view from abroad

Sometimes it takes a critic from abroad to make us see how badly our foreign policy has gone astray.

This is from Caroline Glick's column in the Jerusalem Post, lamenting the American loss of will.

... THE US policy of appeasing jihadists in the Horn of Africa is just one example of the recent turn that US policy has taken regarding the war against the global jihad. On every major front, and particularly in its dealings with Israel, Iraq and Iran, the Bush administration is implementing policies that undermine its allies, strengthen its enemies and consequently harm US national security interests.

... Iran has effectively taken control of Basra, Iraq's port city and oil hub. The Iranian toman rather than the Iraqi dinar is the currency of trade in the city. The Shi'ite holy city of Najaf is also veering toward becoming a protectorate of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

[...]

[T]he US is effectively attempting to collaborate with Iran in a manner that facilitates the Iranian takeover of Iraq. This move is opposed by US military commanders in the country who are tired of allowing the Iranians to kill US forces at will. Yet while they are reportedly demanding that the authority kill Iranian operatives in Iraq, their moves are being blocked by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her associates at the State Department and the CIA.

THIS CRITICAL dispute currently revolves around the issue of whether or not the White House will publicly reveal evidence of Iran's deep involvement in the war in Iraq generally, and attacks against US forces specifically. Rice and her colleagues argue for suppressing the information. Revealing the depth of Iranian operations against the US, they argue, will force the US to actually fight back.

That is, apparently, Rice and her associates would rather see Iran take control of Iraq, and so bring about the most humiliating defeat of US forces since the Vietnam War, than acknowledge that Iran is fighting the US and its allies.

[...]

Fatah forces make no attempt to hide their involvement in terror attacks against Israel. They wear their Aksa Martyr Brigades T-shirts beneath their official uniforms. And yet, this week it was revealed that some $76.4 million of the $86.4 million that the US plans to give to Fatah will go to training 13,500 terror forces. That is, the US is now openly involved in training and equipping Palestinian terrorists who, as Abbas makes clear, are seeking to expand their operations to kill Israelis.

Furthermore, last month Rice signaled that the US is easing off its refusal to engage the Hamas terror group. Speaking to European reporters, Rice referred to the jihadist terror group as a "resistance movement."

[...]

Now, frustrated with the seemingly intractable realities on the ground and in the political battlefield in Washington, Bush is attempting to establish a middle course between victory and surrender.

Unfortunately, this course - which involves handing over the fruits of military victories to jihadists and their state sponsors - cannot help but ensure the defeat Bush rightly wishes to avoid.

We've always know that the State Department is more concerned with its own narrowly-defined interests, rather than acting in the best interests of the United States (You do know that, don't you?), but it's disheartening to see the Bush administration flail about, losing sight of just who the enemy is.

And that those who advocate keeping secret the proof that Iran's weapons, funds and men are killing our troops -- because the American people would demand action, Zut alors! -- aren't horsewhipped, publicly humiliated, and run out of Foggy Bottom on a rail, is yet another sign of the malaise afflicting the White House.

Bad times, my friends, bad times.

Posted by Mike Lief at 02:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 06, 2007

Another golbal warming skeptic

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm

Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide

Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?

By Timothy Ball

Monday, February 5, 2007

Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition.“Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.” . For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.

What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.

No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?

Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.

No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.

I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague, saying I had no right to say what I was saying, especially in public lectures. Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.

In another instance, I was accused by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki of being paid by oil companies. That is a lie. Apparently he thinks if the fossil fuel companies pay you have an agenda. So if Greenpeace, Sierra Club or governments pay there is no agenda and only truth and enlightenment?

Personal attacks are difficult and shouldn't occur in a debate in a civilized society. I can only consider them from what they imply. They usually indicate a person or group is losing the debate. In this case, they also indicate how political the entire Global Warming debate has become. Both underline the lack of or even contradictory nature of the evidence.

I am not alone in this journey against the prevalent myth. Several well-known names have also raised their voices. Michael Crichton, the scientist, writer and filmmaker is one of them. In his latest book, "State of Fear" he takes time to explain, often in surprising detail, the flawed science behind Global Warming and other imagined environmental crises.

Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen's. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen.

I think it may be because most people don't understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.

Meanwhile, politicians are being listened to, even though most of them have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change. Hence, they are in no position to question a policy on climate change when it threatens the entire planet. Moreover, using fear and creating hysteria makes it very difficult to make calm rational decisions about issues needing attention.

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.

I was greatly influenced several years ago by Aaron Wildavsky's book "Yes, but is it true?" The author taught political science at a New York University and realized how science was being influenced by and apparently misused by politics. He gave his graduate students an assignment to pursue the science behind a policy generated by a highly publicised environmental concern. To his and their surprise they found there was little scientific evidence, consensus and justification for the policy. You only realize the extent to which Wildavsky's findings occur when you ask the question he posed. Wildavsky's students did it in the safety of academia and with the excuse that it was an assignment. I have learned it is a difficult question to ask in the real world, however I firmly believe it is the most important question to ask if we are to advance in the right direction.

Dr. Tim Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (www.nrsp.com), is a Victoria-based environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

Posted by Mike Lief at 05:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 05, 2007

Portfolio: Camp Roberts, California, Part III

Sunrise this morning at Camp Roberts, Calif., taken with the Casio EX-S600, 1/50, f2.7.

I did another stint at Camp Roberts, helping troopers heading into combat plan for the aftermath of battle, preparing wills, advanced medical directives, and powers of attorney.

When I was done for the day, I roamed the post, camera in hand (or in pocket).

Today began with a spectacular sunrise; I stood in the cold outside the chowhall, almost forgetting to take the picture, so stunning was the vista.

A day earlier, I entered one of the many chapels dotting the base, ramshackle on the outside, seemingly unchanged since the 1940s on the inside.

As I stood in the cool shadows, sunlight streaming through the tall windows, the sounds of modernity faded away as the door swung shut behind me. I paused for a moment in the vestibule, then stepped into the main hall.

The dust motes danced through the shafts of light; it was easy to imagine khaki-clad GIs filling the pews, soon to board the waiting trains for Europe and the Pacific.

As I walked down the aisle, the worn floorboards, covered in the ever-present tattered burgundy linoleum, creaked beneath my boots. I paused, studying the rails that many a Catholic had knelt upon, head bowed in prayer, hearting pounding as he sought G-d's blessing and protection in the trying, dangerous days ahead.

Something caught my eye, and I took a closer look.

The boards were scuffed and scraped, worn from more than 60 years of use, and on the rail in the background, dirt, rocks and gravel from the boots of the GIs who'd sat in these pews. How long had these pieces of earth lain upon the wood? Whether they were from the boots of a trooper heading to Iraq, or from GI Joe, there was something about those pebbles that seemed to capture the essence of the footsoldier, the weary, plodding march that lead to victory -- or death.

I can't help but wonder if these men made it to VE-Day, to VJ-Day, survived the heat and bitter cold of Korea; the war in Vietnam -- and at home.

When I'm done drafting the wills, the powers of attorney and other plan-for-the-worst-hope-for-the-best paperwork, explaining them to the soldiers, I tell every trooper, "Good luck; I'll see you when you get back," shake his hand and send him on his way.

And I take a moment in that chapel and say a prayer for them all, warriors past and warriors present.

Posted by Mike Lief at 02:57 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Jihadis at UC Irvine

Roger Simon points to an event highlighting the sad state of free speech -- the free exchange of ideas -- on American college campuses -- and to the growing civilizational clash taking shape, one that has somehow escaped the attention of the mainstream media.

UPDATE

I listened carefully to the anti-Israeli protestors after they disrupted and walked out of the lecture; their leader had some interesting things to see to his fellow jihadis (His word, not mine).

"Right now, they're all pretty depressed in there."

(laughter)

"It makes them feel like Israel is there to stay ... They have no future. And it's just a matter of time before the state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the Earth --"

"ALLAHU AHKBAR!!"

[...]

"Our weapon, our jihad, our way of struggling in this country is with our tongues, we speak out, and we deflate their morale, is the best we can do right now. Our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world are handling business in their own way, and we all want to give them strength; it gives us all strength."

"ALLAHU AHKBAR!"

Note two things: that Israel will be destroyed; and the support for the terrorists -- their "brothers and sisters" -- who are "handling things in their own way," i.e., killing Israeli civilians with bombs in bakeries, restaurants, buses, discos and markets.

College students in America, supporting terrorism abroad.

Posted by Mike Lief at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What the hell is the DNC thinking?

Proving once again that politically-correct multi-culti sensitivity is their coin in trade, the Democrats invited a radical Muslim cleric to give the invocation at the winter conference of the Democratic National Committee.

Check out what the mullah said while the Dhimmis Dems bowed their heads in prayer.

In the name of God the most merciful, the most compassionate.

We thank you, God, to bless us among your creations. We thank you, God, to make us as a great nation. We thank you God, to send us your messages through our father Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Mohammed.

Through you, God, we unite. So guide us to the right path. The path of the people you bless, not the path of the people you doom.

Help us God to liberate and fill this earth with justice and peace and love and equality. And help us to stop the war and violence, and oppression and occupation. Amen.

According to Robert Spencer, this is a not-too-veiled threat to non-Muslims and Israel, although it's also a clear condemnation of the U.S. and Christians, too.

In mentioning "Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Mohammed" I expect that he sounded wonderfully generous and ecumenical to the assembled Democrats. But in fact, he was almost certainly invoking them in their capacity as Muslim prophets: it is mainstream Islam that all of these were prophets who taught Islam, and that the followers of Moses and Jesus corrupted their teachings to create Judaism and Christianity. The Qur'an says that Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian, but a Muslim (3:67), and depicts Jesus denying his own divinity (5:116) -- and this, of course, is the Imam's frame of reference. So what seems to be a gesture of ecumenical generosity is actually a declaration of religious imperialism and the delegitimization of other religions.

Also, imagine if a Christian priest or minister had prayed at a DNC meeting that those attending be guided away from the path of those doomed by God. In this, in any case, the Imam is echoing the Fatiha, the first sura of the Qur'an and most common prayer of Islam. It asks Allah: "Show us the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast favoured; not the (path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray." The traditional Islamic understanding of this is that the "straight path" is Islam ... The path of those who have earned Allah's anger are the Jews, and those who have gone astray are the Christians.

[...]

It is interesting to see the Democrats standing with heads bowed piously while the Imam Husham Al-Husainy prays, in veiled terms to be sure, for their conversion to Islam, and oh yes, for the destruction of Israel ("And help us to stop the war and violence, and oppression and occupation").

I differ a bit from Spencer, in that I don't find it "interesting" to see the latest from the Dems; depressing, dispiriting, disturbing -- and, yes, infuriating.

It's as if we place our necks on the chopping blocks, expecting compliance when we ask for a little off the back and sides, instead of righteous decapitation.

Is it any wonder the Muslim clerics and their jihadi warriors have such contempt for the West?

Posted by Mike Lief at 02:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 04, 2007

Michael Ramirez

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ending Green Romanticism

While this guy does say the kind of things that usually make me write the ranter off as a complete idiot (global warming does more damage than a nuclear war), he does have impeccable street cred with the enviro-moonbats.

Hell, he even invented the idea of Gaia, Earth as a living organism, which means he's golden with the Wiccans, et. al.

But he strays from the script when he says that there's nothing humans can do to stop global warming, other than adapt -- and build lots of nuclear power plants.

Even worse, he calls for an end to "Green Romanticism."

All in all, a very interesting take on the global warming hoo-ha.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dispatch from Not-So-Great Britain, Part the Third

And in yet another update on the decline of the once-mighty English Empire -- upon which the sun never set, comes this controversial crime-fighting advice:

If you see a crime, honk your horn or jump up and down.

Controversial, because it runs counter to the preferred course of action: do nothing, don't get involved, walk away.

Blimey.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dispatch from Not-So-Great Britain, Part the Second

Did you hear about the doctor whose home was burgled? The thieves got away with computers containing irreplaceable patient data -- as well as a lifetime of family photos, but the cops couldn't be bothered with such an insignificant crime, refusing to send an officer to the crime scene to take a report.

So the good doctor posted signs in his neighborhood, offering a reward for the return of the pilfered PCs, no questions asked.

Finally, the cops had a crime they could solve, and a criminal they weren't afraid to pursue.

Yeah, you guessed right.

It's illegal for a private citizen to post a reward for the return of stolen goods, making the doctor a criminal.

Let me rephrase: it's a crime to purchase stolen property, and in England, the fact that you're buying back your own bloody stuff is no excuse!

According to the Daily Mail, this is just a taste of the stupidity that seems to have afflicted the once-formidable British law enforcement establishment.

The Mail revealed this month how the Met was refusing to send officers to burglaries if the culprit had fled the scene – instead dispatching civilian ‘scenes of crime’ staff to examine for signs of a break-in.

Senior officers claim this actually improves detection rates because potential clues such as fingerprints or DNA evidence are retrieved sooner.

Dr Chan’s case is the latest in a series of bizarre police investigations.

A pub landlady from Somerset was investigated by police last June for inciting racial hatred.

Her ‘crime’ was to devise a St George’s Day celebration featuring children throwing homemade arrows at the dragon on a Welsh flag.

In early 2006, the crown prosecution service was forced to drop public order charges against an Oxford University student for calling a mounted policeman’s horse ‘gay’.

A police spokesman later said that the remarks had been ‘offensive to the policeman and his horse’.

And the reason why we should pay attention to what the rest of the world thinks is what?

They've gone insane.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 03, 2007

Pacific Coast Highway

January 20, 5:31 p.m., north of Santa Barbara. Casio EX-S600, 1/80 second, f2.7, exposure bias -0.67.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dispatch from Not-So-Great Britain

Did you hear about the two killers who escaped from prison in England? If you lived there, you might have heard about them, boy you'd never have seen them, if the police had their way.

Seems the police chief didn't want to release the mugshots of the fleeing murderers, because to do so might violate their human rights.

A Chief constable was accused of 'madness' last night after refusing to release pictures of two escaped murderers amid fears it might breach their human rights.

Derbyshire's top policeman David Coleman claimed the killers posed 'no risk' to locals, while the force said it had to consider the Human Rights Act and data protection laws when asked to publish 'wanted' photographs of the two men.

Mr Coleman's attitude towards murderers Jason Croft and Michael Nixon contrasts sharply with his ruthless crackdown on speeding drivers in recent years - including a 62-year-old who was jailed after being caught doing 38mph in a 30mph zone.

The more you read, the worse it gets.

Madness. Sheer, bloody, politically-correct madness.

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Unintended consequences

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal has a column by Peter Sanders, who thinks the biggest winner of tomorrow's Super Bowl may just be the bookies.

According to Sanders, the recent U.S. ban on internet gambling has led to a huge reduction in sports gambling resurgence in sports fans making book with their local oddsmaker.

The best quote from the article comes courtesy of a professional Las Vegas sports handicapper, Wayne Root:

"The online gambling ban should be re-named the Sopranos Support Bill."

And a consultant for on-line gambling interests makes a good point, too, her bias notwithstanding.

"The crackdown has taken the online bets out of a fairly transparent set of companies and put them into companies that aren't transparent at all."

While not much of a gambler (I haven't placed a bet since the early '90s), I was deeply opposed to the internet-gambling ban. Why is gambling okay when the Indians offer it, when the state does it via the lottery, but wrong when Joe Blue-collar wants some action without flying to Vegas or driving to the reservation -- or wants to try something requiring more skill than buying a scratcher at the 7-11?

More to the point, could you come up with a better illustration of our willingness to ignore history, to repeat the same mistakes of the past?

With legalized gambling, the state has an opportunity to regulate the conduct, ensure a fair game is being hosted. This leads to tax revenues for the state, as well as consumer confidence -- and drives the Mob out of the gambling biz.

Which is what happened in Vegas over the years. And, up until the greatest collection of jabbering poltroons and egomaniacal nincompoops in recorded history (i.e., the U.S. Congress) got involved, the Mob had little -- read no -- role in modern-day gambling.

But, thanks to the efforts of our nanny-state minders, the only place you can get some action is with Paulie Walnuts. And you do not want to miss a payment with dese guys.

Remember Prohibition? Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, The Valentine's Day Massacre?

It was all related to turf wars over booze. Supply and demand -- and the illegality of hooch -- guaranteed that someone would satisfy the nation's thirst, and the Mafia was only too glad to pour.

When Prohibition ended, oddly enough, the Mob moved on to other forbidden fruits.

When was the last time you heard about gangland-style shootouts over beer routes?

So, our recent experience is a Prohibition-in-reverse. Having eliminated safe, legal, regulated on-line gambling, the criminal underworld moves in to provide that which no one else can.

Alcohol, gambling, and the third leg of the triad, drugs.

All the same principles apply to the drug trade. How many people have been murdered by the drug dealers and their henchman? If anything, the drug-addled button-men wreaking havoc for the modern-day mobsters make one pine for the fedora-clad thugs of yore, who seemed to be more ... discriminating when playing a tune on their Chicago violins, killing fewer innocent bystanders and more of their own than the new breed of indiscriminate killers.

The legal system is choking on the drug-related cases, with non-violent addicts cycling through the courts with the distant threat of incarceration yielding few instances of junkies ripping the monkeys from their backs.

And the killings continue, drug dealer on drug dealer, buyer on seller, seller on buyer, and their product is still available to any and all who desire a chemically-induced break from their daily grind.

It's just amazing how we never -- never! seem to learn from past experience.

Why do I have a hunch that Tony Soprano would raise a glass of chianti to the Congressmen who banned internet gambling? And he'd be beaming if they'd only consider reenacting Prohibition.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 02, 2007

Impenetrable

I've not a clue what Bogie was thinking when I took this shot. I was reading the paper, when I got the feeling someone was staring at me. I glanced over the top of the editorial page and found the hound staring intently at me, face half shrouded in shadow.

He didn't move as I picked up the ever-present digi-cam, and here's the result.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 01, 2007

Bias? What bias?

That's the lead from an Associated Press story on the budget. I looked for some indication that it was tagged as an opinion piece, but, other than the inflammatory last half of the sentence, there's nothing that states it's anything other than a straight news article.

Actually, I'm wrong. The label up top, "Associated Press," is all the warning you need that what follows is nothing but opinion masquerading as unbiased reportage.

Hacks.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack