When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively.
In a way, the next move is up to him.
R. A. Lafferty
[This reminds me of the situation in the Mideast.–Joe]
Does this seem at all familiar, Joe?
Professor Thomas Klocek a Roman Catholic…was dismissed by DePaul University for allegedly offending Muslim students when discussing Christian interests in Israel, disputing that Israeli treatment of Palestinians was akin to the Nazi treatment of the Jews and then terminating the discussion when it appeared that the students were more interested in Israel-bashing than discussing the issues.
It is our understanding that Prof. Klocek alleges:
1) He was never allowed to meet with his accusers.
2) He was never presented with a written list of the complaints or charges against him.
3) He was suspended by the Dean of the School for New Learning in clear violation of the University’s own stated Faculty Handbook procedures.
4) He was never given a hearing.
5) A vote by the DePaul Faculty Council affirmed that the same rules that apply for a formal academic hearing apply to all professors, full-time and adjuncts alike.
Read more here http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/display_petitions.cgi?ID=3
I just realized that Dr. Joe’s Cure for Everything is one of the viable options to winning WWIII (or IV depending…). As I have said before we must destroy their culture. One of the ways we can do that is by “corrupting” their youth and leading them away from a strict Islamic lifestyle. Hence giving their young hormonally overdosed youths a steady diet of porn could lead them to “the dark side” of western culture.
It could work! I even have a slogan for this campaign: “Porn for Peace.”
I also have cameras and spare bandwidth. I’m hereby volunteering to help in this new campaign. I just need volunteer models. Send me an email with a sample photo if you want to participate. Hillary need not apply–we want to win this war, not put a bullet through our own brain.
Bruce Schneier must have different, and much better, search terms than I do for these things. Here is a sample of what airport security is about (emphasis added):
The point of the training class is simple – to teach you to identify the FAA test items on the x ray machine. Pat downs, hand wands, those sort of things were covered in a cursory manner. Pat downs, incidentally, had their own picture, illustrating that a man cupping a woman’s breast served no purpose for security measures. The rest of the days were spent on the test items. We were drilled frame by frame, chanting in unison –
“Gun”
“Knife”
“Bomb”
“Clear”
“Knife”
This went on for hours, then the tests became “tricky”. The film strip was inserted backwards, and we did it again. We lost two trainees that first run, two men who insisted that the slide they had just looked at left to right no longer contained the bomb when viewed right to left. Then they ran the strip upside down. When we concluded, it was time to be tested.
Test items. Not actual items considered a threat. Do you think I’m just displaying my Aspergers? Ha! Got you this time. Check out this:
“How do you know it’s a gun?” He asked me.
“it looks like one,” I said, and was immediately pounded on the back.
“Goddamn right it does. You get over here,” yelled Mike to Will.
“How do you know it’s a gun?”
“I look for the outline of the cartridge and the…” Will started.
“What?”
“The barrel you can see right here,” Will continued, oblivious to his pending doom.
“What the hell are you talking about? That’s not how you find this gun”
“No sir. It’s how you find any gun, sir,” said Will. I knew right then that this was a disaster.
“Any gun? Any gun? I don’t give a fuck about any gun, dipshit. I care about this gun. The FAA will not test you with another gun. The FAA will never put any gun but this one in the machine. I don’t care if you are a fucking gun nut who can tell the caliber by sniffing the barrel, you look for this gun. THIS ONE.” Mike strode to the test bag and dumped it out at the feet of the metal detector, sending the machine into a frenzy.“THIS bomb. This knife. I don’t care if you miss a goddamn bazooka and some son of a bitch cuts your throat with a knife you let through as long as you find THIS GUN.”
“But we’re supposed to find,” Will insisted.
“You find what I trained you to find. The other shit doesn’t get taken out of my paycheck when you miss it,” said Mike.
The incentives are screwed up. It’s important they pass the tests, not that they catch you or I with a knife in the bottom of our carry-on luggage. Bruce has another post that points us in generally in the correct direction. But we really need to consider alternatives. The incentives need to be aligned with the desired goals–safe air travel. The passengers and crew of the plane have the motivation and are in the best position to implement appropriate security measures. Let them do their job instead of taking away their defensive tools.
I was talking with a friend at work yesterday. He grew up in Lebanon and his mother is still there. Nearly every day when I see him I ask about his mother (she evacuated safely and is doing fine so far). He told me the extremists are about 1000 years behind the times. They are brain washed and the entire world has a problem. I agreed.
If you don’t agree then take a look at the evidence Michelle Malkin presents:
…a 16-year-old girl hanged in a public square in the Iranian city of Neka. Her death sentence was imposed by Islamic mullahs for “crimes against chastity.”
That is just a hint of what we are fighting against. As long as we tolerate “crimes against chastity” and other affronts to the Islamic extremists we will be attacked. It will not stop until we capture or kill them. Yes, there are innocents die as we, and now Israel, fight this evil but the number of innocents killed will be greater if we do nothing. It is better to fight them now before they obtain atomic weapons rather than after. I just hope enough people of the world realize the seriousness of this war such that we have the resources and the will to finish it.
It’s bad enough that cops enforcing speed limits have quotas. But think about the implications if Federal Air Marshals have quotas. And there’s evidence that some of them do have quotas to meet. It’s time to consider some alternatives and scrape the TSA efforts.
The criticism is right on but the proposals are only a step in the right direction. The optimal won’t currently pass political muster so one has to go with the baby step:
This approach would begin with the fundamentally different assumption that the function of aviation security is to identify and isolate dangerous persons, not dangerous objects per se. The challenge is to keep bad people from causing harm, either in the terminal area or to the planes themselves. The TSA currently devotes the lion’s share of its airport resources to only one of these threats: preventing would-be hijackers from boarding planes with weapons. Far less money and effort is spent on securing airport terminal lobbies and the ramp areas where planes park and on keeping airline tickets out of the hands of known and suspected terrorists.
She appears to have taken after her father. That’s my girl!
The war with Israel does not depend on cease-fires … . It is a Jihad for God’s sake and will last until (our) religion prevails…from Spain to Iraq. We will attack everywhere.
Ayman al-Zawahri
Second in command to Osama bin Laden
July 26, 2006
As quoted in the Jerusalem Post
[This is entirely consisted with Osama bin Laden’s letter to America. This extremist culture must be destroyed worldwide.–Joe]
The ruling has come out. No gay marriage in Washington State for the time being.
I’m all in favor of gay marriage but it needs to be approved by the majority of legislature and/or the people. The people working this issue have more foundation to lay before they can erect the institution.
Gun rights advocates can learn from this. Going to the courts to resolve your issue can backfire. If you don’t win you can make things worse.
Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.
These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value–the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives–and illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.
Mr. Dubois
Instructor of History and Moral Philosophy
A character in Robert A. Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers
Page 90
[Do not think for an instant that Marxism, the most thoroughly tested and failed political philosophy in human history, is dead. It should be but millions of people still yearn for it. It’s a mind numbing addictive drug that gives an initial euphoria and the illusion of well-being but ultimately it destroys initiative, your economic health, and then your life.–Joe]
One could argue that the “government stupidity” is redundant, but please don’t bring up that argument this time. The following example provides more material for illustrating your point today:
The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security said while in Edmonton on Tuesday that certain types of travel will be exempt from new regulations on border crossings between Canada and the U.S.
While speaking to legislators and business leaders from both sides of the border at the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region’s annual summit, Michael Chertoff said a “practical approach” is necessary.
“In particular, we will not be, for example, including in this set of regulations a requirement for passports for ferries or private watercraft, recognizing that this is a particular form of transportation that we don’t want to interfere with,” said Chertoff.
Security, defensive security in particular, is only as good as it’s weakest link. If a passport requirement for travel between the U.S. and Canada provides some sort of security advantage (I question that it does, but that is why the requirement was put in place) then having an exemption for ferries and private watercraft is of dubious wisdom. Does this mean that terrorists don’t know how to board boats? Does Mr. Chertoff think they are all scared of the water?
I suppose it’s possible that the water routes have some sort of different security mechanism that provides as good as or better security than checking your passport as you drive across the border. But I doubt it. Most likely they don’t have the facilities and resources to deal with all the crossings.
Take a look as places like Detroit, which is actually directly north of parts of Canada. End to end Lake St. Clair is only 25 miles long and provides direct access into Detroit from Canada. Personal watercraft can easily cross that gap in 45 minutes. It’s just not possible to interdict all the water skiers, fishermen, and people just crossing the lake to eat dinner in the city and ask them for their passports without pissing everyone off. Similar claims could be made about Lake Erie, and in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
And what’s the point with passports anyway? Does someone think having “good ID” somehow makes everyone safer? Here is a case where fake ID is saving lives.
The bottom line is that passports cannot improve security. The reason our government is requiring passports, in some cases, is to make some people feel more secure. Real security depends on hunting down those that try inflict violence upon us and capturing or killing them. Exactly the solution Israel is implementing now.
Thanks to Bruce Schneier for his no passports needed for water traffic and the fake ID saving lives posts.
Anyone who clings to the historically untrue–and thoroughly immoral–doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.
Mr. Dubois
Instructor of History and Moral Philosophy
A character in Robert A. Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers
Page 26
You cannot defeat your enemy unless you take the offense. We are opening up another offensive front:
Former U.S. representative Bob Barr of Georgia filed a $400 million lawsuit against New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg yesterday, claiming Bloomberg’s attempt to crack down on gun dealers was “careless, willful and clearly illegal.”
The lawsuit, filed in Cobb County Superior Court in Marietta, Ga., came in response to a federal lawsuit filed by Bloomberg in May alleging that 15 firearm brokers in five states, including Georgia, were “rogue gun dealers.”
…
Barr’s lawsuit alleges that Bloomberg made misleading statements to the national media that were defamatory toward Smyrna, Ga., gun dealer Adventure Outdoors.
“We didn’t start this fight. They did,” Barr told a cheering crowd in Marietta’s city square. “But we intend to finish it and win.”
Bloomberg’s lawsuit claims that the dealer sold 21 guns over a seven-year period that were used in New York crimes. The shop’s owner, Jay Wallace, said his name has been “trashed in the public eye of the nation.”“I’ve run my business with honesty and integrity, and I take pride in being part of the firearm industry,”he said.
The announcement took on a patriotic tune as flag-waving supporters cheered the news of the lawsuit and danced.
“We will fight to prove the Constitution of the United States is still intact, and that Mr. Bloomberg’s fight to abolish the Second Amendment must and will fail,” said Edwin Marger, a lawyer who filed the lawsuit with Barr.
See also the press release that Cam Edwards received.
I’m hoping to open up a new offensive front of my own soon. Sometimes things move far, far slower than one hopes.
In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians — not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.
On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped 1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese bodies were found in the charred remains–a number greater than the 80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined.
Walter Russell Mead
The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy
[Thanks to Kevin Baker for pointing this out. The Barking Moon Bats and the Muslim extremists should be reminded of this every time they whine about the civilian deaths in the MidEast. If you really piss us off you will have something to complain about.–Joe]
We will win because we are good and they are evil. We will win because we always came in peace and they came with a call for the destruction of the state of Israel.
…
If the international community will not make an end to the Hezbollah, we will make an end to the Hezbollah. We are after the terrorists and we will be after them until Israel will be 100 percent, from all the world, secure.
Ehod Danoch
Israel’s general consul to the Southwest United States
July 19, 2006
Las Vegas Jewish community told Israel to prevail in current war
[Like no other country on this planet, Israel knows what we are dealing with in this world war. Just as Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews so do the Islamic extremists. Israel, you’ve got the ball, now run with it and don’t stop until you’ve won.–Joe]
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
Dante Alighieri
[I’m thinking of the current war against Islamic extremists… WW III or WW IV depending on how you keep count.–Joe]
Ry and I have talked about this type of thing until the wee hours of the morning many times. It always came down to destroying their culture or engaging in some really nasty stuff. It turns out we weren’t the only ones that came up with those conclusions. This is from 2003:
A Pew poll finds 40% of Americans worry that an US city will be destroyed by a terrorist nuclear attack. James Lileks thinks the annihilation of a city is a dead certainty and will only mark the start of a long, wearying struggle against Islamists armed with nuclear car bombs.
…
In stark contrast, the nuclear threshold against a terrorism may be crossed once they get the capability to attack with weapons of mass destruction. Unlike the old early warning systems, designed to gauge Soviet intent, the intelligence systems of the War on Terror are meant to measure capability. The relevant Cold War question was ‘do they intend to use the Bomb?’. In the War on Terror, the relevant question is simply ‘do they have the Bomb?’ This puts the nuclear threshold very low.
…
This fixity of malice was recognized in President Bush’s West Point address in the summer of 2002, when he concluded that “deterrence — the promise of massive retaliation against nations — means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend.”
…
Because capability is the sole variable of interest in the war against terrorism, the greater the Islamic strike capability becomes, the stronger the response will be. An unrepeatable attack with a stolen WMD weapon would elicit a different response from one arising from a capability to strike on a sustained and repetitive basis. The riposte to an unrepeatable attack would be limited. However, suppose Pakistan or North Korea engineered a reliable plutonium weapon that could be built to one-point safety in any machine shop with a minimum of skill, giving Islamic terrorists the means to repeatedly attack America indefinitely. Under these circumstances, there would no incentive to retaliate proportionately. The WMD exchange would escalate uncontrollably until Islam was destroyed.
…
The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure guarantee uncontrollable escalation once the nuclear threshold is crossed. Therefore the ‘rational’ American response to the initiation of terrorist WMD attack would be all out retaliation from the outset.
…
It is supremely ironic that the survival of the Islamic world should hinge on an American victory in the War on Terror, the last chance to prevent that terrible day in which all the decisions will have already been made for us. That effort really consists of two separate aspects: a campaign to destroy the locus of militant Islam and prevent their acquisition of WMDs; and an attempt to awaken the world to the urgency of the threat.
I wish Israel well in their efforts to exterminate radical Muslims from their neighborhood. It’s a start down the appropriate path. The alternate paths are far too uncomfortable for me.
They want to destroy Israel and kill all Jews. That’s the truth. Got a solution Katie? We’d all love to hear your perky plan.
Michelle Malkin
Vent–July 18, 2006
On Katie Couric saying “We heard from many people that the news is just too depressing… I believe we can be a little more solution-oriented.”
[“Don’t be surprised if Katie’s “solutions” are socialistic, involved the loss of personal freedoms, and masquerade as “news”. Malkin introduces Couric to a cluebat.–Joe]
It would have required courage to hang out with the Mahdi Army, if there were any likelihood that a member of the Iraqi “insurgency” would regard a representative of the New York Times as an enemy.
John Hinderaker
July 15, 2006
Power Line post commenting on this picture.