This blog is now read by more machines than humans: RSS robots, spam-laying insectopoids, echoes of blog-gathering .edu projects. This essentially is the state of affairs that all human activities w
Cleaning Up the Nation
Austin Bay:
If Air America were a conservative radio network its corrupt funding trail and cynical abuse of a poverty program would be front page news at the NY Times and full-time mega-scandal at
Rank Materialism
Freedom. I am now the proud new owner of a Gateway 6020GZ laptop, perfect for students and others with limited means. I can now go into a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble and look like I'm doing some
Fallujah Fonda
Uh-oh. From the Telegraph comes this exciting news:
Jane Fonda is returning to anti-war activism and embarking on a cross-country tour to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq.
Acros
John Pilger: Partner in Terrorism
In an outrageous piece of terrorist propaganda appearing on the cover of today's New Statesman, John Pilger puts the blame for the 7/7 London attacks not on the terrorists, but rather on Tony Blair:
Month 6/2004
Fear Factor
Here are two headlines currently on MoveOn.org's home page:
Al Gore Speaks on Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses
Al Gore: The Bush Administration is Destroying Democracy
Hmm. I guess the sec
Playtime
The BBC is too damn funny lately. They've posted a series of views from various parties on the future of Iraq. Each of the eight people whose opinion is given is introduced by name and organization or
Constant Contact
BBC:
Israeli helicopter gunships have fired missiles at a media centre in a Gaza City tower block and at a workshop in a refugee camp elsewhere in the Strip.
Workshop.... One that made medical d
Fascists, Brownshirts, Etc.
Interesting story about a couple of MoveOn.org wackos (via baldilocks):
Moviegoer, Richard Streeter, was one of the many who made his way to a theatre to see what the hype was about. After viewing
Counterpoint
The Afghan army has come up with an interesting response to their local Islamists' tactics:
Afghan soldiers beheaded four Taliban fighters after guerrillas cut off the heads of an Afghan interprete
And Again
Islamists have scored some more points with Allah, according to Al-Jazeera. "The pan-Arab station said it had received a videotape showing that Kim Sun-il had been executed," AP reports.
In other i
"Any attempts to libel me will be met by force"
By force? Ah, the ironic ineptitude of the left. The quote is from Michael Moore of course. The challenge has been taken on by Christopher Hitchens, in what is the most severe movie review I've seen s
Not Buying It
Thus spake Clinton:
"I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over," the former president said.
More Islamist Diplomacy
Our friend and Islamic man of letters Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has initiated an overture to the Republic of Korea. He's requesting that the Korean governme
The Reckoning
Pearl, Berg, Johnson. Americans are beginning to get used to this kind of thing. Not in the sense that we don't care about the victims, but in the sense that those instances of Islamist behavior are e
Aftermath
It's been reported widely that the Saudis along with the FBI couldn't find Paul Johnson's would-be killers in time to prevent his death, but that they killed Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin as he was getting ri
Surgery for Mubarek
According to this BBC item, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek is to travel to Germany to have surgery to fix a slipped disc.
This is after rumours of his death circulated wildly on the internet the
Make War, Not Love
Seems everybody has a comment on Andrew Sullivan's recent post disavowing support for Bush in November. Here's another. While I agree with Andrew and most conservatives that the expansion of entitleme
Again
Matt Drudge has posted photos of Paul Johnson, beheaded by Islamists in Saudi Arabia.
This kind of thing can't go on for much longer. The American street won't put up with it. Will Muslims?
Mahm
Rated R, with Guardian
Sayeth the Guardian about Fahrenheit 9/11:
The film, which is being advertised with the strapline "Controversy? What controversy?", has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America, me
Not in Their Names
Admiral Stansfield Turner's Ten Steps to Fight Terrorism Without Endangering Democracy, written a few weeks after 9/11:
1. Assassinations are neither an appropriate nor an effective counter-terrori
Terrorists in Ohio
The FBI nabbed another terrorist here in Ohio. Good on them. Nuradin M. Abdi, a Somali immigrant, is accused of planning to set off a bomb in a Columbus shopping mall (via LGF).
Columbus has a size
Zippy
Those electric cars from the G8 summit were pretty cool. An elderly gay couple in my neighborhood can often be seen driving around in one (sans stars
Korean Humor
South Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo comments on the proposed US troop reduction there:
"We have to ask whether it is the right action for a 50-year ally to unilaterally pull troops from a potential
More Like This, Please
Reuters:
Bin Laden, responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on U.S. cities, and his followers have vowed to topple the Saudi government, which they loathe for allying itself with America.
Not Like This
The BBC has covered the War on Terror and its battles, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and others, horribly. At times it seems that they're guided by the misinterpreted journalist notion that their duty is to
Ronald Reagan
This shouldn't be a sad occasion. It is sad that he suffered from Alzheimer's for more than 10 years. But I've come to believe that funerals shouldn't be
Blame Game
Reuters:
Saturday saw a spate of attacks, including one that wounded would-be recruits to the new Iraqi army, one that killed a U.S. soldier in Baghdad, two apparently aimed at foreign civilians an
The Reckoning
Pearl, Berg, Johnson. Americans are beginning to get used to this kind of thing. Not in the sense that we don't care about the victims, but in the sense that those instances of Islamist behavior are expected, par for the course. It is accompanied by hardening of attitudes towards Muslim extremists, and Muslims in general. As our tolerance for the enemy's depravity increases, so does the tolerance of our own excesses increase. Already, the stories of American abuses at Abu Ghraib have become dull and boring. So what.
To be fair, it's not only the Islamists who are defining atrocity downwards, it is us too. A month ago, the Abu Ghraib photos were a shock. Now they're old news. There may be more to come, but even if the new revelations outstrip the old in outrage, as they promise, they won't have the same effect. The first photos confronted Americans with the truth about what we are capable of in wartime. We haven't had to look at this aspect of ourselves since My Lei. But our comfort level has changed during the last month or so. We're starting to get comfortable with what we're doing.
The continuing anti-democratic attacks in Iraq, the Al-Khobar killing spree in May, and the Johnson murder yesterday argue that we're not wrong to behave so harshly. The apparent lack of moderate Muslim outrage doesn't help. (To some extent, this may be the media's fault, because the media doesn't believe that moderate Muslims need to respond to Islamist crimes- only the Bush administration does. And yet, moderate Muslims may have it within their power to end the incipient world war.)
The American street is hardening its heart in order to win this war by any means necessary. Day by day, item by item, we're becoming more inured to the atrocities that will be necessary to win. And to the atrocities that the other side is willing to commit. It's a moral coarsening.
Meanwhile the Guardian writes of the anonymous US intelligence author of a forthcoming book, "As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them." (He predictably blames the Bush administration, in the Guardian's telling anyway, for every lost opportunity and error in the war on terror, and for which he had a better alternative, but that's de rigeur when selling a book. Apparently the geostrategically perfect answer to every problem is obvious to everyone but Bush.)
But al Qaeda will acquire WMD. One need not be an anonymous member of the US intelligence community to reach this conclusion. As has been written elsewhere, nuclear technology is from the 1940's. It can't be secured and controlled forever. Once al Qaeda has WMD of course they will use them.
Then, the slow ratcheting up of acceptance that we see in the United States will go full throttle. We're already open to new thinking on the matter of protecting ourselves. We're just talking about a difference of degree, not a difference in kind.
Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. I recall thinking in the 1990's that these aspects of American history were only historical, and were not particularly important anymore. Yes, go ahead and argue whether they were justified or not, but whatever decision you arrived at didn't matter. Those events are part of America's past and have no bearing on today or on the future.
I don't think so anymore. The US has a reputation of being slow to anger but once angered, hard to appease. It's all to do with our short attention spans and lack of interest in the outside world. And this will once again prove deadly to those that antagonize us.
There are US nukes pointed at the Sunni areas of Saudi Arabia and the Wahabist sections of Pakistan that Musharef doesn't control. Given that al Qaeda will eventually get a nuclear device and use it, I think it's inevitable that those areas will be destroyed. By that time, most Americans will support that move. We're halfway there already.
It's a vicious national defense mechanism, built not into the government, but into the character of the American people, and illustrated by one of our earliest national symbols: DON'T TREAD ON ME.
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