Category: Uncategorized

See, I told you Giuliani would be dropping out soon:

“After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday.”

Mr. Giuliani hinted at what aides said would be his uncompromising position on abortion rights yesterday in Huntsville, Ala., where he was besieged with questions about abortion and his donations to Planned Parenthood. “Ultimately, there has to be a right to choose,” he said.

Asked if Republicans would accept that, he said, “I guess we are going to find out.”

Yeah, I should say we are. “So does this mean that Giuliani is going to come out foursquare for Roe?” Ramesh Ponnuru asks incredulously. Hey, if you’re going to sink anyhow, you might as well do it with a big splash.

His few remaining supporters will surely hail this move as proof of his courage. Of course, if he was actually courageous, he would have been forthright about his position from the start and everyone would have acknowledged that his candidacy was a stupid idea. Now, it’s too much, too late.

No doubt there are copious high-fives being exchanged among the Romney crew today.

Marines don’t fuck softly:

A marine testified on Wednesday that he urinated on the bloody remains of one of five unarmed Iraqi men in Haditha whom his squad leader fatally shot in late 2005 moments after a roadside bomb had killed one of their comrades.

The marine, Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, said at a hearing here that he had acted in anger over the death of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, known as T.J., whose convoy was hit by a bomb planted by Sunni Arab insurgents.

“I know it was a bad thing what I done, but I done it because I was angry T.J. was dead,” Sergeant Dela Cruz said in a monotone.

I don’t blame the Marines. Not for a second. They’re in an impossible position, an impossible position which the president has cruelly inserted them in the name of his idiotic nation-building project. There’s just no way you can realistically expect heavily armed soldiers to meekly endure losses over an extended period of time without enacting reprisals.

Soldiers aren’t policemen, social etiquette is not a primary component of military discipline and minor atrocities of this sort not only have always happened in war, they will always happen in war. You can’t use killing machines to win popularity contests, which is one of the reasons that the Iraqi Occupation has failed.

The jihadists are wisely using the American military’s superior force against it, in much the same way that a judo black belt uses his opponent’s aggressive momentum to provide the force required to flip him. Simply applying more force is not going to solve the problem.

The Marines have a saying: Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome. In this case, withdrawing from Iraq and having a good solid strategic think before the next engagement would be an integral part of applying the second part of that program.

UPDATE: Even Powerline appears to be beginning to grow skeptical about the wisdom of continued occupation:

It is true that the surge is not complete. But it sounds like the additional forces will concentrate on the outskirts of Baghdad. Though it’s possible that progress there will bring benefits to Baghdad, it seems at least as likely that what we’re seeing now in Baghdad is roughly what we will get during the remainder of the year.

The question becomes whether this sort of progress — an end to Shia expansion, significant reductions in sectarian violence, but continued high levels of terrorist attacks and the continued loss of 50 to 100 American lives per month — will be sufficient to make the war politically sustainable in the U.S. The answer, I believe, is no. Under the scenario I’ve sketched (which, to be sure, cannot be said at this point to be the only possible outcome), the war will continue to lose support and, except in very red states, so will Republicans who still back it.

2008 is shaping up to be very, very ugly indeed for Republicans. That’s what you get for your vaunted pragmatism, folks. Well done. Now, do try to remember this the next time someone starts up with the whole pragmatic thing again.

In search of evidence that autism is not vaccine-related:

The mainstream scientific consensus says autism is a complex genetic disorder, one that has been around for millennia at roughly the same prevalence. That prevalence is now considered to be 1 in every 166 children born in the United States.

Applying that model to Lancaster County, there ought to be 130 Amish men, women and children here with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Well over 100, in rough terms.

Typically, half would harbor milder variants such as Asperger’s Disorder or the catch-all Pervasive Development Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified — PDD-NOS for short.

So let’s drop those from our calculation, even though “mild” is a relative term when it comes to autism.

That means upwards of 50 Amish people of all ages should be living in Lancaster County with full-syndrome autism, the “classic autism” first described in 1943 by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner at Johns Hopkins University. The full-syndrome disorder is hard to miss, characterized by “markedly abnormal or impaired development in social interaction and communication and a markedly restricted repertoire of activities and interests,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders….

So far, there is evidence of only three, all of them children, the oldest age 9 or 10. Julia is one of them. I found out about her through a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., Dr. Mary Megson. I had been asking around for quite some time about autism and the Amish, and she provided the first direct link.

Megson said she would give my name to this child’s mother, who could call if she chose. A few days later the phone rang. It was Stacey-jean Inion, an Amish-Mennonite woman. She, her husband Brent and their four children live simply, but they do drive a vehicle and have a telephone. After a few pleasantries, I told her about my trying to find autistic Amish.

Here is what she said, verbatim:

“Unfortunately our autistic daughter — who’s doing very well, she’s been diagnosed with very, very severe autism — is adopted from China, and so she would have had all her vaccines in China before we got her, and then she had most of her vaccines given to her in the United States before we got her.

I shall be most interested to hear the vaccine apologists explain this mysterious absence of autism among an unvaccinated population. Perhaps the reporter just didn’t look hard enough. Or perhaps some proper double-blind studies should be performed instead of relying on these statistical surveys which are so easily massaged.

Did I ever mention that I love Camille Paglia?

Age segregation by grade, in my opinion, is a mechanistic atrocity that spawns ruthless social cliques, who oppress and enrage the losers in the provincial pecking order.

As I have argued for years, we desperately need a return to vocational training. The virtually universal conversion of American high schools to a pre-college track over the past half-century has watered down the curriculum to its present deadening uselessness.

Now if we can simply convince her of the necessity of getting the government out of the picture….

Yeah, about all those Hispanics who were going to vote Republican because they’re so socially conservative….

A new study has struck a harsh blow to the premise that U.S. immigrants, particularly from Mexico, are committed to traditional family values.

The Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies said that immigrants from Mexico and Spanish-speaking countries were not committed to traditional values and pointed to the dramatic rise in illegitimate birth rates among Hispanic immigrants.

People occasionally ask me if the reason my political predictions are more accurate than most is because I’m so astonishingly brilliant. And sure, I am and all, but the truth is that the two really aren’t related. You see, you don’t have to be particularly intelligent to see where things are probably going, you just need to look at what the morons are doing and then consider the ways their idiotic plans are most likely to blow up in their faces.

The only way that Karl Rove could possibly be a genius is if he’s a secret Clinton operative.

The Magic Negro has no chance. He never did:

Meet Barack Obama, the BradleyDeanBabbittTsongas of the 2008 election cycle….

Let me repeat: I wouldn’t mind living in a country where Barack Obama is president. Brains; candor; charisma; ambition hitched to a work ethic; I admire those qualities. But frankly, the people who’ve ponied up $4,600 for Obama in this election cycle might as well have piled the money on the kitchen table and set fire to it. Or donated it to the Audubon Society, which has a lot better chance of being in business a year from now than Obama’s presidential campaign.

This guy, whoever he is, understands how it works. The vast majority of commentators and journalists, who fall for exactly the same trap every single time, obviously don’t.

Andrew Sullivan demonstrates that he’s not only got a giant fork sticking out of his back, he’s beginning to turn green and smell:

If gun rights are civil rights, why would anyone feel the need to hide the fact that they own one?

Gee, that’s a really tough one. Here’s four reasons off the top of my head. I’m sure I could come up with more if I thought about it for five seconds.

A) They’re worth hundreds of dollars.
B) Criminals who require them for nefarious purposes usually prefer to steal them rather than buy them.
C) Governments continually demonstrate a desire to confiscate them.
D) Liberals have been screaming for decades that the Second Amendment is a collective right, not an individual one.

Does anyone still think this guy is intelligent? I can’t understand why anyone ever did.

No wonder they’re getting their heads handed to them. Mr. Dr. Helen points out a laughable metaphor from a media boss:

“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation,” Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said, referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed “Custer’s Last Stand”.

It’s not about the battle, it’s about the war, Mr. Parsons. And you’re right, like the Sioux nation, the old media was there first.

So, where should we put the rez? And should we let them have casinos?

Every now and then, someone who wants to make a movie about one of the EW novels contacts me. This sort of thing is exactly why I tell them that I have very little interest in it:

When the historian Dee Brown published “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” in 1971, it became an instant sensation. In an age of rebellion, this nonfiction book told the epic tale of the displacement and decline of the American Indian not from the perspective of the winners, but from that of the Indians.

But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience. When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white woman….

Nicolas Proctor, Mr. Brown’s grandson and one of three people who oversees his estate, as well as an associate professor of history at Simpson College in Iowa, said that as a historian he was “always kind of shocked that history is not moving enough, is not evocative enough and rich enough to keep people from having to get in there and start monkeying around with it.” He said that the estate had no control over the film’s content.

Mr. Proctor said his grandfather wouldn’t necessarily be surprised by HBO’s tinkering. “I don’t think he ever thought anything historically accurate would come out of any film version,” he said. Still, before this, “nobody had ever before gone and gutted it and turned it into a love story.”

I hate Hollywood. Truly hate it. I hate the drivel they produce, I hate their smug pandering to the lowest common denominator, I hate their predictability, but most of all, I hate their unjustified arrogance in insisting that they can tell a better story than the most successful storytellers.

Even Peter Jackson, who did a much better job than I expected with The Lord of the Rings, couldn’t keep himself from occasionally sticking his fingers in, turning Gimli into the stock comic character. Oh, it was funny at times – “Toss me… don’t tell the elf”, but mostly it was lame and it didn’t add anything to the film. I thought the people at Walden did a better job with The Chronicles of Narnia, despite the limitations of the child actors.

Still, Shadow would make for a pretty good movie. I just hope Walden doesn’t mess around too much with The Dark is Rising. Besides LOTR and Narnia, that’s the childhood book I most wanted to see on screen.

Is there anyone here who is a Latin expert? I need to translate a paragraph into Latin and I want to make sure that it’s correct. If you can do it tonight, please email me.

Thank you.