Category: Uncategorized

Chuck writes: “Then I guess that embarrassing incident in Gibralter (6 Mar 88) never happened. The three IRA terrorists bent on bombing the British, at a major parade there, were never gunned down in the street.”

I don’t know how to break this to Chuck, but Gibralter is not, in fact, London. Furthermore, the three individuals involved weren’t random individuals walking down the street, but known terrorist operatives engaged in an operation. And as Chuck himself admits, once in 1988 does not qualify as “regularly”.

Craigp writes: “who would benefit from portraying the situation giving as much benefit as possible to the British Police.”

Um, Craig, that would be the British Police. On a secondary note, the British government.

Chuck also wrote of Waco: “based on what I understand, the feds deliberately went in to kill everyone in the compound and that military personnel were involved in the final assault. Too many big explosions and muzzle flashes of fully automatic fire from outside the buildings.”

[credulous citizen] But the official investigation has determined that those weren’t muzzle flashes picked up on IR camera, they were the reflections of sunlight off pieces of glass strewn about the location. Take off your tin foil hat! Everyone knows no cop or government official would ever intentionally kill a law-abiding civilian, they just occasionally make tragic mistakes. [/credulous citizen]

Peter King is in for a surprise:

I think I’m entering the world of blogdom this week. I’m going to blog my way through NFL camps on SI.com, with an entry (or two, hopefully) a day describing my travels around the pro football world. I’ll even make my photography debut with my new digital camera. I’ll try to take you with me through camps, training tables, sidelines … and, most of all, airports and interstate highways. Never been to Mankato? You’ll get there now. Should be interesting. Or tremendously boring. Not sure which.

I imagine the Scribe of Sports Illustrated will have his eyes opened rather wide once he gets to the home of the Robin’s Egg Blue and Gentle Yellow.

Oh yes, that’s right, it’s nearly FANTASY FOOTBALL time!

John Major hints that the Brits are on the verge of getting serious:

“There seem to be many people who, for reasons that are irrational, dislike the Anglo-Saxon way of life,” he said.

He called for heavier penalties for those who incited violence at this “particularly sensitive time”.

“Always difficult to balance this against freedom of speech but I think, at the moment, it is justifiable to protect the public,” he argued.

Mr Major added: “As far as those who literally spit hate at our country and there are some of them – they spit hate at our country and they incite – I personally would be prepared to deport those where it is clear that what they are doing is causing civil unrest and may cost other people, as a result of that, their lives.”

His assertion of the killing of the Brazilian man being a result of a “shoot to protect” policy is both Orwellian and absurd, of course, but I’ve never been a fan of John Major or his squishy wing of the Tory party.

Still, Muslim deportations could easily become the lightning-rod issue that will sink Labor and bring the Conservative Party back into power. I find it interesting to note that after a series of attacks which are much smaller than either New York or Madrid, the British have reached this point.

I suspect it is a result of their past experience with IRA terrorism. Unlike the US and the Spanish, the Brits have tried pointless mucking around for decades and learned that it got them nowhere. I also suspect that one reason that Paris hasn’t been seriously attacked is that the police there are liable to accidentally drown dozens of handcuffed Muslims given the slightest provocation.

And as for the Germans, well, historically speaking, they don’t need much of an excuse to round up and eliminate semitic people.

A note for Euro-ignorant Americans: European laws regarding residency and citizenship are very different, and usually much more strict, than the USA’s. I strongly suggest that one look up the immigration law of a European country before embarrassing oneself by making ludicrous assertions based on one’s knowledge of US law.

The Bodysnatcher writes on NRO:

John Roberts is, it appears, a genuinely witty man — as documents unearthed at the Reagan Library dating from his time in the White House counsel’s office reveal. In one, dated 1983, he takes on the idea that Supreme Court justices just work so very, very hard: “While some of the tales of woe emanating from the court are enough to bring tears to one’s eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.”

Another quip: “The generally accepted notion that the court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term gives the same sense of reassurance as the adjournment of the court in July, when we know the Constitution is safe for the summer.”

We’ll see… but in the meantime, I’m highly down with that general sense of skepticism and contempt.

From the Financial Times:

On Sunday, ministers and senior police officers defended a policy of shooting dead individuals suspected of being suicide bombers, in spite of calls from British Muslim groups, human rights bodies and politicians for a public inquiry.

Since the shooting, police have confirmed that two years ago they secretly changed operational guidelines allowing officers chasing suspect suicide bombers to shoot them in the head.

In other words, the Brazilian that some have called an idiot for failing to realize that he’d be shot in the head for the dual crimes of wearing inappropriate clothing and turnstile jumping not only had no way of knowing that London police officers considered him to be a suspect suicide bomber, but could not possibly have known about the secret policy with regards to the recommended guidelines for dealing with them.

Police heads should be rolling over this decision to enact lethal force in public without bothering to warn the citizenry of the potential consequences of their actions.

I am not, as some might claim, soft on Islamic terrorists or the sea of moderate Muslims in which they swim. The problem is that shooting innocent Brazilians in the head is not going to stop, or even slow, the spread of Islamic terror.

There are two primary goals of terrorism. One is to achieve a specific end, usually a withdrawal from occupied territory. The second, usually on the part of domestic terrorists, is to provoke a self-defeating response from the target that will swell the pool of terrorist sympathizers. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have foolishly fallen into the latter trap by appearing weak and indecisive, more prone to sacrifice the civil liberties of their own citizens and traditions of their own culture than to reduce the danger posed by the alien invaders.

As today column makes clear, this country ain’t for everybody, just the sexy people. And yet, my proposal makes about as much sense as anything the Bush administration has done to win the War on Method.

Arguably more, in fact. I doubt even the most motivated Islamikaze would be able to bring himself to spend weeks cavorting naked around America; they do seem to be a rather modest lot.

On a tangential note, must one be naked to cavort?

Cedarford equates two scenarios:

If the killing of a Brazilian who by every objective measure and standing rules of engaging a dangerous subject refusing obey public safety commands to freeze was murder…So too, I guess, every US soldier is a murderer because they will waste any car that fails to obey commands to stop at a checkpoint. I am not ready to label American troops doing their duty murderers, VD. Are you?

And MikeT agrees:

Seriously Vox, since you think that the London PD was simply not justified at all here, do you consider the American soldiers who destroy Iraqi vehicles that speed at check points murderers? If you don’t, then there is simply no logical reason that you can argue that the London PD committed murder of any kind here.

However, the two situations are completely different:

1. Iraq is an occupied war zone. London is not.
2. A Tube turnstile is not a military checkpoint.
3. Firing from a distance at a car that is ignoring clearly posted directions and might contain a car bomb coming towards you is very different than firing five shots at very close range at a man who ignored shouted orders and is running away from you.
4. Police in plain clothes are not uniformed military servicemen. The Geneva Conventions make it clear that soldiers are not expected to recognize combatants out of uniform, much less foreign civilians.
5. Shooting a helpless and unarmed man is considered murder even in wartime.
6. The lethal act of the London policeman could easily have made things worse had his victim been a suicide bomber. The policeman had no way of knowing if the bomber was rigged with a dead-man switch, in which case killing him would have set it off in the middle of a bunch of a crowd.

It is remotely possible that the London killing might have been justified. But this is unlikely, and in any event, any such justification cannot reasonably be made with the information available to most of us here on this blog.

LW has a few thoughts:

You really are on a roll. Though we often differ, I cannot argue with your train of thought lately. So much so that I have abandoned the Republican party, or more to the point, have realized that train never was headed for, never will arrive at, and does not even have tracks laid; to the train station I’ve been calling it from. Ok, so you were more correct than I had thought about Bush. Still, voting Democrat, Libertarian, or Constitutional party would have been no better and potentially worse. Anyway, I have left that train station and now wander the political wastelands of America.

You ask a lot of interesting questions in your recent articles. If you are anything like me, you have probably answers to those questions. Those answers are just too ugly to look at, do dangerous to publicly state. For example, why use the new expanded federal powers on US citizens while having open borders? Well, that is simple if perhaps cynical; it’s a government power grab based on a set of events that will only strengthen based on future and similar events. The powers are the
pry bar that will open the US vault of personal and state powers that had been locked away. Once opened, the precious commodities are slowly removed, more quickly if another attack occurs. Leaving the borders open ensures that the vault will remain unsealed and that the valuables may be looted more swiftly….

Anyway, perhaps I am wrong and you have no such scenario’s worked up in your mind. Perhaps I am delusional, hysterical, or at odds with what is happening so much so that I am blind to reality, but then if I am even near the answer we are in trouble.

If nothing else, you seem to see that last quite plainly. Out of curiosity, what practical solutions do you see? The only one I see would be a massive ground swell of Libertarian or Constitutional Party membership. Alas, I do not see that occurring. Then again, in some ways we all seem to be slightly blind to the overall picture of what is really happening. The internet and blogs only seem to offer more
questions than answers and the news is either blatantly pro or con.

Well, I am sure you are too busy to respond to a typical conservative email. I’ll continue to follow your articles, the news, and whatnot. More out of curiosity than anything now. Is there a pool for when the US becomes a totally socialist nation? If so, I want in.

I do, indeed, have many theories about various aspects of the current situation that I do not choose to share. Not because they are dangerous – I harbor no illusions about my own importance in a media pond that lends great credence to what passes for the thinking of Rich, Dowd, Malkin and so forth – but because they are only half-formed, at times contradictory and lack sufficient foundations in irrefutable proof.

Also, I prefer to ask questions because I’ve found, as have many individuals since Socrates, that asking the sort of questions that cause others to think is far more productive than telling them what to think. I believe the ability to doubt and think for yourself is far more useful than the simple transference of blind faith from one authority to another.

It is obvious, of course, that the behavior of the current administration, and of the governments of Europe, defy logic, if not belief. The US government is at war with the hitherto unalienable rights of its citizens at and peace with a “religion of peace” while the UK government has responded to eight Muslim bomb attacks by investigating anti-Islamic English football hooligans and murdering a Brazilian.

Where are we headed? Not towards a purely socialist construction, which, by most economic measures has already largely been installed. In my opinion, George Orwell appears to have understood the ultimate direction better than most, and not only in the metaphorical sense that most people read his work. Perhaps Nate is correct about the insidious evils of soccer.

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons. The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

“I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot, and probably would have chuckled at the absurdity of the notion. We now appear to be living in a world where even the most laughable paranoid fantasies about commercially controlling simple social concepts are being outdone in the real world by well-funded armies of lawyers on behalf of some of the most powerful companies on the planet,” said Taylor.

Microsoft SOP:

1. Discover something computer-related, usually several years late
2. Copy it.
3. Claim you invented and use lawyers to prevent others from using what you ripped off.

I was pleased to note that more than 50 percent of you are now using non-Microsoft browsers. Let’s get that up to 100 percent! If you’re still using Explorer – and I don’t know how you can stand it – I encourage you to switch to Opera or Firefox.

Microsoft isn’t a capitalist organization, it is a socialist-led technobureaucracy wrapped in a capitalist shroud. Corporations are not capitalism.

Nancy writes:

Perhaps it’d be best for all you Monday morning quarterbacks if the police or (bobbies), just said “ok, Fine, we resign! and we will let you fin for yourselves, if you get bombed on the train to grandmas house or to work or to take your kids to school, or while on vacation in Egypt, well then that is just all on you.
No more will we put our lives on the line and as a matter of fact maybe soldiers should do the same.

You want to call the police incompetent and rash, blah blah blah, after what they’ve been dealing with to try and keep you safe? Live Free and Die, you ungrateful, whining, liberal wretches!”

Hmmm, that’s true, because without the police, innocent people might have died in 9/11, the OK City bombing, the Madrid bombings or the London subway bombings.

Ahem, wait a minute….

The police are there to pick up the pieces, and to arrest the perpetrator if he chooses to turn himself in or if someone close to him tells them who did it. They are not there to defend anyone. They are not there to protect anyone or prevent anything. This is not up for debate, it is a matter of settled case law.

Live Free or Die is not exactly a left/liberal philosophy.