Category: Uncategorized

Al Qaeda and Afghanistan

This is what happens when you don’t go home when the game is over:

ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Carney when was “the last time US troops in Afghanistan killed anybody associated with Al Qaeda.” Carney didn’t have an answer, and referred Tapper to the Defense Department and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force.

I queried those agencies Tuesday and got an answer today. According to a Defense Department spokesman, the most recent operation that killed an Al Qaeda fighter was in April 2011—ten months ago. However, there was an “Al Qaeda foreign fighter” captured near Kabul in May 2011, and an “Al Qaeda facilitator” captured in the Paktiya province on January 30 of this year.

By comparison, there have been 466 coalition fatalities since April 2011.

This can be spun one of two ways. But regardless, either the Coalition of the Willing – love those bizarre Bush administration names – has won the war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and should bring its troops home or it is losing by a 466-1 ratio and should promptly retreat before it ends up getting wiped out.

Dutch Einsatzgruppen

Humanity continues to progress towards Seculatopia:

A controversial system of mobile euthanasia units that will travel around the country to respond to the wishes of sick people who wish to end their lives has been launched in the Netherlands. The scheme, which started on Thursday , will send teams of specially trained doctors and nurses to the homes of people whose own doctors have refused to carry out patients’ requests to end their lives. The launch of the so-called Levenseinde, or “Life End”, house-call units – whose services are being offered to Dutch citizens free of charge – coincides with the opening of a clinic of the same name in The Hague, which will take patients with incurable illnesses as well as others who do not want to die at home.”

“In 30 years Holland has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia of people who are terminally ill to euthanasia of those who are chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for mental illness, from euthanasia for mental illness to euthanasia for psychological distress or mental suffering, and from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia or as the Dutch prefer to call it “termination of the patient without explicit request”.”

In related news, German officials recently announced that they are considering the establishment of a federal Bundeslebensende which would provide involuntary euthanasia services to individuals of Jewish descent regardless of age. The amusing thing is that the Dutch actually profess to be upset by the fact that Rick Santorum is drawing American attention to their murderous practices. Santorum appears to have exaggerated, but is otherwise correct; the figures I have read show that involuntary euthanasia accounts does not account for one-half of all euthanasia cases, but only one-quarter.

A lesson in alternative logic

Let’s play He or She.

What’s that?

Say it’s a he or a she.

What’s a he or she?

An animal.

Um, okay. He.

Is it white?

No.

Is it blue?

No.

Is it red?

No.

Is it golden?

Yes.

Is it money?

No. Doesn’t it have to be an animal?

Oh yeah…. Is it a clown?

No! It’s an animal, remember? A he.

Is it a hippo? Is it pink?

No, it’s not a hippo. He’s golden, golden brown.

Is it a princess?

Tracking the trackers

This Firefox add-on is a good idea, particularly if you don’t make use of NoScript or keep your cookies turned off.

Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has unveiled a new add-on for the popular web browser that gives web users an instant view of which companies are ‘watching’ them as they browse.

The move comes the same week that Google pushed ahead with its controversial new privacy policy, built to provide even more data for Google’s $28 billion advertising business – despite concerns that the massive harvesting of private data might be illegal in many countries.

The Collusion add-on will allow users to ‘pull back the curtain’ on web advertising firms and other third parties that track people’s online movements, says Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs.

Google’s new anti-privacy policy is disappointing, as it really reduces the usefulness of Android. I don’t even turn on the data connection on my smartphone or use most of its features simply because I don’t want to share my entire life with Google.

It increasingly appears that the only way to deal with the data monsters is to flood them with crap. I’m thinking it might be useful to have an app or an add/on that will surf all the nastiest websites and all the most random shopping sites possible in the background and constantly stream that information to the data collectors. Sure, your real data will be there, but they’ll have to work a lot harder to make any useful sense of it.

Mailvox: suffering suffrage

YM is provided with a compelling argument against the wisdom of granting women the right to vote:

I am a very big fan of your blog and your unique brand of Christian libertarianism. I mentioned to my mother your position on women and the vote. She asked me what I thought and I said that you presented some compelling arguments and I was unsure of my position. She then grounded me and refuses to let me leave the house until I apologize to her and tell her that I believe that women should have the right to vote. I have tried having discussion with her, but she immediately starts comparing me to Hitler.

The punchline? He’s 37. Actually, I have no idea how old he is, but at least he is being provided an informative lesson in female nature, female solipsism, and the authoritarian instincts of women. The Hitler comparison is particularly ironic, given that both the National Socialists and the Fascists were staunch supporters of women’s suffrage and the German party was, in fact, dependent upon it for their 1933 rise to power. It was literally the first plank in “The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle”, published in The People of Italy on June 6, 1919 by Benito Mussolini.

“Italians! Here is the program of a genuinely Italian movement. It is revolutionary because it is anti-dogmatic, strongly innovative and against prejudice.

For the political problem: We demand:

a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility for women.”

It’s worth noting that the Fascist demand for proportional political female representation is significantly more “progressive” than anything American feminists have ever demanded. Anyhow, I would never recommend apologizing to anyone for accused thought-crimes or submitting to exercises in forced re-education. One is required to honor one’s mother, not submit to her lunatic demands for pious expressions of political correctness.

You’re not alone

I’m a little hard on Team Calvin and their insistence that there is no free will. But perhaps they will be reassured by the fact that they have an intellectual giant in their corner, as Sam Harris has announced that his new book on the illusion of free will is forthcoming:

I briefly discussed the illusion of free will in both The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape. I have since received hundreds of questions and comments from readers and learned just where the sticking points were in my original arguments. I am happy to now offer my final thoughts on the subject in the form of a short book, Free Will, that can be read in a single sitting.

The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.

It will certainly be interesting to see if his contortions in attempting to hold responsible helpless puppets sans free will are similar to those produced by The Responsible Puppet and others.

So, what was your first clue?

The left-liberal mind never ceases to astound and amuse:

Beheadings Raise Doubts That Taliban Have Changed

The Taliban took the four men to the main bazaar in a southern Afghanistan district at evening prayer on Sunday, regional government officials said, denounced them as government spies because they were carrying satellite phones, then beheaded them in front of local residents who had been summoned to watch.

Three days later, on Wednesday morning, the director of a relatively progressive radio station in eastern Afghanistan was found stabbed to death in his car. His back, stomach and chest had been slashed, and his throat slit, according to the man’s brother, who said his head had been nearly severed from his body.

Just doubts, mind you. Sure, they may be beheading people for carrying mobile phones and all, but we don’t actually know for sure that they are still totalitarian religious fanatics firmly planted in the seventh century Anno Domini. This article tends to raise an obvious question. If public beheadings are not enough to convince the NYT that the Taliban has not changed over the course of the eleven years of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, what would suffice?

Not that the Taliban policies don’t possess a certain appeal. I will readily admit that if they promised the public beheading of all iPhone users and to slit the throats of progressive media figures, I’d be at least a little tempted to consider voting for their presidential candidate in preference to Obama or Romney. There is a silver lining in every cloud.

Secretary of the Treasury arrested?

This is certainly an interesting and unexpected development. I have absolutely no idea what it signifies, but it does appear as if the massive pyramid of cards is looking increasingly flimsy of late.

Nope, old news. Business as usual. Dow 13,000! Nothing to see. Move along, move along…. And if at first, second, and third you don’t succeed, try, try again!

Team Calvin: Question 2b

Jamsco attempts a summary:

Okay, I’m going to do what I did in Question AA and say what I think Vox is saying. Vox, again please correct what I have wrong.

We cannot apply Vs. 28-31 to all Christians, because it is in the context of vs.10-15, in which Jesus describes what the 12 should do in their first mission. This means we can’t apply Vs. 16-27 to all Christians either.

And since the comparative passages in Luke are in Chapters 9 and 12, we can’t apply the verses in Luke 10 and 11 to all Christians either.

This includes the Parable of the Good Samaritan, The Lords Prayer and the instruction to Take up your Cross and follow Jesus.

I have decided much of this in the last day or so, because I don’t like what it means if the Sparrows and Hairs passage applies to all Christians.

So what do I have wrong?

Most of it. But before I begin, I will note that this summary further supports my contention that Calvinism is primarily a consequence of a problem with reading comprehension.

We cannot reasonably apply Matthew 10 verses 28-31 to all Christians, because it is clearly in the context of verses 1-15, in which the twelve disciples are listed by name and Jesus describes what the twelve should do in their mission to the lost sheep of Israel. This means we can’t apply verses 16-31 to all Christians either.

I decided this the first time I read this passage, because my reading comprehension abilities have been objectively determined to be superior and I tend to have very little difficulty correctly determining to whom a message is being addressed.

Being a Calvinist, Jamsco can’t possibly understand that I don’t dislike the Sparrows and Hairs passage because I have never thought, for even a moment, that it contradicted my opinion concerning the voliscience of God, as compared to the omniscience postulated by Calvinists and other Christians. It’s not as if I hadn’t encountered the passage prior to the last day or so, after all.

With regards to Luke, it’s quite clear that because he was working from second-hand sources, he has certain events out of order. The fact that there are passages related to the sending of the Twelve in both chapter 9 and chapter 12 says absolutely nothing about the contents of chapter 10 and chapter 11, which quite clearly refer to different events taking place at different times. This is hardly remarkable; in the massive and magnificent The Cambridge Medieval History, just to give one of many possible examples, there are references in Volume VIII: The Close of the Middle Ages to events that precede events recounted in Volume II: Foundation of the Western Empire thousands of pages earlier.

Now, the fact that Jesus Christ’s specific instructions to his twelve disciples are clearly not intended to be specific instructions to us does not mean that we can’t learn something useful from them. But it does mean that we cannot assume that the message He was providing to them was also meant for us in precisely the same manner that it was meant for them. And the fact that even at the end of the chapter, verse 40, Jesus is still making specific references to the mission of the twelve is indicative that the entire chapter is best understood through the context of that mission.

I note that when Jesus is speaking in general terms in this chapter, he does so. Verse 32: “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven”. Verse 37: “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” And yet, in the two verses immediately prior, he did not say: “Even the very hairs of everyone’s heads are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; everyone is worth more than many sparrows.”

The fact that Jesus uses specific terms in verses 30 and 31 then switches to general terms in the verses immediately following them strongly supports the interpretation that the earlier verses are not intended for general application, but apply to the individuals to whom he was speaking.