Category: Uncategorized

Although the evidence tends to suggest that they were, ultimately, correct:

Peterson told Kegley that he had gone to his ex-girlfriend’s house early Sunday morning in hopes of patching up the relationship after a recent breakup. He said Peterson lost control when an argument erupted and other people started ridiculing him as a “worthless pig.”

Police, who declined to provide details of the argument, said Peterson stormed out, retrieved an AR-15 rifle from his car outside and burst back into the house firing 30 shots that killed all but one of the people at the party.

I suppose one should feel lucky to only get a traffic ticket after calling a police officer a worthless pig. It’s interesting to note that a mass killing by a policeman doesn’t generate the media calls for disarming the police the way that a mass killing by a member of the public does always leads to calls for disarming the public.

I’d much rather that the public was permitted arms and the police were not. You can neither make nor keep the peace with guns, except by defending yourself. The police not only are not interested in defending you, they specifically deny any obligation whatsoever to defend you.

Moreover, courts have repeatedly upheld those denials. Whatever they are doing with those guns, they’re not defending you.

We clearly can’t allow these armed and dangerous individuals to be permitted to carry guns:

An off-duty sheriff’s deputy went on a shooting rampage early Sunday at a home where seven young people had gathered for pizza and movies, killing six and critically injuring the other before authorities fatally shot him, officials said.

The gunman, Tyler Peterson, was 20 years old and worked full-time as a Forest County deputy sheriff and part-time as a Crandon police officer, said Police Chief John Dennee.

This tends to underline the truth of the statement that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Even if they do wear badges.

Sam Harris reconsiders:

The second reason to be attentive to the differences among the world’s religions is that these differences are actually a matter of life and death. There are very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings. But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally, balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time.

Apparently it seems to have recently occurred to Mr. Harris that vehemently attacking the hundreds of millions of people who have pretty much left your tiny, insignificant minority in peace for centuries and are all that stand in between you and tens of millions of people who would like to cut your head off may not be the brightest course of action.

Needless to say, most of those brilliant strategists in the New Atheist movement vehemently disagree with him.

I’ll have a more substantive analysis of this interesting confessional in the next day or two. Harris only begins to touch on a few of the inherent problems with atheism today, but those he touches upon are relevant.

“When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see.”
– Richard Dawkins

Everyone knows that Christopher Hitchens is anti-semitic. But Daniel Finklestein, a left-wing editor at The Times, is appalled to discover that Richard Dawkins appears to be as well.

“So Dawkins, a liberal hero, believes, er, that Jews control world power. And, judging from the Guardian, it is now a part of mainstream debate to say so. Perhaps you think I am over-reacting, but I am a little bit frightened.”

While there would be a good deal of amusement to be engendered by watching liberal atheists’ heads explode from the overload of cognitive dissonance, I think Dawkins must be excused from the charge of anti-semitism by virtue of his near-complete ignorance of world history and foreign policy. He’s merely repeating an opinion that held by many Englishmen and other Europeans.

This should be obvious, as Dawkins clearly has no idea that it’s primarily non-practicing Jews who are the politically influential individuals, both in Israel and the United States.

It just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it:

The rising political firestorm over the Blackwater massacre runs up against a legal firewall in the form of an edict issued by Paul Bremer, former U.S. viceroy, that forbids US military personnel (including private contractors) from being charged by Iraqi authorities or tried in Iraqi courts. It was one of his last acts, one that put the lie to the American proclamation of Iraqi “sovereignty.”

The truth is that we can no longer be reasonably considered to be “the good guys” in Iraq by the Iraqi people. That window has now closed. The fact that the US military and its camp followers are literally above the law in Iraq makes a mockery of the idea that we are attempting to bring the Iraqi people “democracy”, much less “freedom”. Right now, Iraq is every bit the puppet state that the Eastern European nations were under Soviet rule.

What conservatives who still support the occupation don’t understand is that the reason US imperialism is a serious problem isn’t because it’s bad for the occupied nations, although it usually is, it’s because it is bad for the imperial nation.

Mainstream Republicans begin to realize they were bidding on a slug in a sack. One frustrated Thompson supporter writes an open letter to old Fred:

You said you had the fire in the belly. You sucked all the air out of the atmosphere on the right. In doing so, you pledged to run a different kind of campaign. But if you are going to be the big man on the right, you can’t be lazy. Yet you have been so. You have a responsibility to bone up on basic local issues of national import. Any old moron should know, for instance, that you can’t go into Florida without having at least thought about what you would say if asked about Terri Schiavo or about the Everglades. Moreover, what your campaign has offered so far has been a themeless pudding….

Look, the truth is that I would like to see your campaign catch fire. Conservatives all over the country are hoping you catch fire. But you can’t catch fire if you don’t even carry a match or any kindling. You come across as unprepared, soporific, and vague.

I don’t think Thompson can win the nomination. He’s not a strong conservative nor is he really even a serious candidate, he’s a political mirage. The fact that he hasn’t been able to leave Giuliani – despised by more than a quarter of the Republican base – in the dust demonstrates the fundamentally hapless nature of his campaign.

Rudy Giuliani explains wh you should not vote for him:

“I cannot be all things to all people. If you disagree with me, don’t vote for me.”
– Rudy Giuliani

I hear you, Rudy, loud and clear. So, if you are anti-abortion, if you are anti-occupation, if you are anti-open borders, if you are anti-big government, don’t even think about supporting Giuliani. And when people like Tony Blankley and the Anchoress try to argue that you should vote for him because it is the most importantest election ever, you can remind them that Giuliani himself said you shouldn’t.

As for the linked article, it’s clear that the writer’s belief that Giuliani has a genuine chance is based on a false foundation, given the way that he believes that in 2006, “Ballot initiatives opposing gay marriage and abortion were defeated across America.”

The truth is precisely the opposite. “Between 1973 and 2005, 42 states enacted statutes similar to the federal DOMA…. Two more states passed constitutional bans on gay marriage in 2005 and eight more in 2006. Arizona in 2006 became the first and only state so far to reject a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage.”

More than one sage has expressed an opinion that Hillary is only lying in wait, not unlike a crocodile lurking at a waterhole, before announcing an unexpected bid for the presidency. I disagree. In my humble opinion, there are a number of reasons why the Lizard Queen will choose to sit on the sidelines in 2004…. So, the Lizard Queen will continue to lurk quietly in the gaseous morass of the Senate, biding her time, waiting for the right moment to strike an unsuspecting America and drag it beneath the dark waters of her totalitarian vision.
– Vox Day, November 24, 2003

The chief reason, however, for the likelihood of her ascendancy in 2008 is that the omens point to it being her time…. These are early days, of course, but look for the Republicans to nominate an unelectable candidate in the Dole mode to serve as a sacrificial lamb. Jeb Bush would be ideal, although Rudy Giuliani might be even better as a candidate who looks credible on the surface, but who will suppress the turnout of the Republican base.
– Vox Day, May 30, 2005

The charade comes to an end:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has jumped to an astounding 33-point lead over Barack Obama, topping her main rival among every major slice of the electorate and widening a dominating advantage she has held all summer. Clinton got support from a full majority for the first time in any national survey about the Democratic presidential field. She is backed by 53 percent in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Unless the Republicans run Ron Paul against her, she wins the presidency in a walk. Anti-war and anti-immigration is the only way to beat her.

UPDATE – of course, since the Republican leadership is taking a fall, they’re trying to nominate the guy who more than a fourth of the party will not support in any thircumsthantheth:

If Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination and a third party campaign is backed by Christian conservative leaders, 27% of Republican voters say they’d vote for the third party option rather than Giuliani.

The thing is, Democratic tailwinds are so strong that they don’t even need to play the third-party card this time around. But it’s good to know that there are still some Republicans with principles left. Tony Blankley and The Anchoress can blather about why principled individuals should cast their principles to the wind in favor of inept political pragmatism, but it’s not going to work. It’s time for pragmatic Republicans to face the facts and accept that Giuliani, Thompson, McCain and Romney are all losers, so they might as well line up behind Ron Paul.