Insolent, Raving, Self-Righteous, Uneducated, Sniveling Adolescent Punks

Hot Air has video of the Popular Mechanics guys who wrote Debunking 9/11 Myths going head to head with the Loose Change conspiracy theorists on a talk show. It looks like everyone who doesn't agree with the half-baked ludicrous theories is a liar! This has to be seen to be believed.

These youngsters are illustrating the most important principle of engineering forensics: if given the choice between a handful of harried eyewitness reports made in the initial moments of confusion (and only those that support your theory, and taken as far out of context as possible) or the result of man-years of sober engineering analysis done in the months after the catastrophe (by many different institutions), obviously, go with the former! The children who made Loose Change are ignorant fools whose ignorance includes the fact of their ignorance. And they won't listen to anything The Man has to say!

I wasn't originally planning on buying the Popular Mechanics book, but now I'm going to, just on general principles.

Good exposition and additional links here.

Update: Entire debate in one consolidated piece is here.

Liberal Complains That Republicans Are Becoming A Very Musical People Who Can't Swim Well

Taranto:

Liberal Racism Watch

Adam Howard, a blogger for The Nation:

Has the Republican Party suddenly caught a case of jungle fever? This year Republicans will most likely run three African-Americans in statewide elections: Kenneth Blackwell (for governor in Ohio), former NFL star Lynn Swann (for governor in Pennsylvania) and Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, who is seen as the frontrunner for the Republican Senate nomination there.

Excuse us, but "jungle fever"? What do these three distinguished politicians have to do with the "jungle"?

Follow The Argument Before Following The Money

Thomas Sowell:

Recently one of those increasingly familiar New York Times editorials disguised as news stories was headlined "Conservatives Help Wal-Mart, and Vice Versa."

There was a chart with photos of people from conservative think tanks saying things favorable to Wal-Mart's side of the controversies surrounding that company, along with dollar amounts over them and their statements, indicating how much Wal-Mart had donated to the think tanks where these individuals work.

Buried deep inside the story, near the end, there was a passing comment that "labor unions have financed organizations that have been critical of Wal-Mart." But there were no people or statements singled out with dollar amounts over them.

The double standard was evident in another way: The damning charge was that these conservative think tanks and the scholars who work there "have consistently failed to disclose their ties" to Wal-Mart.

There was no charge that liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution, or the scholars there, "failed to disclose their ties" to their donors.

It is very doubtful if most of the scholars at either liberal or conservative think tanks know who all the many donors to these institutions are -- or care.

...

It is by no means unknown for different scholars at the Hoover Institution to come out publicly on opposite sides of controversies. Nor is that unknown at other think tanks, liberal or conservative.

Why then should we "disclose" -- even if we knew -- who the donors are, as if we were delivering commercials for our sponsors?

Why do conservative donors contribute money to conservative think tanks or liberal donors contribute money to liberal think tanks? Is it rocket science that people are more likely to contribute money to those they agree with?

...

[T]here are people so narrow and shallow that they cannot understand how anyone else could possibly disagree with what they believe without having sold out.

Somehow such journalists, or those that they appeal to, believe that they are so iron-clad right that no one could even mistakenly disagree with them without being bought and paid for by the bad guys.

...

The self-infatuated idea that nobody could disagree with you for honest and informed reasons is far more dangerous than any influence that donors' money may exercise.

Far more is involved here than cheap-shot journalism. It is the audience for such journalism that is the real concern.

Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence.

The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far beyond Wal-Mart or think tanks. It is in fact the Achilles heel of this generation of our society and of Western civilization.

A Simple Question

In cartoon format:

Quick Thoughts From Lileks And Steyn

Taken from this NRO "9/11: Did It Change Us?" symposium:

James Lileks

Half a decade later the changes seem small, and perhaps that’s a blessing. If 9/11 had been followed by 10/17, 11/02, 12/24, the Smallpox Epidemic of ’02, the EMP blackouts of ’03, and so much promiscuous anthrax distribution that mailmen tottered around in Hazmat suits on the hottest day of July, America would look quite different. But the other shoe didn’t drop — or rather, Richard Reid was KO’d before he could light it — and consequently we don’t look at the paper for news about the latest attack. We look at the ads in the paper for news about plasma-TV sales.

If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.

The good news? We returned to our norm: cheerful industrious self-directed Americans who think in terms of fiscal quarters, not ancient grievances, and trust in Coke and Mickey to spread our message of tolerance and prosperity. The bad news? Same as the good. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.


Mark Steyn

In the end, very little changed. The so-called “9/11 Democrats” are almost as invisible a presence as the “moderate Muslim,” and, insofar as one can tell, are most likely outnumbered by members of the Scowcroftian unrealpolitik Right still wedded to stability uber alles. In theory, if you’d wanted to construct an enemy least likely to appeal to the progressive Left, wife-beating gay-bashing theocrats would surely be it. But Islamism turned out to be the ne plus ultra of multiculti diversity-celebration — for what more demonstrates the boundlessness of one’s “tolerance” than by tolerating the intolerant. The Europeans’ fetishization of the Palestinians — whereby the more depraved the suicide bombers are the more brutalized they must have been by the Israelis — has, in effect, been globalized.

Anyone who’s mooched about the Muslim world for even brief amounts of time is struck by what David Pryce-Jones calls its “intellectual poverty”: It has a remarkable lack of curiosity about anything beyond its horizons. That hobbled it for centuries in its wars against the west. But our multicultural mindset is its mirror image: For isn’t the principle characteristic of “multiculturalism” its almost total lack of curiosity about other cultures? The multicultis make bliss of ignorance: You don’t need to know anything about Islam, you just have to feel warm and fluffy about it, and slap that “CO-EXIST” bumper sticker on your Subaru. If you want to know how little changed on 9/11, look at how it’s being observed in the nation’s schools.

A Thirteen-Year-Old Sums It Up

As quoted in her father's blog here.

This September 11 will be a quiet one for me. I will spend the morning writing an essay for the journal Policy Review on legislating counterterrorism policy. At noon I have volunteered to teach a class at my daughter's high school, to ten teenage girls on just war theory. We will discuss 9-11. They were in eighth grade when 9-11 took place, my daughter was in third grade, and they spent that morning watching smoke rise from the Pentagon from their school windows atop Mt St Albans, the highest point in Washington DC.

I am curious to know how, or whether, they sense it has affected them. It has had an effect on my own daughter. Of course things are changeable, especially for the child of a conservative father and liberal mother, but when I asked her why she, practically alone among her Upper Northwest DC limousine liberal classmates and teachers, was willing to call herself a conservative, her answer was unhesitating.

"Liberals," she said, presumably referring to her endlessly politically correct private school (the same National Cathedral that hosted ex-president Khatami last week), "always want to tell you what to do and what to think, but then they don't even keep you safe."

Democratic Party politicians might want to reflect on that awhile. They think of themselves as defenders of freedom, protectors of civil liberties. To my daughter, however, they are merely authoritarians who tell you what to think, but then, when push comes to shove, these liberal authoritarians don't even protect you from existential risk...

More good stuff follows.

Open Letter By Former Liberal

This is pretty good.

Cracked Bells

Darned good Vanderleun post.

excerpt:

[T]heir cracked bells will never stop ringing.

And those bells will ring even louder in the next few months as the liberal media, bleating in lock-step with the Left and the dwindling liberal Democratic party, tries to beat a war-weary electorate into shrugging submission; into a desperation so deep that they will do anything to make this cast-off cartel of crap shut up, even vote them into power. And so they will ring out their cracked bells of doom, of surrender, of despair and the decline of America into delicate things.

Nothing else has worked and nothing else is to hand. So ring out the message of cracked bells, Let the citizens of these states know that for you to shut up, they've got to give power over to the party whose plan is to kill them after taxing them half to death. Boys and girls up in your trembling tower, jerk on the ropes. Ring them bells. It just might work. We don't like long wars, we like quick wins. Maybe we'd like a little peace and quiet around here for a change. Or maybe, just maybe, we'd like you to shut up and listen to us. God knows more and more of us try harder and harder not to listen to you.

But don't think that we're stupid. After all, we're smart enough not to listen to you. And don't think we don't see your plan. It is so hard to miss since you seem, in your dotage, to have hidden it in plain sight, forgetting we've all read Poe's "The Purloined Letter" in high school. Let me see if I can explain it clearly, even to you. Please try not to quote me out of context.

...

The program of this dying media -- which has chained itself onto a drowning political philosophy -- is quite simple: To take the rest of us down with it. And you plan to do it by carping on doom to such an extent that one literally will not be able to hear oneself think. Doombells in the coming months will ring everywhere at a volume louder than a U2 concert seeking to save Africa from the Africans. Stick you head out the window on Mainstream Media Street and listen. Do you hear it? Yes, there it is.

...

The bells, bells, bells, bells, bells of the Bush-bash are clapped over the citizen's ears wherever and whenever he foolishly glances at a newspaper's front page, or mistakenly clicks on a major network of a Sunday morning. Stock markets improve, jobs are so filled up that there are jobs Americans won't do because they have jobs they are happy to do. A deep problem of many Americans looking to buy second (or third or fourth) homes is that interest rates aren't as magical as they were a year ago. The 18% mortgage interest rates brought to you by Jimmy Carter's administration are consigned to the shadows while Jimmy Carter, America's official Buffoon to the world, is actually given space for his opinions on how to handle Iran, the price of oil, and the national economy. And the ratings tank, tank, tank, and the circulation of newspapers creates ever widening unemployment in the news rooms, and still the cracked bell beatings go on in the hope that Americans everywhere will say, "Hurts. Hurts! Make it stop!"

But it won't stop because, like bears hooked on garbage, the mainstream media of the United States knows only two things and tells only two stories.

In the end, the old media is dying off because the only stories they know are "Vietnam" and "Watergate." Everything they've said for nearly half a decade are just variations on those themes and we've become sick and tired on these old moldy tales; a sickness unto the death of the old media...

Let's Make This Real Simple

In this housing bubble thread, I found some excellent financial advice (in the form of the videos below) that just about anyone ought to be able to understand. Too bad it wasn't more widely available before the country threw away its financial future on insane real estate speculation. Live and learn, kids!

Would It Kill Us To Joke Around A Little?

One Cosmos looks at the lack of self-deprecatory humor in Islam. And then suggests a few jokes they could be telling themselves. Actually, when push finally comes to shove, I think the West really ought to try open and scathing ridicule. Maybe that would get through to them. It would be relatively cheap, too, and with a reduced overall body count.

The Future Lies Ahead

Scrappleface has details about the upcoming ABC docudrama. See also this.

The Pilot In Command Is Called That For A Reason

American Thinker on who was at fault in the Lexington, Kentucky crash a couple of weeks ago. None of this is earth-shattering news to pilots, but may be of interest to non-pilots.

excerpt:

What is interesting, is that if you look at the airport diagram for Lexington Blue Grass International, the departure end of both runway 22 and 26 are nearly inline when viewed from the tower. The two runway headings differ by only 40 degrees. With conditions as they were the morning of the crash – a light rain falling a little before dawn – it’s very possible that even if a controller in the tower had been watching Flight 5191 as it lined up and started its takeoff roll, he may not have immediately realized that the aircraft was moving down the wrong runway. After all, in either case it would have been moving laterally to his field of view. With visibility and lighting conditions as they were, depth of field and perception would have been reduced.

At major airports with high volumes of traffic, radar is used for aircraft separation and control both on the ground as well as in the air. Some very large facilities, such as Chicago’s O’Hare, even have more than one ground control frequency depending on where you are while taxiing. This is to reduce the level of “chatter” to avoid confusion and reduce the chance of error and accident. The ground control radar is used to track aircraft independent of visibility.

You will never find this level of control and supervision of ground traffic at an airport such as Lexington. It is just too expensive and would be wasteful. The controller at a small airport, especially during periods of light traffic, would merely give the pilot the takeoff runway, surface winds, barometer setting for the altimeter and the ATC frequency to contact after takeoff, if that hadn’t been given with the IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) clearance.

If there wasn’t any other traffic operating in the area, this information could include the magic words, “Comair 5191 you are cleared for takeoff runway…” Prior to taking off those exact words must be received from the controlling authority at an airport with an operating control tower- “You are cleared for takeoff.”

If you takeoff without that clearance, you can be cited for a violation of FAA rules. For landing the magic words are “You are cleared to land runway…” This is true, believe it or not, world-wide for international traffic. Part of the pilots’ bible. If Comair 5191 had been so cleared, no further communication is required or necessary between the tower controller and the aircraft. It’s strictly up to the pilot to find the right runway. Sure, the tower would alert the pilot if they noticed that something was amiss. But it is not in any way the controller’s responsibility to place the pilot on the correct runway for takeoff. After all, he’s not operating the aircraft. The pilot is.

Regarding all the chatter about airport construction, new taxiways, barriers, lighting not being on or not working, the situation is similar. In the wonderful world of aviation we have what’s acronymically called “NOTAMS.” That is, “Notices to Airmen.” Anything that can affect operations at an airport, be it repairs, closures, openings, or modifications of runways, taxiways, lighting, et cetera, will be in the NOTAMS for that airfield both prior to (if possible) and subsequent to any such changes or restorations. The same is true for instrument approach procedures, changes to the traffic pattern, runway markings, navigational aids, communication frequencies, new or modified significant structures in the vicinity of the field or along approach or departure paths, and so forth. Just about anything and everything that could possibly impact operations will be in the NOTAMS. Fail to read and heed these at your own peril. You might even takeoff on the wrong runway. Sorry, fellas. Such things may contribute to an error but they are no excuse or justification for not paying attention.

The federal aviation regulations are quite clear on who has ultimate responsibility for the safety of a flight. It is the pilot.

The American Thinker piece also mentions what is supposed to be standard pilot procedure to prevent just this sort of thing:

The number on a runway is the magnetic compass direction of that runway rounded to the nearest ten degrees. However, if you check the airport diagram for Lexington Blue Grass, you’ll see that though the actual direction is 225.3, it’s still designated runway 22 and not runway 23. You can also see a visual representation for the magnetic variation on the airport diagram. Note that magnetic variation “varies” over time as shown on the diagram. So the number on the runway will have to be changed at some time in the future. But the important thing to remember is that the runway number’s purpose is to distinguish it from other runways. If you have parallel runways, as does Detroit’s Metro Airport which has three parallel runways, they end up with the same number but with the suffices L, C, & R for “Left”, “Center”, and “Right” When you line up an a runway, your “whiskey” compass – so-called because the bowl is filled with alcohol as a dampening fluid for this purely magnetic compass – and your heading indicator, which is a gyroscopic instrument, should both read approximately the same magnetic direction as the runway. If not, you have one of two problems. First, you’re lined up on the wrong runway or, second, one or both of your directional reference is malfunctioning. Before taking off, one would be well advised to find out which it is!

Cautiously Pessimistic

I heard it said somewhere that the optimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist is afraid he's right. James Lileks has this to say about pessimism:

While working and doing various things the other day, I lent an ear to the radio. The morning host was talking about pessimism, and how he’s sick of it. Sick! I agreed. It's not just specific pessimism about specific issues, which is sometimes apt and wise, but the overall glumness you get from the news media. Of course, you can find glumness anywhere. Swaths of the right are pessimistic about America because immigration will result in the national anthem sung in Toltec by 2018, and chunks of the left are pessimistic because Chimpy McDiebold may serve out his term without impeachment or interment. Everyone’s glum about something. But I listen to the news on the radio every hour on the hour, and it makes me want to saw ditches into my wrists. It’s the needling worrisome hectoring tone of the newscasters that annoys me. There's a a woman who handles the morning shift on ABC; she emotes every syllable, infusing them with a sense of impending disaster, and then she hands it off to Vic Ratnor, who likewise leans into every phoneme with worried urgency, regardless of whether it’s an oil shortage (which could rekindle inflation!), a discovery of a new oil field (which could cost billions to exploit!) or a study on the effect of global warming on popsicles (which could stain the rug!) The two of them could make a flooded antihill sound like the end of the Republic.

The news is never good. If the economy’s up, there’s an expert on hand from the Institute of the Possible Downside warning about unforseen pressure on the bond market, softening housing, hardening tensions, turgid wage growth, and explosive release of inflationary pressures. Have a cigarette. Was it bad for you?

TV news gives me the same impression, which is why I avoid it. All those earnest faces. Good evening, we’re deeply concerned, and powerless to do anything about it. Although we hope you infer from our brows the need to contact someone, and urge action on this issue. Now here’s a baby giraffe.

The formulation seems simple: The continued existence of problems at this late date in human history implies that we’re regressing. We’re screwing up, we’ve lost it, and we wander confused amongst the morass of the malaise and vice versa. Hard times, brother. Hard times. I’m not saying they should pretend we live in the Republic of Happy Bunnies Who Pee Champagne, but for God’s sake, sometimes you’d think the bread lines snaked from the Hoovervilles to the soup kitchens again. I’m probably confusing the sugar-coated recollections of early youth with actual history, but I grew up with a sense of optimism and confidence in the country. That really makes me sound like Mr. McFartus shakin’ a whittlin’ stick at the jaunty-hatted younguns, I know. But the icons in my dim early youth, either by absence or presence, were JFK and Humphrey. They weren’t defeatists, and they didn’t give off that rank stink of anger.

Of course, someone who's angry about different things is always unbalanced, right? I’m sure I’m regarded as a delusional tool because I worry more about Islamicists than global warming. But it comes back again to that theme I blathered about a few weeks ago, the idea of the eternal adolescent strain in American culture; to the adolescent, the cynic is the truth-teller. The optimists are the fools. (It takes an adolescent to think that people who believe in nothing are the best judges of those who believe in something.) It’s all a pose, for the most part, but after a while it feeds on itself. Pessimism produces its own coal, stokes its own furnaces. Optimism is harder. Optimism takes work. You have to roll your own.

Hah! The iPod just kicked on that fine messy song “Tubthumping.” I get knocked down. But I get up again. I get knocked down. But I get up again. You’re never going to keep me down. That's the spirit, ya commie buskers! I don’t listen to that song and wonder “what has he done to get knocked down?” I salute the boozed-up shouting chanty brio of the sentiment, which is the distant cousin of Cagney snapping of "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." Really. Chest out, chin high, eyes bright, up yours if you're heart can't find the tinder to shout hoorah. Look: there’s always a place for the bitchers, the carpers, the griefers, the snipers, the angry marginal sorts flinging poo from the cages of their own beliefs. But it’s not the pessimists who will save the West. It’ll be those who believe the West is worth saving, and not because it is the least horrible option whose defense must be prefaced with endless apologies, but because it really is the best hope we have. Would you rather be a libertarian in China? A Christian in Sudan? A Zoroastran in Iran? A lesbian in Saudi Arabia?

Leftists, Watch This Video. Take Note That The Middle East Is Not A Sea Of Glass. And Tell Me Again What A Ruthless Imperialist Country We Are.

Evan Coyne Maloney has a new mini-documentary about 9/11 called Crystal Morning. It is a must-see.

The Perpetual Campaign That Started In 1992 Is Getting Wearisome

A couple of great posts by The Anchoress.

If You Want A Vacation, Take A Vacation, And Spare Me The Guest Bloggers

A WSJ article takes a look at the vacation conundrum for bloggers.

In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families. Those brave enough to detach themselves from their keyboards for a few days must choose between leaving the site dormant or having someone blog-sit.

I don't understand the worry. I've got a list of blogs I look at each day. It costs me a couple seconds to access each blog and see if its been updated. If it hasn't been, I move on to the next one. A blog would have to go stale for weeks on end before I would say, "screw it", and drop it from my list. But what I don't like is having to wade through a bunch of guest posts. I'm there to read that blogger, not the guest posters. If I'd wanted to read them, I'd be looking at their blogs. It just wastes my time to wade through a confusion of inane posts that are only there to "keep the lights on". If a blogger thinks that the folks whom he wants to use as guest bloggers deserve the boost in visibility, then it should already be happening in the course of normal posting. If someone is that great, they should already be getting links from that blogger. If, over time, I agree that they're that great, they'll already be on my list. I won't need to be reading them on another person's blog. And if I don't think they're that great, then I wouldn't enjoy reading them on another person's blog. In fact, I'd be annoyed.

If you want to take a vacation, do it. I can handle it. I won't abandon you. And I'll appreciate the time you'll be saving me by leaving your blog un-updated!

The Complex Traits Just Poof Into Existence, And Natural Selection Then Does All The Heavy Lifting

Gil Dodgen:

Denyse just alerted me to this latest gem of wisdom in the evolutionary psychology arena, concerning the origin of musical ability and appreciation:

link

The one thing that always amazes me is that Darwinists concentrate on the survival value of a certain trait (why natural selection would select that trait), while assuming that the trait can be had on the cheap and for the asking. Do any of them ever ask, What random mutations would it take to genetically rewire a non-musical brain so that it could appreciate and create music, and what are the probabilities that these mutations could have arisen by chance and been fixed in the population in the time available, with the number of generations available in that time frame, and with the number of individuals in the population?

These quintessential questions are never asked because the answer is obvious: There is no chance that this could have happened, and most people with a modicum of common sense figure this out. One needs a Ph.D. in evolutionary theory to not figure this out.

Is it incomprehensible that the human penchant for music and the arts was programmed into us, just like the machinery of life?

The Inescapable Clutches Of Evolution Somehow Let This Guy Slip Through

Mark Shea:

What a superbly arrogant specimen of scientism!

You could hardly write a parody that would be funnier:

The human brain is hard-wired to be susceptible to supernatural beliefs as a result of tens of thousands of years of evolution, a British psychologist said today.

Religion and other forms of magical thinking continue to thrive, in spite of a lack of evidence and the advance of science, because people are naturally biased to accept a role for the irrational in their daily lives, according to Bruce Hood, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol.

This evolved credulity suggests that it will be impossible to root out belief in ideas such as creationism and paranormal phenomena, even though they have been refuted by evidence and are held as a matter of faith alone.

People ultimately believe in them for the same reasons as they attach sentimental value to inanimate objects like wedding rings or teddy bears, and recoil from artefacts linked to evil, as if they are pervaded by a physical "essence".

Scientists have not yet figured out why Bruce Hood's brain attaches sentimental value to books full of atheistic materialism, nor why Bruce Hood's brain thinks a three pound lump of meat between Bruce Hood's ears is an infallibly reliable guide to the nature of the universe. Science also has yet to answer the question of why evolution would create a species that is incorrigibly driven to seek supernatural meaning to the universe, nor what "survival value" this bit of brain wiring has, nor why people who discover it seem to invariably have evolved past this primitive phase and become "brights". Also unanswered is the question of whether "Brights" have reached the Next Phase in Evolution or are, contrarily, throwbacks who cannot appreciate a supernatural dimension their normal fellow homo sapiens can see. Perhaps the problem, in other words, is that Bruce Hood's brain is closer to that of a cow than that of the Superman.

Evidence of bovine reasoning ability includes the inability to realize that disproof of some supernatural claims does not constitute disproof of all supernatural claims. Other evidence includes a congenital inability to understand why a wedding ring could matter to somebody. Some authorities suspect that this basic sociopathic inability to relate to simple emotions comes from early exposure to Trek Conventions and other socially maladjusting influences. This, plus a grandiose notion of superiority could account for a great deal of what passes for "scientific research" on the human person.

More Colbert

Mark Shea links to four Colbert interviews. I've only looked at the first one, and it is quite amusing.

Martyrdom

Kobayashi Maru (H/T Anchoress):

How wise the jihadists are in assessing the West. We are weak. Our worship of material prosperity and their apparent disdain for it leads us value our earthly existence more than they do and that gives them a big advantage. How else to explain multi-lingual, world-traveling Ph.D candidates willing to blow themselves up for allah?

And yet in our terms it all seems so trivial. How easy it was--in one sense--for the FOX reporters to gain their own release.

Allah blah, blah, whatever. Doesn't count 'cause my fingers were crossed and I coughed and blinked and everyone back home knows it was a brutal no-win set-up and I had no choice.

...

You say you want a video? And it's not going to be like Nick Berg and Danny Pearl? Heck yeah! No problemo, man! You want me to strip naked and dance like Barney the Dinosaur while reciting the Koran? Can do, babe! Here, let me show you. Roll the tape, Achmed!

...

It would be just as easy for us as a culture to give the jihadists exactly what they want--a verbal profession of faith--a profession that in our frame of reference has come to mean less and less, and in many circles virtually nothing.

Public prayer makes us nervous--graduation speeches watered down by school administrators to bland affirmations of goodness, ice cream, being kind to kittens and respecting the rain forest and the cosmos. Presidential inaugurals that refer to the deity as often as their predecessors are cause for a national media kerfuffle. We have the deconstructionists to thank for all that--for the increasing malleability and ultimate meaninglessness of language and dilution of what used to be solemn oaths and commitments.

...

The culture of "whatever meets the culture of "deadly seriousness in Islam.

We've run up against a movement within Islam that makes the term "fundamentalist" seem quaint in its traditional Christian context. It's a movement in which every stinking word in a little book (and don't you dare rumple the pages!) is from allah. And don't even think about arguing or joking about it or changing a semicolon or an accent or we'll slit your throat you dhimmi pig!

It's a funny conflict when you think about it.

...

All the Islamofascists want is for us to say just one little thing: that God has a particular name and that a 7th century pedophile is his prophet.

What's the big deal? (Hold that thought just a moment longer...)

The reporters did what they had to do to get back to their families and continue living their lives, we think. Who wouldn't? They're rational. They're human. They said what they had to in order to be released. Who can blame them? It means nothing, we say to ourselves. They had guns pointed at their heads. The alternative--probably for both, even if only one had refused--was a slow, ugly beheading and who wants that?

Nor have we heard the reporters publicly renounce Islam in favor of anything else. Why would they, we think? Doing so would only invite other fanatics to hunt them down and kill them. Islam ratchets. Renunciation isn't an option. Apostasy is punishable by death. No exceptions. We all know that. No sense baiting an angry tiger.

The conventional wisdom of course, is that the renunciation is implicit in their situation. And anyway, goes the thinking, whatever it is that they choose to return to faith-wise is their business. Faith that's not shared doesn't need a name or a counter-profession. It's private. Non-specific secular humanism doesn't either.

Let them alone, we say to ourselves. They're back and that's the only thing that matters. Thank... Umm... Well... thank the stars... thank goodness... thank whatever.

There was once a time when it wasn't so. There was once a time when ordinary men and women with families and homes and perfectly bright futures and plenty to go back to--just like most of us, and just like the FOX reporters--were so convinced of the beautiful truth that God had come into the world for their sakes and sacrificed His only son that they did the irrational thing and refused to profess loyalty to Roman gods they knew to be false. They allowed themselves to be hung on crosses and ripped apart by lions and pierced with arrows and burned and beaten and minced in innumerable ways.

Most of them could have avoided such fates quite easily. They didn't. And people paid attention. Even Rome eventually paid attention. On their suffering and in their memory was born a great religion of peace--one that doesn't have to say so repeatedly in order to be taken seriously. Yes, we Christians have stumbled and stumbled and stumbled again, but the ideal remains utterly clear. There is no active admonition to subdue and convert by the sword--or even to cut off an ear.

Faith must have outward expression but only as a sincere upwelling of something deep within one's heart. If it's only the outward expression, it means nothing. If it's only the inner feeling, it's ineffective.

Those same courageous individuals at the dawn of the first milennium could have said simply, "whatever". Roll the tape, Achmed. Hand me the script, Caesar... and we never would have remembered them. Nothing would have been built.

They were not so different from us... except in their reverence for words and oaths and the infinitely rippling impact of public expressions of faith (or lack thereof). They are the saints of old. They are alive and watching. They are praying for a few brave souls to hold back the waves of bowel-clenching dread and say to their captors:

'No'. I will not bow to a false god. Behead me if you wish. I know my salvation is in Christ. I know the world is watching. I know what I must say. I know what I must do. Your will, not mine, oh Lord.

Imagine such a spectacle: a modern saint on the nightly news--a wholly different kind of martyr. Not the kind we're used to hearing about who blows himself up on the subway. Just as firm in conscience, but utterly submissive in body. Imagine. More powerful than the greatest army...

How Odd

A very strange and disturbing car commercial. Suzanne Fields:

Detroit will try anything, even melancholia, to sell cars, even to women. Our automakers are finally into quality, having learned their lesson from the Japanese, the Germans and the Koreans, and now build tougher and more reliable cars. Changing perceptions is more difficult. Detroit is betting that sadness, sorrow, woe and gloom, along with a female version of macho, can tease customers back into the showrooms. Interesting work, if you can get it.

General Motors huffs and puffs to remain the No. 1 automaker in the world, so far managing to stay just ahead of Toyota. The company that Henry Ford built is trying to stay out of bankruptcy by closing plants, and may sell off its prestigious foreign badges, including the elegant Jaguar, the politically correct Volvo and Land Rover, the scourge of elephants, rhinos and hippopotami.

A new Hummer is on display outside a Hummer dealership in Richmond, Va., Wednesday May 31, 2006. New car sales figures are due out Thursday. Automakers release their sales figures for May. High gasoline prices were expected to have crimped sales of sport utility vehicle and trucks for domestic automakers. Some analysts are predicting that General Motors Corp. will be hit hardest because it is trying to wean itself off incentives and fleet sales, and because it relies heavily on truck-based SUVs. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Hard times will make a monkey eat red pepper, as the wisest man I ever knew (Daddy, of course) was fond of saying, and Labor Day, once a joyous occasion in Detroit, is this year just another day to fret. In a remarkable bit of pushing the advertising envelope, a television commercial for the new Ford Freestyle, an SUV that was left out in the rain to shrink to about half the size of the behemoths that have taken over the narrow streets in nearly every city, a mom and a dad start out for a day at the beach with a back seat full of happy, smiling kids.

The car moves across desert and plain, through Norman Rockwell country, down hill and past dale, and home again after a good time is had by all. Then the Ford stops, Dad gets out, pulling his little duffel bag with him, and looks gratefully at his wife. She's in the driver's seat, of course. "Thanks for inviting me along," he says, and to the kids, adds: "I'll see you next week." The wife gives him a wan but relieved smile, the little family dog barks a sad little bark, and Mom and the kids drive away in what critics are calling "the Divorcemobile."

"This is perhaps the weirdest commercial I've covered," observes Seth Stevenson, an automobile writer, in Slate, the online magazine. "It is a freakish mash-up, blending a classically boring car ad with a bizarre stab at social commentary. I can't for the life of me see what Ford hopes to achieve here."

Maybe it's to make divorced wives and children of divorce feel better, to make them feel included in the warm and cuddly fantasy world of television commercials. Nothing wrong with that. Or maybe it's to make women feel more in control, even when they aren't. The man in the Ford commercial is a bit of a wimp -- "wet," as the British say -- and some critics say he looks gay, or at least metrosexual. The wife doesn't look particularly sad that she's not taking him home with her. Neither do the kids. [This is not strictly correct. The daughter seems happy-go-lucky, her brother seems wistful. At the end, Mom seems like she barely tolerated having Dad around.]

I found the ad on YouTube here. Have a look.

Good Quote

Seen here:

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

--Wittgenstein

Dhimmitude Is Highlarious!

Bill Maher has shown us the true soul of our leftist betters. Islam means submission! And that's pure comedy gold!

You'll want to watch the video clip, but a partial transcript can be found toward the end of Flopping Aces post. In addition Mark Steyn has an excellent column about "fake conversions" to Islam.

Cognitive Dissonance

Illustrated on a bumper. Highlighted here. Reminds me of a Miata I once saw which had the Darwin salamander, and also a sticker saying "Subvert The Dominant Paradigm".

Bravo. It's About Time.

Dr. Helen mentions a new television show about people who have defended themselves from violent crime, sometimes using of all things, guns. The horror! I took a look at the promotional clip from the show (available on the show's website), looks like very good stuff.

They're Courageous Heroes For Fighting Something That Isn't Happening

Good piece at PowerLine re: the Bush assasiniation movie. Here's a teaser which was quoted at Dr. Sanity:

Liberals have been announcing the imminent Nazification of America for some years now, and yet...to the presumed embarrassment of nutballs like Keith Olbermann and Howard Dean...the dark night of fascism stubbornly refuses to fall. Not only has Bushitler refrained from rounding up liberals and putting them to the sword, the heady air of freedom has never been headier.

In many social circles, people not only dare to launch vicious attacks on the President, they risk ostracism if they fail to do so. It's not quite the repressive atmosphere that liberals were expecting. Are liberals setting up overseas bank accounts so they are ready to flee when the crackdown comes? Um, no. Indeed, liberals appear serenely confident that no adverse consequences will follow from their accusing the President of every crime known to humanity. They go happily about their business, secure in the knowledge that their hysterical attacks on the President are bullshit.

To date, President Bush has failed even to accuse his critics of a lack of patriotism, let alone imprison or behead them. This is not what has traditionally been characterized as fascism.

Blinded By The Glorious Future Marxist Triumph

Interesting angle on Democrat insanity.

excerpt:

The Republicans are hardly the last word in human wisdom, but right now they are the only ones acting normal. Sure, Democrats think they are making sense, but that’s only when they talk to each other. There aren’t enough grey-beard loons in the country to win national elections. What the Dems don’t get is that they have flagrantly and repeatedly crossed a clear red line in American politics: The line between being for our country or against it.

Forget the word “patriotism.” The question is, do Democrats favor a strong and vigorous America that protects itself—- and the entire West—- against a monstrous and aggressive ideology? Americans don’t want to be in doubt about that. For the Democrats to be so completely blind to the signals they constantly send out is weird beyond words. It is self-destructive, and it degrades our political dialogue. We need sensible Democrats. As it is, the sensible ones who speak up are purged, like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller.

The only explanation I can think of is that liberals have in their minds substituted internationalism for nationalism. They have slipped into a belief they can’t own up to.

But the plain reality is that our nation is the only vessel in which we all sink or swim. Punch a hole in the bottom and we all go down. In a nuclear age, with North Korea and the Khomeiniacs getting the Bomb, it’s not just a scare headline any more. Give enough Bombs to enough rogues with enough hate for the West, and Boom! It’s over. Back to the Dark Ages.

That’s obvious to the average voter. It’s so obvious that it’s not even worth debating. It was average Americans who spontaneously broke out a great blizzard of American flags in the months after 9/11. That was the instinctive and natural expression of our pain, the feeling that we had been personally hit by a mad and ruthless enemy—- an inhuman enemy who was willing to use utility knives to butcher female airline attendants, and then fly hundreds of innocent people into buildings filled with more than fifty thousand ordinary people. The whole barbarian piece of butchery was simply unimaginable to normal Americans. It still is.

That spontaneous flowering of flags was eloquent, solemn and silent. It did not need words, because we all understood what it meant: “We are all hurt, we are all Americans, we are all healed by acknowledging who we are. We are one.” Words were not needed.

But to liberal Democrats, the great spontaneous wave of flags in those bitter days made no sense at all. They saw it as a throwback to jack-booted Jingoism; as if they had utterly forgotten what country they were living in. To liberals, our shared destiny in the frail craft of nationhood was no longer obvious. They were afraid of those millions of little flags, because they felt excluded by them.

Internationalist Supercessionism

It can only be that the Left has absorbed a Marxist assumption about the world, and done it so completely that don’t even realize it themselves. That unconscious assumption could be called “internationalist supercessionism.” It is the idea that the nation-state is out of date. Nations are doomed, and furthermore, it’s really good that they are destined to die, because nations will be superceded by some international body that will abolish war and create welfare and equality for all.

...

That never made any sense. Suppose—- just for the sake of argument—- that the whole fantasy is true, and that nation states will crumble in the best Marxist fashion and be superceded by an ideal government for all the world, a government that is good, decent, equitable, generous, honest, fair, prosperous, and gives welfare benefits for all, for ever and ever, amen. Don’t laugh. Let’s just assume it.

How do we get from here to there? By allowing Islamofascists to win in Iraq or Lebanon? By teaching multiculturalism, to discredit our own time-tested values and sabotage our survival? By hoping that Hillary brings healthcare for all, with no limits and no tough choices? As soon as you start to ask questions, the whole Tinkerbelle wish-upon-a-star fantasy becomes obvious. Even to liberals.

...

Marxism has fallen on hard times—- big sigh of relief!—- but the Left still doesn’t have any answer. It doesn’t even ask questions—- choosing instead, for example, to bury their heads in the sand in the face of an open Third-World corruptocracy at the United Nations. They need to believe. Don’t ask.

The internationalist assumption has spread, because none of the insiders raise questions; and those who raise questions are purged. That’s exactly how cults work. I think I know that, because I keep asking my liberal friends to answer simple questions, but I never get to the end of my sentence. Instead, they just keep changing the subject when I try.

It’s very strange. Here are very intelligent people, living in unprecedented prosperity and security in the most freedom-loving nation on earth. Yet they are obsessed with an otherworldly dream, so that their lives are filled with passionate loves and hates. They love whoever sings their dream song, and they hate anybody who doesn’t. The Left loved Kennedy and hated Nixon with a deadly hatred. They hated Eisenhower and loved Adlai Stevenson. Today they love Hillary and hate Bush. It’s all very black and white. There are the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and that’s all there’s to it.

It is as if liberals are too frail, too weak to think freely about some of the most important questions in the world. Skeptical questions seem to hurt their feelings. My liberal friends seem thrive on warm social groups that confirm their beliefs. Nationally, they have converted a gloriously argumentative newspaper industry into dull conformity, after the invention of television made an intellectual monopoly possible. Vibrant intellectual institutions like Harvard University have been degraded into places where the president gets fired, simply for asking questions.

I believe that’s what happened to the Democrats. They have become intellectually hollow, allowing themselves to drift into cult-like, otherworldly fantasies. Just by shutting out questions, by controlling the national narrative, they have turned a viable political party into an empty shell, interested only in winning power and privilege, but unable to tell the voters why they deserve to win.

It's Amazing How Many Lies Have Had To Be Told In Order To Make Bush Look Like A Liar

Is the first comment to this Roger L. Simon post about the incurious end to the MSM's Plamegate obsession. Be sure to check out the many literate and insightful comments to the post!

Homeschooling Keeps Looking Better And Better

Interesting piece in the WSJ. A 7:20 AM start time for highschoolers? No wonder teenagers tend to be a bunch of sullen adult-haters!

As a father of two teenage boys, I can attest to the fact that the single greatest teen crisis in America is not drugs, alcohol, smoking or early sexual activity, but sleep deprivation. Tuesday marks the start of the school year in our district in Fairfax, Va., and for the better part of the next nine months my kids will shuffle through the day resembling the zombies from "Night of the Living Dead." The reason that so many kids today appear to be slouching toward Gomorrah is simply that they lack sleep.

Waking teens from their deep REM sleep before 7 a.m.--which during late fall and winter is well before the rooster crows--is much like approaching a lion gnawing on an antelope carcass. All the niceties that we've tried to instill in our children for the past 15 years about honoring thy mother and father go flying out the window in these wee hours of the morning. Breakfasts from now until June will be as somber as the death row inmate's last meal. We shovel frosted flakes down their throats so that the temporary sugar fix arouses them out of their comatose state long enough to get them out the front door.

...

It's astonishing that a community like Fairfax, which prides itself on the quality of its public schools, retains a 7:20 a.m. start time despite the detriment to the health and scholastic achievement of our kids. Parents with teens are in open revolt to the idiocy of the policy and have even started a Web site, SleepInFairfax.org, to fix it.

The school board insists that an 8:30 a.m. start time would cost the county some $40 million a year, because of unalterable bus schedules. Incredible. The legislators in our state just passed a $2 billion tax increase, the largest ever, to fund the latest education fads, like higher teacher pay and smaller class sizes--which studies all show will have almost no effect--but they can't afford a policy at a fraction of the cost that will do far more to benefit kids in terms of improved behavior, attendance, mood, health and test scores.

This controversy over early school start times is raging in hundreds of communities today, pitting parents against unbending school bureaucracies. Surveys of teen's parents in school districts with early start times find that as many as 90% favor a later starting bell. If ever there were a case study in how public school boards ignore the wishes of their "customers," it is this.

...

Studies show that spurting growth hormones in teens alter their circadian rhythm and naturally turn them into night owls, physiologically uninterested in 9:30 p.m. bedtimes and fiercely opposed to 6:15 a.m. wake-up calls. (This fact suggests that I myself am still in late puberty.)

So here is the inevitable ritual: Kids trudge through the week on insufficient sleep, barely limp to the finish line on Fridays, use the weekends to pay off the week's sleep debt by snoozing until noon and then try to readjust their body clocks on Monday morning. Prof. Jim Moss, a sleep expert at Cornell, says: "It's as if at the start of every week our kids have West Coast to East Coast jet lag." He finds that in the early morning classroom "the overwhelming drive to sleep can replace any chance of alertness, cognition, memory or understanding."

Kindly Advice For Jihadis

A good open letter in The American Thinker.

Some highlights (but do read the whole piece):

I suspect that you have found recent events in Lebanon rather disconcerting. One of your leaders, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezb’allah, is quoted as saying:

“We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military and political reasons. Neither I, Hezb’allah, prisoners in Israeli jails nor the families of the prisoners would accept it.”

Your traditional strategy, of using terrorist tactics while counting on your enemies to adhere to the rules of diplomacy and formal warfare, doesn’t seem to be working any more.

What you have really done, by past decades of terrorism, is open a Pandora’s Box of horrors that may ultimately harm you and your people more than anyone else. This toughening of the tactics of Western powers is merely an example of Magruder’s Law that:

“Combat inevitably sinks to the lowest common denominator of the combatants. If you like to wrestle in the mud and your opponent likes to gouge out eyes, then sooner or later you will both be eye-gouging in the mud.”

...

[A]lready in Iraq, there have been isolated ugly incidents that indicate that the patience of the US forces may be wearing thin. Although you may think that this will be to your advantage, you are mistaken. You don’t want escalation when dealing with an enemy with our resources, resolution, and (as cited above) our penchant for delayed but massive “disproportionate” retaliation.

You seem to have forgotten that the basic purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to make your enemy cower, panic, and flee. Thus, successful terrorism is always a conspicuous exception to Magruder’s Law. On the other hand, when terrorism does not frighten the enemy but makes him more angry, the consequent escalation may be more than the terrorist bargained for and may work to his downfall—especially if his resources are inferior to those of his enemy.

...

[T]here are signs that you may try to employ this suicidal procedure against the United States. I am particularly alarmed by the recent news that Iran has been trying to acquire cesium, for the obvious purpose of instigating some sort of radioisotope terrorist atrocity. Bear in mind that you are planning such an attack against the biggest nuclear power in the world and the only one that has actually used nuclear weapons against an enemy. The only thing that restrained us during the Cold War, aside from fear of reprisal, was a mutually agreed upon taboo. If an Islamic power violates that taboo and uses nuclear weapons against the US, what form do you think our retaliation will take? And how “proportionate” do you think it will be?

Is that what you really want? Does the prospect of your wives and children becoming martyrs of Jihad fill you with joy? If so, then I suppose I have nothing more to say. But if you are expecting the U.S. to continue to exercise Judeo-Christian restraint and compassion in response to your attacks, then according your own accusations, you are wrong. If what you have been saying about our degeneracy is true; then we are no longer a morally restrained Judeo-Christian nation. If most of us are, as you claim, hedonistic materialists, then we are just as capable of vengeance and cruelty as you are.

I do not mean this as a threat, but as an urgent warning. I am trying to make you realize that you—and your families—are at the edge of a slope, a steep muddy slope that slides down irreversibly into an unthinkably horrible pit in which the people of Islam may ultimately perish.

Your Thinking That It Is Easy To Drive Me To It Drove Me To It

Not a helpful attitude:

Here's a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a 19 year-old Muslim beauty queen in Britain:

The first Muslim to be crowned Miss England has warned that stereotyping members of her community is leading some towards extremism.

...She said: "The attitude towards Muslims has got worse over the year. Also the Muslims' attitude to British people has got worse.

"Even moderate Muslims are turning to terrorism to prove themselves. They think they might as well support it because they are stereotyped anyway. It will take a long time for communities to start mixing in more.

In all fairness to Ms. Kohistani, she did get elected for her looks, not her brains. But, let's set that aside for just a moment and look at her line of reasoning.

"Even moderate Muslims are turning to terrorism to prove themselves. They think they might as well support it because they are stereotyped anyway."

So, because they're stereotyped as terrorists, they're turning to terrorism and what -- proving the stereotype is spot-on? Worse yet, if "moderate" Muslims are turning into terrorists, then doesn't that mean that even "moderate" Muslims can't be trusted?

I'm sure there are Muslims all over Britain right now going, "Thank you for the kind words, no, no, really. Thank you. But, could you move on to world peace or saving Africa or some other topic please? No, no, you did just fine, but we'll take it from here, Ok?"

PS: If Ms. Kohistani or any other Muslim wants to do something about the perception -- the growing perception I might add -- that Muslims are sympathetic to terrorism, then there's a very obvious thing that can be done. Condemn terrorists and terrorism at every opportunity. Condemn Al-Qaeda, condemn Hamas, Condemn Hezbollah. Call them what they are: despicable, evil, monstrous. When there's a terrorist attack in Europe, Israel, Russia -- it really doesn't matter where it happens -- don't make excuses, don't try to shift the blame -- unconditionally condemn the people responsible. If a lot more Muslims were to start doing that on a regular basis, they'd find that a lot of the ill will and suspicion cast towards Muslims would start to evaporate in short order.

To Hell With Jiffy Lube, Then

The NBC affiliate in LA did a three month investigative report on Jiffy Lube. You've got to see this very well produced video segment. The reporters made use of many miniature hidden cameras placed about the vehicle, proving that paid for work was not being done. Pure fraud at many different store locations (5 out of 9!). Includes confrontations with the store managers, and a district manager who lies about his own identity. Busted.

The KNBC web page has more background about the story (looks like the story ran last April or May) here.

Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the report are available on YouTube here. Is this company being run by Tony Soprano and friends? Or even worse, Reuters?

Class. Some People Got It, And Some People Don't.

The Anchoress looks at the way a couple of different well-known guys handled going to Mass as non Catholics. It's not like this is arcane rocket science. The inside cover of every Catholic Missalette found in the pews explains the proper etiquette. Surely someone in the previous Administration could have done the research.

You Pretend To Show Me Diversity, And I'll Pretend To Celebrate

Honesty through and through:

YOU'RE A publisher of children's textbooks, and you have a problem. Your diversity guidelines -- quotas in all but name -- require you to include pictures of disabled children in your elementary and high school texts, but it isn't easy to find handicapped children who are willing and able to pose for a photographer. Kids confined to wheelchairs often suffer from afflictions that affect their appearance, such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. How can you meet your quota of disability images if you don't have disabled models who are suitably photogenic?

Well, you can always do what Houghton Mifflin does. The well-known textbook publisher keeps a wheelchair on hand as a prop and hires able-bodied children from a modeling agency to pose in it. It keeps colorful pairs of crutches on hand, too -- in case a child model turns out to be the wrong size for the wheelchair.

Houghton Mifflin's ploy was recently described by reporter Daniel Golden in a Wall Street Journal story on the lengths to which publishers go to get images of minorities and the disabled into grade-school textbooks. A Houghton Mifflin spokesman claimed that able-bodied models are presented as handicapped only as a last resort. But according to one of the company's regular photographers, the deception is the norm. At least three-fourths of the children portrayed as disabled in Houghton Mifflin textbooks actually aren't, she told Golden. In fact, publishers have to keep track of all the models they use for such pictures, so that a child posing as disabled in one chapter isn't shown running or climbing a tree in another.

Faked photos of handicapped kids are just one of the ways in which truth is sacrificed on the altar of diversity. The cofounder of PhotoEdit Inc., a commercial archive that specializes in pictures of what it calls ``ethnic and minority people in all walks of life," advises publishers that images of Chicanos can be passed off as American Indians from the Southwest, because they ``look very similar." Similarly, Golden notes, a textbook photographer tells clients that since the ``facial features" of some Asians resemble Indians from Mexico, ``there are some times where you can flip-flop." [Well, you know, they all look alike to me]

Yet pictures of authentic Hispanics who happen to have blond hair or blue eyes don't count toward the Hispanic quota ``because their background would not be apparent to readers." In other words, rather than expose schoolchildren to the fact that ``Hispanic" is an artificial classification that encompasses people of every color, publishers promote the fiction that all Hispanics look the same -- and that looks, not language or lineage, are the essence of Hispanic identity.

...

It isn't only when it comes to texts that diversity has led to dishonesty, or even to the manipulation of photos. In 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Madison featured a group of students cheering at a football game on the cover of its admissions brochure. One of those students was Diallo Shabazz, a black senior who hadn't been at the game. University officials, desperately wanting the new publication to reflect a diverse student body, had lifted Diallo's image from somewhere else and digitally inserted it into the football shot. ``Our intentions were good," Madison's director of university publications said when the deception was exposed, ``but our methods were bad."

But the ``good" intentions of the diversity crusaders cannot be separated from bad methods they resort to, whether those methods involve racial quotas in admissions and hiring, the assignment of schoolchildren on the basis of color, or photographic fakery that puts healthy kids in wheelchairs. By reducing ``diversity" to something as shallow and meaningless as appearance, they reinforce the most dehumanizing stereotypes of all -- those that treat people first and foremost as members of racial, ethnic, or social groups. Far from acknowledging the genuine complexity and variety of human life, the diversity dogmatists deny it. Is it any wonder that their methods so often lead to unhappy and unhealthy results?

Ephesians 5 Is A Hard Saying. Who Can Accept It?

I went to Mass at an out-of-town Church last Sunday and experienced some of what Mark Shea is talking about here. Shea links to Dale Price, and to a piece that Shea wrote earlier. Both are worth reading.

It was amazing to witness at Mass all the hemming and hawing about Eph 5, combined with self-congratulatory acceptance of the "hard saying" part of Jn 6. And all with no consciousness for the complete irony of the situation.

Chesterton Quote

Via Mark Shea:

Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox: a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson. to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.

IMHO, the problem with modern philosophy is that it treats necessary axioms (free will, reason, the knowable existence of objective reality, etc) as if they should be provable conclusions. Failing to find a way to prove the unprovable axioms (which are yet knowable by any sane person), modern philosophy rejects the axioms, landing it in a morass of utter confusion (and irrelevance).

And Now For Something Completely Different

This.

Good Dalrymple Quotes

Via Jay Nordlinger:

Dalrymple, like Steyn, writes truth so effortlessly, his prose takes on the character of aphorism. For example, in his Updike piece, we find this: “In the current climate, you can’t fail as a minority: you can only be failed by others.”

And, “It is not the personal that is political, but the political that is personal. People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that has so wounded them.” [As a former angry leftist, I can absolutely testify to this]

Yes. And how about this? “One might have expected [Joseph Conrad] to have sympathized with extremists of almost any stripe, but he understood only too well that those who opposed tyranny by terrorism objected not so much to tyranny as such but to the fact that it was not they who were exercising it.”

And, “The crude nostrums of Islamism rush in where the Enlightenment fears to tread.” (Trust me, in context, you will see that this is perfect.)

Finally, oil — Dalrymple beautifully lays to rest the canard that Westerners exploit Arabs for their oil. This claim, on the part of Arabs, “is not merely self-serving; it is patently absurd. If anything, the direction of the exploitation has been precisely the opposite, for merely by virtue of their fortunate geographical location, and with scarcely any effort on their part, the people of the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere have enjoyed a high standard of living thanks entirely to the ingenuity of those whom they accuse of exploitation and without whom the oil resource would not be an economic resource at all.” [yup. It makes zero sense for barbarians who make war on us to be allowed to control our oil, and I expect that eventually, they will not be allowed to continue to do so. We will achieve energy independence by seizing the oil, until the barbarians learn to behave. We are reasonable people, after all]

In The Interests Of Prudence And Comity, Theists Really Ought To Shut Their Pie Holes

Seems to be the position of Heather MacDonald, a generally excellent conservative thinker and writer. In a very good essay, Michael Pakaluk explains why she is off track.

Begetting The Next Generation "Certainly Not Essential"

Maggie Gallagher reflects on a recent Newsweek cover story:

What lies "beyond babies"?

That's the question Newsweek raises in its latest cover story on the looming depopulation crisis in Europe and Asia. But Newsweek (I kid you not) says it means "good things for restaurants and real estate":

"Powerful social and religious taboos (in Greece) labeled childless women as barren spinsters, and cast suspicion on the sexual preferences of single, middle-aged men. No longer. In the space of a generation, that tight social corset has largely vanished, thanks to an array of factors, including better education and job options for women and Greece's entry into the cultural mainstream of the European Union. The result: a marriage rate below the EU average, and a birthrate among the world's lowest, at 1.3 per woman."

So Newsweek tries to stuff perhaps the biggest story of our time -- the sudden collapse of childbearing to below-replacement levels in virtually every free, democratic and affluent nation on this Earth -- into a happy tale of a new generation's lifestyle liberation from that old ugly "social corset" of marriage and family...

The Newsweek article may be read here.

It begins:

Sept. 4, 2006 issue - At the fashionable Da Capo cafe on bustling Kolonaki Square in downtown Athens, Greek professionals in their 30s and early 40s luxuriate over iced cappuccinos. Their favorite topic of conversation is, of course, relationships: men's reluctance to commit, women's independence, and when to have children—or, increasingly, whether to have them at all. "With the years passing my chances of having a child go down," says Eirini Petropoulou, a 37-year-old administrative assistant at the Associated Press news agency. "But I won't marry anyone just to have a child." She loves her work and gets her social sustenance from her parea, or close-knit group of like-minded friends, who increasingly play the role of family for young Greeks. "If at 45 I'm still childless, I'll consider having a child on my own," she says. But it's not as if her sense of personal fulfillment depends on it.

Just a few decades ago, Petropoulou and her friends might have been considered, well, odd. Greece was known as one of Europe's most traditional societies, where the Orthodox Church's strict commandment to marry and multiply held sway. Powerful social and religious taboos labeled childless women as barren spinsters, and cast suspicion on the sexual preferences of single, middle-aged men. No longer. In the space of a generation, that tight social corset has largely vanished, thanks to an array of factors, including better education and job options for women and Greece's entry into the cultural mainstream of the European Union. The result: a marriage rate below the EU average, and a birthrate among the world's lowest, at 1.3 per woman. To young Greeks like Petropoulou, babies are great—if the timing is right. But they're certainly not essential...

Well, it does sound good for restaurants and real estate. Even better, it means less people suffering under violently imposed Sharia law. And don't we owe that to our kids?

Good Questions

From the Cornell Daily Sun:

In the 1970’s, university administrators became increasingly concerned by the marginalization of certain minority groups on their campuses. At a time when female and African-American intellectuals were beginning to demand that their voices be heard, they had no arena in which they could do so. In response to this situation, schools soon developed women’s studies and Africana studies departments. Universities across the country took affirmative action to ensure that every point of view had ample opportunity to be heard. In much the same way as in the 70’s, another ideological minority is being shut out today: conservatives. Perhaps it is now time for a different kind of affirmative action, the affirmation of the majority, which has become the minority on college campuses.

In order to avoid offending any one minority group, the majority is often censored. It is not acceptable to proclaim that you disagree with same-sex marriage on moral grounds, since you may hurt the feelings of gay rights activists. It is not OK to state that God created the world, as outlined in Genesis, because then you might be stepping on the toes of the atheists. It is not all right to talk about Jesus being the Son of God, because then you are infringing on the rights of the Jewish community. It is not all right to support the Iraq war, because then you would most definitely be accosting the sacred liberalism that runs rampant on Cornell’s campus.

But what about my views? What about my rights? Why, because I hold a majority opinion, should my ideas be shot down as uneducated sheep-like behavior? Higher education, in order to protect those with minority opinions and views, has in essence marginalized the mainstream. What happened when the Class of 2006 graduated and found themselves out of the liberal Cornell bubble and in the very conservative United States of America? Without any exposure to conservative ideas for the last four years, were they able to assimilate successfully? Or did they maintain their ignorant superiority and try to convince Republican leaders that higher taxes really are the way to save the world?

Why is it forbidden then, to educate students from all walks of life in all walks of life? Why can’t a Muslim take a class on Christianity, and hear a real Christian explaining his or her faith? Why must religion classes at Cornell be taught by atheists and others who do not understand the fundamental principles of the religious community due to their lack of faith? Why don’t we switch the faculty of the nanotechnology department with that of the art department and see what happens. If that doesn’t make sense, then why is it not a problem for your biology professor to start enumerating the many faults of President Bush in the middle of a discussion on mollusks?

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At a school like Cornell, where diversity holds such a sacred place in our community, where special housing is offered for life style groups such as the Ecology House and JAM, where red arches have dotted campus, proclaiming diversity, where specific training is given to OLs and RAs so that they can sensitively discuss different ideas on our campus, how can such a large group of students, with such strong convictions, be so marginalized? Why is it that conservatives have been forced to wear the scarlet letter? Ezra Cornell once famously said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” How has it become that “any person” does not include conservatives? And how has it become that “any study” does not encompass the ideas and ideologies of the majority?

Are administrators afraid of ideas that are different than theirs? Are they trying to avoid lawsuits from rich liberal alumni? Is it due to the lack of presence of conservative faculty? Or does the higher echelon of campus administrators really just want to make life difficult for those who think for themselves? As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

How True

Glenn Reynolds, in a short post quoting the foreign minister of Australia's criticism of "dishonest" war reporting (which generated a typical "leave the press alone" complaint):

If any other industry were doing as much public harm by producing a similarly substandard product, the press would be screaming for the government to take action.

Wallowing In Ignorance And A Smug Sense Of Superiority, An MSM Reporter Will Fall For Just About Anything

David Frum has a letter from a combat pilot:

Aug. 29, 2006: More About Those Fake Photos...

A reader writes:

Take it from someone who's fired the Maverick, if it had hit those ambulances the crowd would be standing in a hole, not in the vehicle. The later models are so destructive we have to set aside targets on the Nellis ranges for them. Once hit, armored vehicles are in pieces, light skinned vehicles are shredded/vaporized and just about everything else is so completely, um, disassembled that it not longer is big enough to serve as a useful aiming reference/ target. The Hellfire is smaller but the penetration and blast renders commercial vehicles unrecognizable.

You know what the biggest problem is? War and the tools of war, tactics and even the simplest combat concepts are now so unfamiliar, no, utterly unknown, to the folks reporting it that the latter's manipulation is easy. Couple this with their professional cynicism and it becomes inevitable.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has more background on ambulance fraud (HotAir vblog).

Great Photos

Some stunning closeups.

Here are just a few:

Excellent Progress

Right Wing News:

"...(O)n the eve of the 2004 election, an election dominated by “moral values” voters (despite what some have written), fully 42% of Americans saw the Democrat Party as “friendly toward religion.”

Of course, the Dems got walloped in 2004, largely because they were so remarkably out-of-step with the values of those “values voters”. The Dems then embarked on a remarkable propaganda campaign designed to “take back the faith” from religious conservatives. This effort was led by people like Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and … well, you get the picture.

The campaign was a flop. One year later, after all this posturing, the percentage of Americans who viewed the Dems as “religion friendly” plummeted to 29%.

Another campaign seemed to pick up; this one more serious. Genuine liberal Christians like Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo took the reigns of the religious left movement from out of the hands of the blowhard politicians. As Steve Waldman has written in Slate, “A week doesn’t seem to pass without some group convening a conference on religion and liberalism.”

… And the percentage of Americans who viewed the Dems as a “religion friendly” party fell again! This time to 26%."

-- Patrick Hynes

The Swedish Example

Interesting:

One of the joys of my working life is that I get to read papers like "The State of Working America" from the Economic Policy Institute. They are, as you may know, the people who urge that the USA become more like the European countries, most especially the Scandinavian ones. Less income inequality, more leisure time, stronger unions and so on. All good stuff from a particular type of liberal and progressive mindset -- i.e. that society must be managed to produce the outcome that technocrats believe society really desires, rather than an outcome the actual members of society prove they desire by building it.

I will admit that I do find it odd the way that only certain parts of the, say, Swedish, "miracle" are held up as ideas for us to copy. Wouldn't it be interesting if we were urged to adopt some other Swedish policies? Abolish inheritance tax (Sweden doesn't have one), have a pure voucher scheme to pay for the education system (as Sweden does), do not have a national minimum wage (as Sweden does not) and most certainly do not run the health system as a national monolith (as Sweden again does not). But then those policies don't accord with the liberal and progressive ideas in the USA so perhaps their being glossed over is understandable, eh?

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To start with, they make some adjustments to the usual measures of the income of a nation, the GDP, by adjusting for different price levels. This gives us the so called Purchasing Power Parity numbers (PPP) and the USA is set as being 100 on the scale. Only one of the advanced industrial nations has a greater income per capita, Norway, at 105. Given that Norway gets some 20% of its GDP from pumping oil and gas out from beneath the North Sea and is, thus, almost a petro-state, it would be fair to say that the USA is, in fact, the large country with the highest income per head in the world without depleting its natural capital. Good, so far something we knew already.

We're also told on page 6 that if we look at the average of the countries studied without the USA and compare that to the USA's performance, that income growth rates are higher in the USA. 1.8% to 1.9% in 1989-2000, and 1.1% to 1.3% in 2000-2004. So not only richer but getting even richer faster, as well.

Furthermore:

"The U.S. average from 2000 to 2005 was 1.7%, well above the OECD average of 0.7% in real compensation growth. Four countries fared better than the United States, most notably Norway with 2.3% growth. Note also that Germany had negative real compensation growth from 2000-05."

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Ah, but, we can always find something nasty in the woodpile. The US has the most unequal distribution of income of all the countries studied.

Now if the equality of income distribution is something you worry about this is of course a troubling fact. It is what leads to the statement that while the US might be richer, the poor do worse, that in fact the poor in America are worse off than the poor in Europe. Which leads us to this highly informative little picture.

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How we're supposed to read this is that the USA has a very uneven income distribution, that the poorest 10% only get 39% of the median income, that the richest 10% get 210%. Compare and contrast that with the most egalitarian society amongst those studied, Finland, where the rich get 111% and the poor get 38%. Shown this undoubted fact we are therefore to don sackcloth and ashes, promise to do better and tax the heck out of everybody to rectify this appalling situation.

But hang on a minute, that's not quite what is being shown. In the USA the poor get 39% of the US median income and in Finland (and Sweden) the poor get 38% of the US median income. It's not worth quibbling over 1% so let's take it as read that the poor in America have exactly the same standard of living as the poor in Finland (and Sweden). Which is really a rather revealing number don't you think? All those punitive tax rates, all that redistribution, that blessed egalitarianism, the flatter distribution of income, leads to a change in the living standards of the poor of precisely ... nothing.

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As I said above I'm sure this isn't quite what the EPI actually wanted to tell us. But there it is, from their own report. Which is why I rather enjoy my working life -- sad case that I am -- because I get to read all those reports that really don't tell us what the authors think they are telling us.

It's also my understanding that for whatever reason (and I can't imagine what that might be), US poverty statistics don't count as income all of the assistance received by the poor. So, effectively, even when they're getting plenty of help, they're counted as getting no help at all. Nice.

The Shameful End Of A Ludicrous Diversion

Mark Levin succinctly sums up Plamegate:

The more I think about this Fitzgerald investigation, the more astonished I become. Richard Armitage was Bob Novak's "source" — i.e., he identified Valerie Plame — which, incidentally, is clearly not a crime and Armitage has not been charged with any offense. And prosecutors knew Armitage was the "source" almost immediately after beginning their investigation because Armitage confessed. Indeed, when he thought he may have done something wrong, he appears to have cried on many shoulders. Armitage told his boss, Colin Powell, that he was the source, as well as other State Department and Justice Department officials. He told the Special Counsel's people. And not one of them — Armitage, Powell, Patrick Fitzgerald, et al. — had the guts or integrity to tell the public that the original source was Armitage. Why were they protecting him from public scrutiny? By their silence, Armitage and Powell allowed two innocent men, Lewis Libby and Karl Rove, to be smeared as speculation about them being Novak's original source ran rampant. Liberal commentators and politicians had a blast. The truth be damned.

I also believe two things are very apparent. First, the media like Armitage and Powell. They've been great anti-Bush sources over the years. They run in the same social circles in Washington. So, many in the media protected Armitage and Powell. Not until later, when Bob Woodward had to come forward and admit that Armitage had also fingered Plame to him, did it become more difficult for the media to continue to cover-up for their favorite Bush administration officials.

Second, Fitzgerald's investigation is a sham. That's right, a sham. He knew several things early on: 1. Armitage was the original source; 2. disclosing Plame's identity was not a crime; and 3. the investigation was launched due to political pressure from Capitol Hill, especially Chuck Schumer (who was working with Joe Wilson, and who is also the head of the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee). Rather than put an end to this, Fitzgerald appears to have enjoyed the spotlight and adulation from the president's opponents, pursuing "the case" as if he were chasing mobsters or terrorists. He sought and received from his long-time friend, James Comey, extraordinary authority which Fitzgerald used to put pressure on reporters and news organizations as he widened his investigation in pursuit of anyone who might have revealed Plame's name. But to what end? That's not a crime in itself. To catch officials in memory lapses or — to be charitable to prosecutors — false statements or perjury? You don't conduct investigations to catch people in lies. You conduct investigations to uncover or expose crimes and punish those who are responsible. Meanwhile, the president's top advisor sat in the dock, waiting for word whether he'd be indicted, during a good portion of the administration. Only a few months ago did Fitzgerald finally inform Rove that he was in the clear.

The fact is that there was never an underlying crime, period. Yet, as I wrote at the time, many of Fitzgerald's comments at his press conference, at which he announced the Libby indictment, were wildly deceiving. The indictment had nothing to do with any underlying crime. This entire enterprise is disgraceful, from beginning to end.

You Gotta Like Hitchens

Details here. The WMV clip is very high quality.

UPDATE: The twelve minutes available here are definitely worth watching to see Hitchens in action against Maher, Cleland, and an audience full of leftwing yahoos.

Real Shock And Awe

This letter to the editor was in the print edition of the August 21 Weekly Standard:

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

REGARDING Christopher Hitchens's "Scorched Earth" (July 31): The real consequence of an indiscriminate bombing campaign was the changing of the German (and Japanese) mind after 1945. As a German born and raised in Hamburg, I am pretty sure that the air campaign extinguished German romantic militarism.

The bombing bore two lessons for generations to come: First, those who did not prevent Hitler from rising to power in 1933 perished along with the Nazis--a lesson that made Germans very wary of extremist parties in statu nascendi ever since. Second, the war came home to German women, instead of being fought merely in the trenches. As such, for the first time since the Thirty Years' War, the female half of Germany drew on firsthand experiences when cautioning against militaristic slogans. In the years following 1918 that had not been the case, resulting in young Germans falling prey to heroic tales the Nazis were telling them about Langemarck and Verdun.

After 1945, it was different. I have known many Hamburg citizens who could not stand a cozy fireplace any longer, even decades later, for the terror of the fire bombing made a fireplace unbearable to them. The reply an American general gave to a reporter in March 1945 when asked why the Allies bombed small cities with no strategic value has turned out to hold true: We want Germany to remember for a hundred years the consequences of waging war against us.

It is, I might cautiously add, an experience that our present enemies are missing. A strategy that makes allied soldiers and pilots tiptoe and hop around mosques and kindergartens is a very humane and sensitive one. It might, though, fail to drive home a lesson that Japanese and Germans learned the brutal way: Citizens who do not care about what their neighbor does, citizens who do not rise to the occasion when there is time to do so, will pay dearly for it. Terrorists hiding among the populace count on precisely such complacency.

In Germany and Japan, the allied bombing campaign made it clear to everyone that missing courage may not be a means of getting out of the way; to the contrary, it may draw those who do not stand up against megalomaniacal hotheads into the abyss as well. That is a lesson the Allied warplanes, amidst their bombs, pounded the Germans and Japanese with, and though I hate to admit it, given the sacrifices of those who did not favor the wars of Hitler or Hirohito, it did indeed work.

TORSTEN KRAUEL
Washington, D.C.

Here's What I Was Seeing At 9:35 Tonight

My commercial pilot rating requires 5 solo hours of night flight, which includes 10 takeoffs and landings at a tower-controlled airport. So I took off from Palo Alto and did 10 laps over at San Jose International. First time I've piloted a plane at night without an instructor aboard! Picture above is the pilot's view of the Palo Alto runway at night (not taken by me; I found it via google. Page it's from is an interesting training diary with lots of photos).

You May Say I'm A Dreamer, But I'm Not The Only One

In this column, Michelle Malkin addresses the following recent example of corporate foolishness:

Dear High Fashion Cosmetics Manufacturers:

I want you to know that I am a conservative woman who shares something in common with your millions of treasured liberal female consumers: the need for a quality skin-care regimen. Perhaps this comes as a shock to you, but conservative women also suffer chapped lips, rough elbows, undereye circles and ragged cuticles. (I speak with Absolute Authority on this.) The quest for a good moisturizer transcends partisan politics. Our money is green, like everyone else's. Oh, and we have feelings, too.

So when corporate boneheads in your industry (such as the ones at MAC Cosmetics) hire left-wing celebrities (such as offend-a-holic Sandra Bernhard) to hawk lip-plumping products by hurling epithets at us (such as "little freaked out, intimidated, frightened, right-wing Republican thin-lipped bitch"), we are not just going to roll over like tubes of mascara across a make-up counter...

It's a good piece. The part I really liked is her subtle sendup of the famous John Lennon tune:

Can you imagine how much more militant the offended Muslim response would have been if Burger King and Nike had gone out of their way -- as MAC did -- to hire someone to deliberately provoke a significant portion of their customer base? Imagine riots and burning buildings and fatwas. It's easy if you try.