Kickin' Music Video

You don't hear something like this very often coming from young rockers. Good song, true rebels, and I like the cut of their jib.

Always Consider The Things Unseen

Some food for thought in this Brian Tiemann post:

This is interesting:

The findings? America's most expensive vehicle in calendar 2005 was the Maybach (presumably a 62), tallying up at a staggering $11.58/mile. The thriftiest? Scion's boxy xB, just $.48 cents/mile.

But here's where it gets interesting: CNW's findings indicate that a hybrid consumes more energy overall than a comparable conventionally powered model. It judged showed that the Honda Accord Hybrid rang up an Energy Costs Per Mile of $3.29, while a gas-powered Accord was significantly cheaper at $2.18/mile. The study concludes that the average of all 2005 U.S. market vehicles was $2.28/mile.

The reasoning goes that hybrids use up more energy to manufacture, as well as consume more resources in terms of the assembly (and eventual disposal) of things like batteries and motors. By CNW's reckoning, the intrinsically lower complexity of, say, a Hummer H3 ($1.949/mile) actually results in lower total energy usage than any hybrid currently on the market, and even a standard Honda Civic ($2.42).

You mean it's not all just about the gas? Electricity doesn't just magically come out of a hole in the wall to power the clean cars that the Stonecutters are holding back from us? There's actual industry behind creating the things we use—industry that operates at scales far beyond anything we can affect through our own pitiful individual human actions?

This month's Road & Track has a "Tech Tidbits" segment on oil consumption. In an aside, it notes that a single cargo ship, during a single hour of maneuvering coming into port, puts out as much pollution as 350,000 cars; the clouds of diesel fumes travel hundreds of miles inland and settle in urban basins. And yet we agonize over five extra miles per gallon and the difference between ULEV and Super-ULEV.

The Audi dealer told me of a woman who had recently bought a new car there, and had specified cloth seats because she was a vegan. But the steering wheel was leather-wrapped; so she paid out of her own pocket ($800) to have the car taken to a specialty interior outfitter, have the hand-stitched leather removed, and have a vinyl covering installed. The woman's rationale was that she didn't want to be responsible for any leather products being used in her car. But, er, well, the leather was already paid for, ma'am... that cow's already dead...

Also, check out Brian's V For Vendetta review.

Don't Swat That One. He's Cool.

Yes, it's not a photoshop. Those are miniature glasses. Via Ace Of Spades.

Nicely Played, WFB

As quoted at the Media Research Center's DisHonors Awards Dinner here:

I'll close with William F. Buckley's commentary on Alec Baldwin's nomination for the "I'm Not a Political Genius But I Play One on TV Award," because it's so delightfully Buckleyan. Baldwin lost to Rosie O'Donnell and Buckley explains exactly why. Here's Baldwin's quote:

"Most Republicans who are registered Republicans are decent, honest good people who you have a difference of opinion with. The leadership of the Republican Party are a bunch of sociopathic maniacs who have their lips super-glued to the ass of the conservative right."

Here is Buckley's assessment:

"The image is vivid, but polemically unsatisfying. Glued, perhaps. But super-glued? The hyperbole offends."

Hee. Buckley = the man.

Berlinski Amuses

Part 3 of an "interview" with him here (I use double quotes because I think it probable the Berlinski is having a lark and writing both sides of the interview). And look, I said I found it amusing, I didn't say it was gospel, so leaving comments "disproving" what he has to say, or illustrating that he is a jerk would be a waste of time.

excerpt:

[G]etting back to the point at issue, if you are not persuaded that opposition to design arguments is sincerely based on anxiety about fundamentalism, on what is it based?...

I wish I knew; I wish I understood it better. And I’ve tried. There is, in fact, a good deal of heterodoxy on the margins of the scientific world. You look at Tom van Flandern’s web page and the blog that he’s got up and running, it’s just full of attacks on relativity, reports of forgotten experiments, clever little thought experiments, that sort of thing; and oddly enough, a lot of it is quite plausible. Note what I am not saying. I’m not saying it’s true. Just plausible.

… And thus? …

But no one pays it any attention. And this is so of a good many other scientific issues. Two very smart mathematicians have gotten themselves interested in Krishna, a lot of weird stuff, and have published an immense book on forbidden archeology. Extraordinarily interesting claims, lots of data. I would not have the slightest idea whether there’s anything there. But ditto for attacks on Big Bang cosmology, and these are sometimes undertaken by physicists with terrific credentials. In all these cases, and you can just multiply them endlessly, the queer point is that no one cares. You get a high-school physics teacher arguing that Big Bang cosmology is seriously flawed, no one says boo, certainly not the ACLU. Why have attacks on Darwinian theories become a flash point?

… Are you saying, then, that you have no idea? Surely not …

I don’t think the issue can be analyzed in terms of its manifest content. For a better sense of what’s going on, you really must go to the blogs, and not the newspapers. The newspaper columnists do little more than express prevailing pieties of thought, and most of them are too busy sniffling at Brokeback Mountain to have anything interesting to say about Darwin. The blogs are another matter. I follow two of them: Talk Reason and The Panda’s Thumb, and I must say, I find them fascinating. Talk Reason is upscale and sober, and it gets good people to write for it: Mark Perakh, for example, or Andreas Bottrero. They make an effort to be fair. And yet the overwhelming impression conveyed by Talk Reason is a kind of insecure disgruntlement. It is the impression conveyed by men who suspect that the opinions they reject might just prove persuasive to men less intelligent than themselves, rather like a group of cigarette company executives complaining to one another about the irresponsible allegations that smoking is involved in the onset of various diseases. One of their listings is entitled The Art of ID Stuntmen. An interesting title, don’t you think? A stunt is, after all, something requiring a certain skill, and stunts are designed to fool those who view them. These five words convey an entire system of anxiety.

The Panda’s Thumb, on the other hand, is entirely low-market; the men who contribute to the blog all have some vague technical background – computer sales, sound mixing, low-level programming, print-shops or copy centers; they are semi-literate; their posts convey that characteristic combination of pustules and gonorrhea that one would otherwise associate with high-school toughs, with even the names – Sir Toejam, The Reverend Lenny Flank – suggesting nothing so much as a group of guys spending a great deal of time hanging around their basements running video games, eating pizzas, and jeering at various leggy but inaccessible young women.

Now if Talk Reason conveys an attitude of insecure and even worried superiority, The Panda’s Thumb conveys something quite different, and that is a deep, almost incoherent anger.

When you look at Talk Reason, you see a lot of smart but lazy and shallow people defending what they take to be important issues of principle in a way guaranteed to make their defense a perfect irrelevance. When you look at the Panda’s Thumb, you see an entire overlooked class demanding its right to be heard, and when given that right by the blog itself, having nothing whatsoever to say beyond a very touching demand that that right be accommodated.

I don’t have any trouble understanding Talk Reason; but why Darwinism has been able to provoke this new class into existence is something more interesting, and probably more troubling.
So I come back to my original point: Why ID and why Darwinism?

… Yes, why? …

My guess it that ID has become a flashpoint as a form of what Marxists used to call left deviationism. I’ll explain in a minute, but you’ve got to remember that there is also something taking place that could be called right deviationism. Figures like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins are profoundly embarrassing the scientific establishment, and by that I mean the top biology departments, the editors of Nature and Science, the senior bureaucrats at the NSF and NIH, by going on and on about atheism, selfish genes, evolutionary psychology, stuff that everyone with their heads screwed on tight knows has absolutely nothing to do with any of the serious sciences. And I do mean absolutely, and I do mean nothing. And yet no one much cares. The ACLU is not up in arms about anything these guys say. Put Dawkins on a high school reading list with his claims about being a fulfilled atheist – that’s fine, no problems there. Everyone quite understands that Daniel Dennett is lacking a little in the top story, but he makes the most of his handicap, God Bless. And, again, no one cares what he says.

On the other hand, there is creationism and especially Young Earth Creationism. It might not exist for all the real criticism it provokes. A few years ago, I got some sharp intelligent comments from someone writing to Talk Reason. I’ll call him Mr. X, to preserve his privacy. We corresponded and by and by he showed me a manuscript on which he had been working. It comprised the most detailed, thorough, intelligent and striking critique of old-fashioned creationist ideas that I had ever seen, just tore into Henry Morris, Duane Gish, young earth creationists, Philip Johnson. I tried to get it published. I did my best. I wrote to people at Talk Reason, telling them that this is one of your own. No response, not even from Paul Gross. I sent the manuscript to the MIT press – I’m an MIT author after all. Nothing. The Princeton University Press – nothing. In the end I finally understood. The creationists did not count. The moment that anyone plumped for biblical inerrancy, he was regarded by the scientific establishment like a Czarist in Lenin’s Russia.

Ah, but ID, now that is a different matter. What makes the challenge so potent is that the ID movement has been shrewd enough to discover that it has a natural ally beyond the scientific establishment itself in the American – no the world – public at large. So what you have is a massively potent form of left-deviationism, and just as one might have expected, the prospect scares the daylights out of the biologists. It is intolerable.

The ID movement in its attack on Darwinism has simply articulated what many people instinctively feel. Darwin’s theory is plain nuts. It is not supported by the evidence; it has no organizing principles; it is incoherent on its face; it flies against all common experience, and it is poisonous in its implications.

And another thing. It is easy to understand. Anyone can become an evolutionary biologist in an afternoon. Just read a book. Most of them are half illustrations anyway. It’s not like studying mathematics or physics, lot of head splitting stuff there.

It is thus infinitely droll to see evolutionary biologists restrain themselves from debating the issue on the grounds that the public is apt to get confused. And God Knows, there’s no need to confuse the public so long as they keep those swell funding checks coming.

It won’t work, it can’t work and it shouldn’t work.

Derbyshire's Cool Fort

Good pictures of his attic conversion here, complete with explanations, a link to the original National Review article where he described the project, and a link to 'before' pictures.

Anti-Christian Hatred On The Rise

Good Don Feder article. Rejoice! As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of me.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

It is indeed good to have clear, rather than blurred lines. For people to be hot or cold, rather than lukewarm...

The Fun Vacation From History Is Over

We thought history was over, and now we've been plunged back into it. Excellent essay at American Digest.

excerpts:

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE TOWERS FELL, in the ash that covered the Brooklyn street where I lived at that time, in the smoke that rose for months from that spot across the river, when rising up in the skyscraper I worked in, or riding deep beneath the river in the subway, or passing the thousand small shrines of puddled candle wax below the walls with the hundreds of photographs of "The Missing," it was not too much to say that you could feel the doors of history open all about you.

Before those days, history happened elsewhere, elsewhen, to others. History did not happen to you. In your world, until that day, you lived in the time after history. There were no more doors in front of you, all history lay behind you. It was a given.

...

History was behind us. It was something our parents entered for a while during the war but they emerged into what was, essentially, the long peace. They'd had enough history, didn't want any more, and did what they could to keep history from happening. In general, the history of the Cold War is the history of what didn't happen punctuated by a few things every now and then such as Korea and Vietnam. But all in all, for over 50 years, history didn't happen.

With the end of the Soviet Union in a whimper and not a bang brighter than the sun on earth, history was officially over. The moment even got its own book, "The End of History," which stimulated an argument that even more than the book emphasized that history was over.

Most sensible people liked it that way. In fact, a lot of people really liked it that way. Because if history for the world was over, these people could get on making the history that really mattered to them: The History of Me.

...

Then on one bright and unusually fine New York September morning History came back with a vengeance we'd never seen before in the history of America. It came back and it stayed and stayed and stayed. The doors of history swung open again and we were all propelled through them into... what?

Nobody knows. Not the President, not his opponents, not the right, left, center, or just plain unhinged and now in low-earth orbit. We know how it began, but we don't know how it will end. We don't really know what's next. Indeed, we never know.

It was better when we lived in The History of Me. We knew how Me would end -- birth, fun, school, fun, job, fun, family, fun, age, fun, death and then ... probably fun, who knew, who cared? The meaning of this history was not deep but was to be found in the world "fun." Mini-Mes love fun. You could almost say it is their religion, a religion of fun. A funny concept, fun. Fills the space between birth and death. "He was a fun guy" could be a generic epitaph for the era.

Now we find ourselves back in history as it has always been and it is not fun. Not fun at all. The history of history has little to do with fun, almost nothing at all.

...

History as it will now unfold will require little from Me but much from Us. I'd like to say that this country's going one way or another tomorrow will be the ruin of the nation. If I could I would be able to get my Me into the Punditocracy. But that is false. One result or another will not be the ruin of the nation for there is, as one of the founding fathers once remarked, "A lot of ruin in a nation."

Should the nation choose to continue in the elections of this year to move forward, to stay the course and continue the offensive, our encounter with history will move forward at much the same pace as it has these past four years, perhaps a bit accelerated. Should the nation choose to step back, to retreat, it will simply retard the process that grips it a bit more than otherwise might be the case. Neither result wil place us back in the History of Me no matter how many yearn for it.

History, having returned, will continue to happen, not to Me, but to Us.

We will have war whether we wish it or not. It will continue to be brought to us as it was brought for many years before we could see it in a pillar of flame by day and a pillar of smoke by night. We will be long in this wilderness, perhaps as long as forty years, and it will take a terrible toll from us, soldier and civilian alike; a toll we have not yet begun to see. Like all global wars in the past century, the war upon us will rise in violence until such time as we either capitulate, or find the will to kill our enemies wholesale. This is not what we would choose, but it is what we shall have.

We could, if we wished, withdraw every soldier from every inch of soil that is not American territory and leave them here inside our borders rusting for a decade. War will still come because war is already upon us, and wars do not end in staged withdrawals, but in either defeat or victory. The lessons of Vietnam and the Cold War teach this to us if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

In this First Terrorist War, the character of our leadership will make a difference to some degree, but it will not decide. It is who we are and who we shall become as a people that will decide. How that will be in the end, I do not know. What I do know is that history, no matter what they tell you, never comes to an end. And because of that, the one small thing that I have the power to do is to decide that I shall no longer vote for Me. I shall vote for Us.

Darned Clever Photoshopping

Some folks have been having a little fun with Hewitt's latest book.

Some good ones:

There Is Nothing Unconstitutional About 'Bad Science' Or 'Not Science'

Interesting take on a First Things article (article not yet online) about the Dover decision.

It begins thusly:

This is a letter I sent to First Things today.

Dear Editors of First Things:

Robert T. Miller argues that Judge Jones’ decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was correct even though Miller admits that Intelligent Design (ID) is not religion (Darwin in Dover, PA, April 2006). Miller’s conclusion is plainly a non sequitur. The Establishment Clause has one and only one purpose – to prevent the establishment of religion. If Miller is correct and ID is not a religion, a policy promoting the teaching of ID does not, by definition, operate to establish religion. Therefore, such a policy cannot violate the Establishment Clause. The inescapable conclusion given Miller’s own premises? Judge Jones erred when he ruled that teaching ID violates the Establishment Clause.

Miller argues that Jones’ decision was nevertheless correct – not because ID is a religion, but because “Intelligent Design does not belong in a science class.” (emphasis in the original) This conclusion is also wrong. Judges – especially federal judges – have a limited role in our constitutional democracy. They do not have a roving warrant to run around setting perceived errors in judgment aright. Judge Jones was entitled to strike down the Dover policy only if it established religion. Miller admits that it did not, because ID is not a religion. Therefore, Jones was wrong even if we grant Miller’s aesthetic judgment about the unseemliness of combining the teaching of two non-religious subjects (assuming arguendo that ID and science are different subjects) during the same class time. This becomes clear if we posit the combination of science and another academic subject that is not as emotionally charged as ID. For example, if the Dover school board had enacted a policy requiring all science teachers in the district to use the last ten minutes of each of their classes to teach music, the policy would have been stupid, but it would not have been unconstitutional. The citizens of Dover’s remedy would have been to throw the rascals out at the next election and hope the new school board would repeal the policy. Their remedy would not be going to court to have the “science and music” policy struck down as unconstitutional...

Sharia Online Dating

Ace of Spades has discovered an Islamic matchmaking website.

Thanks, MSM. Thanks, Democrats. Thanks, Traitors. Because Of You, The Bad Guys Think They Only Need To 'Wait Until Bush Is Gone'.

From OpinionJournal, first the bad news:

Hassan Abbasi has a dream--a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

...

It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of "waiting Bush out" is played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals, this writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr. Bush's plan to help democratize the heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure from Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting restrictions against the country's major political parties and allowing their exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year's elections will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American leader in the region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by courting Tehran and playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.

In Turkey, the "moderate" Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear. With the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the judiciary and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private sector controlled by his party's supporters. There are fears that next year's general election would not take place on a level playing field.

Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite politicians are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni leaders are having second thoughts about their decision to join the democratization process. "What happens after Bush?" demands Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided to slow down all measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim that they have to "take precautions in case the Americans run away."

There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush's democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabia has put its national dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic rather than political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine has been put into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic constitution to set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the security services are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble. Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping much-advertised reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping and testing the waters at all levels.

And, just maybe, some good news:

While Mr. Bush's approval ratings, now in free fall, and the increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the "helicopter" theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. as the world knows it today.

Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to their cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics but the realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Mr. Bush may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a visitor to the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much more than the polls suggest.

I'm not wildly optimistic.

Democrats Can Act Religious, Quote Scripture, And Say They Aim To Apply The Teachings Of Jesus To Politics All They Want.

It's okay with the MSM if they do it, because no one believes they really mean it. David Limbaugh looks at the glaring double standard.

excerpts:

Can someone please explain why Hillary and Bill Clinton always get a pass from the secular left when they invoke God in their public discourse? Why is Dan Quayle ridiculed for championing family values while Hillary is glorified as a dutiful disciple of evangelist John Wesley?

Do the God-mocking among us doubt the Clintons' sincerity and thus not perceive them to be a threat to their sacred church-state separation doctrine? Or could there be some other reason we don't see hysterical editorials when the power couple mention Jesus Christ, as when Hillary recently dragged Him and the Good Samaritan into the immigration debate?

Why is no one calling Hillary an "American Taliban"? Why don't the media pillory Hillary like they did John Ashcroft for saying, "We have no king but Jesus?" Shouldn't someone step forward and ask, "Can a deeply religious person be president?" like Tony Mauro, then of USA Today, inquired concerning Ashcroft: "Can a deeply religious person be attorney general?"

In 1992, Bill Clinton likened his Republican opponents to the Pharisees and the "sanctimonious money-changers" of the New Testament. In 1996, he received a glowing tribute from the media for ranking "near the top of the list of presidents who have talked comfortably about religion" -- as if, all of a sudden, they deemed that a good thing. That same year, Hillary received kudos for urging her party to reclaim the mantle of family values. (Memo to the short-term memory challenged: The libs' nose-holding scramble to reconnect with "values voters" didn't begin with their soul-searching group therapy in the aftermath of the 2004 election presidential election.)

Of course, the journalists praising the Clintons were the same ones who defended Hillary against those lampooning her quasi-seances with Eleanor Roosevelt and her dabbling in other New Age concepts, such as Michael Lerner's "Politics of Meaning."

...

[Hillary has] said, "I've always been a praying person."

Why didn't anyone skewer her for that like they did President Bush for reportedly saying that when he was contemplating attacking Iraq he prayed "for the strength to do the Lord's will?" Do these now-silent critics presume Hillary means something else by "praying"?

...

[Bill Clinton has said] in a post-presidential sermon to his former fellow congregants at the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. that, 'You cannot imagine the peace, the comfort, the strength I have drawn from my Sundays here." Hum, could he have been talking about the same kind of "strength" President Bush had in mind in his prayer concerning Iraq? Surely not, right? Liberals don't cross that hallowed line.

...

The next time the secular media crucifies a conservative politician for openly professing the relevance of faith in his public life, try to remember their refusal to inflict the same rhetorical punishment on those in their ideological camp -- and ask yourself, "Why?"

This Threat Is Bigger

But, thankfully, weaker. Dennis Prager compares the Islamic threat to the threats of Nazism and Communism. The Soviets could have destroyed us, but had a basic sanity that prevented them from doing so. Islam, however, is insane. It threatens to destroy only itself, assuming it finally pushes us hard enough (presumably through nuclear terrorism) to strike out against it with righteous, devastating, relentless fury. Of course, such a thing would be a worldwide upheaval that would be much bigger than WWII and the Cold War. The Islamic countries would lose all sovereignty, and we would undertake the forceful occupation of their lands (and seizing of their oil) that all the morons, cowards, and suicidal leftists accuse us of already doing (ironically, their sedition and treason against our efforts to fix things in a comparatively easy, and gentle way only adds to the likelihood). If the delusional lefties think America is a bunch of violent, xenophobic, racist, imperialistic, dissent quashing, oil stealing, uninclusive meanies now, well, they ain't seen nothing yet, assuming Islam doesn't find some way to learn to settle down, and stop being a threat to the rest of us. Of course, if we do end up facing acts of nuclear terrorism, the left is finished, for good. At that point, sedition and treason will be taken quite seriously. My hope is that we are successful in preventing all of this, and if we are, it will be with no thanks to the left.

excerpt:

[T]here are two unique aspects to the evil emanating from the Islamic world that render this latest threat to humanity particularly difficult to overcome.

One is the number of people who believe in it. This is a new phenomenon among organized evils. Far fewer people believed in Nazism or in communism than believe in Islam generally or in authoritarian Islam specifically. There are one billion Muslims in the world. If just 10 percent believe in the Islam of Hamas, the Taliban, the Sudanese regime, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, bin Ladin, Islamic Jihad, the Finley Park Mosque in London or Hizbollah -- and it is inconceivable that only one of 10 Muslims supports any of these groups' ideologies -- that means a true believing enemy of at least 100 million people. Outside of Germany, how many people believed in Nazism? Outside of Japan, who believed in Japanese imperialism and militarism? And outside of universities, the arts world or Hollywood, how many people believed in Soviet-style totalitarianism?

A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones.

But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.

That is why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked with the Soviet Union. Communist leaders love life -- they loved their money, their power, their dachas, their mistresses, their fine wines -- and were hardly prepared to give all that up for Marx. But Iran's current leaders celebrate dying, and MAD may not work, because from our perspective, they are indeed mad. MAD only works with the sane.

There is much less you can do against people who value dying more than living.

The existence of an unprecedentedly large number of people wishing to destroy decent civilization as we know it -- and who celebrate their own deaths -- poses a threat the likes of which no civilization in history has had to confront.

The evils committed by Nazism and Communism were, of course, greater than those committed by radical Islam. There has been no Muslim Gulag and no Muslim Auschwitz.

But the threat is far more serious.

One Of History's Great Quotes

Highlighted by Ace of Spades (from a Mark Steyn column about the Abdul Rahman case in Afghanistan):

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" - the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

Outstanding Review

Ace of Spades is a seriously talented writer. Check out his review of "V For Vendetta".

Wailing And Gnashing Of Teeth At The Citadel Of Tech Mediocrity

The schedule for Microsoft's next probable fraud of an operating system (I mean let's be honest) slips yet again. Via Peeve Farm, here are some lamentations from inside the company.

Here's one comment:

What's the difference between Mac OS X and Vista? Microsoft employees are excited about Mac OS X.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

Very cute Sunday school quiz answers at The Anchoress.

Quip Of The Day

A throwaway in a DJ Drummond post at Polipundit:

Yeah, the MSM is in touch — with the rotting corpse of V.I. Lenin, apparently.

Hewitt Is On Fire

Good stuff from Hugh Hewitt. He interviews VDH (two separate MP3's, second is midway down the transcript), Reynolds and Kaus, and Mark Steyn. I downloaded the MP3's and queued 'em in WinAmp, yielding an excellent commercial free interview show. Main topic was the growing backlash against the seditious MSM. I liked this quote from Glenn Reynolds:

One thing I've noticed about the press, by the way, the defensiveness I've seen in the last week or two illustrates a couple of things. I think first it shows that even they realize that they've gone too far and overplayed their hand, and it's likely to come back to bite them. The other thing I think they've figured out is imagine that in fact, what they're doing succeeds, that we do lose the war, that it is seen as another Vietnam. A substantial portion of the American public, 30, 40%, at least, is going to blame them and hold a grudge that will last decades. Now is that a position they want to be in? Because that's what's going to happen, and they will have earned it.

Yes, filling a huge part of your potential customer base with seething, enduring resentment would definitely be an asinine move.