Category: Uncategorized

Toledo residents manage to get outsmarted by Nazi morons:

A crowd protesting a white supremacists’ march Saturday turned violent, throwing baseball-sized rocks at police, vandalizing vehicles and stores, and setting fire to a neighborhood bar, authorities said.

When Mayor Jack Ford and a local minister tried to calm the rioting, they were cursed for allowing the march, and Ford said a masked gang member threatened to shoot him. At least 65 people were arrested and several police officers were injured before calm was restored about four hours later.

If you ever want to develop past a child’s understanding of the universe, you absolutely need to understand that when it comes to human relations, it is entirely possible for both parties to a dispute to be hopelessly wrong. Sometimes, even most of the time, there are no good guys.

“‘It’s exactly what they wanted,’ Ford said of the group that planned the march”. Gee, do you think so? Because personally, I know I always tend to think more highly of people who go berserk and burn things because they don’t like what someone else is saying.

Ramesh Ponnuru writes on NRO’s Corner:

Speaking of Republican strategists, another one spoke to me the other day. I asked him what Republicans could do to bounce back, and he had three suggestions.

The first was for the president to “stop going to New Orleans.”

The second was that Republicans needed to find a way to go on offense on taxes

The third was that Miers withdraw her nomination.

And so the momentum builds…. Also on The Corner, Jon Podhoretz notes that this praise for Miers comes from the TalkLeft blog:

Most of those I’ve spoken with believe she will be okay or better as a Supreme Court Justice. While she may be more conservative than many of us, all thought she would be fair. No one can recall a single instance of her talking about abortion or Roe v. Wade…. The main thing to keep in mind are the alternatives. From a legal standpoint, we lucked out with both Roberts and Harriet Miers. If she were to withdraw and Bush were then to repay the radical right what they think he owes them, we will be far worse off.

Joseph Farah demonstrates the fortitude to openly admit past errors:

My instincts were right back in 2004.

I should not have pulled the lever for George W. Bush and I should never have urged others to do so. Even my wife, who coaxed me to break my vow never to support a candidate who doesn’t honor the Constitution, agrees now it was a mistake.

Without making more excuses, all I can say for myself was that I was so moved by the action of the Swiftboat Vets and their righteous campaign against traitor John Kerry, my emotions got the best of me.

I lost my head. I was not true to the promise in my own book, “Taking America Back,” just out in paperback, to avoid supporting the lesser of two evils, to avoid making insidious compromises in electoral politics, to avoid, at all costs, supporting politicians who do not understand and abide by the Constitution.

Mr. Farah is a good man, and I’m pleased that he’s decided to face the facts. I admire anyone who has the courage to shake their head, admit that they got it wrong and try to learn the appropriate lesson.

I always find it interesting how the Constitution and unalienable rights endowed by the Creator have to be “put in perspective”. Or how violations of them have to be “understood in context” of the surrounding events.

That’s just weasel talk for justifying the evasion of the limits on the government by the government. Which has happened in the past and will happen in the future, until those rights are noteworthy only for their absence.

It would be nice if just one government, somewhere in the world, was truly dedicated to the rights of the individual instead of constantly attempting to manufacture a thousand thousand reasons to limit, work around and eliminate them. Just one. All the security wet-blankets, the social net neo-Marxists, the power-mad bureaucrats and the respect-through-legislation women can have the rest of them, as far as I’m concerned. Just one, is that too much to ask for? Apparently.

I would live there.

Sinewave demonstrates his successfully indocrination by the PC crowd:

OK, I’m going to slammed for this, but here it goes. I feel using “me-so” in Michelle’s name is racist.

She is ditzy and pompous, but I don’t believe a tramp.

The “Me-so” title implies she is a whore from SE Asia. I assume your using it becasue she’s of Asian descent.

Feel however you like. Of course, by this definition, any reference whatsoever to an individual’s race is racist. But Dictionary.com defines racism thusly:

1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.

Does lableling an Asian woman “Me So Michelle” indicate a belief that her demonstrably low level of intellectual character is based on her being Asian? Does it even state anything about her ability at all? No. Does it amount to discrimination or prejudice? Again, no. If I were regularly referring to all Asian women in this manner, then one might have a case, but this is clearly not so and the basis for my disregard for this particular Asian woman should be fairly well established by now as one that has everything to do with the content of her character, not the color of her skin.

I do quite enjoy applying infelicitous appellations, and Michelle Malkin’s not only refers to her being a metaphorical prostitute – only Bill O’Reilly more richly deserves the title of media whore – but also refers to her insistence on thrusting herself into the middle of whatever issue is currently topping the news cycle. And the metaphor works very well indeed; I am always amused by one of the ways in which bloggers regularly refer to her:

OKLAHOMA UNIVERSITY BOMBER
“It looks like Michelle Malkin is on top of it.”
October 7, 2005
Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online

TOM DELAY INDICTED
“Michelle Malkin is all over it”
September 28, 2005
Badger Blogger

AIR AMERICA SCANDAL
“Michelle Malkin is all over it.”
August 3, 2005
Spartac.us

BUSH WILL ANNOUNCE NOMINEE IN PRIME TIME
“President Bush has made up his mind! And he will announce his nomineee for Supreme Court Justice tonight. Should be interesting. Michelle Malkin is all over it.”
July 19, 2005
Strange Things Afoot

There’s a word for women who make a career of draping themselves all over everything, is there not? And what is that word, it seems to be escaping me just at the moment?

Now, I will readily admit to having a serious problem with Malkin, just as I do with Bill O’Reilly, Al Franken, Ben Shapiro, Frank Rich, Susan Estrich, Maureen Dowd and Sean Hannity. My problem is that people take these ludicrious charlatans seriously, when they would be much better off paying attention to the John Derbyshires, Jonah Goldbergs, Ramesh Ponnurus, Pat Buchanans, George Wills, Eric Altermans and Ann Coulters of the world. Even when the latter sort are wrong – and they often are – at least they attempt to be intellectually honest when they go about making their arguments.

Charles Lofgren reviews Malkin’s travesty for the Claremont Institute:

The brunt of criticism has fallen on Malkin’s claims about the relocation as a response to a military threat perceived as real at the time. Unfortunately, she does not carefully sort out what was known at the time from what was not. One of Malkin’s blogger critics quickly observed that the Japanese submarine’s shelling of the oil field near Santa Barbara on February 23, 1942, could hardly have been a factor in the key decisions of the preceding several weeks. In response*, Malkin noted that she had linked the shelling to the speeded-up evacuation of Terminal Island on February 25. This comes about 80 pages later.

Similar difficulties are explained away less easily. After describing the shelling episode, Malkin turns to Japanese operations in the Pacific immediately after Pearl Harbor and to Secretary Stimson’s fear of raids against the American mainland. The reader then learns that Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, a Japanese naval commander, had precisely this in mind. Relegated to a footnote is Malkin’s qualification that the source from which she drew the episode “states that other Japanese officers were unenthusiastic about Yamaguchi’s plan.” She does not mention at all that Yamaguchi presented his plan at a conference on February 20-23, 1942, on board a Japanese battleship. Did Yamaguchi’s plan help shape American thinking relating to the evacuation? Could it have? One suspects not. (Malkin covers herself, perhaps, by noting that similar ideas circulated in the Japanese media.)

Another problem of sequence emerges when the reader learns “[i]n the Philippines, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and statesman Carlos Romulo described massive Japanese espionage activity in the country prior to the war.” Malkin then provides several details. The source is a book by Romulo, one written and published following his arrival in the United States in June 1942. A bit further on, as added evidence for why Americans in late 1941 and early 1942 could reasonably have worried about the enemy in their midst, the reader learns that “Japan’s surrender in 1945 came as a traumatic blow to many Hawaiian Issei,” and that Tomoya Kawakita, a Nisei who served in Japan’s army, “tortured scores of American POW’s held in a Japanese prison camp.” The torture occurred during the war, of course, and Kawakita was exposed after the war once he returned to Los Angeles.

The reviewer’s reference to “the brunt of criticism” is interesting considering that none of the debates in which Malkin was willing to engage had anything to do with the military threat. That was the issue I raised, the one that Malkin was willing to lie rather than address in any way.

And for all that Yamaguchi might have had the bright idea to engage in a stupid, risky and pointless series of raids, the USN’s post-war interviews with other Japanese admirals demonstrate very clearly that his superiors, including Admiral Yamamoto, had no intention of invading Hawaii, let alone the American West Coast. As I have demonstrated, even a successful and costless series of raids could not have slowed down the American war effort by a single day, let alone “crippled” it as Malkin ludicrously asserted.

It is a pity that the reviewer did not see fit to mention how Malkin not only demonstrates a near-complete ignorance of a) military logistics, b) American war plans, c) basic Naval details (she not only halved the number of American aircraft carriers, but didn’t know where any of them were in early 1942) and d) post-Pearl Harbor naval movements and theatre priorities, but a singular in ability to reason logically in asserting a proof of military necessity based on Secretary of War Stinson’s post-war comments. Since Stinson was arguably one of the primary players in the internment order, Malkin is simply engaging in circular reasoning.

Amusingly enough, the Malkin defender cited by Powerline in Me So’s defense follows her lead in failing to address any of these points, preferring instead to engage in what-if scenarios. But I’m quite pleased that others are finally noticing the gaping hole in Malkin’s moronic thesis, as Lofgren finally concludes:

“Indeed, Malkin never quite brings together the argument that for the decision-makers in Washington, D.C., military necessity, as inferred from sources known at the time, was the reason for the indiscriminate mass evacuation that actually occurred.”

Exactly. Although I would tend to agree with Ken Masugi in saying that “needlessly inaccurate” isn’t really fair to the book. “Wildly inaccurate and nonsensically amateurish” would be more precise, in my opinion.

*This is why I despise Malkin. She simply can’t admit that she’s wrong. Whenever she’s exposed, her immediate reaction is to lie. At least the leftist lunatics usually have the excuse of genuinely not having a clue.

Crom hits a girl:

Regarding the Jolie v. Pitt matchup it’s ridiculous to think that she would even stand a chance. I am a mid-level combat hapkido student and when I recently sparred a black-belt female it was a joke. She was more talented in her movements, but if I hadn’t have pulled my punches I would have broken her. By the end of the three minutes she was not pulling anything, and I still was holding back.
She was furious at the end of the match, and said that in a tournament she would have been the victor. I replied that in a tournament, yes – but on the street she would have been stomped.

This is typical of the attitude of both women and men who are only trained to tournament fight. It bears no more resemblance to actual physical combat than modern fencing does to the armored brawls that characterized medieval combat.

There were no such point fighters at my dojo, as it was not only the most notoriously brutal fighting school in the Twin Cities but the only one to ever sweep all the first-places in a major tournament, from gold to black. However, on the few occasions I did run into a woman sporting this kind of attitude, I simply smashed right through her defenses and dropped her. Do this twice in a row and either they’ll lose the attitude and ask what they can do to try and defend themselves – which is usually what happens – or else they’ll pretend to be hurt and quit for the day.

Most martial arts schools do their students a real disservice by failing to allow them to spar properly. Techniques are great, but they’re only one part of the equation. Speed, power, fitness and general toughness are all important elements of unarmed combat and they vary in importance depending on the specific opponent.

A wrestler will almost always beat a tae kwon do kicker, as will a boxer. But both boxers and wrestlers are very vulnerable to judo and akido moves, and nobody matches up well with kali fighters except the manics who do the real muey thai, not the watered-down American kickboxing version. There is no magical one set of techniques that can guarantee victory over anyone, it’s simply a matter of increasing your probabilities of success given what you have to work with.

All the skill and technique in the world don’t matter much if your opponent whacks you over the head from behind with a baseball bat, is so much stronger than you that your blocking limbs get broken or is so much faster that you don’t even see the blows coming. Women who train but don’t fight hard contact simply don’t understand how great their speed and power deficiency is until it is demonstrated to them in a manner they cannot help but understand.

As my instructor said when he helped me up off the floor after completely failing to pull his punches: “You were getting careless, so I felt that it was a teaching moment.”

From James P. Hogan’s THE GENESIS MACHINE:

The Aub that Clifford grew to know better during this time turned out to be even better than his first impressions had suggested. Like Clifford, he was preoccupied, almost obsessed, with a compulsive urge to add further to the stock of human scientific knowledge; he had no political persuasions and few ideological beliefs, certainly none that could be classed as part of any recognizable formal system. He accepted as so self-evident that it was not worthy of debate the axiom that only the harnessing of knowledge to create universal wealth and security could provide a permanent solution to the world’s problems. It was not, however, the desire to discharge any moral obligation to the rest of humanity that spurred him Onward; it was simply his insatiable curiosity and the need to exercise his own extraordinary inventive abilities.

Actually, “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is not exactly a new or aspiritual concept. The fact that adding to the stock of human scientific knowledge is what one wilts doesn’t change the fact that as described here, it is an entirely selfish exercise and however desirable it might be in comparison with another who wilts genocide or forced sexual pleasure derived by the use of violence and physical strength, it hails from the same ethical source.

Indeed, the notion that knowledge – for which “education” appears to be considered an adequate substitute, if not wholly synonymous – will provide a permanent solution has become a veritable religion of its own. It is a faith every bit as blind as the Communist religion; although it lacks a single, extraordinary prophet it does have a handy priesthood in the secular SF-writing community.

Handicapped by their youthful social inadequacies, this fairly intelligent group of people nevertheless can be depended upon to get it wildly wrong whenever it comes to the basics of human interaction. This is not only why their futuristic techno-utopias are usually designed to mimic economic and political models which are already defunct, but why their sex scenes are unspeakable disasters so clumsy as to make romance novels look sophisticated. The reason that the woman always takes the sexual initiative in an SF novel is that the overweight wallflower who has written the book cannot for the life of him imagine how one would even begin to go about seducing a woman.

The SF-writing community sometimes reminds me of the journalism crowd, another group notoriously bad at self-examination. They are smug in their certainty that they have no ideology, even as they go about the act of propagandistically furthering the supposedly non-existent beast.

From Drudge:

The DRUDGE REPORT can now reveal that not only did Harriet Miers testify that she would not join the “politically charged” Federalist Society — she testified that she had joined a liberal organization – the Democratic Progressive Voters League.

[According to the Handbook of Texas Online [http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/DD/wed1.html], the Democratic Progressive Voters League is a Dallas political organization closely associated with the Democratic Party.]

Miers was also asked whether she considered “the NAACP [to be] in the category of organizations” that she considered to be “politically charged.”

Her answer: “No, I don’t.”

Adios, Miss Harriet.

Witrack emails to inform me that someone named Stephanie Miller is a big fan:

Stephanie Miller mentioned, or rather read and made fun of your latest article on KTLA 1150, an Air America station.

She called it “dating tips from a skinhead”. And they said you probably live in your mother’s basement, etc. It wasn’t really that funny when they talked about it, to me anyway.

Just thought you’d like to know that you have now hit the big time, being mentioned Air America!

It seems Witrack and I have divergent opinions on hitting the big time…. I’ve never heard of this woman before, but I’m guessing that Miss Miller is a strong and independent liberal thirty-something career woman with a communications degree from a third-rate university who doesn’t have children and loves cats. Now, I don’t actually know anything about her since I don’t listen to talk radio, but what are the odds that I’m completely wrong? Two percent, maybe three? If anyone’s inclined, look it up and see if I’m right.

Anyhow, Chad the Elder and the Fraters Libertas gang will be pleased. They can now add Vox Day vs Stephanie Miller to their proposed Northern Alliance – Air America rumble.

And then it occurs to me. Witrack, my friend, what on Earth are you doing listening to Air America? Is it even supposed to be funny?

UPDATE: Witrack says that you can probably hear it tomorrow, if you’re so inclined, here. Let me know if they say anything interesting.