Category: Uncategorized

From Drudge:

British investigators headed to a closed-door hearing Wednesday to argue that suspects arrested in an alleged plot to blow up as many as 10 trans-Atlantic jetliners should be kept in custody without charge. Meanwhile, Home Secretary John Reid said civil liberties “must and will be balanced by the right of collective security.”

This sort of arbitrary power must be nipped in the bud. If those arrested are believed to have done something illegal, then charge them with it. If they are aliens, then simply send them home. But to hold them without charging them with any wrongdoing is nothing more than kidnapping.

As the West opens its gates to the Third World, it continues to move away from the principles that separated it from the barbarians in the first place.

J-Pod ineptly and hysterically defends the World Democratic Revolution on NRO:

Despite being “disturbingly Leftist,” “shrill and uninformed,” and all sorts of generally awful things that place me entirely beyond the pale, I will manage to climb out of my hole of invincible ignorance to crawl next to the self-appointed Diogenes of Democracy, Andy McCarthy, and say that he has cast his lantern’s light upon the key question of our time. Can a Muslim nation ever be a functioning democracy? Andy offers the indictment. But he cannot secure a conviction, because he does not have sufficient evidence. The “democracy project” has not even had five years yet, and it is already declared a monstrous failure because in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, monstrous things are still going on and the governments include monstrous people in them.

No, those failures, (Podhoretz leaves out the Palestinian election of Hamas), are conclusive because they sustain the prediction of failure made by those of us who are more historically astute than the NROniks, whose memory only goes back to the Immaculate Election of Bush the Younger.

One would imagine that before even beginning to offer speculations on the likely fate of democracy in the Dar al-Islam, one would consider how it has fared in three Muslim democracies, Turkey, Indonesia and Algeria. Indonesia is the only country where democracy has not been a complete failure, although that is largely due to the vestiges of Suharto’s autocratic rule which ended in 1998. Turkey’s democracy is kept strictly penned and is “guided” by the military, which has mounted three coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 to overturn democratically elected governments.

In Algeria, meanwhile, the military intervened in 1992 when it became clear that the radical Islamic party was going to win the parliamentary elections and sparked a murderous civil war that lasted ten years and will likely start up again should the military relax its hold on the country.

Thus, the failure of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan should come as a surprise to no one. The fact that it could surprise anyone is merely testimony to the historical ignorance that pervades the blogosphere and the commentariat.

UPDATE: McCarthy’s devastating bitch slap which inspired Podhoretz’s incompetent post is worth reading too:

The basic thing you and those who agree with you insist on as an article of faith — namely, that “of course terrorism and democracy are irreconcilable” — is demonstrably wrong. Whether you like it or not, terrorists have great popular support in Lebanon. It may not be majority popular support, but it is at least substantial popular support. The same is true in the other “young democracies” in the Middle East. As long as the administration continues to confound popular elections with democracy — which is exactly what it is doing, whether you admit it or not — we are going to see this.

The gross irresponsibility here is staggering.

I don’t know why NRO or anyone else publishes Podhoretz on politics. He’s fine when it comes to movies, and he would do well to limit his public commentary to them.

Every woman needs this sort of protection:

One Israeli woman has received an unexpected boost from her breast implants during the Lebanon war — the silicone embeds saved her life during a Hezbollah rocket attack, a doctor said. “This is an extraordinary case, but it’s a fact that the silicone implants prevented her from a more serious and deeper wound,” Jacky Govrin, of the hospital in Nahariya that treated the woman, told army radio Tuesday.

“The young woman went through surgery two years ago to have a larger chest,” he said. “During the war she was wounded in the chest by shrapnel” that got stuck in the implants instead of penetrating further. The woman did not emerge from her ordeal completely unscathed, however. “The shrapnel was removed but the implant had to be replaced,” Govrin said.

It’s just a matter of safety and personal security, really.

From the Telegraph:

Police are seeking new powers of “instant justice” to combat anti-social behaviour and bypass the courts, according to reports. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Apco) is considering pressing ministers to dispense punishment without the need for a court appearance.

This sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Considering that courts and equal rights before the law are supposed to be proof of our civilization, it can’t be a good sign when Western authorities not only wish to move away from such things, but believe they stand a good chance of getting away with it.

I imagine that if the nations of the West weren’t importing millions of third world quasi-barbarians, it wouldn’t be deemed necessary to devolve into semi-civilized societies dependent upon the arbitrary application of force by the authorities.

Remember it this fall, when they urge you to just vote (R) regardless of your liking for the candidate:

Q Does the President support the Republican candidate for Senate in Connecticut?

MR. SNOW: The President supports the democratic process in the state of Connecticut, and wishes them a successful election in November.

Q Wait a minute. I realize he supports democracy, but I’m wondering, does he actually support his own party’s candidate?

MR. SNOW: I know that’s not news —

Q Why aren’t you committing — why wouldn’t the President commit support for the Republican candidate in that —

MR. SNOW: I don’t know. Why do you ask?

If the President and the RNC don’t take party identification seriously, why should you?

The one saving grace might be the last “benefit”, in that if the girl truly has a logically-oriented, masculine mind, this could simply be a rational, technology-assisted way to go about finding a mate in a larger pool of available men. But something about the subtext just screams DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN:

I have a *lot* of choices of men who want to date me. Given that, of course I choose to date only the highest quality men — men who are also fit, attractive, intelligent, educated, financially successful, etc. I’m attracted to men from any race and a wide age range (21 to 50 or so) so the pool of men who meet those requirements is quite large, which allows me to add all sorts of additional restrictions if I want — must be atheist, must be libertarian, must not want (more) children, must be financially independent or self-employed and available for frequent world travel, etc.

Her suggestions for men are fairly reasonable, though I find it amusing that despite her intelligence, she is not experienced enough to realize that “educated” is not necessarily considered a plus among highly educated, intelligent men these days. Unfortunately for her, she’s not anywhere nearly attractive enough to “date only the highest quality men”; if she’s more attractive than 86 percent of the single women on the planet, I’ll have to reconsider the notion of ever leaving the house again.

UPDATE: Upon further reason, this girl doesn’t stand a chance. The following exchange is the gold mine; apparently she has ADHD, which leads to this:

Actually, ADHD is a mental illness which I pointed out to you before in one of your posts claiming that people who believe in God are mentally ill. You are, according to the standard reference of the American Psychiatric Association, mentally ill.
– Posted by: Individualist Woman

They used to classify homosexuality as a mental illness too, that doesn’t mean it is or was.
– Posted by: Jacqueline

If you disagree with that, that’s fine. But that’s the professional standard, and most people recognize that as more credible than your own personal definition that conveniently makes you not mentally ill but the vast majority of other people mentally ill.
– Posted by: Individualist Woman

Highly intelligent, reasonably educated, and yet in the end just another self-centered woman who can’t handle basic logic when it doesn’t suit her wishes.

This one didn’t quite make it into the column today, as it ranged rather too far afield. It deals with the failure of His Majesty’s Government to secure a tripartite alliance between Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union in 1939, prior to the Soviet-German nonaggression pact. The Soviets had eagerly pursued this alliance after the fall of Czechoslovakia exposed Poland to the Germans, but when the British de facto rejected it by sitting on it for months, the pro-Western Maksim Litinov who’d pushed it fell from favor and was replaced with the infamous Molotov.

“Here their error was not only spectacular, it was historic. Harold Macmillan, one of the handful who suspected what was coming, was puzzled by their blindness. In part they were victims of a distorted self-image, an illusion common among superpowers; like Americans a generation later, they assumed that all other countries held them in high regard. Actually, the men in the Kremlin bore malice towards the Western Allies, and with reason.”
– William Manchester, The Last Lion, vol. II, p. 474-5.

It’s important to keep in mind that the willful blindness of HMG, led first by Stanley Baldwin and later Neville Chamberlain, lasted a full seven years. During that time, Germany assassinated one head of state, annexed two countries, bombed a third and repeatedly rattled its saber despite being in a much weaker military position compared to France, let alone all of its future enemies. The Polish army alone was more than twice the size of the Wehrmacht for most of that period.

It is important to keep this in mind when considering the position of the United States versus the jihad. Unlike the pre-WWII situation, the Dar al-Islam is actually larger than the Western Allies and unlike the historical Germans, it has successfully infiltrated the West as well. The West today is arguably more susceptible to the weakness of will which Hitler successfully diagnosed and rode to successive victories over Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and France; bin Laden’s assessment of strong and weak horses is significantly less insane than it might appear on the surface.

This quote delves to the inherent flaw in the Bush administration’s approach, which relies on the concept that Muslims wish to live under Western cultural standards. This is not dissimilar to the error made by the Edwardian leaders, who found it impossible to understand that the nations of the Empire would not wish to live under Imperial rule were it to be made optional.

Remember that bit about the brothel or the burqah? In England, some feminists are going for the burqah:

As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.

On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say.

Except, of course, to join it, the morons. And as for that “strawfeminist” concept, it tends to fall apart when you can so easily find feminists who fit the description:

I’m always startled at the anti-childbirth, anti-mother faction within feminism, because whenever an acquaintance of mine says something like “I don’t like feminists, they wouldn’t respect my decision to have children” or “Feminism isn’t for me, because I really want kids,” I want to be able to tell them “no! it’s okay! That won’t happen here…!

When feminists buy into the idea that giving birth is weird, or icky, or not a possible feminist choice, they are playing directly into the hands of the opposition. The right wing knows that this sort of division is bound to alienate 85% of women from feminism in all forms — and they’re fully armed with people who’ll tell them that feminism is anti-mother. When feminists themselves add to this view, they are living down to a strawfeminist stereotype that should be beneath them.

Oh, but it isn’t. In terms of sheer loathsomeness, I rank feminists just above Stalin-era Communists and a degree or two below National Socialists. As their enthusiasm for anti-Patriarchal Judenhassen and Hezbollah demonstrates, that’s about the right place for them.

From the Washington Times:

The original film footage of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, one of the most important artifacts of the 20th century, has been lost. The television broadcast seen by about 600 million people in July 1969 is preserved for posterity, but the original tapes from which the footage was taken have been mislaid, most likely in NASA’s vast archives at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The footage could transform our view of the moon landings, offering images far sharper than the blurred, grainy video shown around the world. It also could lay to rest the conspiracy theory that the landings were faked on a Hollywood soundstage.

I tend to support the faked Moon landing theory myself, not because of any particular detail, but simply based on the theory that if the Official Story is that we landed there, then we probably didn’t. This mysterious disappearance tends to support that… it’s intriguing to see how tapes, videos and recordings never seem to survive whenever an Official Story is questioned by the public.

I finished reading the second volume of Churchill’s biography yesterday and rather enjoyed seeing conclusive proof of how readily British government leaders would lie to the British people. Baldwin blatantly lied to Parliament about German military developments for years every time he was asked about them, while Churchill himself often lied about British shipping losses when he was at the Admiralty in 1939. (In fairness, they were at war by then and national morale was a real issue. Plus, it really pissed Hitler off.)

The more history one reads, the more one realizes that one cannot trust even the most basic statements of fact from politicians and bureaucrats.