Author: VD

Just in case you’ve been wondering what he’s been up to, this recent press release makes it pretty clear that he’s been busy playing video games on this thing.Vector processing and massively parallel processing capabilities in a single architecture – Combat Mission would absolutely fly on that thing!

Which reminds me, I’m going to need to fire up Wing Commander – the first one – once I get that Mitsubishi projector I’m thinking about. It’s amazing how there haven’t been many great games in the lasat few years considering how much better the graphics have gotten.

From the Onion:Your choice of reading material for the bus is very important. Displaying Harry Potter books could get you mugged, but no one f—- with a guy reading “Surviving The Imminent Nuclear Holocaust.”

Not that I’m a survivalist or anything, but this does remind me of a conversation with Big Chilly one afternoon many moons ago in the Digital Ghetto. Now, keep in mind that while we did have some storage space in the house, it was entirely occupied by the Mad Scientist’s extensive botany project. Big Chilly came into my room – which was essentially lined with bookshelves packed double and triple deep – and asked if I still had that old .38 revolver that my Dad had given me when I was a kid.

I was sitting on my bed, so I said yeah, reached over to my left, tipped three paperbacks forward, unloaded the cylinder and handed it to him. He looked at me a little strangely, then asked if I kept my Glock handy too. I reached over to my right, tipped two hardcovers forward and pulled out the Glock. At that point, he glanced up at the ceiling fan and asked suspiciously: “If I put my hand up there, what will I find? And where’s the SKS and the AR-15, anyway? You can’t tell me you’ve got them in a bookcase.”

“Dude, look under the bed.”

Iraq’s feared Abu Ghraib jail was one big sex romp – sometimes by candlelight with an audience watching, U.S. troops said yesterday. Sex and alcohol were commonplace, and soldiers frequently set up candlelit rooms for voyeuristic sex shows, said a soldier who served at the notorious prison. “There were lots of affairs. There was all kinds of adultery and alcoholism and all kinds of crap going on,” said Dave Bischel, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police unit, who returned home from Abu Ghraib last month.

It will be interesting to see if the mainstream media will run with this aspect of the story. Possibly not, since the only conclusion is that women have no place in the military. I don’t think that they’ll be able to avoid it, though, anymore than the Pentagon could sweep the abuse pictures under the rug.

I agree with VDH. The notion that Rumsfeld should resign over Abu Ghraib is absolutely absurd. I think that the Secretary of Defense has done yeoman’s work in what I consider to be an impossible task, and although I believe the Iraqi occupation is doomed to ultimate failure, I have not forgotten the brilliant campaigns that conquered Afghanistan and Iraq in an amazingly short period of time.

Where Rumsfeld has been weak is in the areas not historically central to his responsibilities. As he admitted, he hasn’t “been focused on the war of ideas, to be honest with you.” That single comment reveals why he has not recognized the impossibility of the task he and the administration are undertaking. The secretary is an intelligent man, and as it becomes increasingly clear that semiotics count more than soldiers in this particular conflict, he will adjust his thinking accordingly.

The occupation will fail, but it will fail less disastrously and with less cost to the United States in prestige and blood if Donald Rumsfeld is in charge. If nothing else, I suspect he is a man who will recognize when the situation becomes impossible and have the courage to change course.

The United Nations’ decades-old scheme to set up an international authority to tax Americans at the same time they take control of over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface — the Law of the Sea Treaty — is getting a lot of attention in Washington. That attention is what we fought to achieve, and it is exactly what the internationalists behind Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) wanted to avoid. They hoped to sneak this flawed treaty through the Senate while no one was looking.Since our last update, March 16, 2004, both the Senate Committee on Armed Services and the House Committee on International Relations have held hearings on LOST.

Congressman Ron Paul and 13 of his House colleagues sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pointing out threats to American sovereignty and national security problems contained in this “terribly flawed treaty.” The Bookings Institution sponsored a briefing.The gloves are off! Pro-LOST forces are fighting back with display ads in Capitol Hill newspapers urging ratification of LOST. Pro-LOST lobbyists have picked up their pace in the halls of Congress. House members who favor LOST have circulated a letter urging quick ratification by the Senate, and the pro-U.N. Citizens for Global Solutions (formerly known as the World Federalist Society) is pushing hard for ratification.Hearing first hand what the pro-LOST forces said in their formal presentations, as well as overhearing some “off-the-record” comments, I can tell you that they are not happy. They expected the Senate to have quietly ratified LOST by now. They never expected Americans who live outside Washington’s Beltway to know what was going on and get in their way….

Those same Senate sources have asked us to continue urging our U.S. senators to oppose ratification as a countermeasure to the pro-LOST campaign.Learn why, as Steve Forbes recently wrote, “Sensible senators should strangle this resurrected beast.” Then, take action to counter the pro-LOST propaganda.

I have an idea. How about simply throw LOST, the UN and the Senators who support both into the sea. It seems a good place for them. I’m thinking somewhere in the Marianas Trench.

Just got an invite from the Fraters Libertas, and I’ll be on the Northern Alliance Radio Show at AM 1280 in the Twi Cities on Saturday at 2 o’clock. It should be an interesting show, as Joe Carter from the Evangelical Outpost will be on as well for a last hurrah before heading out to Saudi Arabia. The topic will likely be Abu Ghraib, as Joe was one of the first people to point out that the reservist factor was a strong element in the prison scandal.

GS writes: You are the only person with half a brain that may understand what I am trying to say. I submit to you that nothing, nothing, is as important as the ongoing debate about the abuses in Iraq and the fight against terrorism. We are at a turning point, and although I find your pontification about the intellectual ineptitude of the media, clever and entertaining, if not repetitive; I ask that you turn your vituperative abilities to clarifying the inequities of the moral equivalencies propounded upon us by the left.

If that’s a compliment, I shudder to think at what GS would come up with were he in the mood to sling insults. However, I will have to disappoint him as this is one of the rare cases where the left, in its focus on the apalling breakdown of military discipline at Abu Ghraib, is correct. Not, of course, for the reasons it thinks it is correct, but only because its mindless, kneejerk opposition to the Bush administration happens to have landed it, accidentally, in synchronicity with the truth.

Any attempt to defend the American abuse of prisoners on a basis of comparison with Arab atrocities is short-sighted. It is correct, to be sure, as very little of the abuse rose to the level of torture, much less the wholesale massacre of the innocent in which Arab terrorists revel. Nick Berg’s death was disgusting, even more outrageous was the murder of the pregnant Israeli woman and her little girls. But being better cannot be equated with being harmless.

For what these myopic American cheerleaders forget is that success in Iraq, as defined by the President and the administration, depends entirely on convincing the Iraqi people that the American way is desirable. In this cause, the non-abusive pornographic behavior of the troops is as problematic as the abuse itself. The President and the Secretary of Defense realize this, which is why they were so quick to apologize for the actions of the troops. It was not a Clintonian exercise in self-flagellation, but an attempt to defang a massive PR debacle. Needless to say, it failed, but their attempt to do so was a sign of perspicuity, not weakness.

Because the administration has chosen not to fight the clash-of-civilizations war, (a legitimate choice, if one that does little but buy time), it is engaged in what is essentially a public relations war between Islamic-fascist culture and secular Western culture. The significance of Abu Ghraib is huge due solely to the symbolic nature of the war. If we were fighting the clash-of-civilizations war, Abu Ghraib would be an insignificant issue; the very fact that it is a big deal indicates that this is, sopratutto, a war of semiotics, not soldiers.

The American media’s impact is not terribly important in the Arab world. In that fever-swamp of Zionist-haunted imaginations, the fake porn pictures are a bigger outrage than the pictorial record of the real abuse. For all my contempt of the mainstream media, I believe it has unwittingly done the American people a real service in drawing attention to the daunting, if not impossible, challenge presented by the administration’s arrogant Wilsonian goal of nation-building. And remember, that previous attempt at nation-building made the subsequent round of conflict much worse, not better.

This phase of the battle against the global jihad was lost the moment that the president declared that Saudi Arabia was our friend and that Islam is a religion of peace. What happens in Iraq now, one way or the other, is almost irrelevant, which is why I have been arguing that the troops should have been brought home after the fall of Bagdad and the capture of Saddam Hussein. The wise general does not enter a battlefield on which he cannot win.

The good news, however, is that the war is not lost, indeed, like John Paul Jones, we have not yet even begun to fight.

Ilana Mercer writes: Although many insist the crimes at Abu Ghraib are an aberration, others, including the Red Cross, Amnesty International, scores of detainees, and Maj. Gen. Taguba, tell a different story. Taguba underscores that although he found no evidence of specific directives from higher authorities, the abuses, nonetheless, were systematic and widespread, involving a “quarter of the military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors.” Our chastened lawmakers agree that the involvement of a wider circle of jerks than previously posited now seems likely.

While it is quite reasonable to argue in favor of using deprivation techniques to extract information that may save lives, it is quite another matter to use sexual crimes, practiced and chronicled with pride by mugging soldiers, as a form of interrogation. Ultimately, however you slice it, the photographs tell a tale, not of fleeting youthful indiscretion, but of abiding degeneracy.

It looks as if MI was involved after all, although it doesn’t sound like this fit the official and approved method of interrogation, since only a quarter of them got into it. I don’t believe there was any serious purpose behind most of the activity, it sounds to me more like a group of bored men and women getting their rocks off by taking advantage of a total absence of military discipline.

Although if conducting Late-Roman style bacchanalias is actually an MI duty, I expect they won’t have any problem finding recruits in the future.

Joseph Farah writes:What can one say about such sloppy journalism? Does it make you angry? Were the editors at the Boston Globe repentant? Guess what? The staff at the Boston Globe was furious at WorldNetDaily for exposing their gaffe. Within minutes of the posting of the story, the Globe reporter and editors were angrily demanding WND editors retract the story, pull it from the website, make it go away.

Why? The reporter first told WND editors that our reporter, Sherrie Gossett, had not identified herself as a journalist. After Gossett produced e-mails in which she clearly identified herself as a journalist and offered up links to four previous stories she had written on the subject of the bogus rape photos in an effort to help the Globe, the story changed….such was the level of embarrassment at the Boston Globe that staffers were grasping at straws this week in an effort to cover their own shame.

This tells you all you need to know about the mainstream media. First, their reporters and editors are too dumb to even recognize basic Internet porn. You’ll notice I never once wrote about those “rape” pictures, mostly because I figured that Iraqi women seldom have blonde hair or implants. Second, they’re dumb enough to think that maybe if they ignore it, they can make it disappear. No doubt they were planning to have their ombudsman make a circumspect statement on page 28 six weeks from now. This head-in-the-sand response may have worked back in the pre-Internet era, but it won’t cut it now.

The arrogance of demanding that someone else hold his tongue about your own blatant mistakes is breathtaking. Here’s to Mr. Farah and his willingness to tell the Globe to take a hike.

We hear a lot today from the mainstream media about jihad. Usually, it’s a happy-face jihad, congenially rendered as “the internal struggle to become a better person,” or “the struggle of communities to drive out drug peddlers,” or “the struggle against disease, poverty and ignorance.” In many ways, these reflect admirable efforts to reconstruct a very troubling concept, with an eye toward an Islam that blends into the modern world.

But let’s be clear: these are reconstructions. Jihad, in its seventh-century origins, is a forcible, military concept. I realize politesse frowns on saying such things out loud, but one of the main reasons it is so difficult to discredit the militants — to say convincingly that they have hijacked a peaceable religion — is this: when they talk about this central tenet, jihad, as a duty to take up arms, they have history and tradition on their side. As Abdel-Rahman, the influential scholar with a doctorate from the famed al-Azhar University in Egypt, instructed his followers: “There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad…. If Allah says: ‘Do jihad,’ it means jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is jihad. Jihad against God’s enemies for God’s cause and his word.”

So rich is the military pedigree of this term, jihad, that many of the apologists concede it but try a different tack to explain it away: “Sure, jihad means using force,” they say, “but only in defense — only when Muslims are under attack.” Of course, who is to say what is defensive? Who is to say when Muslims are under attack? For the militants, Islam is under attack whenever anyone has the temerity to say: “Islam — especially their brand of Islam — is not for me.” For the militants who will be satisfied with nothing less than the destruction of Israel, Islam is under attack simply because Israelis are living and breathing and going about their lives.

Read this article. It is one of the most cogent arguments against the absurdities of the war on method that I’ve ever read. The comparison of the wars on Drugs and Terror is particularly apt, as I expect about as much success in the latter as the former.