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The Hall of Badassitude....

Every week Ben Thompson writes a wonderfully twisted story about his bad ass of the week....

From Mythical to Fictional to true historical and modern figures. These are his bad asses - your mileage might vary, but there's something for everyone.

Enjoy his take on Paul Atreides, Audey Murphy, Johnny Cash, Australia and dozens more. Worth your time.

Found from following links starting on Cowboy Blob

Not something we tend to consider, but I suppose shrinks give it a lot of thought.

Priest - Knight/Warrior - Artisan/Merchant - Laborer - Untouchable/Outcast

His comments on the untouchables are priceless. I still don't know where I fit, but I must be in there cuz i'm not especially unhappy.

...for it is difficult to be happy if one spends one’s life on the wrong path. As the Buddhists say, “another man’s dharma is a great bummer,” or something like that.

I haven't been a warrior for 35 years, I'm not purely intellectual, I create little of anything, nor am I expecially a rebel, so I guess Laborer is the ticket.

Well I like my work, get antsy when I'm not doing it, and can make piles of money at it - so I guess I'm in my spot. That's a load off my mind.

Who here can raise a boy to be a man? Wimps and Barbarians.... - Terrence O. Moore Thanx to One Cosmos for the link For more than a decade I have been in a position to see young men in the making. As a Marine, college professor, and now principal of a K-12 charter school, I have deliberately tried to figure out whether the nation through its most important institutions of moral instruction—its families and schools—is turning boys into responsible young men. Young women, always the natural judges of the male character, say emphatically "No." Manhood is not simply a matter of being male and reaching a certain age. These are acts of nature; manhood is a sustained act of character. It is no easier to become a man than it is to become virtuous. In fact, the two are the same. The root of our old-fashioned word "virtue" is the Latin word virtus, a derivative of vir, or man. To be virtuous is to be "manly." As Aristotle understood it, virtue is a "golden mean" between the extremes of excess and deficiency. Too often among today's young males, the extremes seem to predominate. One extreme suffers from an excess of manliness, or from misdirected and unrefined manly energies. The other suffers from a lack of manliness, a total want of manly spirit. Call them barbarians and wimps. So prevalent are these two errant types that the prescription for what ails our young males might be reduced to two simple injunctions: Don't be a barbarian. Don't be a wimp. What is left, ceteris paribus, will be a man. Today's barbarians are not hard to find. Like the barbarians of old, the new ones wander about in great packs. You can recognize them by their dress, their speech, their amusements, their manners, and their treatment of women. You will know them right away by their distinctive headgear. They wear baseball caps everywhere they go and in every situation: in class, at the table, indoors, outdoors, while taking a test, while watching a movie, while on a date. They wear these caps frontward, backward, and sideways. They will wear them in church and with suits, if ever a barbarian puts on a suit. Part security blanket, part good-luck charm, these distinctive head coverings unite each barbarian with the rest of the vast barbaric horde. The second condition that must be present is a sufficient level of thumos to enable the man to rise to the defense of honor or goodness when required. Modern education and culture, however, have conspired to turn modern males into what C. S. Lewis called "men without chests," that is, wimps. The chest of the wimp has atrophied from want of early training. The wimp is therefore unable to live up to his duties as a man: We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. Wimps make worthless watchdogs. But their failure as watchdogs or guardians has nothing to do with size or physique. My father used to tell me when I was growing up, "It is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog" that matters. Many of today's young men seem to have no fight in them at all. Not for them to rescue damsels in distress from the barbarians. Furthermore, wimps vote. As Aristotle pointed out, to the cowardly, bravery will seem more like rashness and foolhardiness than what it really is. Hence political and social issues that require bravery for their solution elicit only hand-wringing and half-measures from the wimps. Wimps are always looking for the easy way out.

The first chapter of his new series of essays....Civilization The forces of ignorance and barbarism – bearers of ruin and despair wherever they make camp – are growing in confidence. But beside their will to destroy and die they have nothing. These Death Cult barbarians think this is all they will need – that, and an initial alliance with the forces they most despise. I still hold out hope that they will crack open a second book – a history book, say – that might at the eleventh hour give them some insight into the avocado nature of the Civilization they seem determined now to assault: soft and pulpy on the outside, impenetrably tough and hard within. They are going to do more than chip a tooth on us, these raving, bloodthirsty lunatics: they are about to make, I think, the same mistake that others have made before them – to see the Cindy Sheehans and Michael Moores as representative of a corrupt and dying culture, rather than what they really are: somewhat entertaining animal acts we Westerners use to pass the time while waiting for the next opportunity to pull the gloves off, and kick some new inhuman, barbaric horde onto the ash heap of history, where reside Aristocracy, Slavery, Fascism and Communism, holding in common only the mark of our boots on their asses.

An essentially identical logic obtains now. Organized terrorist groups have attacked America. These groups wish the Americans to not fight. The American pacifists wish the Americans to not fight. If the Americans do not fight, the terrorists will attack America again. And now we know such attacks can kill many thousands of Americans. The American pacifists, therefore, are on the side of future mass murders of Americans. They are objectively pro-terrorist. [...] - Sharp Knife examines an essay by Mike Kelly Kelly is paraphrasing comments by George Orwell and Sharp Knife adds Commentary by G.K. Chesterton, Margaret Thatcher, Teddy Roosevelt, and Todd Beamer. Orwell stated - "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me." Chesterton Agreed - "The cheapest and most childish of all the taunts of the Pacifists is, I think, the sneer at belligerents for appealing to the God of Battles. It is ludicrously illogical, for we obviously have no right to kill for victory save when we have a right to pray for it. If a war is not a holy war, it is an unholy one--a massacre." "I cannot see how we can literally end War unless we can end Will. I cannot think that war will ever be utterly impossible; and I say so not because I am what these people call a militarist, but rather because I am a revolutionist. Absolutely to forbid fighting is to forbid what our fathers called 'the sacred right of insurrection'. Against some decisions no self-respecting men can be prevented from appealing to fortune and to death."

I find it impossible to disagree with Sharp Knife's logic.

Sanctuary I and Sanctuary II are up from Bill Whittle. Is humiliation the same as torture? It is not -- that's why the words are spelled differently. To get to the heart of the difference, assume you were a prisoner at Abu Graib, and your interrogator started to remove your fingers one by one with bolt cutters. How long would it take you to beg to be posed with women’s panties on your head? Yeah, I thought so.

A look at the Sanctuary of the Uniform, the Sanctuary of Surrender, Sanctuary of Mercy, And The Sanctuary of Safe Haven...all as they relate to the wars America has fought. Bill covers a lot of territory including Iraq, the clash of civilizations, and where America seems to be heading. Always the best read on the internet. I bought his book of essays.

Think about it. When Europe orders all American troops out; when Japan claims our textbooks whitewash the Japanese forced internment or Hiroshima; when China cites unfair trade with the United States; when South Korea says get the hell off our DMZ; when India complains that we are dumping outsourced jobs on them; when Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians refuse cash aid; when Canada complains that we are not carrying our weight in collective North American defense; when the United Nations moves to Damascus; when the Arab Street seethes that we are pushing theocrats and autocrats down its throat; when Mexico builds a fence to keep us out; when Latin America proclaims a boycott of the culturally imperialistic Major Leagues; and when the world ignores American books, films, and popular culture, then perhaps we should be worried. But something tells me none of that is going to happen in this lifetime.

But human inventiveness depends on humans - and that's the one thing we really are running out of. When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2005, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2025 (or 2033, or 2041, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management, Systemic Racism and Gay Studies degrees). If that's not a political issue, what is? To cite only the most obviously affected corner of the realm, what's the long-term future of the Scottish National Party if there are no Scottish nationals? - Mark Steyn

Hmmmm, the blue states have seriously declining birth rates, while the red states are increasing their birth rates. Some countries in Europe will see a 50% decline before 2050. I wonder who will take up the slack? Can you say 3rd world immigrants?

Telegraph | Opinion | I hate to rain on Europe's parade, but... Mark Steyn Alas, they've got a much tougher job. The snow is still coming down, and they've got nothing in the back of the car except the same watery beer they've been chugging for three years: "They Are Waiting for the Rivers of Blood," proclaimed the headline over Robert Fisk's column in the Independent, another classic for fans of the beloved comic genius to cut out and add to treasured clippings - such as his coverage of the Afghan war ("Bush Is Walking into a Trap") and his confident assertion that there were no Americans at Baghdad airport and that the blundering Yanks had merely stumbled upon an abandoned RAF airfield from the 1950s.

The Global Throng Why the worlds elites gnash their teeth. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Do we even remember "all that" now? The lunacy that appeared after 9/11 that asked us to look for the "root causes" to explain why America may have "provoked" spoiled mama's boys like bin Laden and Mohammed Atta to murder Americans at work? Do we recall the successive litany of "you cannot win in Afghanistan/you cannot reconstruct such a mess/you cannot jumpstart democracy there"? And do we have memory still of "Sharon the war criminal," and "the apartheid wall," and, of course, "Jeningrad," the supposed Israeli-engineered Stalingrad or was it really Leningrad? Or try to remember Arafat in his Ramallah bunker talking to international groupies who flew in to hear the old killer's jumbled mishmash about George Bush, the meanie who had ostracized him.

The Worst Generation The post WWII generation we know as the baby boomers are a stain on the memory of generations of Americans who came before them. How we have reacted to developments in our world is an embarrassment and shameful to all. Our parents were shocked from their isolationist complacency by a surprise attack that killed thousands of our military. We were shocked from our well fed complacency by a surprise attack that killed thousands of civilians sitting down to work. How these two generations responded to these challenges couldn't be more different. Our fathers and mothers fought our enemies to a bloody ruin. They fought a two-ocean war against enemies with millions of soldiers, enemies with half the resources on the planet, and with the universal will of their populations to see it through to the end. Enemies with no desire to destroy our society or occupy our land, by the way, only the desire to secure their own spheres of influence...and America was perceived as weak and in the way. How did we crush them so completely in just over 3 years that it took decades for them to recover? Crush them so utterly that we were easily able to imprint democracy on the few who were left? We did it with a national will that was like steel. Every civilian at home supported every American soldier under arms. American soldiers were supplied with an overabundance of materials that shocked our allies as well as our enemies. Every American, from children collecting scrap to the elite of Hollywood flying combat missions, was united in their desire to destroy the enemy army and homeland completely. The media at the time saw themselves as part and parcel of the struggle to win, no matter what it took. What it took was a war to the knife. At the end of the war, among exhausted allies and obliterated enemies, only America was left standing. The baby boomer generations reaction to attack and war couldn't be more different. Those boomers who answered America's call in the 60s and 70s were few, under supplied, and under appreciated. The majority of our generation saw us as an aberration, called us baby killers, and shunned us for our service. Hedonism and the cult of self is the only legacy that boomers want to leave to the world. Again we have been attacked by surprise, this time with thousands of civilians dead on a clear fall morning. This enemy is an order of magnitude weaker than any we have fought before, yet the issue is in doubt. This enemy is mired in a death cult dedicated to returning the world to a state that hasn't seen the light of day for 1300 years. An enemy whose only desire is to destroy the society built by these very boomers. This enemy's only important allies are American. What does my generation do? They march for unilateral peace when our enemy doesn't want peace...only martyrdom. They complain that we brought the attack on ourselves and that we should open a dialog with an enemy who just wants us dead...not witty dialog. They tell us it was our fault because we support the only democracy in the region, and applaud every child murdered in cold blood by savages, yet they condemn any accidental death we cause. They actively impede America by any means they can devise - fair, financial, or foul. They use their control of media to ridicule any who would argue for the fight. They have decided that the motivation of those who fight can only be stupidity. They have a blinding hatred for any who would be a leader at a time when leaders are a critical need. They use their control of schools and universities to corrupt the young with their foul ideologies. They yearn for past leaders whose weaknesses led us to our current horror. They lionize European governments with an unbroken history of exporting colonial terror, appeasement, ingratitude, and unconscionable weakness. There were always too few of us to change the strange culture of vulnerability, defeatism, and insane profligacy that the boomers embrace. The greatest generation would have known us as cowards and traitors. I'm glad that the boomers are starting to lose influence and die out. America will be a better place when this generational stain is finally gone. I have much more faith in the current crop of young Americans than I ever did in my own. These younger generations have allied with the millions of the greatest who are still with us, and now America is turning its back on the twisted priorities of the boomers. The worst generation will die whining and crying, denying the realities of life...just like they lived. A few of us try to go to our reward with our honor intact. I hope there is a place for me at my dad's table.

The Disenchanted American - Are we growing world-weary? Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online In fact, an American consensus is growing that envy and hatred of the United States, coupled with utopian and pacifistic rhetoric, disguise an even more depressing fact: Outside our shores there is a growing barbarism with no other sheriff in sight. Any cinema student of the American Western can fathom why the frightened townspeople — huddled in their churches and shuttered schools — almost hated the lone marshal as much as they did the six-shooting outlaw gang rampaging in their streets. After all, the holed-up 'good' citizens were always angry that the lawman had shamed them, worried that he might make dangerous demands on their insular lives, confused about whether they would have to accommodate themselves either to savagery or civilization in their town's future, and, above all, assured that they could libel and slur the tin star in a way that would earn a bullet from the lawbreaker All this hypocrisy has desensitized Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative. We will finish the job in Iraq, nursemaid democratic Afghanistan through its birthpangs, and continue to ensure that bandits and criminal states stay off the world's streets. But what is new is that the disenchanted American is becoming savvy and developing a long memory — and so we all fear the day is coming when he casts aside the badge, rides the buckboard out of town, and leaves such sanctimonious folk to themselves.

Read it all After the Jump...it's great!

How Far We’ve Come Let’s not forget. by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers The harrowing World War II movie Twelve O'Clock High begins with a postwar bald and bespectacled Dean Jagger (Colonel Harvey Stovall) riding his bicycle out to an old airfield in Archbury, England, that years earlier had been home to the 918th B-17 Bombing Group of the 8th Air force. As the nondescript Jagger walks along the weed-infested airbase and rusting bombers, the movie unfolds as one long dreamlike flashback of the horrors of what daylight bombing over Germany in 1942 entailed and the courageous men who used to take off from the now eerie, abandoned runways. In juxtaposing the dreadfulness of what the airmen went through (centered around the bravery and eventual breakdown of group Commander Gen. Frank Savage) with the calm of the post-bellum English countryside, director Henry King reminds us how easily we forget horrors of the immediate past. No one in the town, or indeed back home in America, other than the families of the dead, recalled a Bishop, Cobb, Wilson, or the thousands of Savage's anonymous flyers who perished in doing their part to bring down the Third Reich. The tragedy of Stovall's war, King seems to suggest, is that the inferno in the skies was but a blink of the eye from its dividends of victory and rural tranquility — and that we all are of short memory, allowing even the worst nightmare to retreat into the oblivion of everyday life. I fear the same may be said of Afghanistan and even Iraq in a year or two. Indeed, we already see how few talk of what it was like in the very dark days of September 2001. The country was reeling from 3,000 murdered; a trillion dollars were lost to economic dislocation; and the prospect of going 7,000 miles to the other side of the world to root out Dark-Age killers that had grown emboldened by a decade of American appeasement was considered too frightening.

Dennis Prager - February 26, 2003 The future is Muslim, European or American The world’s future is being decided at this time. Such moments are extremely rare in history. And when they have occurred, they have between two, not three, competing ideologies. But there are now three ideologies competing to shape the future of mankind. They are militant Islam, Western European secularism and socialism, and American Judeo-Christianity and capitalism. The first is being spread both peacefully and violently, the second is being spread peacefully, and the third is not being spread. Though most people ignore the fact, almost all of the world’s believing Muslims believe that all of mankind should be Muslim. This, in and of itself, is not troubling – after all, most Christians would like the whole world to be Christian, and most Westerners would like the whole world to democratic. What is troubling is that if only 10 percent of these Muslims are prepared to use violence to impose their religion on others, we are talking about 100 million people. This is the reason about one million non-Muslim Sudanese have been killed in the last 15 years – because they are resisting the violent imposition of Islam by the Islamic government in Khartoum. This is the reason for the Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria – Christians there, too, are resisting the violent imposition of Islam. And this is the reason for Islamic terror – to weaken those countries, particularly the United States and Israel, that stand in the way of an Islamic takeover. The second ideology seeking to dominate the world is secularism and socialism as practiced in Western Europe and supported by educated elites around the world. This is a primary reason for the anti-American demonstrations in Western Europe and in the United States. They were far more against America (especially the America of George W. Bush) than they were against war. Most of these people could not care less about the wars of the world. They have been silent throughout the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks, during the genocide in Rwanda, during China’s crushing of Tibet, and during Saddam’s wars against Iran, Kuwait and Iraq’s own Kurds. American and European “peace” activists have found those atrocities and wars quite boring. Western European socialists and their American (and Canadian, and Latin American) supporters are as passionate about secularism and socialism as believing Muslims are about Islam. And they want to dominate the world as much as militant Muslims want Islam to. Their vehicles are the United Nations, the European Union, international treaties such as the Kyoto Protocols, and international institutions such as the International Court. Regarding the American way, there are serious impediments to its success. First, while the first two ideologies – Islam and socialism/secularism – dominate many countries, the third ideology only dominates one – America. There is no other country that claims to be Judeo-Christian and no other that has such strong support for capitalism and small government (the opposite of socialism). Therefore, while both the militant Muslims and the socialists/secularists have supporters around the world, American values have few. That is why America goes it alone – with the partial exceptions of Israel and Britain, no other society has the same values as we do. Second, neither Judeo-Christian nor capitalist values are secure in America. Many Americans, including almost its entire intellectual class, are as hostile to Judeo-Christian and non-socialist values as the militant Muslims and European socialists are. Third, almost no one is teaching the next generation of Americans (as almost no one taught the present adult generation) what is unique, let alone superior, about American values. Our children are overwhelmingly educated by people who believe in Europe’s values, not in ours. As neither China nor the rest of Asia, nor Africa, nor Latin America are offering an ideology that can dominate the world, either Europe’s, or the militant Muslims’, or America’s way of life will prevail. But the American way can only prevail if Americans believe in it. That is why, as important as the military and ideological battles against militant Islam are, the most important battle is the ideological one within America. But with America’s universities, unions, professional associations, mainstream news media, and one of its two major parties ideologically aligned with Europe, and with big businesses constantly undermining Judeo-Christian values, the battle within America itself for America’s unique values is far from won. And given that only America offers a viable alternative to both militant Islam and secularism/socialism, if we lose the battle here, humanity has a very dark future. The above essay is fine if you ignore about half of the world...and half the world's population. What about Asia? India? Most of these countries are neither Judeo-Christian, secular, or Muslim (except for Indonesia). They support twice the population of Europe, America, and Arabia. They certainly have a place in the world's future. I just think it is a mistake to ignore China.

This guy has a first class mind, and an excellent look at the true effects of eurocentric anti-americanism. Nelson Ascher There are around 200 countries in the world today. Think that every floor of each WTC tower was one of them. The richest were those closer to the ground, the poorest the highest ones. If the base crumbles, the hundredth floor is unable to stand alone in thin air. Besides, the closer people were to the ground, the safer they were. The whole world is the WTC and those who inhabit its higher floors want to see the building collapse. That’s as clever as setting fire to the floor below your own.

Bill Whittle has an essay on Deterrence If I could write like this guy, I'd be famous. It all comes down to carrots (liberals) or sticks (conservatives). By the way: if you’re in a rush and need to run, here’s the spoiler: You can offer a carrot. Not everybody likes carrots. Some people may hate your carrot. Your carrot may offend people who worship the rutabaga. But no one likes being poked in the eye with a stick. That’s universal. Like Bill, I'm a stick man.

JAMES TARANTO President Bush may or may not get a "bounce" out of his convention here this week, but one suspects John Kerry is grateful for a respite after weeks of pounding by Vietnam veterans angry over his past antiwar activities and his present war-hero braggadocio. Before we turn our sights to the festivities at Madison Square Garden, it's worth pausing to consider how the Democrats ended up in this mess. Why did they nominate a candidate whose almost obsessive invocation of Vietnam made it all but inevitable that this decades-old war would become a central issue in the campaign?

World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win - Norman Podhoretz The memory of how it was toward the end of World War III suggests another intriguing parallel with how it is now in the early days of World War IV. We have learned from the testimony of former officials of the Soviet Union that, unlike the elites here, who heaped scorn on Ronald Reagan’s idea that a viable system of missile defense could be built, the Russians (including their best scientists) had no doubt that the United States could and would succeed in creating such a system and that this would do them in. Today the same kind of scorn is heaped by the same kind of people on George W. Bush’s idea that the Middle East can be democratized, while our enemies in the region—like the Russians with respect to "Star Wars"—believe that we are actually succeeding.

Americans eat disasters and crap hand grenades. And I got your quagmire right here. - Captain Bill

Eject! Eject! Eject!

Bill Whittle has his new chapter out...It's a Trap.

...some people see bad men doing bad things that must be stopped.

...others see disadvantaged individuals victimized by cultural and economic paradigms of inequality that force them into involuntary self-destructive behavioral modalities that are predicated on and the result of external dynamics beyond their control or cognitive abilities, resulting in behavior modification protocols that are aimed at recovering basal self-esteem levels while providing the disadvantaged individual skill sets essential to their reintegration into the community and a return to standardized norms of societal interaction.

Sent to me by Jim Wardwell

By WAYNE ANGELL
March 25, 2004; Page A16

Robert Rubin will never admit it, but the recession that began in the third quarter of 2000 was the direct result of the Clinton administration's attempt to pay down the federal debt. The Clintonites did this, you'll remember, by leaving tax rates high enough from 1995 to 2000 so as to direct a larger and larger share of the surge in growth of personal income to be paid in federal taxes. In the four quarters from the second quarter of 1999 to the second quarter of 2000 individual income tax receipts of the federal government increased by 11.4% -- exactly twice the 5.7% growth rate of personal income.

an excerpt....

Only hysteria, an outburst of emotion and fear, could produce the irrational response of the Congress and the public to the supposed danger of federal debt left to our children and grandchildren. Save your outbursts for reining in the growth rate of government spending. Then we will be able to keep tax rates conducive to faster increases in output and thereby add to both the well-being of our people and to future tax receipts available to the Congress.

Read the whole thing....

An excellent essay by Charles Krauthammer. The Last SuperPower in a dangerous world...
What to do, what to do?

Isolationism
Liberal Internationalism
Realism
Democratic Globalism
Democratic Realism...

Fortune.com - Technology - The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare

As a non-practicing marine zoologist (BS-'68), I have always been wary of doomsayers and purveyors of junk science. Hysteria over Global Warming never made any sense to me. I was learning about global environmental cycles as they relate to zoological survival pressures almost 40 years ago...these cycles have always been with us (and before we were here). The latest was in the 1800s - (remember all the Ives etchings of London under snow...it doesn't snow in London any more). The "hole in the ozone" over Antartica has always been there...it gets bigger and smaller, but it was "discovered" by us, not created by us.

Hard evidence shows quite regular climatic changes over (quite long) time. Hard evidence shows a predictable cooling trend ending about a hundred years ago. Hard evidence shows a 1 degree warming trend over the past hundred years with no predicted biological die-off. Hard evidence predicts a coming (mini) ice-age. Maybe global warming is a good thing.

Without hard evidence to base their portents of DOOOOOOM on, those with an agenda turn to junk science. I have watched this stuff (as a hobby) for 40 years and have yet to see anything that is disrupting the normal 500 year cycle of cooling/warming. Hell, when the 100000 year cycle of major iceage gets here you will certainly know it.

The Pentagon is tasked with creating scenarios for every eventuality. Here is their take on the a possible "instant iceage".

Kim du Toit has an essay called "The pussification of the Western Male".

Fucking A.

I used to drink, smoke, chase girls, shoot guns, took the bus alone into NYC from Jersey, climbed trees, explored caves, did chores, took weeklong survival hikes, came face-to-face with bears, walked wilderness trails, hunted, skinny dipped, got mugged, could set a bone, fished, camped, got my ass kicked, kicked ass, and played at war. All before I was 12.

I have a couple degrees, but all I can remember are the parties. I blew things up for a living in the service, had a bitch wife "dear john" me a year after I enlisted, was a very bad boy for a while, met SHE, and pretty much can only remember the parties. My personal interests are guns, cars, dogs, and computers. I am pro-gun and pro-choice. I have been in jail. I am always armed. The doctor says no more parties.

Gay women don't bother me (hell, I like women too).
Gay men are incomprehensible.
Being in the midst of armed men does not make me uncomfortable, lawyers and politicians do.
Storms, loud noises, and bumps in the night do not make me uncomfortable, but "does this dress make me look fat" breaks me out into a cold sweat.
I know for a fact that I can stay calm when things go to shit, but I don't know (or care) what tie goes with what shirt. SHE and Man pick my clothes out so I don't look too dorky.
I know very little about art, music, design, or the proper use of color (it doesn't help to be somewhat colorblind), SHE tells me what looks good and what looks bad (like my ripped jeans).
I have tried (sometimes successfully) to be a good father and tried to be (several times) a good husband. The only serious complaints I hear are that I am stubborn.

The upshot is that my children love me, women trust me and feel safe with me, my peers respect me. All my enemies are dead.

I refuse to change.

It was fun being out here in California for the recall. The run up to the election saw everyone with an opinion. I admit to being curious if that would actually translate into people getting out to vote...but the turnout was a record for this state.

I thought the last minute "grope-anator" stuff was heavy handed, and no-one out here seemed to take it seriously (except the LA Times). The rest of it was just too much...a porno queen, a guy painted blue, an ex-child star, the owner of Hustler...and on and on. So typically left coast. I was very suprised it ended as quick as it did, and that Arnie won so big.

For all their post-election spin and bluster, the Donks really took it big time. Over 60% of the voters went for Arnold or McClintock (the machine Republican candidate). I'm not sure that the Republicans really can see this as a victory either. Hell, fully half the votes went to the middle with only a bit over 10% to the red and 30% to the blue. The other 150+ mondo bizarro hopefulls pulled 3% of the vote in toto.

I read that a pundit called this a victory for the "eagle" party. That is defined as voters who are fiscal conservatives, racially tolerant, and desirous of a strong defence. Sounds about right...the great middle. You certainly can't call either mainstream party fiscally conservative, and they both play the race card.

California just seemed sick of politics as usual. Something we could learn in New Jersey, I think. The stupidist quote of the day was a young woman (from Berkeley, of course) who said she was tired of the Republicans trying to steal elections in California (?). What the fuck does that mean! The Donks have had this state for the past 4 governors...including both houses of their legislature. Besides it was a fucking landslide election.

Most of it was fun. There was only one Donk that really puked me out with his "after election" comments....Jesse Jackson. He complained bitterly that there weren't enough voting machines in LA county in the black communities. He was reminded by a TV interviewer that Kalifornia has been Donk since Reagan so who's fault was that? Jackson fucks up everything he comes near. If I was running for office I would keep him as far away from me as possible. He makes me queasy. Sharpton is at least entertaining.

One thing I found interesting. When Davis gave his little speech to his troops after getting smashed, he was standing next to this guy Torres who is the State Democratic Chair. Torres had a look on his face that bespoke a deep and abiding disgust and hatred for Davis (who is not known out here for being a nice guy). It tickles me when they let the masks slip.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY
Okay, the day is still young, and God knows what mischief may yet be in store. But I can’t help being amazed at how well we have done in these first two years of what we all knew would be a new world, back on that beautiful morning, a world ago.

Despite the best efforts of news media to portray us as a terrified, angst-ridden nation ready to fall apart with just one more good poke…despite desperate attempts to undo unparalleled victories for political gain…despite hysterical warnings of Islamic rage and retribution, we have gone two years now, knock wood, without a single terrorist attack on US Soil.

Who could have thought such success possible on that first evening? How many of us went to sleep expecting to hear in the morning of new and more terrible attacks on September 12th, or 13th? How is it possible to forget that first Thanksgiving, or Christmas, sure that the symbolism was just too great for our enemies to pass up? And then New Years. Superbowl Sunday. 4th of July. Elevated threat levels. Dire warnings on muffled audiotapes.

Nothing.

This is quagmire? This is a debacle?

Say what you want about George W. Bush and his policies – that is of course your right. But consider this, all you defeatists and self-haters out there: it is barely possible, mathematically, to tie the President’s record for defending this country from a new terrorist horror. You cannot – not even hypothetically – improve upon it. This is a fact that is undeniable and so obvious that only a few will see it.

And at what cost? Did jackbooted storm troopers descend in the night from black helicopters to take away those voicing dissent? Or do the most vile and baseless accusations fly hither and yon, blown ever larger by a terrified and complicit media elite? Did hundreds of thousands of Muslims have their businesses torched, their families terrorized and beaten, the rest hauled off to concentration camps, or are you far safer, both physically and emotionally, as a Muslim in the US then you would be in any middle eastern country – safer and less harassed, without question – than Jews are in France today? Have we given up our liberty and lifestyle for this perfect record, or do we still go to football games and shopping malls and fly, more or less, the way we used to?

What, indeed, has this victory cost us to date, other than the irreplaceable lives of our young men and women, fewer in number still after two earth-changing victories than the number lost in a Beirut barracks during a time of relative peace and hidden yet growing dangers?

Today, if it continues in its bland denunciations of the President and his policies, will be another day where New Yorkers can go back to suing each other over WTC memorials, where the Democrats can cry WMD and Quagmire to their heart’s content, and where life in general returns 1/730th of the way back to normal once again. For those too blind to see the magnitude of this victory, let them whine and seethe all they want. We are still here. We are still here, and far better off, then we were two years ago today, when entire countries were vast terror camps, and children’s cemeteries.

The people that launched that horror, and those that supported it, and those that applauded it – that dwindling number of those of them that are still alive – have, to put it plainly, had their asses handed to them by the country they saw as soft, decadent, gutless and afraid.

And we have been blessed with a President who for all his faults, gaffes, mistakes and compromises has nevertheless maintained the one simple, essential, necessary character trait needed to fight -- and win -- a war against ruthless enemy and the armies of useful idiots that rally to its defense: single-minded determination and an utter disregard for criticism from those who should know better. For all his many manifest failures, it is hard to imagine a politician less effected by the legions of hysterical people determined to put off this fight. In my eyes, he has not tired, he has not faltered, and he has not failed.

Much remains to be done. Many more horrors undoubtedly await. But we have made a decision to fight back, and we are winning on such a scale as to leave future historians shaking their heads in wonder at how so many could be so wrong about something so obvious.

So, it is indeed a Happy Anniversary, tasteless as it sounds. Take a moment, today – take a long moment – and imagine how just how much worse things could have gone.

I was going to write about 911, but I'm just not good enough to express my feelings on paper. Then I found an entry on the Rachel Lucas Blog that sums it up for me....

Rachel writes.....

I can't write like this, but hopefully Mr. Lileks won't mind if I share his brilliance with you here.

For background, some jackass wrote the following on Metafilter: "What the hell does [James Lileks] have to be angry about? He's Caucasian, male, and living in the richest nation in the world. He has more opportunities in one day than a Third World citizen has in a lifetime. Is he being targeted because of his ethnicity? Is he being thrown into a camp and being repeatedly raped? Is he being buried alive in a pit by hateful condotierres paid a pack of cigarettes a day? The 9/11 victimhood seems to me an excuse for the Angry White Male to make a comeback. Except this time it seems to be justified, even if you weren't anywhere near the WTC. And that's the sick cancer festering within the American psyche."

Ah-hem. Nobody could respond to that like Lileks...

Angry? Almost two years later I’m still f*#king furious about it, if you want to know the truth. I’m not sure what emotion these people want me to have. An appropriate amount of sadness mixed with an appropriate amount of shame mixed with a soupcon of perspective and a dram of self-hatred? Can you send me the precise recipe, please? Because from where I stand, I see the two forces I thought the left deplored: religious intolerance and fascism. Together at last! Swirled into one cone! If Kluxers had flown planes into the UN building, these people would be insisting that America was bubbling over with millions of Bubbanazis, and the failure of the networks to mount Second Anniversary specials would be proof that the media secretly embraced the White Power agenda.

Again, I’ll ask the question: when did I overdo it? January 14, 2002? August 23rd 2003, 11:34 AM? Was that the point at which we were supposed to pack it all away in a box and store it in the attic with the newspapers and Time magazines? I pass a house every day that still has a Wellstone! sign in the front window. Should I knock on their door, and ask why they have the sign up? They’re white, male, living in the land of opportunity. Stop grieving. Stop it!

Wellstone died almost a year ago - by accident. Three thousand people died by design that day. Only a fool couldn’t help noticing what it meant: they want us all dead. They want a world in which my daughter is a slave - and even though they’ll never get it, they will kill someone else’s daughter a half a continent away just to make their point. They want a world in which there is no US, and the Bosnias and Rwandas are not only commonplace, but proof that their god is ascendant.

Sorry. No. I want a world where those who choose Western ideas can flourish and thrive. And by “Western” I mean that raped girls aren’t stoned. Gays aren’t crushed by rocks. Public cleavage doesn’t get you whipped. Jews and Lutherans and Sufis can sit on a bus together and it’s no big deal. Where citizens decide that if they don’t like their government, they try it again - and the recall pits an Austrian immigrant against a native-born man of Hispanic origin.

"The 9/11 victimhood seems to me an excuse for the Angry White Male to make a comeback. Except this time it seems to be justified, even if you weren't anywhere near the WTC. And that's the sick cancer festering within the American psyche."

There you go. The problem isn’t Islamist fascism. It’s the sick cancer of men with low melanin concentrations who can’t forget that picture of two strangers - one Asian, one Black - embracing in sobs in a bodega as the smoke and dust rolled down the street. This is why I left Metafilter right after 9/11. They don’t mind if you’re angry. You can be angry about important things, like Microsoft security lapses and Ashcroft crusades. But 200 stories of skyscraper falling to the ground? Thousands dead, ten thousand orphaned, ten million mourning?

Dude. Get a grip.

Part of an Essay by Kim Du Toit

The history of the fall of the Third Republic gives us an invaluable means to identify the traitors in our midst today, little more than half a century later.

And I use the word "traitors" advisably. Like the French intriguers, these are people who despise our own Republic, who would replace it with another form of government, and who will form any alliance, no matter how unholy, to achieve that end. Remember too that while these are in the main politicians, they are ably abetted by their camp followers in the Press and in the bureaucracy.

Here are the means with which to identify these modern-day traitors to our Republic:

1. The first manifestation of traitors is those who would change our government completely--in other words, replace our representative form of government with a popular one. These are people who talk the most about "the majority of the people" and mean "the majority of the voters." These are people who believe that Al Gore should have won the Presidency because more people voted for him nationwide. These are people who would seek to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a simple plebiscite. These are people who would talk of running the country and making its laws by popular referendum rather than by popular representation. Above all, these are people who talk about America as a "democracy" rather than as a "republic", mendaciously allowing the inherent rightness of the former to be confused as an end per se, rather than as the process by which we maintain the republic.

2. The next manifestation of traitors is those who would replace our basic freedoms, either by legislation or by regulation. The most common of these can be found among people who consider the Constitution a "living document", one whose terms may have been applicable when first formulated, but which seem hopelessly archaic now. Thus, for example, we get approval for curtailment of political expression under the guise of "campaign finance reform", curtailment of our right to be armed under the guise of "protecting the children", "ending violence" or "terrorist threat". Thus too, we get approval for principles and policies that are inimical to the future welfare of the Republic which are not only faulty in philosophy, but have been proven to be failures in practice: confiscatory taxes levied only on "the rich" through the politics of envy; State confiscation of private property for "the public good"; and regulatory oppression of rights where legislative oppression is impossible to implement. Thus, for example, while the right to bear arms is entrenched in the Constitution as a universal right, the city of Chicago can ban firearms by local fiat.

3. Another manifestation of traitors is to create disunity in the republic. In a country like France, which had an ancient culture and a single language, disunity had to be created and maintained through the political process, which as we have seen was inherently unstable. In a (largely) two-party republic like ours, this is more difficult. How then is the traitor able to create and maintain perpetual disunity and instability? By creating social division. Thus we find the common glue of communication, the English language, replaced with a multiplicity of tongues and the concomitant social irritation, all under the guise of "equality". We find likewise our common culture and heritage replaced by a policy of relativism, whereby foreign cultures are as worthy as our own, and therefore our common culture is replaced by a multiplicity of cultures, all in the name of "diversity". Of course, the natural human instinct is for conformity--we do not by nature embrace diversity--so diversity must perforce be imposed on an unwilling populace by legislation and regulation, which engenders yet more resentment and disunity.

4. Finally, we find the manifestation of traitors in those who espouse causes other than (small "r") republican ones: those who call themselves "progressives", "socialists", "communitarians", "populists", "globalists" and so on. Make no mistake about it: all these people want to replace our Republic and its forms with another type of state, one which serves their own ambitions or goals--or, most reprehensibly, the ambitions and goals of those outside our borders. Thus we find little formal opposition to United Nations-mandated land use, under the guise of "international heritage sites". We find support for international (instead of local or national) tax authority under the guise of "uniformity" or "equality" and under the auspices of unelected bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). And we find support for "open borders", in the final analysis a means whereby the system can be flooded with people who owe no allegiance to our society, our laws, our culture or our heritage. Each one of these is a traitorous activity, for they would surrender our national sovereignty to strangers; aggregate them, and there should be a prima facie case for criminal arraignment, especially if these activities are performed by elected or appointed officials sworn to uphold the Constitution.

We ignore these warnings and lessons at our own peril. Remember, the final objective of our modern-day traitors is no different to that of those traitors in France during the final decades of the Third Republic: they seek to replace the republic with something else. And lest anyone think that simply desiring a different form of government is neither treason nor traitorous, it should be noted that after France was liberated by the Allies in 1944, and after a long and exhaustive trial, Pierre Laval was executed by firing squad.

I made some predictions 6 months ago...Lets see how they did.

Some predictions:

Bush is a one-term President...he will get hammered by the economy. A DemocRAT will win and America will be the U(seless)Ns bitch for another 8 years.
This is looking more and more true everyday. It's still pickem on the DemocRAT tho. It's not so much the economy, but the useless diddling with the "War on Terror" that is driving him down. He is spending money like water to entitlements and sounding like a fucking liberal. He will do whatever he can to get re-fucking-elected.

Iran will self-destruct from within...the majority of the population is young and chafing under theocratic control.
Well there were student protests, but by the middle of July over 4000 had been arrested, rallys were prohibited, and the mullahs were making an effort to calm the students down. It's been quiet for 2 months (at least in the media). Recent local concerns seem to be a suspected government coverup in the murder of a popular Iranian female photojournalist and the feeling that Iran is the center of the world's critical eye. Still the religious center of world jihad.

Syria, the Sudan, and Saudi will be "werry, werry, qwiet" for a while (heh, heh, heh, I'm hunting wahabits!).
Syria, the Sudan, and Saudi have been quiet, but haven't changed their tune. They are both sending fighters into Iraq to kill Americans. An islamofag was captured and tricked into thinking he was being turned over to the Saudis for interrogation. He was overjoyed and gave the Saudi (CIA) poseurs phone numbers of Saudi princes to contact who would "explain everything". Quite a shock, but those three princes died shortly under mysterious circumstances. Sudanese cannon cockers are still found all over the world.

Israel will balk (again) over the roadmap proposed for mid-east peace. When they finally agree--the Palestinians will balk (again).
Who didn't see this one coming. After the incredible Paliscumian bombing the peace train derailed, Isrealis have been killing Hamas left and right, and are mobilizing an all out fucking blitzkreg on Gaza. About time.

America will be hated throughout the world...and 2.3 million of the world's best and brightest will apply to immigrate each year to the US.
Still hated, and still the destination of Choice.

The US should (but won't) leave NoKo to SoKo, China, and Japan to handle. All we need do with this asshat is leave him alone. As his sewer of a country self-destructs, Lil' Kim will need a war to stay in power.
NoKo admits it has nukes, is planning a test, pretty much says fruck-ru to Russia, SoKo, China, Japan, and the US. It is becoming painfully obvious that the US is going to roll-over on this one and bribe the pinheaded little fuck...leave him ALONE...unless he starts selling arms to the jihad...then just kill him.

Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
Editorial – 27 March, 2002

The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age: Their Untimely Demise and Welcome Resurrection

The Medieval Warm Period and subsequent Little Ice Age - which followed hard on the heels of the Roman Warm Period and Dark Ages Cold Period (McDermott et al., 2001) - were long considered to be classic examples of the warm and cold phases of a millennial-scale climate oscillation that has reverberated seemingly endlessly throughout glacial and interglacial periods alike (Oppo et al., 1998; McManus et al., 1999), as well as across the early Pleistocene (Raymo et al., 1998).

In addition to their intrinsic historical value, the last of these warm and cold periods have particular relevance to the highly-charged global warming debate. If there was truly a period near the beginning of the past millennium when temperatures were as warm as they are presently, for example, but when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was about 90 ppm lower than it is today, and if that period was followed by a several-centuries-long cold period with essentially no decline in the air's CO2 content, there would be little basis for invoking the 20th-century increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration as a reason for the planet's return to the degree of warmth it had experienced a millennium earlier, as Idso (1988) argued nearly 15 years ago and Broecker (1999, 2001) has reminded us more recently.

Faced with this dilemma, the political forces that view the theory of CO2-induced global warming as a mighty lever for moving the nations of the earth in the direction of global governance - via the establishment of an entity with power to regulate nearly all forms of human enterprise in the guise of protecting the planet from the climatic consequences of CO2-producing activities - realized they had a serious problem on their hands. To keep their political juggernaut alive, therefore, they had to "deep-six" the concept of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, in order to imbue their program with a semblance of rationality; and they saw the perfect opportunity to do so in a pair of papers published by Mann et al. (1998, 1999).

These papers presented an entirely new perspective on earth's climatic history over the past thousand years, which was different from what had previously been accepted by even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Houghton et al., 1990). Whereas IPCC documents up to at least 1995 had faithfully depicted the existence of both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, the new history - derived from a few select proxy temperature records - showed, in the words of Esper et al. (2002), "an almost linear temperature decrease from the year 1000 to the late 19th century, followed by a dramatic and unprecedented temperature increase to the present time," which is now routinely described as "the warmest period of the past millennium."

Thus died the Medieval Warm Period; and with its passing, the Little Ice Age also succumbed. With not much else to block their progress, the political forces behind the Kyoto Protocol consequently began to press forward in a major way; and they would probably have quickly achieved their goals, but for the stubborn resolve of a U.S. president who refused to cooperate. Now, however, thanks to the meticulous and careful work of Esper et al., both of these unique climatic periods have been resurrected, and they stand as stronger and healthier witnesses than ever to the intellectual bankruptcy of the climate-alarmist claim that the warming of the past century is CO2-induced.
So what did Esper et al. do? In the simplest of terms, they employed an analysis technique that allows accurate long-term climatic trends to be derived from individual tree-ring series that are of much shorter duration than the potential climatic oscillation being studied; and they applied this technique to over 1200 tree-ring series derived from 14 different locations scattered over the extratropical region of the Northern Hemisphere.

Two separate chronologies were thus developed: one from trees that exhibited age trends that are weakly linear and one from trees with age trends that are more nonlinear. The results, in their words, were "two nearly independent tree-ring chronologies covering the years 800-1990," which were "very similar over the past ~1200 years." These tree-ring histories were then calibrated against Northern Hemispheric (0 to 90°N) mean annual instrumental temperatures from the period 1856-1980 to make them compatible with the temperature reconstructions of Mann et al.

What do the results show? The biggest difference between the Esper et al. and Mann et al. temperature histories is the degree to which the coolness of the Little Ice Age is expressed. The Little Ice Age is much more evident in the record of Esper et al., and its significantly lower temperatures are what make the Medieval Warm Period stand out more dramatically in their temperature reconstruction. Also, they note that "the warmest period covers the interval 950-1045, with the peak occurring around 990." This finding, they say, "suggests that past comparisons of the Medieval Warm Period with the 20th-century warming back to the year 1000 have not included all of the Medieval Warm Period and, perhaps, not even its warmest interval."

In commenting on these findings in a companion "perspective" paper, Briffa and Osborn (2002) make several interesting and important points. First, they acknowledge that "the last millennium was much cooler than previously interpreted" and that "an early period of warmth in the late 10th and early 11th centuries is more pronounced than in previous large-scale reconstructions." In fact, the Esper et al. record makes it abundantly clear that the peak warmth of the Medieval Warm Period was fully equivalent to the warmth of the present.

This fact reaffirms the point raised by Idso (1988), i.e., that there is no need to invoke CO2-induced global warming as a cause of the planet's recovery from the global chill of the Little Ice Age. "Since something other than atmospheric CO2 variability was ... clearly responsible for bringing the planet into the Little Ice Age," as he phrased it, "something other than atmospheric CO2 variability may just as well have brought the planet out of it." And that something else, as suggested by Esper et al., is probably "the 1000- to 2000-year climate rhythm (1470 ± 500 years) in the North Atlantic, which may be related to solar-forced changes in thermohaline circulation," as has recently been described in compelling detail by Bond et al. (2001) and which we heartily endorse.

Briffa and Osborn also note that Esper et al.'s record clearly shows that the warming of the 20th century was actually "a continuation of a trend that began at the start of the 19th century." In addition, the Esper et al. record indicates that the Northern Hemisphere warmed in a consistent near-linear fashion over this entire 200-year period, contrary to the climate-alarmist claim of unprecedented warming over only the last century. Hence, the new data do great damage to the claim that CO2-enhanced greenhouse warming is responsible for the temperature increase that brought us out of the Little Ice Age, since the increase in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration over this period was highly non-linear, rising by only 10 to 15 ppm over the 19th century, but by fully 70 to 75 ppm over the 20th century, with no analogous increase in the latter period's rate of warming.

Finally, Briffa and Osborn say that "we need to know why it was once so warm and then so cool, before we can say whether 21st-century warming is likely to be nearer to the top or the bottom of the latest IPCC [predicted temperature] range." Actually, we probably already know the answer to this question: the extremes of warmth and coolness to which they refer were likely caused by "solar-forced changes in thermohaline circulation," as suggested by Esper et al. and described by Bond et al. In any event, it is becoming ever more clear with each passing day that these significant climatic changes were not caused by changes in the air's CO2 content.

Dr. Sherwood B. IdsoPresident Dr. Keith E. IdsoVice President

I can read and speak a little French. Just enough to compare an English translation to the original so I have been reading up on the Frogs....An example below...

I was not aware that French unemployment was approaching 15% (if you included cronic unemployables and students). If you remove government spending, France is actually in a depression. Even a minor boycott of French products has to hurt.

I knew France had a muslim population but I didn't realize it was so large (about 10%), and growing by leaps and bounds. And of course this minority has a higher unemployment rate than the country at large. I was very surprised to see that young (non-arab) women were wearing veils in certain cities to protect themselves from abuse. A court house was burned down after several arab men were convicted of rape. France has a very small prison system, but 60% of the inmates are muslim. Like everywhere else, the militant islamists are trying to hijack power.

I am not really sure how much of the problem France has with its muslim minority that I read is true. There is a lot of Frog bashing out there now...and the English language papers lap it up. The French papers are all government flacks and mention nothing of any problems. I see bits and pieces from independant sources (web based and published college lectures).

This reminds me too much of the black/white stuff that goes on here. Each side has an agenda. Is France the leader of a New Europe, or soon to become a New Third World Country. Somehow, I don't see France imploding, but from experience we certainly know what interesting moments a large and activist minorty can cause. We will see. Don't think I want to take the wife to France on vacation any time soon tho...

France is Almost Finished
By Guy Milliere
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 10, 2003

Little by little, the French government tries to change its behavior. The smell of Allied victory wafting out of Bhagdad maybe? You can expect Chirac and Villepin to say: we have always loved the United States. We are your friends, no hard feelings... I just hope nobody will believe it in the United States. If within a few days, Chirac and Villepin say this, think about it: it’s ALL about the money. They want to try to keep some of their Iraqi contracts intact. They want the United States to go back to the United Nations where they can again paralyze you with their vetoes and their
counter-proposals.

I'm sorry to say it, but nothing good for the U.S. can come from France now.

Some day in the future this may change, but the French will have to learn their lessons the hard way. They have to feel the pain, unlike the citizens of Poland. The Polish see what they owe to the United States. A little more than ten years ago, they were under the rule of a communist dictatorship and they remember it is thanks to the United States that they were freed from that nightmare. The French people will have to see what a nightmare looks like before you can take their apologies seriously.

Be patient, the nightmare is almost upon us.

Economically speaking, France is decaying, full speed. Unemployment is officially around ten per cent. If you add the people who have never worked and so are not counted for the statistics, and also add the students who study nothing useful, the right number would be way above fifteen per cent. Growth rate is now officially around one per cent, and it includes government activities: if the government component was not included, it would be easy to see that France is in depression. Her population is growing old, and no money is available to take care of the large number of senior citizens in the years to come. The greater part of young people are Muslim, not integrated with French society, and almost illiterate.

In fact, the only things that are growing in France right now are crime and Islamism. Some readers have been amazed by the fact that teenaged girls and young women in many city districts have to wear the Islamic veil if they do not want to be harassed, but it gets worse. A few weeks ago, a young Arab burnt a teenaged girl alive in the suburbs of Paris. He was convicted of murder, but he became a hero and an example for other young Arabs living in the same kind of areas. Two month ago, ten Arab men who raped another teenaged girl in another district were convicted and condemned to spend five years in jail. Yes, just five years. Their families left the court of justice shouting to the journalists it was unfair and they would look out for revenge. Eight days later, the court was burnt down during the night. The teenaged girl and her family have had to leave Paris, and hide in another part of the country.

I have written columns in the French press concerning what’s happening. The response has been death threats, with color pictures of slit throats, anti-Semitic insults. There were Muslims in France thirty years ago, but they were not like the Muslims of today. They were moderate, they did not feel they could wield decisive political power in France, they did not think they were at war against western civilization. Now it’s clear that they think they are at war. Very few people are in jail in France (France does not have enough jails), but more than sixty per cent of the convicts are Muslims, and Islamist imams visit them on a weekly basis. My wife was born in a Muslim family. She’s not a Muslim anymore, and because she left Islam, she risks being killed if she says it openly. My wife’s mother is still Muslim, but she is a moderate, and she’s afraid to be considered a traitor by the much more radical Muslims that are spreading throughout France.

Within twenty years, Muslims will be a majority in France. And if nothing changes, they will be radical Muslims.

The French government takes care of the present: it knows it cannot take care of the future because there is no future. The French government acts like a traitor to its old allies for many reasons: because it has no principles, because it needs money, but especially because it is afraid of bloody riots. France is not a sovereign nation anymore: it’s partly ruled by the mob, partly ruled from the outside by corrupting Muslim tyrants. But don’t worry, France also has no importance anymore: it can still bark, but it’s bite is more like a nip.

France is almost finished. The nightmare is almost here. France has to know the horrors of the nightmare if you want her to have a chance to wake up. Sure, you may find some exceptions to the rule. France has some decent intellectuals: but they have about the same access to the mainstream media that dissenters had in the Soviet Union twenty years ago. France has bold politicians: one, maybe two if I want to be extremely generous. France still has genuine journalists: you could count them on the fingers of one hand. For the next years, come to France if you want, visit old monuments, but do not expect to be understood or appreciated by the locals. Behave as you would in a third world country; soon France will be a third world country. Perhaps it will wake up with a start, but who knows? Right now, if you read the polls, only 53% of the French hope the U.S. army will defeat Saddam: the rest hope the United States will be defeated and Saddam will win...

Do you really want France to have a word to say in the re-building of Iraq after Saddam is defeated?

I have noticed that the main media outlets have picked up on something the blogasphere has been talking about for weeks...mainly that the billions and billions of dollars generated by the UN "oil-for-food" program has disappeared in monumental waste and corruption. A billion in commisions alone in the last few years, billions to the frogs and Russia, billions spent on airplanes, computers, a cartoon theater, cars and trucks for the baghdad airport, a laundry list of (not) food and medicines...looking at the state of the country, very little actually went for food and medicines.

Our buddy Kofi Annan is PERSONALLY responsible for the fund. I'm not being sarcastic. The last few years, he has taken personal management responsibility for the fund. An interesting statistic is that the UN says all records pertaining to the management and finances of the fund are private and cannot be examined by outside parties. The French do the accounting for the UN for the fund.

This is going to be better than watching Clinton define "is".

On another note, my wife wonders were CentCom got Saddams DNA...could Monica L be involved. Enquiring minds want to know.

Oil, Food and a Whole Lot of Questions
By CLAUDIA ROSETT

President Bush's call to lift economic sanctions against Iraq could mean the end of the United Nations oil-for-food program, which has overseen the country's oil sales since 1996. Not only are France and Russia likely to object, but they may well support efforts by Secretary General Kofi Annan to modify the oil-for-food system, which is due to expire on May 12, and give it a large role in rebuilding the country. Whatever Mr. Annan's reasons for wanting to reincarnate the operation, before he makes his case there's something he needs to do: open the books.

The oil-for-food program is no ordinary relief effort. Not only does it involve astronomical amounts of money, it also operates with alarming secrecy. Intended to ease the human cost of economic sanctions by letting Iraq sell oil and use the profits for staples like milk and medicine, the program has morphed into big business. Since its inception, the program has overseen more than $100 billion in contracts for oil exports and relief imports combined.

It also collects a 2.2 percent commission on every barrel — more than $1 billion to date — that is supposed to cover its administrative costs. According to staff members, the program's bank accounts over the past year have held balances upward of $12 billion. With all that money pouring straight from Iraq's oil taps — thus obviating the need to wring donations from member countries — the oil-for-food program has evolved into a bonanza of jobs and commercial clout. Before the war it employed some 1,000 international workers and 3,000 Iraqis. (The Iraqi employees — charged with monitoring Saddam Hussein's imports and distribution of relief goods — of course all had to be approved by the Baath Party.)

Initially, all contracts were to be approved by the Security Council. Nonetheless, the program facilitated a string of business deals tilted heavily toward Saddam Hussein's preferred trading partners, like Russia, France and, to a lesser extent, Syria. About a year ago, in the name of expediency, Mr. Annan was given direct authority to sign off on all goods not itemized on a special watch list. Yet shipments with Mr. Annan's go-ahead have included so-called relief items such as "boats" and boat "accessories" from France and "sport supplies" from Lebanon (sports in Iraq having been the domain of Saddam's Hussein's sadistic elder son, Uday).

On Feb. 7, with war all but inevitable, Mr. Annan approved a request by the regime for TV broadcasting equipment from Russia. Was this material intended to shore up the propaganda machine Saddam Hussein had built in recent years? After all, the United Nations in 2000 and 2001 approved more than a dozen contracts with Jordan and France for Iraq to import equipment for "educational TV."

It is impossible to find out for certain. The quantities of goods involved in shipments are confidential, and almost all descriptions on the contract lists made public by the United Nations are so generic as to be meaningless. For example, a deal with Russia approved last Nov. 19 was described on the contract papers with the enigmatic notation: "goods for resumption of project." Who are the Russian suppliers? The United Nations won't say. What were they promised in payment? That's secret.

I was at least able to confirm that the shipment of Russian TV equipment approved in February was not delivered before the war started. A press officer told me that batch didn't actually get to Iraq because United Nations processing is so slow that "it usually takes three to four months" before the purchases start to arrive.

Bureaucratic lags notwithstanding, putting a veil of secrecy over tens of billions of dollars in contracts is an invitation to kickbacks, political back-scratching and smuggling done under cover of relief operations. Of course, with so little paperwork made public, it is impossible to say whether there has been any malfeasance so far — but I found nothing that would seem to contradict Gen. Tommy Franks's comment that the system should have been named the "oil-for-palace program." Why, for example, are companies in Russia and Syria — hardly powerhouses in the automotive industry — listed as suppliers of Japanese vehicles? Why are desert countries like Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia delivering powdered milk?

And then there is this menacing list of countries that supplied "detergent": Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen and Sudan. Maybe all that multisourced soap was just a terrific bargain for doing the laundry. But there is no way for any independent parties — including the citizens of Iraq, whose money was actually spent on the goods — to know.

Mr. Annan's office does share more detailed records with the Security Council members, but none of those countries makes them public. There is no independent, external audit of the program; financial oversight goes to officials from a revolving trio of member states — currently South Africa, the Philippines and, yes, France.

As for the program's vast bank accounts, the public is told only that letters of credit are issued by a French bank, BNP Paribas. Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq, entitled to goods funded by 13 percent of the program's revenues, have been trying for some time to find out how much interest they are going to receive on $4 billion in relief they are still owed. The United Nations treasurer told me that that no outside party, not even the Kurds, gets access to those figures.

Then there is the program's compensation commission, which is supposed to dole out 25 percent of all oil-for-food proceeds to people and companies harmed by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It has so far dispensed $17.5 billion and approved a further $26.2 billion. Who decides on compensation claims? Commission members are picked from a "register of experts" supplied by Mr. Annan. One staff member told me that that this register cannot be released because it is "not public." The identities of the individual claimants are, of course, "confidential."

Lifting the sanctions would take away the United Nations' remaining leverage in Iraq. If the oil-for-food operation is extended, however, it will have a tremendous influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before that is allowed to happen, let's see the books.

Jonah Goldberg - National Review Online

The Arab world is a basket case, economically and politically (morality we can debate another day). One handy statistic: If you subtract oil, the total exports of the Arab world — i.e., the 500 million people comprising all of North Africa and the Middle East, minus Israel — amount to less than those of Finland: a country with one hundredth the population...

What’s Wrong with the Arab World?
We’re not morons, you know.

re the Arabs really this stupid?

As politically incorrect as this may sound, that's more or less what I keep thinking when I read about the Arab world's response to the war in Iraq. Oh, I don't mean their opposition to the war. While I think it's the wrong position to take, it's hardly fair to say it is an inherently unintelligent point of view. Reasonable and unreasonable people alike may differ on this. Jacques Chirac isn't stupid — nor, for that matter, is his old friend Saddam Hussein.

No, what I'm referring to is the widespread outrage from across the region denouncing two alleged — alleged — accidental misfires of U.S. weapons which Saddam's regime says hit Iraqis. After 58 Iraqi civilians died in a second such incident, newspapers across the Arab world went into overdrive. "Monstrous martyrdom in Baghdad," blared a huge headline in al-Dustur, a Jordanian newspaper. "Dreadful massacre in Baghdad," Egypt's huge Akhbar al-Yawm newspaper declared, featuring pictures of two young victims of the explosion covering half the front page. "Yet another massacre by the coalition of invaders," was the main headline in our ally Saudi Arabia's popular al-Riyadh daily (Note: The first "massacre" claimed 15 lives).

Between these newspapers and the broadcasts of the al-Jazeera television network and numerous similar Arab TV stations, the region is being fed a steady stream of body parts, wailing children, and grieving women.

In response to these images and the corresponding commentary about them, numerous intelligent, successful, Arab civilians from across the Middle East believe that America is willfully murdering Arab civilians in huge numbers. "Those pictures have showed that America's war is not only against the Iraqi regime and the Iraqi army, but also against the Iraqi children and elderly. How can we trust them now?," 19-year-old Mahmoud Sahiouny, a Syrian computer-science student who lives in Beirut asked the Washington Post.

"It is as if you are watching a horror movie," said Summer Said, a journalist for the Cairo Times, an English-language newsmagazine. "I thought, at first, okay, maybe it isn't a war for oil. Maybe America does want to help. Now, it's genocide to me. Is the American government trying to exterminate Arabs?"

And it is precisely this point which makes me ask, Are the Arabs stupid?

For you see, if the goal were to massacre Arabs — never mind commit genocide — we would not bomb merely two obscure markets. If our goal was to "exterminate Arabs" our precision-guided bombs might land more precisely — and more often — on Arabs in, say, Basra or Baghdad or Cairo, or wherever else we might find Arabs in large numbers. Instead, the criticism from even the Iraqi military is that we are blowing up empty buildings. Indeed, as of this writing, we've launched more than 17,000 sorties over Iraq in about 12 days. For some perspective, the Dresden firebombing took place over a period of about 18 hours and involved about 2,000 bomber sorties. It killed about 135,000 people. We've launched 8 1/2 times that number of sorties and generated less than 1 percent of the casualties. I'm no bean counter, but if our intent is to "massacre" Arabs, our tax dollars are being woefully misspent.

So, what's going on?

ARAB PRIDE
Well, for one thing, the hothouse logic of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is surely spilling over into this one. For decades, Arab governments and the newspapers they control have been pouring gasoline on the fire of Arab resentment toward Israel as a way to deflect attention from their own corrupt and impoverished regimes. No doubt, there are Palestinians with serious and legitimate grievances against Israel (and vice versa) but Arabs in Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc., who have no plans ever to visit historic Palestine, have no relatives there, and, were it not for the presence of Jews there, would not care about the plight of the Palestinians at all, have been convinced that their problems can be attributed to the oppression of the Palestinians. The Palestinians are the Sudenten Germans for any number of dictatorial regimes, beginning with Iraq.

Indeed, speaking of Iraq, we won't know for sure for some time, but there's every reason to think that since the war began Saddam Hussein has ordered the purposeful murder of more Iraqi civilians then we have killed by mistake, and yet there are no headlines about that in Cairo or Riyadh, and no pictures of Jordanian Arabs tearing apart the Iraqi flag with their teeth in the Washington Post either.

And it has been ever thus. Syria's government wipes out thousands of its own, and no one cares (including, alas, the U.S. government). Syria occupies Lebanon even today and no one wails about the "occupation." Iraq invades Kuwait and it is easily forgiven and forgotten. Shiites in Saudi Arabia are second-class citizens, to say the least. But Israel, ah Israel; if Israeli kills even a single civilian by accident in pursuit of terrorists who blow up children, the charges of "genocide" go up like flags on a football field.

Even the single greatest indictment against Ariel "the Butcher" Sharon centers on an event in which Arab Christians slaughtered Arab Muslims. Whatever Sharon's culpability in the massacres at Shabra and Shatilla, they were almost certainly tangential and inadvertent. Nevertheless, Sharon is routinely denounced as a blood-drinking warmonger, while Yasser Arafat is "a man of peace," despite the fact that he has directly ordered the murder of women and children on more occasions than anyone cares to remember. Indeed, Arafat has ordered the execution of more Palestinian civilians (he calls them "collaborators") than Sharon has.

Which, understandably, brings us back to Saddam. It may be, as Chris Matthews suggests — with just a bit too much of a smirk — that Iraqi nationalism and ethnic pride are forcing many Iraqis to overlook Saddam Hussein's evil and defend their nation in much the same way millions of Russians defended Saddam's reported hero Joseph Stalin. Of course, the Germans weren't invading Soviet Russia as liberators (though they were greeted as such by many in the Ukraine and elsewhere).

Indeed, to the extent such loyalty extends beyond the ranks of the Fedayeen Saddam and the Republican Guard — we still don't know how many Iraqis are fighting from fear rather than loyalty — I think it has more to do with what could be described as mass-Stockholm syndrome. So terrorized and brutalized have the Iraqis been, for so long, they scratch at the eyes of their rescuers.

GOOD RIDDANCE VS. GOOD FUTURES
This is a tragedy.

The Arab world is a basket case, economically and politically (morality we can debate another day). One handy statistic: If you subtract oil, the total exports of the Arab world — i.e., the 500 million people comprising all of North Africa and the Middle East, minus Israel — amount to less than those of Finland: a country with one hundredth the population. So convinced that some outside force — imperialists, Jews, oil companies, America, the CIA — is responsible for the failings of their once-great civilization, Arabs cannot handle any blow to their self-esteem. It's not so much dead Arabs which grates on their psyche but, the sting to their pride which comes when non-Muslim, non-Arabs do the killing. This is what makes smart people act stupid.

Indeed, this is hardly unique to Arabs. All over the world and throughout history national pride and cultural passions have driven nations to violence and folly. As Yale's Donald Kagan has written, "The common practice of calling such motives 'irrational' reveals how narrow the professional understanding of what matters to people has become in our day." He goes on: "The notion that only economic benefits, power and security are rational goals is a prejudice of our time, a product of the attempt to treat the world of human events as though it were the inanimate physical universe, susceptible to scientific analysis and free to ignore human feelings, motives, and will. Such an approach is no more adequate to explain current behavior than to explain the actions of human beings throughout history." (For more on this, see "Don't Kowtow Now.")

But if Arabs want to define their national interests in terms of pride and shame — as NR's David Pryce-Jones has argued so eloquently — that's fine; that's natural even. But that decision has serious costs. If the Iraqis side with pride and totalitarianism over realism and liberty; if the Arab propaganda machine and suicide-bomber networks decide that it would be better for Iraq to be a giant Lebanon free of Americans than to be an Arab Sweden with our help; if they decide that even one dead Iraqi at the hands of "infidels" is worse than 100,000 at the hands of Saddam; if they greet this rescue mission with bullets, then things will only worsen for the Arabs.

For that's what this is, a rescue mission. It may have been launched out of American self-interest, but that should make no difference to the Iraqis. And I still hope that the Iraqis will snap out of it and recognize we're there to help. Indeed, if they greet the U.S. with gratitude there really will be no end to American charity and assistance. We can point to Japan, South Korea, and Germany as evidence of the prosperity and decency we can help usher in. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, et al., can offer only Lebanon or some phantasmagorical Brigadoon plucked from the fantasies of jihadists. To those who can see clearly the interests of their children, this should not be a hard choice.

But it is a choice. If even after Saddam is gone, they shoot at the lifeboat and spit at its crew, America will simply confiscate the weapons we came for and leave. Many, many Americans will conclude that democracy cannot take root in Arab soil after all, and if they don't want our help we will say "to hell with them" — as we did to the Somalis. We will strike deals with murderers and thugs whenever profitable and contain those murderers when not. To borrow a phrase from Le Monde, we will declare "We Are All Frenchmen Now" and we will let Arabs kill Arabs (and yes, probably Israelis too) because it won't be our business — all because some desperate people are too proud to stop acting stupid.

On to the next quagmire! Don't get mired in the bog of yesterday's conventional wisdom, when the movers and shakers have already moved on to new disasters. America may have won the war but it's already losing the peace!
- Mark Styne

Meanwhile back in the real world

Mark Steyn
National Post

Monday, April 14, 2003

On to the next quagmire! Don't get mired in the bog of yesterday's conventional wisdom, when the movers and shakers have already moved on to new disasters. America may have won the war but it's already losing the peace! Here's your at-a-glance guide to the Top Ten Impending Quagmires -- all you need to know about what the experts who got everything wrong last week will be getting wrong this week:

1) "Iraq's slide into violent anarchy" (The Guardian, April 11th)

MBITRW (Meanwhile Back In The Real World): Chill. For as The Guardian's own columnist Naomi Klein has assured us, "Breaking windows is vandalism, not violence." It seems these guys are genially indulgent of the anti-capitalist trashing of Seattle, Quebec City, Rome and Gothenberg, but steal the photocopier from Baghdad's Ministry of Genital Clamping and they're pining for the smack of firm government. Despite the media characterization of generalized "anarchy," one can't help noting the somewhat precise targeting: UN HQ, the German Embassy, the French Cultural Centre, whose portraits of Jacques Chirac were torn from the walls and trampled into pieces. Soon all the Chirac portraits will be gone. In a year's time, Baghdad and Basra will have a lower crime rate than most British cities.

2) "The head of the World Food Program has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster" (The Australian, April 11th)

MBITRW: No such disaster will occur, anymore than it did during the mythical "brutal Afghan winter" and its attendant humanitarian scaremongering. ("The UN Children's Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger." They didn't.) Indeed, the cutting-edge scaremongers are now warning that the real problem in Iraq will be a surfeit of food, but food of the wrong kind.

"Some people would think that seeing a KFC on a street corner is a sign of progress, I certainly don't," says Stephanie Schaudel of Voices In The Wilderness, "an anti-war group in Chicago," "Iraqis have really good food, they don't need a KFC."

When the massive humanitarian disaster fails to materialize, the Kentucky Fried Chicken Littles will have the field to themselves.

3) "Iraqis Now Waiting for Americans to Leave" (Associated Press, April 10th)

MBITRW: There will be terrible acts of suicide-bomber depravity in the months ahead, but no widespread resentment at or resistance of the Western military presence.

4) "If Saddam is not found dead, or caught alive, it will be the worst of all possible closures for the war against Iraq ... bin Laden himself continues to elude capture" (Roland Flamini, UPI)

MBITRW: Bin Laden continues to slip through the Americans' fingers because that's what specks of dust tend to do. If Saddam is reduced to "bin Laden's" current schedule -- mailing in bimonthly audio cassettes of Islamist boilerplate -- what's the difference? Even if he'd escaped to Syria, he'd be spending the rest of his days as a Bedouin goatherd. Right now, Boy Assad is doing his best not to attract Rummy's attention, and renting out the spare room to Iraq's A-list moustaches is not on the agenda.

5) "Turkey is concerned that a Kurdish capture of Kirkuk could help bankroll moves to establish an independent Kurdistan" (Agence France-Presse, April 9th)

MBITRW: Nothing to worry about. The Kurds are the only part of the indigenous population that were part of the liberation force from the start. They're not going anywhere now. They'll settle for being Scotland or Quebec rather than Pakistan.

6) "Rather than reforming the Muslim world, the conquest of Iraq will inflame it" (Jeffrey Simpson, the Toronto Globe And Mail, April 10th). "The war has bred more terrorists than Osama bin Laden could ever hope for" (Dr. Jedrzej George Frynas, the National Post, April 12th)

MBITRW: I note that in October 2001 Faizal Aqtub Siddiqi, President-General of the International Muslims Organization, said that the bombing of Afghanistan would create a thousand bin Ladens, whereas the other day Egypt's President Mubarak said that the bombing of Iraq would create a hundred bin Ladens. So right there you've got a 90% reduction in the bin Laden creation program -- just by bombing a second country! I'd advocate bombing Damascus if it weren't for the fact that it's ceased to be necessary. Effective immediately, Palestinian suicide bombers are no longer subsidized by Baghdad; in Jordan, the Saddamite boot is off the Hashemite windpipe; Syria is under notice to behave and in the unusual position, for an Arab dictatorship, of being ringed by relatively civilized states -- Turkey, Free Iraq, Jordan and Israel. Despite the best efforts of Western doom-mongers to rouse the Arab street, its attitude will remain: Start the jihad without me.

7) "Looting is always unsavoury. Let's hope the Americans don't pilfer the oil" (Brenda Linane, The Age of Melbourne, April 11th)

MBITRW: The pilfering of Iraq's oil has just ended. Under the old regime, Saddam parceled his country's wealth out to those companies willing to cozy up to him. The development rights worth up to US$60-billion that TotalFinaElf secured on behalf of Jean Chrétien's family, among others, wi