Category: Uncategorized

Debka investigates the “acid-throwing” by the protesting Jewish settlers:

The tale of the acid attack by disorderly evacuation resisters against Israeli troops and police was born on the spur of the moment amid the noise and clamor of the evacuation of the Kfar Darom synagogue in the Gaza Strip Thursday, Aug 18.

It was picked up without any sort of investigation with suspicious speed.

While the activists were still being handed down from the synagogue roof, OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen Dan Harel and Israeli police commissioner Moshe Karadi stood below. With shocked faces, they announced that the roof holdouts had poured acid and seriously injured the special border police unit members as they scaled ladders to remove them. The men were described as having fled in a panic, to strip off their burned uniforms and be sluiced down with water.

Live broadcasts from the scene reportedly hysterically that six ambulances had rushed the injured police officers to hospital. Defense minister Shaul Mofaz announced he had asked the state attorney to file serious charges against the alleged acid-throwers….

By this time, the acid-in-the-synagogue story was being lapped up by the international media.

None heeded the denials issued by the alleged acid-throwers or the testimony of the deputy director of Beersheba’s Sorocca hospital, who treated the 75 policemen. He said he had seen no acid burns or any other marks of violence. Some showed slight irritation around the eyes, possibly from turpentine solution. They all arrived partially dehydrated, some feeling faint, but there was nothing medically amiss to warrant rushing any of the men in blue to the hospital.

Friday afternoon, Aug 19, Michael Eytan, chairman of the Knesset law committee, published a furious protest against “the acid lie.” He called it “a blood libel” designed to mar the atmosphere of restraint and mutual sympathy that had prevailed in the evacuation operation till then. Responding to the lawmaker’s inquiry, the hospital expressed itself surprised to see the men. They had no need of medical treatment and most were released soon after their admission.

Those of you who believe the Sharon government is only cleansing Gaza of a religious Jewish presence because it is necessary might want to keep this incident in mind when you consider whether it is telling the truth about the situation or not.

QB Trent Green
RB Domanick Davis
RB Lamont Jordan
WR Marvin Harrison
WR Steve Smith
WR Jerry Porter
TE Randy McMichael
K Jeff Wilkins
DEF Atlanta

I can’t decide if I like my team or not. It strikes me as one with decent potential, provided I make reasonable pickups along the way, but there’s no one that’s liable to strike fear in anyone’s heart. But, when you finish in third place, you pick eighth, so what do you do. Here’s hoping Oakland’s offense manages to turn it around.

The big question I’m still wondering about was TO. He went in the third round and I’m wondering if I should have paired him with Harrison. As it stands, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger on him and he ended up with Chokechain, who also has Priest Holmes. I play Chokechain in Week One and his team strikes me as one that could either walk all over everyone or fall completely apart by Week Four.

There’s only one way to find out.

Northwest’s mechanics go on strike:

After months of talks broke off here just before midnight Friday, union spokesman Jim Young said the mechanics would rather see the airline go into bankruptcy than agree to Northwest’s terms. The Airline Mechanics Fraternal Association 4,427 of Northwest’s 40,000 workers.

This simply goes to show how much unions care about their fellow workers. They’d rather pull the plug on the 35,573 employees who don’t belong to their own little union than lose 2,200 jobs. Is that understandable? To a certain extent, misery loving company and all, but it also shows precisely the same level of indifference to others that unions typically accuse management of having.

It would seem that they are simply projecting, wouldn’t it.

Bob Costas isn’t interested in dead girls:

While some cable TV hosts are making their living off the Natalee Holloway case this summer, Bob Costas is having none of it. Costas, hired by CNN as an occasional fill-in on “Larry King Live,” refused to anchor Thursday’s show because it was primarily about the Alabama teenager who went missing in Aruba. Chris Pixley filled in at the last minute.

“I didn’t think the subject matter of Thursday’s show was the kind of broadcast I should be doing,” Costas said in a statement. “I suggested some alternatives but the producers preferred the topics they had chosen. I was fine with that, and respectfully declined to participate.”

Costas’ manager declined to elaborate on what Costas didn’t like about the topic.

Bravo for Costas. It’s interesting to see how the sports guys have better instincts for what is and is not news than the news people. I have no sympathy for the newspapers and the cable news networks as they continue to decline. Their business model was predicated on being the only game in town, they badly abused their position of privilege and one now derives a true sense of schadenfreude in watching them devolve into shallow emotional porn for barely educated women.

Missing girls and Michael Jackson. What a fitting epitaph!

Tangentially speaking, it may surprise some of you, but I probably don’t watch more than 10 minutes worth of Fox per week, and that only because Space Bunny occasionally watches a bit of Neal Cavuto while channel-flipping. I don’t watch O’Reilly, Hannity & Colmes, I’ve never seen the shows hosted by Tucker Carlson, John Stewart or Greta van Susteren and although I’ve read his name once or twice, I have no idea what Aaron Brown looks like. I never, ever watch CNN, MSNBC CNBC or anything else, and yet I would appear to be reasonably well-informed nevertheless.

And yet some are still wondering why I’m not desperate to appear on TV. This is amusing, because I recently decided to stop doing radio as well – barring Malkin ever accepting my challenge to a debate on the military necessity for the WWII-era internments. My reasoning is that while it’s possible for people to learn and modify their thinking through the two-way interaction possible on the Internet, radio is primarily a combination of preaching to the choir and dancing monkey performances, neither of which appeal to me.

I guess what it boils down to is that I refuse to waste any time on mediums that allow individuals to use the momentum inherent in the medium to skate unchallenged past their logical and factual errors. I’d much rather spend my time doing my job, writing books and interacting with people here. It’s so much more rewarding to receive emails telling me how someone picked up Susan Cooper’s books for the first time or has begun to delve into Austrian economics or Elliott Wave theory than it is to correct a clueless radio host on comparative coastlines or basic econ 101.

The Flem-file writes of Michael Vick, the greatest QB ever:

I recently had a long conversation with Falcs QB coach Mike Johnson, who assured me that Vick was 1) working on his checkdowns, something that’s vital to the West Coast because with coverage zones swamped, those late release guys are usually unaccounted for; 2) working on his footwork in the pocket and; 3) working on his defensive recognition. Then the first three things I saw him do against the Colts and Ravens were 1) run out of the pocket with a checkdown wide open in the flat; 2) bounce in his stance at the end of his drop instead of getting rid of the ball when his back foot hit the turf and; 3) look absolutely befuddled by the stunts and fronts devised for him by Baltimore.

Now, Mike can do all of the above, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. So it has become a matter of whether or not he wants to, whether or not he chooses to. He’s already a great quarterback. But if he can’t take the next step as a passer, he’s only pretending to be a transcendent talent.

It’s not all about the athletics… it’s not all about the athletics… it’s not all about the athletics.

What I’ve said about McNabb goes for Vick three times over. But Flem is wrong. Vick is not a great quarterback, he is a great athlete who is a barely passable quarterback. It is possible that he will become a great quarterback, but I think it rather unlikely.

NRO accidentally tells the truth:

The pictures from Gaza are wrenching: children crying and trying to push away the Israeli soldiers — some of them also in tears — who have arrived to chase them from their homes. On the other hand, they are heartening too. This is a civilized, democratic society at work. Prime Minister Sharon’s decision to pull out of Gaza represents the lawful will of the Israeli majority, and it will not be frustrated by a minority, no matter how passionate or committed.

So, Sharon ran for office by promising no territorial concessions of any kind. He won. Once in office, he reversed his position over the vehement protests of his own party and cabinet ministers.

As much-betrayed conservative Republicans know, this is exactly how a civilized democratic society works. The politicians lie, the people fall for the lies, and the politicians go on to do whatever they like in office under the cover of their fraudulently obtained public approval.

A definitive definition:

The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of one ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide…. The term “ethnic cleansing” has come to mean the displacement or expulsion from a territory of one ethnic group by another. The displacement is usually forcible, though there are examples of voluntary or compensated ethnic cleansing. The 20th century has seen numerous cases, particularly in Europe and the Middle East.

At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the forced expulsion of an “undesirable” population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.

I note that of the many historical examples given by Wikipedia, most involve a relatively non-violent relocation of an ethnic or religious group. The only disingenuousness here is on the part of those attempting to apologize for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza; the primary connection with genocide is that it is sometimes used as a euphemism for it.

The fact that most apologists for this most recent ethnic cleansing are ignorant of Greek, Finnish, Indian, Italian, Pakistani and Turkish history, among others, does not change the fact that the Israeli government is doing precisely what at least 30 non-genocidal governments have done since World War II.

As to the aspect of the definition which refers to “one group by another”, it must be remembered that Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government are secular, while the settlers are religious Jews.

Soaring home prices in California haven’t deterred first-time buyers from entering the market in record numbers, and many of them are going to extraordinary lengths to dive in, according to a study released Thursday.

Californians are increasingly sinking more than half their incomes into mortgage payments, taking on enormous debt, forgoing down payments and signing interest-only or adjustable-rate mortgages, according to the study by the Public Policy Institute of California. Although California still lags behind most states in terms of home ownership, the buying frenzy has lifted it to its highest level — 59 percent — since 1960, the study found.

What is the most fundamental rule of making money? Buy low, sell high. So, if prices are at all time highs, what does this rule suggest is the correct thing to do if you wish to profit?

Hacker objects:

“The use of the term “Ethnic Cleansing” by VD is, I submit, disingenuous on his part. While his definition is a correct one, it’s not a common one or one that’s generally understood.”

It is not disingenuous, it is linguistically precise rhetoric. In case you hadn’t noticed, I regularly use words that are neither common nor generally understood.

As usual, those with a weak logical case attempt to linguistically clean the language to their liking. Hence Malkin’s attack on the term “concentration camp” being used for literal concentration camps and so forth.

Those who are attempting to disguise or explain away their actions always try to hide behind euphemisms. Their apologists will often fiercely attack those who speak plainly. If President Bush were to send in the U.S. Army to “evacuate” the six million Jews in the United States to Israel, I have no doubt that the term “ethnic cleansing” would be among the calmer and more gentle terms slung about.

And yet, that is precisely what Ariel Sharon has ordered the I.D.F. to do to a Jewish population that at .66 percent is not significantly smaller in percentage terms than the 2 percent of the American population represented by American Jews.

The Gaza expulsions are an ethnic cleansing. It is possibly the most humane ethnic cleansing since Ferdinand and Isabella expelled 200,000 Jews from Spain, but it is, nevertheless, an ethnic cleansing.

From Debkafile:

The uniformed men had braced for violent resistance. Instead they were greeted with prayers, laments, outpourings of bitter outrage and chorused recitations of Psalms. The soldiers must have asked themselves: What happened to the “violent extremists,” the loonies they had been taught for more than a year to confront? And why were 40,000 combat troops called up to evict a few thousand civilians, half children, who had clearly no plans of physical resistance?

Police commissioner Moshe Karadi confessed his surprise at the sparse violence in most places. If the present pace is sustained, this part of the operation could be over much sooner than expected and with a lot less pain….

There are three possible motives behind the decision to deploy excessive force:

1. The IDF is ignorant of civilian life, especially in Gush Katif – an illogical assumption.

2. Poor intelligence – impossible since the soldiers have been living and operating in the enclave 365 days a year and are familiar with every home and grain of sand.

3. This leaves the third premise, that the operation’s military planners were under orders from their superiors to deploy a colossal force for reasons of their own. Chief of staff Lt. Gen Dan Halutz and police commissioner Moshe Karadi take their orders directly from the prime minister Ariel Sharon and defense minister Shaul Mofaz. The question therefore, is what game were they playing?

There are two hypotheses:

One, As a veteran general, Sharon is accustomed to commanding large bodies of men. In his mind, Gush Katif was no different from any other front.

Two, Or else, the political campaign to discredit and demonize the substantial opposition to the prime minister’s evacuation plans was best served by inflating the size of the force required to handle it.

The local media played a key role here. Day and night, they harped on the grave menace posed by so-called right-wing extremists to elected government, senior officials including Sharon and democracy at large. The threat was built up to monstrous proportions. Nothing less than full mobilization would have served to match it. To pursue this tactic, prime minister used the armed forces as a political instrument rather than for their dedicated mission of defending the nation against its enemies. Israel’s Supreme Court of Justice played into his hands by declaring the IDF’s mission was to defend democracy, which in fact was not threatened.

Not just the local media. Those NRO writers about whom I wrote below appear to be doing their part to demonize the Jewish settlers.

Defending democracy. We seem to be hearing that phrase a lot recently.