Forward

Delay, delay, delay.

2006-02-14T22:53:00.000-08:00

-021106-

"Gary," Mulholland explained, "I'm just not prepared to send my men into a place where we don't know the commander, lack significant intelligence and what we do know indicates a high probability that a small force could run into an extremely large force and be overwhelmed."

-Gary Bernsten, JAWBREAKER

Even in an Afghanistan lacking civil transparency I doubt that bin Laden and Zawahiri would have been able to avoid American forces this long on their own. Same with Saddam Hussein's unaccounted-for WMD. These people work around U.S. military and political standard operating procedure.

Perhaps I should try to illustrate the theory about the situation with a game called Command & Conquer: Red Alert. It is a strategy game in which there are areas covered in black on your radar screen which doesn't reveal terrain or what is going on there until you "go through it". And that's after you built a radar facility. If you don't, you can forget about having a good overview or increasing your effectiveness on the battlefield. The point is that these black areas must be denied to America's enemies: criminal corporations (i.e. terrorist networks, anti-American political economies/corrupt ideologies).

This is why it is critical that we produce a solution to the American Education Crisis which poisons civilization and the mind of man. I'm not yet comfortable with a formal presentation at the moment, so I won't make it available to anyone except in the form of a few outline copies for safekeeping in the unlikely case that I can't complete my thesis, which I was excitedly preparing to post here as those interested might recall from my last blog.

I'm torn between posting the working paper and delaying any further blogging until the completed work is ready for publication in the form of a book or report somewhere which would also be posted here, of course. It is likely that I'll post a working paper, but not any time soon.

I do believe that completing this dissertation may take a couple of years (everyone has to allow themselves room for personal adjustments) but I will work to cut it down to months. That's why I recommend only four visits a year at most, or one at best within two years. If anyone would like to share any ideas you can e-mail me at MisterBlacko-AT-yahoo.com. I sign in at least once a month.

Oh, and I almost forgot to say, happy valentines day my dear readers (whoever's left).

...JUST ANOTHER INTERMISSION

2005-10-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

[UPDATE: I'm a Centrist who left out his Poll Result for this post. Social-35% Permissive, Economic-43% permissive.]

I've been away, just doing some stuff and coming online a few times, finally deciding to play around a little bit with today's two posts and go a bit casual; taking an intermission, obviously. Anyway, for those who may not believe that I am really a moderate individual, just check out my results at OKCupid's Political Test. Did I do well?

I guess some of us will be coming to a point of no return with this blog after my next entry.

If you want to have an idea of where I might be going with this, to those of you who just found this place and want to know what I'm about, check out the last non-official post at 9:05PM (October 13, 2005) in the comments section of the STOP essay. I'm considering my next major post, which isn't going to be up for a good while as my "Final" in the sense that I could stop blogging after that and be satisfied with the time that I've spent here, graduating myself into whatever comes next, so to speak. My resources are very limited at the moment and I need to get on top of some things which are demanding more attention right now.

Basically, if you've been reading my posts, you know where I may be going on this little Blog. I expect everyone to have a sense of what I'm going to say on FORWARD next. And probably for some months to come, if there is a coming back at all. This is not a threat, be assured. Its funny that someone may consider it that way =) And this isn't a promise that I'll be the best guide for the rest (not to say that I ever was) of the journey, wherever that leads you. We're all students, so just think of this as one trying to help another out. That's what a good individualist is supposed to do, to touch upon a pretty familiar political philosophy here. There will be more ground to cover, whatever happens next. As Maximus might say, duty and honor.

I go where God leads me, and that's all I'm gonna say at this point. Don't read more into this than I'm trying to say.
Stay tuned, amigos.

Sample Origami

2005-10-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

Of course I had to sample the lifestyle of the modern reclusive writer.

I Guess I should do modern reclusive writer-like things like post up some window peeks of this or that

The thing about this is, you don't have to be very good at it, so you can just kick back.

A general rule of thumb is that everyone doesn't have to get every single bit of it. Not everyone, sometimes.

Look at me, woah, I'm such a puzzle. All the kings horses and all the kings men will never be able to put me together again.

NOT!

I have to give credit for this to a bright young lady who has introduced me to the paper folding fun otherwise known as Origami. Thank you, you dear girl. And thank you anonymous person and Anonymous holy warrior for living the truth that "All the darkness of the world cannot put out the light of one small candle."

And just to make everyone happy, here, I offer a belated Hat Tip to Japan for inventing suchinteresting and entertaining things to talk about.

So now I can make paper do something besides fly around and crash into things and people.
How cool is that? Cool like Ero.

(Technical problems, no Origami animal tonight. Sorry.)

BUSH IS FROM COMPTONE, FOOL!

2005-10-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

Dang, he was a COMPTONERO, crazy. At least that's what HP reported at his blog.

I guess this lil hyna who has such a crazy nickname I can't say it is telling me the truth that she lived on the President's block back in the day.

Here she is throwin up tha Dubayu, reminiscing of how it was.

Caption Contest

2005-10-11T10:16:00.000-07:00

To see the picture and original caption, go here to Willisms Caption Contest Pt.25

Here's my entry:

George W. is overheard by the same photographer and sneaky news outfit that likes to dig for dirt on their political opponents, very, very badly, with really sneaky pictures telling rescue operators, 'I'm not really a people person, I'm not really a Christian.

'I just want to manipulate everything and everyone because of my materialist philosophy. No, we materialists never project our own neurotic notions unto others. ::wink wink:::'

OK, so maybe he didn't actually use the words and symbols '::wink wink::' but we have scientifically truth-enhanced this caption because actually treating people like adults and equals is a moral fabrication interferes with out desire to free 'us' from the silly notions that produces this horrible and oppressive nation that is too stupid to vote for a 'good' socialist, whatever we eventually decide that means. But 'trust' 'us,' we 'know' what 'we' are 'doing' this time... 'We' 'think.'

(Caption enhanced from original entry)

Still thinking this through

2005-10-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

In Cruciphobia, Revisited over at Lt./Citizen Smash's blog someone suggested that "we are knocking our heads against brick walls" when we try to be reasonable with the left. I just think that that wall is really nothing but a smokescreen that we can't really find the right shut down button on, right now. We can't lose heart, for God's children have stood up to machinations more extreme in the past.

Outrageously irrational things like this are happening. I mentioned the incredible yet expectable attacks against William Bennett, also, in my last post. He is apparently waging a war against Black men, you see. So he deserves to be slimed. Below, I reproduced a comment that I made over at a blog called Vision Circle because the fact that someone had to make it is yet more proof about the larger problem that we all face and are currently contending with.

Apparently we're dealing with people trained to further the purposes of the coercive and irrational forces of manipulation, deceit, and disgrace rather than for the purpose of an uplifting and healthy education. How to deal with that and yet maintain grace? Not without faith in the Great Redeemer of Man -as always!

I don't believe that renewal is impossible or unlikely or out of reach for this generation. We just have to make the best of what we have. And I believe it's alot no matter where you are or where you've been, despite the way it seems sometimes.

---

CNULAN: Full context would take into consideration Bennett's role as a leader and architect of America's War on Black Men

Once the paper trail from this phase of his career is admitted into evidence, then we begin working with a properly contextualized ground on which to assess the meaning of his reflexive illustration.

As an academic, with full access to the data, Bennett is certainly equipped to know better than to pose such a specious linkage. However, as a hypocritical founding architect of the most damaging and hardline aspects of the War on Black Men it would be foolishly naive to expect him to express himself otherwise.

Bennett is a racist of the first order who has made a career off of twisting the truth to suit his ends - one of which has been maximum havoc and damage in the black community.

SIRC_VALENCE:
Yes, more people are being locked up for longer periods. That's the reason that the crime rate has gone down and no, the problem is not the laws themselves as tempting as it may be for you to say so. There is something more worth considering than shifting numbers and objects that depend on our choices. Had our laws been as relaxed as in times past we would see an explosion of crime like you wouldn't believe.

To illustrate the point:

"In 196o, for every 1,ooo violent crime arrests, 299 arrestees were eventually imprisoned. But by 197o that number had fallen to 17o.* ...From 196o to 197o, violent crime rates rose 126 percent. In the next decade, they jumped another 64 percent."

The cultural and social disfunction has not been alleviated since then, it has in fact become worse in many ways. The rate of single-parent households has actually gone up. Criminality and decadence is not as frowned upon as it was, even then.

"From 198o to 199o, the violent crime rate went up again, but at a slower pace: 23 percent. Then violent crime rates actually began to fall- there was a 6.4% drop between 1990 and 1995.** Why did violent crime rates begin to drop? Because communities all across the U.S. started to roll back the destructive liberal policies of the sixties." In 199o there were 773,919 prisoners, by 1994 there were 1,o53,738 of them. And of course the moral insoucients behind such trends say that we need more of their "medicine" and brand of "progress"; but it is becoming obvious to anyone that escapes the echo chambers of madness that it is poison.

The problem in terms of our current social maladies is that while people have been coming to their senses in terms of policies, the ideological and systematic impetus behind them remains deeply entrenched in academia. The embrace of obscenity, common in criminals, has widely been shared and cultivated by libs. Pretty much, the body has been healing itself, despite what should be the brain. But it cannot survive for very long that way. Solving this problem is going to be a little tricky considering its nature.

--

[NOTE: for all comments in CNULAN SIRC_VALENCE debate go here]

(Quotes from Ch. 26, The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy by David Smith)

*U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 199o, NCJ-129198

**U.S.D.o.J., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 1994, NCJ-151654

Umm, Stop.

2005-10-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

This essay has been adapted from comments that I've made around the net while debating and playing defense in the issue of Harriet Miers' nomination and to offer a defense for the horribly maligned William Bennett. The post was going to be "Enough Already", but I decided to echo Mr. Buckley, as a sort of a hat tip from a blogger to one of his teachers. I noticed that it was Columbus day, by the way. To all who appreciate it, I raise the glass for a toast. To a new generation, huh?

Lately I've been thinking about the old and the new. This is a good place to make a note, that I'm sure I'll repeat again another time, central to my understanding of Conservatism, aka neo-liberalism/classical liberalism. That is that the appropriate educational aim should have been a progression from the Founding Era - and not a fundamental deterioration and departure from it.

In his lecture, The Rise of The West, Professor Raico, which I cited in my post on National Review's 50th, makes a sobering remark which far too many students in America's most prestigious education institutions are no longer be hearing today in calumnies and condemnationsn of their own civilization rather than defenses and elucidations about it:

The very fact that European man was able to inflict atrocities from time to time, besides other things, came from the fact that he had the power to do it. The question is, where did this power come from?... When we look around the world and see the crimes that European man is guilty of [; They] come from and reflect the essentially fallen nature of all men. European man happened to have the power to sail ships around the world starting 500 years ago, with firepower that no other people could match, and did terrible things from time to time. As Lord Acton said, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The cruel and oppressive inherent evils of the Soviet mega-state resulted from the fact that "if there is no truth, there is only power." I think also that the fact that there were and are unwise men and women, ourselves at one time or another inevitably, only validates the value of wisdom. When we throw it out of the window, as Mr. Raico would say, we become like the flies of the summer. The fact that men and women sin, does not mean that sin does not exist but some people have decided for themselves to buck the truth. It really comes to that. (II Ch 7:14- "If my people, which are CALLED BY MY NAME, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek MY FACE, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.") Any living relationship is one that demands mutual engagement from its parties. And as someone pointed out to me, the relationship between God and Man as Christianity teaches, is not one of brother and brother as some people demand it to be due to romantic intellectual misconceptions, it is one of Fatherhood and Sonhood; between the "Bride of Christ" and the vanquisher of Her mortal enemies. Especially the ever beguiling Prince of Nihilism and Falsity.

-

Google "Bennett + racist" (or racism) for an instance of this falsity at work.

The confusion about what he said vanishes when people are informed that he was making the reductio ad absurdom argument to show a caller on his show that an argument which the caller thought was a good one, really wasn't.

That caller was trying to base the argument against abortion on demand on practicality rather than on morality; thinking that it would impress the left enough to change its mind about the deliberate destruction of an innocent, totally dependent, and helpless human being in its mothers womb. The suggestion was made to Mr. Bennett that if it wasn't for the deliberate destruction of future Americans, the Social Security system wouldn't be in as bad a shape as it is.

People have to ask: what is Mr. Bennett actually saying and commited to which causes the left to slander and to create such malignant hysteria about him? This might help people understand where the malice and or ignorance (and the two things often compliment one another) is really coming from.

As far as the President and other people reacting to reports about Bennett's alleged plan to abort Black babies (and who is really most responsible for this actually going on!?), I can't really blame them very much if that is the way that libs in the media distorted Mr. Bennett's actual point.

Did Mr. Bennett lie? All he did was point out what selfishness and materialism leads to.

Anyone with doubts right now should purchase the September 28, 2005 tapes or cd of that show from to find out for themselves by finding a radio station which carries his program, and digging just a little bit on the net for info on how to request a copy of that days "episode". I'll make it easy. 1. Go to the station guide, and 2.Search the name of the station most convenient to you.

-

I would urge patience when dealing with the paranoid and confused. It appears to be a quality that is pretty lacking these days. Even among political economic and social conservatives. Our little coalition appears to be in a bit of turmoil as some feel betrayed and hyper-anxious because of the President's recent announcement on a particularly contentious domestic matter, which we are pretty familiar with by now.

I think that critics should at least wait until Miers' confirmation hearings to make a better evaluation of the President's choice. The boat is still slowly turning around in the right direction on that matter, anyway, IMHO. Here I'll confess to this good public that I admire Ms. Miers' background and think that President Bush's argument in support of his decision to select her as his appointment to a long vacant seat (can I kid a little bit?) is a good one. Ms. Miers carries with her very important practical experience in terms of business, law, and the war on terror.

Yet I keep running into the same ridiculous argument that the President's Supreme Court nominee is one that lacks substance. I find that claim to itself be lacking in the substance department. And as long as we're on the topic of the terms of this debate, the word intellectual has been thrown around too lightly, I think. So much so that it has become unavoidable for me to use it more than I usually like, because some pretty formidable intellectuals have been running out of gas intellectually in trying to maintain their position that Ms. Miers doesn't have the "right stuff" to handle the job that she's been selected to carry out.

I understand the excitement here, I really do, but people are pouring it on very liberally and that doesn't appear very judicious. What can I say, there's quite a bit of clowning going around, sometimes its hard not to joint the party. Please excuse me, good citizens. Not to compare apples to oranges here (and I don't mean that in a qualitative way), but there was a similar problem that we had with the nomination of Judge Roberts, wasn't there? That was that he hadn't been a particularly publicly ideological activist. We really are upset because neither is Harriet Miers, apparently. But the President has viewed her as a valuable asset in the highest levels of government and I think that that should count for something.

People shouldn't continue to allow themselves to be wearied or agitated at this point by the use of the term "mediocre", especially as it is coming from those with the inflexible attitude that leads some otherwise erudite and well tempered friends to accept nothing more than ideological or political carbon copies of the confirmation debate expectations that they/many of us had about taking the left, intellectually, to the woodshed for all of its abuses and offenses by serving them up Ann Coulter or Chris Hitchens in a robe. So some of our intellectual warriors were pumped but obviously not always going on with President Bush. They should remember that just as George Bush is not always right, they aren't either. Right now would be a pretty good time.

It's safe to say that his temperament is a bit different from theirs, and ironically, he appears to have unintentionally gone over the heads of our little political Einsteins. Its difficult to see eye to eye with someone when you are consumned only by what you want, I guess. Not all firebrands are identical or play the same roles. I think that a good understanding of the economic concept of the division of labor might be useful because I don't see a substantial political divide on the right here. Just a noisy tactical battle that some people took too far and now must slink away as gracefully as they can. I think this is just a case of some well intentioned and usually credible people being too eager to dig themselves into holes of philosophical speciousness.

-

Useful information which supports previous arguments that Ms. Harriet Miers does indeed have "the right stuff" continues to become available. No one can deny, for long, that she is a professional and exceptional woman, and maintain their credibility.

Quote: (via liberal loather to Beldar)

"In Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. Esprit Finance, Inc., 981 S.W.2d 25 (Tex. App.—San Antonio 1998, pet. dism'd w.o.j.), the key issue was whether a wholly owned Disney subsidiary incorporated in Delaware could be subjected to the personal jurisdiction of the Texas courts. That in turn took the case into a thicket of both constitutional and nonconstitutional issues — including an analysis of whether there were sufficient 'minimum contacts' between the subsidiary and Texas so that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would not be violated by forcing that subsidiary to respond to a lawsuit in the Texas courts. And that in turn depended on a complicated mix of factual and legal issues involving both agency and contract law. Ms. Miers lost on the personal jurisdiction issue at the trial court level, but then took an extraordinary interlocutory appeal, and won in the San Antonio Court of Appeals. Although her opponents tried to persuade the Texas Supreme Court to hear the case, Ms. Miers apparently persuaded that court to decline to hear it on jurisdictional grounds — meaning, in all probability, that she filed a persuasive brief in the Texas Supreme Court, and then did not have to appear for oral arguments on the merits (and risk losing) precisely because her brief was so persuasive.

"What does it say about Harriet Miers and her intellect and her skills? Some may say that this was 'meat and potatoes' stuff, even on the constitutional issues, and it's not the sort of case that was likely to make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. BUT NEVERTHELESS, IT OBVIOUSLY WAS COMPLICATED ENOUGH TO PERPLEX THE TRIAL JUDGE, WHO (ACCORDING TO THE APPELATE COURT) GOT IT WRONG. It was a close enough case that Ms. Miers' opponents thought they had a shot at getting the Texas Supreme Court to hear it, even after losing at the court of appeals level. The facts and law were complicated enough that this case would have made a reasonably good law school exam question. And I'm reasonably sure that to Ms. Miers' corporate client, getting this six- or maybe seven-figure fraud case thrown out of what it would have regarded as a hostile, pro-plaintiff venue — the famously dusty streets of Laredo in Webb County, Texas — was a pretty significant victory.

"But what do they know? They're just cartoons and stuff."

Some of us righties just have no patience when it comes to pulverizing the left. But discipline is very important in any campaign or battle. And President Bush, not Bill Kristol (nor any other intellectual champion of the right), is the Commander in Chief at the moment. All in due course.

It is helpful, for those who don't know, to understand that this is an important issue to "W", and he knows that millions of Americans have put alot of energy into making sure that we don't get burned again, here. They are less steeped in fanciful and taudry social notions and interested more in just going to work and getting things that need to be done, done. Such is life in a free republic. Some people might actually view the selection of that sort of person to the United States Supreme Court as refreshing, actually. We need remind those who are forgetting, or behaving as if they have, that some very influencial people who were not not judges made some of the most drastic "contributions" to what is taught in law schools today through the Supreme Court.

The president has decided to step out of the scholarly and theoretical (think Souter and FDR's "Brain Trust" gang) and into a more practical world in his decision. Many, including myself, didn't expect that. And that doesn't seem like a very bad idea in a deeply politicized academic environment which would mean that the President has a good understanding about what he is doing and is seeking an intellectually well-grounded, rather than unhinged, person to carry his torch when he is no longer in the White House.

This is one of the things that he wanted to make an impact on, as I understood, when I voted for him in 2000 and 2004, though I didn't agree with some of his early "Compassionate Conservative" platform items; I think that people would be cheating themselves of actually knowing what's going on by assuming that the weakness is married to the strength in that context. One can exist without the other, and in this case they definitely do. The assumption and basic argument that they don't here is to assume that President Bush is a retard.

This is the reason why I believe that it is most likely that Harriet Miers has some out of the box and not necessarily un-intellectual insights to contribute to the 9 member body that is the third branch of the American government.

Hindrocket is right on the money regarding that awful Earthquake

2005-10-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

A large majority of earthquake fatalities and injuries occur because buildings collapse. In one horrifying instance in Pakistan, 250 girls died and another 500 were injured when their school collapsed. In developed countries like the United States, earthquakes take far less of a human toll because of superior construction techniques... There is no mystery to sound construction and clean water; the only requirement is prosperity. And the only requirement for prosperity is freedom. This isn't the most important reason why our foreign policy should be centered on promoting freedom abroad, but it is certainly on the list.
Helping promote free enterprise in the underdeveloped world will do far more good than any amount of foreign aid.
--John Hinderaker, at PowerLine

At least 20 magnitude 5 aftershocks. Wow.

Whenever I post on a Sunday

2005-10-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'm going to leave a line from scripture as the point for a good meditation.

Today it will be Hebrews 10:11,

For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

I say no.

2005-10-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I expressed ambivalence about Harriet Miers' nomination to the USSC.

In the title of that post I asked the question, "to withdraw, or not to withdraw?"

The answer has settled in my mind. I think that the opponents should chill, at least until she gets to the nomination hearings. I would be very disappointed now if President Bush caved to the pressure from the right, here. I really don't expect that to happen.

To repeat myself, for my blog, I'm not going to base my judgement about his decision here on his fiscal and economic weaknesses, which he ran for election on. It's a given that he wasn't the strongest candidate when it came to economic policy proposals. But the boat is still slowly turning around in the right direction on that matter. That being said, I expect the President to back and pass some strong economic reforms in the next 3 years. So get those contributions to CATO, the AEI, and Heritage flowing, people.
Back to the topic at hand, I say that the best assumption to make here is that President Bush understands that this is an important issue for us and that it is a major reason for why the Republican Party has been winning elections. So he is not about to appoint another David Souter and destroy the political and economic progress and reform that we have been working towards.

Thomas Brewton made the argument (in Marshall vs Miers) that I am sure is close to where the President is on this issue, which is basically "that deep immersion in the socialist cesspools of Harvard or Yale law schools ought to be viewed more as a disqualification than a recommendation for responsible office. The fact that Ms. Miers attended Southern Methodist University at a time when it still was a school influenced by religious principles and the fact that she is a born-again Christian suggest the possibility that she, like [Justice] Marshall, may be influenced by sound general principles."

I have become an admirer of Ms. Miers and think that President Bush's argument in support of his decision is not as bad as I thought it was, initially. She carries with her very important practical experience in terms of business, law, and the war on terror.

So, I'm O.K. with the prospect of a Justice Miers and I believe that people should give her and Mr. Bush more credit than they've been getting, this far.

For the record, I'm rooting for Roy Jones Jr.

2005-10-08T22:06:00.000-07:00

He's bad.

Both of these guys are. Just check out them mugs.

R.J.

A.T.

I don't want to miss anymore of this fight of so I'm not going to live blog on it.

---

UPDATE:

Mr. Jones lost the fight on a decision. He couldn't be the best forever, I suppose.

So, Mr. Tarver is still the champ, he still wears the crown.

Apparently he threw around 300 more punches than Jones, but Jones was sharper in there in the ring in terms of what he did. Both of them were in excellent conditioned and I expected to see a bigger collision and more sparks in the ring because of that.

Jones is my favorite boxer, and I noticed that I still wear my Trunner LXs which I bought after I saw an ad in a magazine with Roy in them back in Highschool. The first time that I saw him in the ring I was impressed at such skill combined with the explosive speed of his once ceaseless and accurate blistering punches.

Some of the bottom on my Trunners is missing in both of them and the toe tip on both shoes sort of have a "mouth" which opens and closes when they lift from all the years of wear and tear that I've put on them but I just can't throw them away. I would have taken some pix and posted them up but someone borrowed my camera and the cameraphone which I borrowed tonight wasn't compatible with this laptop which I should go ahead and replace now.

A toast, to the next generation.

---

LAST UPDATE:

I expected something more after the mold of

...Winky vs. Tito (last May)

...or Pacquiao vs. Marquez (2004)

..and other great matches.

I have to say that in Tarver v Jones III, neither fighter unleashed his full potential, but they got kind of close to crossing the threshold at some moments.

Happy 50th Birthday National Review

2005-10-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

"It is an honor to be here to thank you for your service. I want to thank you for leaving us a magazine and a group of thinkers that will help make the advance of liberty over the last 50 years look like a dress rehearsal for the next 50 years." --G.W.B. to W.F.B.

Early this week the 50th anniversary of the launch of William F. Buckley's NATIONAL REVIEW magazine was celebrated, as most political conservatives probably know. It definitely played a central role in politically changing the direction that the nation was heading in, which was down. It played a key role contributing to the victory of the true forces of progress in the heated and arduous intellectual and spiritual warfare between the Evil Empire of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Liberty, the United States of America. It is easy for many to take for granted that the struggle would ultimately be won by the right side. Its pretty easy to dismiss the whole painful struggle as being something that was inevitable and to discount the possibility that things could have turned out very very differently.

The Cold War was not always such for those in the middle of the battlefield, in the gulags, in the forced labor camps or in the dangerous and covert missions and confrontations by proxy that characterized this period of history. For those that do not really understand the phrase, it is nothing more than a hollow cliche, such as patriotism, and truth, but "Eternal Vigilance is The Price of Liberty." This suggests that one has to actually know what to look out for in the first place. This suggests that there is something to actually know, an actual basis upon which everything in the universe depends.

How did George MacDonald put it? "So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing.. And how in such a condition do we generally act? Do we sit mourning over the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic efforts to try to rouse them?"

In God & Man At Yale, on the fourth page of the preface, William F. Buckley very insightfully wrote, "I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level." Bingo.

Here I recommend that people give a listen to Professor Ralph Raico's The Rise of the West lecture available by clicking here as well as his third lecture in The Struggle for Liberty series. I think that doing so would help anyone interested get a pretty good background on when liberalism (the soil out of which free markets and democracy developed) became defective and wedded to socialism, which is what "liberals" push for today. Usually, liberalism, in its unadulterated sense, is referred to as neo-liberalism or classical liberalism. Today, in the United States it is known as Conservatism.

As Professor Raico has explained, John Stewart Mill's argument "leads to pitting liberalism against non-coercive traditional values and arrangements... it also forges an offensive alliance between liberalism and the state..." Mill played an integral role in what Prof. Raico described as the fateful "linking of liberalism to an adversarial stance vis-a-vis tradition and social norms..." resulting in a "liberalism" that "is expressive of the ANTINOMIAN, lawless, normless, mentality of contemporary chattering classes than of liberalism historically."

It is ironic that Mill appears to challenge the censors (no doubt they existed in his day), but he really isn't part of the solution to political correctness or defeating the unholy alliance of the base and intellectual core, so to speak, of the left and Islamofascism. Its not surprising that today most people ignorantly would assume otherwise.

Norman Cantor, quoted by professor Ralph Raico, which I paraphrase here, expressed another crucial understanding that remains under assault from academia today, which is that In the model of civil society, most good and important things take place above and outside the universal level of the state [just as is the case with any other purely materialistic mechanisms and considerations of quantitativeness]. The family, the arts, learning and science, business enterprise, and technological processes, these are all above and outside the state level. These are the work of individuals and groups and the involvement of the state [should be] remote and disengaged.

Though civilization is still under a heavy assault from abroad as much as from "within" it is safe to say that today at least the political tide has significantly shifted in a positive direction to a noticeable extent. Now we need to focus on the academic corruption which produced the current epidemic of adolescents trapped in adult bodies as evidenced by the hopeless nonsense and moonbattery of the left today, collectively.

We're now dealing with this because "The West" lowered its standards educationally and morally by "teaching" that they were a burden upon modern civilization. Jan Paul Burr, commenting on Tom Brewton's "What Does It Mean To Be An American," pointed out that before the left dominated many of America's most important institutions,

We judged behavior and not the person. Since all “fell short” of the standard, we couldn’t very well judge the person since we were as guilty. We may not have been guilty of the same thing, but we were still unable to reach the mark set by the standard. Thus, we only judged behavior, including ours and whether it met the standard or not. We based our laws, mores and culture on that standard.

Since the standard came from a “higher authority” we couldn’t question the standard as being “some man made goal,” by someone who was no better than we were. No, it was set and agreed upon, that a “higher authority” had set down the “laws of nature” and “common sense” and “order.” and [whether considered] fair or unfair, they were to be the standard.

Now, we have decided that since we can’t reach the standard, we need to lower the standard. We have already done that in education and have seen the sad results of that. Now we are “hell bent” to lower the standards of morality, and ethics, and even common sense. We will “allow” behavior that spreads disease or mistrust, or abuse or mental stress and call it “normal” so we can reach the standard.

Yet, at one time we were much “happier” as a “nation under God,” even though we couldn’t reach the standard, but at least we knew what the standard was and we knew that we weren’t alone in not reaching it and knew that we had to help each other come as close as possible to reaching it. It was that helping one another that united us and strengthened us and taught us the discipline we needed for work and family and community and nation.

Just and equal application of laws based on the “standard” set by a “Higher Authority” [God] was what made this nation so strong and is the only thing that will make it strong again.

TO WITHDRAW OR NOT TO WITHDRAW

2005-10-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not actually in the withdraw Miers camp. It is a close call for me, but I'm willing to give her a chance. It is a mistake to say that President Bush made the best decision here, although he may genuinely feel that way.

Ms. Miers appears to be a great person and a good lawyer. The question continues to be, is she good enough for the Supreme Court? If the President wants her for a candidate, I believe that there might likely be a good reason for it. I don't think that he's always right, and neither do the people that voted for him, despite what some people may have been led to believe.

She has to be both personally and constitutionally trustworthy to have been selected but it would have been nice if the rest of us were provided a more reassuring basis to make that evaluation for ourselves. Some people are actually bothered that a legal scholar such as Judge Robert Bork has called the nomination of Miers to the Supreme Court a disaster. Including myself.

So the point that I want to make here is that although it can be entertaining, we should resist the cartoonization of some very dedicated patriots who are. As involved and informed constituents I think that they are right while in terms of actually changing the President's mind and having him accept their gloomy and skeptical view about his decision, they are likely to be wrong. I'm not very interested in fighting for or against the President in this case. Either way, I don't know enough to get very worked up by this move. It wouldn't be a far stretch to say that Robert Bork does, though.

This appears to be a major missed opportunity for us to put some pretty major intellectual firepower available in this country to good use. Of course whenever someone points this out, people cry "elitism." OK, I confess, I am a proponent of the elite. That shouldn't be confused with supporting elitists. I've said it before, this country has been producing too many elitists and not enough elites. There is a very substantial difference between the two things operating there. America has suffered too much from the problem of "educated fools." To quote Mr. Lewis, "Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil." And we have to be prepared to defend life and liberty at every level and recognize any deficiencies in both defenses and defenders.

As I wrote to Patrick Johnston after reading an IC article of his: The sort of pyrrhic victory that Jay Sekulow has pushed for here is what worries me with Harriet Miers [and] Mr. Sekulow in my view would have made a better Supreme Court nomination than Ms Miers!

As good or even great as this pick may end up being, it leaves us with reason to wonder. Its obvious that the President has a very good relationship with this White House Counsel appointee but she would probably not be on the short list of candidates for the Supreme Court of the United States if it weren't for her relationship with the President. It's bothersome to think about all the reliable constitutional legal scholars out there who would without question make better all around nominations.

Some big guns on the right have really unloaded on the president's choice, here; take the hard-hitting double-barrel of Bill Kristol and Ann Coulter, for instance. They could derail her nomination. Part of me hopes that they do, just to shake things up and improve upon the chances that the courts become more faithful to their duties and the legal profession, the industry of lawyers, be elevated in quality and performance.

I can't shrug my shoulders again in terms of "understanding" that President Bush campaigned on "compassionate conservatism" rather than a more reliable form. I guess this would be a good place to mention that I was a supporter of Steve Forbes during the GOP primaries for its presidential nomination for the 2000 election. Yeah, he was and is the flat-tax man and I think that he would have at least put up a fight against all of the pork barrel spending and government waste that is going on today. And I can't imagine that he wouldn't have rejected the euphemistically titled socialistic restraint on freedom of speech and expression known as "campaign finance reform." He would probably have made a better case for Social Security Reform, also.

I don't want to oversimplify, but for lack of a better way to make this point and crystalize the objection: YOU COULD NOT NOMINATE A JUDGE SUCH AS SCALIA OR THOMAS (I'm very tempted to say the only two good Supreme Court Justices, but all of them deserve respect for their service) BASED ON PERSONALITY AND PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS ALONE. You can't select judges like them through a big government philosophy or overcompromising realpolitik. As much as I appreciate our President's leadership, this definitely seems like a case where grassroots intervention and criticism is called for.

And that doesn't always look pretty.

I don't think that anyone doubts that the President made SOME mistake with this nomination. The infighting caused by the President's nomination here, is really about what exactly that mistake was. Some say that it was the actual selection itself, which means that there's no room for acceptance, and others say that the mistake was a political miscalculation in terms of the disconnect between the GOP base and its leadership in terms of the way that Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement was selected; apparently without regard for the legitimate concerns of Americans with reason to worry when it comes to domestic issues and the court.

My view is that the President just is not always on the same page, fundamentally, as the government and cultural reform movement known as Conservatism, in the United States.

Note, the following argument in the Weekly Standard, for instance:

[The President] has put up an unknown and undistinguished figure for an opening that conservatives worked for a generation to see filled with a jurist of high distinction. There is a gaping disproportion between the stakes associated with this vacancy and the stature of the person nominated to fill it. The stern critics of the nomination have, in my admittedly biased judgment, pretty much routed the half-hearted defenders.

One should add that some of the defenses of the president have been spirited as well--and in fairness to the defenders of the Miers nomination, they really were not given all that much to work with by the White House. Consider this game effort from one former Bush staffer:

Harriet used to keep a humidor full of M&M's in her West Wing office. It wasn't a huge secret. She'd stash some boxes of the coveted red, white, and blue M&M's in specially made boxes bearing George W. Bush's reprinted signature. Her door was always open and the M&M's were always available. I dared ask one time why they were there. Her answer: "I like M&M's, and I like sharing."

Bush has made this unfortunate nomination. What is to be done? The best alternative would be for Miers to withdraw. Is such an idea out of the question? It should not be. -Bill Kristol

Pretty persuasive. Still, I think that the court will be better off with a Justice Miers, or anyone else that President Bush selects to take the place of Justice O'Connor (President Reagan's appointment). Basically, we are likely to see a net improvement upon the USSC whether or not President Bush withdraws his nomination or if she withdraws herself.

Mark Noonan over at BlogsForBush wondered aloud: "The President has asked us to trust him on this nomination - and some of my rightwing friends seem downright insulted by this request."

The truth is, we didn't expect the President to play a Rorschach inkblot game with us, and it appears to be one, on this very consequencial and widely and long contemplated issue regarding the drift of the court away from the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as evidenced by horrendous judgements such as Kilo, Roe, and some others that I can't seem to recall off the top of my head.

Here's that disconnect again that I mentioned earlier. Sometimes Conservatives, just as President Bush's main political opponents, have to be reminded that he won the election in 2000 and 2004. If you didn't support Steve Forbes during the GOP primaries and were eligible to vote, I don't want to hear what you have to say right now. People think that their intelligence is being insulted while the President thinks that he's doing something other than disappointing! This is pretty funny, actually. This thing can get pretty polemical on both sides of this issue, but they are both reasonable positions to have, at this point.

I much prefer the country to be moving in the direction where debates are more worthy of a free republic. I think that this right vs. right argument is a good example of where this country as a whole could be as well as a healthy break from the debates provided by the currently irrelevant the left.

(Cartoons via Pookie18 at Free Republic)

The Abiogenesis of Moral Relativism

2005-10-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

Interesting little column at NoDNC.com. Excerpt:

The idea of “abiogenesis” expects one to accept on blind faith that life just “magically appeared” from some accidents with rocks, water, and a few base chemicals. [Pretty much a Supernatural claim from which attacks against consciousness and awareness of the Supernatural are launched; nonsensically, of course.]

Evolutionary theory [today] demands that only physical/material properties can be evaluated. This notion completely ignores the fact that human beings have the ability to reason, to think through things, to make value judgments, to make decisions, to choose right or wrong, to have order and structure or to have disorder and chaos.

This is another point of conflict, if you accept [materialists'] premises, only natural selection is valid and all of our morals, values, and social structures aren’t valid. But they exist and their very existence proves that [materialism] has [fatal flaws].

The “law of the jungle” part of evolution is a glaring defect and a strong demonstration that evolution misses the mark. There is something more to human life than just “kill or be killed.” [see Deut 8:3]

Over and over again, architect, electrical engineer, physicist, chemist, veterinary, and any number of professions routinely cheat “natural selection” with intelligent design. Over and over again evolution’s “accidents” and “natural selections” are overcome by intelligent design.

Look into the eyes of one of God's creatures, of someone that you love. And there you will see the fingerprints of God.

Genesis 2:17 basically traces the statement "to see through everything is to see nothing" to its absolute meaning.

Interesting...

2005-09-28T21:35:00.000-07:00

Something caught my attention while reading "Power Line At The Movies: A Report". So I decided to take note of it and thought that whoever is reading FORWARD (lol) right now would find this interesting:

We got an email from someone at Warner Brothers a couple of days ago, asking how they can get us to do private screenings and reviews of their movies, too. These folks have figured out that the major bloggers have audiences that exceed those of most movie reviewers

I want to hear libs say this alot more of this in the future:

"We consider our work, therefore, to have been brought to an end."

Who said that?

Skye, over at Globalcop.us quoting an "International Freedom Center" statement after Governor Pataki scrapped the project that was going to be imposed against the wishes and desires of most Americans by a few kooks. Such as Richard "Nice Try" Toefel the president of the proposed museum.

Here's a few excerpts from the video and the transcript at that last link:

O'REILLY: ...Then this guy Toefel put his — actually patted her [Deborah Burlingame] on the back and whispered "nice try." In a sarcastic way, would you say?

BRIAN KILMEADE: Yes, it was in the studio. Then he took off into the green room. I don't think it was meant for me to hear. So I asked her as she started crying again, "What did he just say to you?"

She said he said, "Nice try."

I thought he patted her way too hard, as well.

So I quickly followed him to the green room. And I said, "What are you doing?"

He said, "You don't know the whole story."

I go, "All I know is you should not be talking to her like that and don't touch her again. It's totally inappropriate."

...No apology. Had to be convinced to leave the building. This to wait for a woman who's in studio and, clearly it is if — and I would just use this analogy. Imagine going to somebody's wake and going and mocking the widow. That's how inappropriate his comments were. Debate the Freedom Center all you want, but I don't understand the anger, the smugness, and the arrogance of this guy.

tim said...

2005-09-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

"You are F'ing crazy!"

I don't know. Could a crazy man draw like this?

Able Danger Troubles

2005-09-23T02:53:00.000-07:00

AJStrata has covered this story well, if you are interested in this story, you need no introduction here.

After reading some of the comments on Captain Ed's blog about this, I have to say:

GET A GRIP PEOPLE!

This SecDef would not play the bad guy for no reason

If Atta was tracked in other places, including Germany, under other names, and the SecDef doesn't want specifics to get out (even to Congress right now) it is probably not because the intel would embarrass some of our political opponents - it must be because the investigation is ongoing and may be compromised!!! The War On Terror is ongoing. And there were other things going on before it.

We know that Saddam Hussein has been neutralized. But not all of America's enemies, foreign and domestic, have been.

It may be good to remember WWII and the Cold War right now. I'm reminded of the Venona Project, the secret Army unit that was set up by Col. Carter Clarke in the 40s for the purpose of breaking the Soviet code.

He told neither Truman nor Roosevelt about it for operational security. That was a wise move. As Ann has pointed out:

It can now be said that McCarthy's gravest error was in underestimating the problem of Communist subversion.

Hundreds of Soviet spies honeycombed the U.S. government throughout the forties and fifties

among which include the following:

Alger Hiss at the State Department; Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, later appointed to the International Monetary Fund by Truman; Lauchlin Currie, personal assistant to Roosevelt and White House liason to the State Department under Roosevelt and Truman; Laurence Duggan, head of the Latin American Desk at the State Department; Frank Coe, U.S. representative on the IMF; Solomon Adler, senior Treasury Department official; Klaus Fuchs, top atomic scientist; and Duncan Lee, senior aide to the head of the OSS.

America had been invaded by a civilian army loyal to a hostile power. There was no room for denying it. Soviet operatives were stealing information from atomic, military, radar, aerospace, and rocket programs.

After all the righteous indignation of the New York Times about "McCarthyism," to say nothing of that paper's defense of Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Owen Lattimore -and for the record, Stalin, in the classic reportage of Walter Duranty- the Venona Project might have been at least as important as the July 2001 story on how, if you don't count the military ballots, George Bush might have won Florida by only two hundred votes.

Glorious News! (via CaptainsQuartersBlog.com/mt/)

2005-09-19T02:55:00.000-07:00

"NORTH KOREA VOWS TO DROP NUCLEAR PROGRAM"

The AP reported that North Korea has officially "committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning at an early date to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, according to the agreement."

I remember the the nay-sayers crying that the President should forget about making NK agree to six-party talks, crying that we should deal with NK the old way! Now what!

This is spectacular progress!

Next, Iran.

Evidence of 9/11 Coverup and Collusion?

2005-09-17T18:08:00.000-07:00

"That the man [bin Laden] will not be swayed by the plant leaves [*] of Whitman [**] nor by the 'Adventures of Indiana Jones' [?] and will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs."

Doing a review of my last post, I had to ask: DOES ANYONE remember this passage from a column in one of Saddam's propaganda papers, published in Iraq, JULY 2001? [***]

That looks like a "Go" communication to me.

---

[*] Atta Papers Destroyed on Orders -by Matt Margolis, September 15, 2005
[**] Poetic Licentiousness -by Nick Gillespie, July 1998
[***] Coast Guard website. See also Pgs S8525 and S8526 of the Government Printing Office's Congressional Record/Homeland Security Act of 2002 PDF.
[?] I have a very strong educated guess about who al Qaeda is referring to by this. Obviously, its not here because it could be wrong.

Regime Change in Iraq - and Why

2005-09-17T04:28:00.000-07:00

This Post is For You, "Liberal American."

Where did we leave off? Oh yeah, the comments at Jessica's Well, at her Never Forget post, this past Sunday..

I like to multitask, so this is also "Part II" of the Fortitude essay which I was supposed to post yesterday. If you came for that, you can go ahead and skip I. in the Table of Contents and just scroll down to II. or if you're interested in "what happened to the weapons of mass destruction!" go down to III.

-----------------
TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Q&A - Kind of. With " "Liberal" "American " " (blah, blah, blah.)

II. Iraq + Al Qaeda (more info)
-A Body of Coincidence, or of Evidence?
-How Quickly We Forget
-Finds

III. WMD (links, references)

IV. End of Debate
----------------

This was supposed to be a more "formal" presentation, but thanks to "someone's" silly statements and my own reluctance to just ignore them, the plan changed. If anyone doesn't want to bother with it and you just want to get into the info, just skip whatever the heck it is that " "liberal "american" " is saying and what I'm saying back. Just scroll down to the more important links and references. Enjoy.

-Cristobal (sirc)

I. GO >>

"'Liberal' 'American'": You are clueless because:

A) you believe there are ties between 9-11 and Al Qaeda and even Cheney admitted there are NONE. Get it?

>

Sirc_Valence: I don't know if the VP has changed his mind, but I think that you're referring to when the VP answered Tim Russert with "We don't know" after Mr. Russert asked if Saddam was involved in 911. That broadcast was two years ago, you might want to read the stuff on Iraq and al Qaeda here. There's a bit of an elaboration below the "Q & A"./ BTW, I can guess what your next question is gonna be: "get it?"

>

"'Liberal' 'American'": Get it? SADDAM HAD NO LINKS TO AL QAEDA.

>

Sirc_Valence: See, I knew it!

I recall that three years before September 11 the Clinton administration issued an indictment against al Qaeda and bin Laden, charging that "al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular PROJECTS, specifically including WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT, AL QAEDA WOULD WORK COOPERATIVELY WITH THE GOVERNMENT OF IRAQ"

Did President Bush travel back in time to before he was President and force the Department of Justice, the Clinton administration and U.S. Intelligence to attack the poor "freedom fighters" who like to cut people's heads off and blow people up this way?

This is not a very ancient history. If you want to make peace you should know what's going on in the world.

>

"'Liberal' 'American'": Furthermore - why didn't we go after Saudia Arabia? Where the BULK OF THE ACTUAL TERRORISTS CAME FROM? Because Bush and his family have DEEP PERSONAL TIES to Saudi Arabia and oil interests there. Get it?

>

Sirc_Valence: Wow, you're quite a little warmonger there aren't you?

You have no idea how ridiculous your arguments are to anyone with even a slight bit of knowledge about the history of recent conflicts in the Mideast.

Apparently we should have allowed bin Laden to cause a new rift between Saudi Arabia and the United States, and further destabilize the world, because after all, most of the hijackers were Saudi. It was so obvious that that was bin Laden's bait. But our country has been deliberate and persistent in fighting back. They knocked down two towers and we took down two dictatorships. I say that's 2 USA - .00whatever Al Qaeda.

The point in a war is to win, not just to destroy for nothing. Remember, both Saddam Hussein and bin Laden held a grudge against the "infidels" who launched Operation Desert Storm from Saudi territory to repel Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. That's where al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's strategic interests met. The U.S. has worked with Saudi Arabia since at least the end of WWII which served as a powerful reminder of what can happen when nations collide and when countries align themselves against you.

You would have attacked Saudi Arabia because of how many Saudi hijackers there were? You must either be clueless or think that I am if you think I'm going to take your suggestion seriously that had President Bush wanted to carry out a regime change in Saudi Arabia militarily you would have supported it. This argument of yours (and others) is analogous to a child's "naa, you can't catch me" game where you don't really have to stand by something that might appear sound at particular instances.

>

"'Liberal' 'American'": Saddam was a bad dude, so the ___ what? There are MANY bad dudes out there (see north Korea for example) we don't go after them, and why? There's no oil there, stupid!

>

Sirc_Valence: You can't do everything at once. and each case is unique, because the real world is not filled with identical and static situations. If people used that as an excuse not to do anything they would never get anything done.

In the real world, humanitarianish outrage is dead in the stormy waters. The truth is, energy is an important issue - it would be irresponsible to pretend that it isn't. New Orleans shows what can happen in some places if they don't have any for just a few days. But there are more important things than things, and that's doing what is right.

>

"'Liberal' 'American'": B) Read my post again cause you don't get it. I didn't say Bush was responsible for orchestrating 9-11."

>

Sirc_Valence: Let me help you. This is what I said:

"It takes a serious moral lapse and sickness to suggest that the President of the United States was 'behind' 9/11 OR that he, rather than Saddam Hussein, would kill innocent Americans for his own selfish benefit."

Morally, the difference between the two things is merely incidental, and libs have accused him of both. One of those accusations is yours. And for the record, they're both wrong.

>

"'Liberal' 'American'": C) before you get on your high horse about "massive corruption at the UN" give me a break. You need look no further than a multi-BILLION dollar contract to Halliburton for your corruption.

>

Sirc_Valence: Envy is unhealthy. Money in and of itself is not unhealthy. And you can't escape human nature even if you try to ignore it. Over here I pointed out that It's easy to see the prosperity and material progress that accompanies capitalism and overlook an even more fundamental force at work: the work of a community of free and rational individuals. The irony is that socialism, not capitalism, is based on materialism. It is what defines "social justice" in monetary and material terms and measurements. The impulse to socialistically make people fit this (wanna-be) "social justice" template combined with moral relativism produces people who have no problem with playing fast and loose with the truth. And that's why you're so confused. At least in terms of what's going on in the world. But I can help you. Don't worry.

>

"'Liberal' 'American'": What you said is the equivalent of saying "the fact that the US FOUND NOTHING THAT WAS THE PRINCIPLE REASON THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO WAR should let you know that going to war was really really necessary."

>

Sirc_Valence: Not only is that not what I said, or close to its equivalent, it is crazy. I'm gonna prove it to you. Just warming up here. If you felt like quoting someone you should have quoted the President. Then you would know what's up.

What you don't understand is that it was time to take Saddam Hussein down. We let him mess around enough. That's what I'm going to help you see here.

Saddam and his vicious spawn, were an intolerable threat and an obstacle to progress in the War on Terror. To move foreward we needed to deal with it. After 9/11 the rules had changed regarding what America will do to defend herself. A very crucial aspect of President Bush's national security strategy has been that "We will defend the peace against the threats from terrorists and tyrants... we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent."

---
Chris Hitchens recently highlighted a few pretty noticeable changes in the world since we moved to topple the dictatorship of Iraq - paraphrasing:

- The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush AND The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

-The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite. (And as much as libs have tried, they can't say the same about Halliburton. It's interesting, though, to see libs say that they support the troops, but not their mission or those on the ground helping them achieve it.)

-The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

-The ability to certify Saddam as actually disarmed and neutralized

---

Now, the real REGIME CHANGE IN IRAQ, AND WHY.: -

---

II. Iraq-al Qaeda
>A Body of Coincidence, or Evidence?

Saddam's willingness to help bin Laden plot against Americans began in 1990, shortly before the first Gulf War, and continued through last March, the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, says the Oct. 27 memo sent by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

- FoxNews.com, Intelligence Report Links Saddam, Usama

I don't know how many people heard the reports about the Prague connection between Iraqi Intelligence and al Qaeda, a few days after 911, but I think it's a good place to start. Fred Barnes wrote about this in August, 2003 after talking with some officials.

Mohammed Atta was spotted with Iraqi Intelligence officer Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani by the Czech Security Information Service (BIS) which passed on the information to the U.S. after finding out what Atta had done, 5 months after leaving their country. Fred Barnes points out that the Czech prime minister, interior minister, and ambassador to the U.S. support the account of the BIS. Its not something to easily dismiss. At least not after considering alot of the ties to terror that Iraq maintained and employed.

I just have one problem here, and that's with the media trying to push people in one direction or another. Its difficult enough to find out what's going on without people making a mess out of everything.

Quoting the New York Times (via Edward J. Epstein): “A senior Bush administration official Friday night indicated the Czech decision to go public with the information about the meeting took Washington by surprise." The NY Times's James Risen stupidly then claimed that Czech President Vaclav Havel called President Bush to retract. Havel's spokesman REFUTED Risen's incredible FABRICATION. As I mentioned before, the Czech Republic's Minister of Interior stands by the report of the Security Information Service .

This kind of nonsense happens over and over and over with the media.

No wonder people can't connect the dots right in front of their faces. It all turns into static noise in the mind and is forgotten or never even registered, leaving only the tone of senseless noise.

George Orwell was very right in pointing out that "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

Check this out.

In January 2000, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was hanging around the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, Tawfiz al Atash, and with Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi, two of the 9-11 hijackers.

This relates to Saddam Hussein because Ahmed Hikmat Shakir (AHS) was working at Malaysian Airlines but was taking orders from the Iraqi embassy and he stopped working there after the 4-day Al Qaeda retreat in Malaysia.. 2 days after the party was over he was done at that job. Fast forward to six days after al Hamzi and al Midhar slam Flight 77 into the Pentagon, AHS gets arrested in Qatar. As Stephen Hayes reported, his connection to 9-11 wasn't the only reason that he was of interest. He received a phone call from the headquarters in New Jersey of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. More here.

This also might grab your attention:

"Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris) reports that two Iraqis were arrested in Germany, charged with spying for Baghdad. The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties.

"The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be SERIOUS INDICATIONS BETWEEN IRAQ AND BIN LADIN. The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies."

--published seven months before September 11, 2001 in the French Arabic newspaper, al-Watan al-Arabi. Edward Morrissey has more on this at The Weekly Standard

Even apart from the al-Watan al-Arabi reporting, the strange coincidence of discovering Iraqi intelligence operations in such close conjunction to known al Qaeda operations should have raised some eyebrows.

EXACTLY^
-especially in light of that 1998 indictment against al-Qaeda that is mentioned up at the "Q&A" here. Here's the link. It's #4, but I'll post the relevant text here:

...In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.

>How Quickly We Forget

RUSH posted up some past reporting on his site a while back, I'll put some of it up here:

-"-The new indictment ... accuses Mr. bin Laden of leading a vast terrorist conspiracy from 1989 to the present, in which he is said to have been working in concert with governments, including those of Sudan, Iraq and Iran, and terrorist groups to build weapons and attack American military installations ... Both indictments offer new information about Mr. bin Laden's operations, including one deal he is said to have struck with Iraq to cooperate in the development of weapons in return for Mr. bin Laden's agreeing not to work against that country." - New York Times, Nov. 5 1998

-"Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to U.S. intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials. The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December [1998]. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad's ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam's most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq ... News of the negotiations emerged [as] the U.S. attorney general, Janet Reno, warned the Senate that a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction was a growing concern. 'There's a threat, and it's real,' Ms Reno said..." - The Guardian, Feb. 6, 1999

-"The Iraqis, who for several years paid smaller groups to do their dirty work, were quick to discover the advantages of al Qaeda ... Israeli sources claim that for the past two years Iraqi intelligence officers were shuttling between Baghdad and Afghanistan, meeting with Ayman al Zawahiri. According to the sources, one of the Iraqi intelligence officers, Salah Suleiman, was captured last October [2000] by the Pakistanis near the border with Afghanistan." - Jane's Intelligence Foreign Report, Sept. 19, 2001

-"The Iraqis were cued to make their approach to Mr. bin Laden in 1994 after a Sudanese official visited Uday Hussein ... as well as the director of Iraqi intelligence, and indicated that Mr. bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan." - NYT, June 25, 2004

I recall that after Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate a former American President (Bush I), President Clinton targeted a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that his administration viewed as an Iraq-Al Qaeda joint effort to develop precursors for WMD. This man was definitely a threat if he could lose a war to someone and then try to kill them while supposedly being under a conditional cease-fire! A man that would butcher "his" own people en-masse would definitely not hesitate to enable and support a fellow enemy of the United States to attack America if he thought that he could get away with it! Saddam may have really believed that he could fight wars without personally paying a price; he must have thought that he was going to out-last this President and a few after him, even. But Bush 43 apparently thought that the world had seen enough of Saddam and his beastly sons.

Iraq-alQaeda
>Finds

Ok this find is not only an Iraq-alQaeda find, it's also an Iran-alQaeda find.

Edward Morrissey very helpfully pointed out that on pgs 7-9 of Kenneth Timmerman's book, "Countdown To Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran", an Iranian intelligence agent walked into the American embassy of Azerbaijan on July 2001 and told the CIA that the United States would be attacked on September 11.

In that same month, in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's propaganda press published an article supportive of bin Laden, referring to the September 11 terrorism targets in July 2001! QUOTE:

America says, admitting JUST LIKE A BIRD in the midst of a tornado, that Bin Ladin is behind the bombing of its destroyer in Aden. The fearful series of events continues for America and the terror within America gets to the point that the Governor of Texas increases the amount of the award, just as the stubbornness of the other man and his challenge increases.

This challenge makes it such that one of his grandchildren comes from Jeddah traveling on the official Saudi Arabia airlines and celebrates with him the marriage of one of the daughters of his companions. [???]

Bin Ladin has become A PUZZLE and a proof also, of the inability of the American federalism and the C.I.A. to uncover the man and uncover his nest.

The most advanced organizations of the world cannot find the man and continues to go in cycles in illusion and presuppositions. They still hope that he could come out from his nest one day, they hope that he would come out from his hiding hole and one day they will point at him their missiles and he will join Guevara, Hassan Abu Salama, Kamal Nasser, Kanafani and others. The man responds with a thin smile and replies to the correspondent from Al Jazeera that he will continue to be the obsession and worry of America and the Jews, and that even that night he will practice and work on an exercise called ``How Do You Bomb the White House.'' And because they know that he can get there, they have started to go through their nightmares on their beds and the leaders have had to wear their bulletproof vests.

Meanwhile America has started to pressure the Taliban movement so that it would hand them Bin Ladin, while he continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb THE PENTAGON after he destroys THE WHITE HOUSE..

It seems that they will be going away because the revolutionary Bin Ladin is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on THE ARM THAT IS ALREADY HURTING. [???]

That the man will not be swayed by the plant leaves of Whitman nor by the "Adventures of Indiana Jones" and will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs.

This, two months before 9/11. This in al-Nasiriyah, one of Saddam Hussein's propaganda papers. The year after 09/11/01, in 2002, Senator Fritz Hollings decided to enter it into the congressional record. Captain Ed helpfully (again) posted the following links on his own site so that other people can see for themselves.

I'm posting them on this blog (don't leave yet), just scroll down (by about one-third) to where it says "[[Page S8525]]" at this link to the Coast Guard's website where you can find it.

You can also view that creepy column in PDF, here (1) and here (2) without as much scrolling, over at the U.S. Government Printing Office Website. The first one starts in the middle of the center column. PDFs tend to be sloppy like that at first sight.

The only problem is that Hollings made the mistake of following up the al-Nasiriyah editorial by taking sides with Sandy Bergerler over Condoleezza Rice in a very pathetic attempt to attempt to compare the two now formal National Security Advisors. But I don't think its necessary to go over that in this post since much has come to light regarding that, since then. Well, maybe it's really not "much"; just a former NSC member stealing classified information and destroying it...

moving right along

More Shock & Awe, this on Mr. Stephen Hayes' part (don't blame me!):

We know from these [Iraqi Intelligence Service] documents [discovered at their bombed out headquarters] that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

III. WMD

First, "I" should say a little bit about why we don't want Saddam (the terrormasters) or Al-Qaeda (suicidal fascists) to be having WMD:

Let's go with former Secretary of State Colin Powell's Feb. 2003 testimony at the United Nothings, before the war that "LESS THAN A PINCH of ricin" causes "shock followed by circulatory failure. Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote, there is no cure. It is fatal."

Get the idea? Good.
Next,

I'm going to go out on a limb and call THIS a Mobile Biological Agent Production Plant. They say its "probably" one, but I say it is one. End of debate.

Why? Because "Legitimate Uses [Are] Unlikely.":

Coalition experts on fermentation and systems engineering examined the trailer found in late April and have been unable to identify any legitimate industrial use—such as water purification, mobile medical laboratory, vaccine or pharmaceutical production—that would justify the effort and expense of a mobile production capability.

Next,

In an interview with General Michael DeLong, Ed Moltzen for -The Command Post- covered some good ground. Here I just want to show how just because something is difficult or near impossible to find, that doesn't mean it isn't or wasn't there.

Two days before March 19, 2003, we saw quite a number of vehicles going into Syria. We could not go after them because we said we'd give Saddam 48 hours. A lot of (Iraqi) leaders went into Syria, and a lot of WMD went into Syria. We've gotten indications some went into Lebanon, and probably some went into Iran.

The size of Iraq is roughly, in square miles, the same size as California. Seven-eighths of the country is arid desert land. We've done calculations that you could probably bury 16 Eiffel Towers or Empire State Buildings and never find them in the desert.

Just four months ago, they were digging for something out in the middle of the desert and they hit something. It was a MIG-25 Foxbat that the Iraqis buried in the sand. We never would have found this thing. Biological Weapons, you could put almost your whole program in a suitcase. You could probably put your whole chemical weapons industry inside a van. Yes, they did have it and right today they can't find it.

Why were Saddam's MiGs and SU-25s buried? If you're not going to use them anyway, why not leave them on the tarmac? He must have had the idea that the U.S. would just give up and go home if there was enough pressure. Who knows. But the secrecy level for a bunch of jets had to be lower in the priority scale than for WMD.

Randall Hoven at The American Thinker:

It was no secret that the U.S. and the rest of the world really wanted to find those WMD. For over a decade the UN passed 16 resolutions to get at them and sent inspectors to look for them. The United States built up an armed force of about 150,000 surrounding Iraq to support those inspectors. Our Secretary of State testified in public on what we knew about Iraq’s WMD and concealment methods. Even at the end, President Bush gave Saddam 48 hours notice before invading.
Is it any surprise that no WMD were found in the usual places like munitions depots? Eliot Ness also had a problem finding anything illegal in Al Capone’s hotel room. Could it be that neither Al Capone nor Saddam Hussein was as dumb as a post?

Someone being a smart-mouth: "I'm sure that Saddam was aware that arky grad students are interchangeable and expendable, and wouldn't waste his time leaving little presents for them. . ."

Kay, again:

We need to recall that in the 1991-2003 period the intelligence community and the UN/IAEA inspectors had to draw conclusions as to the status of Iraq's WMD program in the face of incomplete, and often false, data supplied by Iraq or data collected either by UN/IAEA inspectors operating within the severe constraints that Iraqi security and deception actions imposed or by national intelligence collection systems with their own inherent limitations.

Jim Woolsey has also weighed in with regards to the puzzle of Saddam's unaccounted-for WMD:

"Look at anthrax, for example, which is the principal biological agent that Iraq, after Hussein Kamal [a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of the military industry in Iraq] defected in 1995, admitted to having produced. The Iraqis admitted they had a biological weapons program. The range of the stockpile of agents was from 8,500 liters, which they admitted, up to Colin Powell's [February 5, 2003] speech [at the United Nations Security Council], drawing on CIA assessments, that it might have been up to 25,000 liters. Now, that sounds like a lot, but that's only the difference between approximately 8.5 tons and 25 tons, or approximately a third of a tractor trailer load or a tractor trailer load and a bit. And if you reduce it to powder, which Powell suggests the Iraqis were perfectly capable of doing to weaponize anthrax, that's the difference between approximately four suitcases full of anthrax powder or twelve suitcases.

You might not know this if all you had been listening to up until this point was the cacophony of the "Bush lied" crowd. I don't think that everyone that thinks that the President lied or has doubts about his decision to go into Iraq is bad. I just think they're wrong and sometimes people get carried away by the way the wind blows or where the crowd goes.

Saddam Hussein and America's strategic and political opponents were, and still are, betting that the WMD might not be found. I'll remind people that when the wanna-be president, John Kerry, heard about that report of VX nerve agent in the hands of some "freedom fighters", he contradicted the "Bush lied" chorus (which included himself) by telling MSNBC's Chris Matthews, over a year after the U.S. went into Iraq, quote: "Who knows if a month from now, you find some weapons. You may." For someone like that, it depends on where the wind blows.

There's no way around it, Saddam Insane was, in fact, in material breach of a conditional ceasefire with the United States- he was never converted into a Mahatma Ghandi who ran a kite-flying playground, over there: "We have discovered DOZENS of WMD-related program activities and significant equipment that Iraq CONCEALED from the U.N."

A President doesn't have that much time to do what he believes he needs to do. Presidents only get 4 years, and 8 if they are re-hired. A dictator can pretty much carry on until the end of his life or power. "American Liberal" complained that the destruction in 9/11 was carried out in the first 9 months of the President's administration. But the perpetrators of such horrendous acts don't go by America's rules or timetables, they in fact try to exploit them. How much time did Clinton have to deal with bin Laden? 8 years. One would think that 9/11 was a painful lesson in what can result FROM UNDERESTIMATING the threats and enemies of civilization.

7 years ago there was another underestimation. The CIA was fooled by India which surprised the world by arming itself with nuclear weapons. A successful nuclear bomb project slipped under the radar. Luckily, there's no Saddam in India.

I wonder if anyone remembers the 2004 report about the 380 tons (38 truck loads worth) of explosives that were, as Kerry put, it, "stolen from the ammo dumps that this president didn't think were important enough to guard!" (To see the outcome go here and here) I'll quote PowerLine's Deacon here as a reminder of what many people pointed out with regard to this hysterical episode of the 2004 election. He said that if this story holds up, the DP and media left "will have (a) jumped to a conclusion that wasn't supported by the facts, (b) assumed the incompetence of our troops, (c) confirmed President Bush's position that Iraq had weapons worth worrying about, and (d) unleashed evidence that, as Rocket Man notes, suggests that chemical and biological weapons could easily have been moved out of Iraq just before we invaded."

In other words, the "Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction" meme that the President lied could vanish at any moment. Its not probable, but its possible. The leaders of the left have irresponsibly exploited that uncertainty in order to continue their propaganda campaign which includes their using the term "freedom fighters" for Al Qaeda in Iraq. For a long time people have tried to explain what leads and what lead to this sort of madness.

It is fair to have doubts, America should be able to do better, but with a large hyperpartisan chunk of the country working against it, its not very easy. Even if you're the President, your words can be distorted and taken out of context.

IV. END OF DEBATE

The President never called Iraq under Saddam Hussein an "imminent threat", the closest he came to that was to call it "a grave and gathering danger." Imminent means "whether or not you act it's about to happen" its too late for warnings - "gathering danger" means that you see something bad up ahead and you are warning people about it. Big difference.

This was the president's main argument for the war, which the election proves most Americans agreed with: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans...It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known....Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent."

The joint congressional resolution (SEE H.J. RES. 114) authorizing Operation Iraqi Freedom has 23 "whereas" clauses articulating the rationale for the use of force. If you go and read it you will see that only one of those 23 focuses on Saddam's actual stockpiles. Yet the left has repeated the lie that the "only" reason was to find WMD. Of course finding out what Saddam did with his WMD is very important, but if the President was as bad and tricky as people say, to be able to mobilize the Congress, the military, and the Intelligence Community with his lies, he could have easily "planted" something and saved himself 2 years of being called a liar, by actually becoming one.

David Horiwitz, re-stating the case for Operation Iraqi Freedom:

"Twelve of the clauses refer to Saddam's violation of 16 UN resolutions – resolutions which constituted the terms of the truce in the 1991 Gulf War, and which most commentators on the war seem to have forgotten. Thus, it was Saddam Hussein's violation of these 16 resolutions and a 17th – Resolution 1441, a final ultimatum – that caused us to go to war. The presentation to the UN by Colin Powell about laboratories for producing weapons of mass destruction, which was the only significant White House presentation of such a case – took place after the decision to go to war was made.

"We went to war against Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, because to withdraw the 200,000 troops without a war and without Saddam’s capitulation to the UN demands would be a catastrophic defeat for the forces of freedom and peace. It would mean with absolute certainty that Saddam would reactivate the weapons programs he had launched and spent more than 40 billion dollars to implement before the United States obstructed them. Saddam was in the process of negotiating an off-the-shelf purchase of nuclear weapons from North Korea, in fact, when the United States entered Iraq to remove him."

CORRECTION:

Despite restrictions, Saddam Hussein paid North Korea $10 million for Nodong missile technology, that's the purchase that David referred to, incorrectly, just above. You're welcome to review the rest of his two paragraphs, here.

HOUSE.JOINT.RESOLUTION. 114

(Under Construction) Regime Change in Iraq - and Why

2005-09-17T03:58:00.000-07:00

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES (damn tagz)

Sorry about the delay

-the management

Comments for Youngmammy and Thepatriotgirl >>

2005-09-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

The streets and villages of Iraq are still filled with danger. The initial euphoria of the liberation of 25 to 26 million people has tapered off, making way for the anxiety that comes when you wonder what may come tomorrow every time a fascistic butcher kidnaps an Iraqi official or civilian, or uses the tactics that Saddam Hussein used in order to maintain their domination over others: terrorism. This is like when people get excited that someone is going to help fix up a broken down home in a bad neighborhood and then realize that its time to start the fixing. Naturally, the attitude is affected by "what is going on right now."

In this time it is good to remember that compared to Saddam Hussein, these mini-Saddams and bin Ladens are just pests in comparison. Their poison, like that of a Black Widow's can kill you or your brothers and sisters. And so the work of cleaning out the spiders and their nests goes on. Although these monsters continue to threaten, maim and kill - they can't do it to as many as the Butcher of Baghdad has.

That's what I'de like to say, Y.M. and The Patriot.

My view is that things are improving. Iraq is becoming stronger verifying that that which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger - unless you allow it to break you down. Just remember: Don't.

Iraq is a country that has survived 30 years of a terroristic dictatorship - and there are terrorists and terrorist dictatorships that are working together to keep the people of Iraq from moving forward. The master does not like to lose his ability to whip his slave, so he fights that. I believe that there is alot of potential in Iraq and around the world that has been locked away by the forces of darkness. To look at all the innovations in medicine and science that a small portion of the world's population produces forces one to consider what more can be and would have been achieved if we were more faithful to our values, especially in education and really understood that The principles of wealth creation transcend time, people, and place. Governments which deliberately subvert them by denouncing God, smothering faith, destroying freedom, and confiscating wealth have impoverished their people.(-Reagan)

In the United States 500,000 Americans perished in the American Civil War in which the fate of slavery in my nation was sealed. To borrow a phrase that has special meaning to our President, we have "A Charge To Keep."

As well as the picture above, I'm also borrowing a quote of President Lincoln from The Presidential Prayer Team that I saw today:

Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.

-Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, IL, February 11, 1861

More to say about Operation Iraqi Freedom

2005-09-14T04:54:00.000-07:00

The follow up to Fortitude will be posted on Friday.

Pt. II (Regime Change In Iraq, and Why) should be more formal than the first part.

Just click on one of these two links to go to Pt. I in the meantime.

Hasta Luego

2005-09-13T05:11:00.000-07:00

There goes another one of my favorite blogspots.

Goodbye Chrenkoff. It was definitely a blog worthy of 3 million visits.

Coming Soon...

2005-09-12T14:54:00.000-07:00

Liberty Film Festival 2005.

Many people ask themselves why Hollywood consistently churns out entertainment films laced with anti-Christian and anti-Capitalist undertones and messages. Messages, which feed people in other parts of the world bad ideas about America. Based on the technically well packaged garbage that is usually produced by the film industry, people in other countries are likely to have very bad impressions about the United States.

The stars and characters in movies tend to be depressed losers or criminals which most plot-lines demand sympathy or support for. I understand that this is a good dramatic area to explore artistically, but it is definitely being overdone to the point where we are being flooded by negativity and trash. Also in these movies, big business, rather than big government, tends to be the threat to freedom and progress, unless the screenplay is too busy focusing on the celebration of villainy and moral insouciance to spend much time on the writer's or producer's economic ignorance and misconceptions.

As Gigi Grazer put it, speaking of individuals in certain regional and elitist closed enclaves and gated communities: "they keep pushing these movies."

We have made a mistake by not taking this conspicuous anomaly seriously enough. If you doubt what an impact it can have, just recall Governor Schwarzenneger's speech at the 2004 Republican Convention:

In school, when the teacher would talk about America, I would daydream about coming here. I would sit for hours watching American movies transfixed by my heroes like John Wayne. Everything about America seemed so big to me so open, so possible.

Contrast that to what people around the world and people growing might see today. Instead of "share the glory and responsibility of freedom" the message tends to be "share the misery of freedom." If life is just one big meaningless accident then what is left for a person to believe in? To be? Here I have to recall something that George MacDonald wrote.

So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing. . . And how in such a condition do we generally act? Do we sit mourning the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic efforts to try to rouse them?

The spirituality of leftist thinkers (as opposed to just their followers and well intentioned accomplices) makes them think of things such as useless non-commercial television and government programs as "holy" things. This impulse is what lies behind their irrational opposition to capitalism aka free-market economics.

In The Law, Classical-Liberal Friederick Bastiat wrote,

"Each of us has a natural right--from God--to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. [...] Under such an administration, everyone would understand that he possessed all the privileges as well as all the responsibilities of his existence."

It's easy to see the prosperity and material progress that accompanies capitalism and overlook an even more fundamental force at work: the work of a community of free and rational individuals. The irony is that socialism, not capitalism, is based on materialism. It is what defines "social justice" in monetary and material terms and measurements. The impulse to socialistically make people fit this "social justice" template combined with moral relativism produces people who have no problem with playing fast and loose with the truth. This explains the behavior of certain professors and the products of their brand of "progressivism" and "liberalism."

Robert Tracinski, in An Unnatural Disaster, fundamentally supports Bastiat's statement:

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

That which conflicts with reality is more likely to cause misery than that which is in harmony with it. Therefore, misery in a capitalist society has to be caused by psychological complexes, not by the economics per se. So what we're seeing in the media is basically the left vomiting its pathologies all over the screen into people's homes and heads. This, too, is a disaster at a palpable enough level.

Basically that's what I wanted to say after reading Liberty Film Festival's blog where I found out about a movie that centers around an Army Ranger turned criminal -!- (see "Post-9-11 Cinema at the Toronto Film Fest") and other disturbing things, including a review of The Constant Propagandizer (see NRO on The Constant Gardener).

A response to this stuff is definitely called for. Not censorship, but competition. The market for an alternative to the limo-lib slush is out there and it is big.

Next month, on the 21st, the second Liberty Film Festival will launch down here in Los Angeles. I missed the first one, but I plan on attending this time.

Amen

2005-09-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

"Even in the deepest darkness, we can see the light of hope, and the light shows us the way forward." -- President George W. Bush. Today.

If you're reading this "Dissenter":

2005-09-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

I hope that you read my reply to you on FPM about your conclusion that the Saudi or the Hugo Chavez model is preferable to the free-market model because "multinationals rape the land and reward only a few." I didn't see a reply, but you know about this blog. Professor George Reisman has answered the proposition, posed by socialists and neo-socialists, that capitalism is bad for the environment. His "Toxicity" essay is a must read for anyone that wants to see the response to that particular argument.

Be warned, it is comprehensively obliterated.

As I told you before: misery in a free-market economy is psychologically caused, not economic.

Take, for instance, your complaint about America's national security preference for the Shah rather than the Ayatollah or the democratically elected opponent to our interests (for one: winning the Cold War). We had alliances, we assisted people, and we didn't assist others. Yes. Its hard to help other people when you yourself are under attack, sometimes you have to make difficult decisions under those circumstances. You are right that the problems that we have today (eg. bin Laden's inspiration and encouragement by the Iranian "revolution" for his Saudi and global Wahhabi dream) are associated by choices made in the past. But notice the way that you have been taught to shrugg off the Soviet role and the Islamo-fascist role, in order to maintain the grudge against the American model.

There is a similar analysis on FPM today, by Chuck Morse, regarding leftwing terrorism and dictatorship:

No doubt there were examples of governmental over-reach in the 1919-1920 crackdown, as the FBI labored to protect our nation from suspected alien terrorists. The same could be said of the FBI’s crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan and organized crime. But no one would conclude from this that the effort to deal with the Klan should be called “The Klan Scare” or the tracking of the Mafia “The Crime Scare.” That is because the academics who keep the historical record, and the intellectuals who write about the history of Klansmen and criminals, have no sympathy for those segments of society or their causes. But apparently they do for anti-American radicals with a violent agenda.

I believe that he was referring to those same people who Yale Law School professor Alexander Bickel, was talking about when he said that "to be a revolutionary in a society like ours, is to be totalitarian, or not to know what one is doing."

Hopefully you finished reading A DiaLog on "Participatory Economics." Regarding intellectual property rights law and corporate law, it would help if you could be a bit more specific in terms of exactly what changes you would like to see made.

I'll go back to one of yesterday's FPM threads, in which we did go off topic, to see if you reply to my conclusion

Chompsky, Soros, Marx, et al; these are not economists, they are social-engineers light who ignore economic science when it contradicts them. These are all anti-capitalists, they all are opponents of the free-market, and the dominant influences in the subject of economics. Only our Constitutionally protected liberty protects us from that which the anti-capitalists support and have supported in other parts of the world. Your arguments are the pieces of show-trial "evidence" that the economic dimension of liberty has been sentenced guilty by.

Finding vs Looting. My opinion.

2005-09-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

If there was time for me to do it, if there was a Wal-Mart or something like that that I came across while trying to find people that might need help, or find my way out of the disaster, I would take a few goodies with me since alot of the things there may not be salvaged by their owners, the store.

Getting food and water from a supermarket is not stealing or looting if it has become part of the hazardous environment that you are trying to survive in.

Once the market has been -effectively- destroyed, taken out of commission, along with the city, and taken out of THE market-
it will be bulldozed or simply rot.

Therefore, when you go into that store or market where the stuff will go to waste anyway, you are not really stealing, if the word means anything. You really are finding.

If you take what you need from the shops in order to help your family survive, then that act of taking is not wrong and it should not be called looting.

Stealing for salvation...

2005-09-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

"MSNBC. COUNTDOWN With Keith Olberman: #4 Stealing For Salvation"

Click the link to see the police "looking for looters" inside some shoes, on aisle 3.

[Maybe this is part of the local rescue effort.]

(via WND.com)

IN-F'NG-CREDIBLE

2005-09-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

Must follow the linkyz

New Orlean's "Hurricane Plan". Scan it for about 10 minutes and you'll see it's a damning document insofar as city management there is concerned. Judging from recent comments by a few of the folks named as responsible in that plan they didn't know it existed - there's no other explanation for the absurdity of some recent statements and "demands"...

Remember, the linkyz..

Evidence of racism?

2005-09-04T00:26:00.000-07:00

I posted this up because of the comments thread linked here

http://www.flynnfiles.com/archives/american_scene2005/kanye_rest.html

We Will Rebuild New Orleans

2005-09-03T19:22:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to post about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But the disaster is bigger than I imagined. I think that Bloggers can help out, as well as pass the word. We need to encourage people to pitch in a little bit.

Here is a list with tons of relief agencies and organizations that anyone can pick and choose at their discretion. Every little bit helps.

http://instapundit.com/archives/025235.php

As I understand it, in New Orleans, there was a mandatory evacuation process underway, but for whatever reason, reportedly 20% of the population stayed. Anarchy ensued to some extent. Some scumbags have taken advantage of the situation to loot people's homes and rape young girls. I've read that shots were fired at rescue helicopters.

I posted a couple of clips of President Bush's radio address explaining what is being done at the Federal level to address this situation.

The next 24 to 72 hours...

2005-09-03T19:09:00.000-07:00

A DiaLOG Focusing On "Participatory Economics"

2005-09-03T17:56:00.000-07:00

10,000 people are estimated to have felt the full effects in Cuba after Hurricanes Isidore and Lili hit. Over 7,300 Red Cross volunteers were mobilized there.

I don't know that the number of people in need of emergency assistance in New Orleans and the rest of the devastated areas is, but it is definitely more than 10,000. As was reported today, "More than 50,000 people had been trapped for days at the two filthy, sweltering buildings [Superdome and Convention Center]..."

This needs to be taken into account anyone claims that a government with the ability to force people to OBEY its commands preferable to a government that exists only to protect the freedom of its citizens from being violated. Recently, I read in a leftist spam blog that "the mobilization of 1.7 million people on short notice" by Cuba, in response to a disaster that affected 10,000 people was evidence of the apparent "efficiency" and "social capital" of the benign dictatorship which takes common cause with the tyrannical regimes such as that of Iran and that which was recently toppled in Iraq.

For some reason, I'm not impressed when a dictator uses his fascistic antfarm-owner power to tell people what to do and what they are allowed to say and learn about. Even IF in SOME cases the result is immediately a good one i.e. a rescue effort.

---

I like to give people that disagree with me one opportunity, at least, to demonstrate that they are either sincere or rational in doing so. Because I might learn something. When they turn out to be both, it is very encouraging.

But sometimes, they are not.

At that point you have to pick up your marbles and move on- after it becomes obvious that someone has lost theirs.

---

I reproduced a debate that I joined in the comments thread of another blogger. See below.

Here's the link, if anyone wants to compare.

I've removed any typos that I may have made, and added links in some places. BTW, I wasn't interested in talking about the taste of American chocolates to some of those available in European or on any other continent. If Japanese seafood is better than Chinese seafood, or if Mexican food is better than Italian food, so what? The issue is not one about continental or regional "fashion" or "flavor." It is about the best way to "allow" people to discover the idiosyncracies of the world according to where their curiosity may lead, I think. Our disagreements regarding economic policy stem from the way that we define or understand the "participatory" nature of market-based and market-determined economics.

So here's the thread on this story on Venezuela that hopefully will be of some use to whoever is reading this blog right now.

I'll start at the 8th comment.

---

SIRC_VALENCE:"Marivit Lopez, from the personnel department, explains that the workers are also drawing up a 'participatory budget' for 2006."

Can someone explain to me HOW that works? I mean, nevermind exactly how many of the workers get a say about how much they are payed, how does the process work? Does worker 1 say, "our salary will be $15 per hour comrades!" after which worker 2 says, "Niet, you capitalist tool of oppression! It shall be $30!" ..and so on.

The fact that no lefty can explain why worker 3 and the rest shouldn't agree on a $30,000 per hour wage rate is the proof that there is nothing "Modern" about what Chavez or Castro have been up to.

Calculation is only possible with cardinal numbers and free-market economics is the economic manifestation of a free nation. Prices are determined by the participants in the market economy

From what I've read, this "Modern socialism" or "participatory economics" is an offshoot and repackaging of what economists have called the "Zwangswirtschaft" type of Socialism. (http://www.mises.org/midroad/mr2.asp)

Because socialism, a doctrine ensconsed in economic ignorance, is inefficient and wasteful, it cannot possibly produce the same standard of living that a truly modern society can. And how does socialism threaten liberty?

No system of the social division of labor can do without a method that makes individuals responsible for their contributions to the joint productive effort. If this responsibility is not brought about by the price structure of the market and the inequality of wealth and income it begets, it must be enforced by the methods of direct compulsion as practiced by the police.

-Ludwig von Mises

If you are seriously interested in what is going on in Venezuela, you ought to read at least Pt III of Liberty and Property.

(http://www.mises.org/libprop/lpsec3.asp)

In the spirit of dialogue,

Sirc_Valence

>

MONDO: Check out this clip of Chavez's speech where he addresses Robertson and Bush. It has English subtitles.

http://www.vheadline.com/audio/chavez_english.wmv

>

JIM: An excellent system that started in the US in the 1930's is The Scanlon Plan. It has worked extremely well when labour and especially management have been willing to be open and honest. There is a ton of info on the net about it. Again it is about participation, responsibility and just compensation. Interestingly, the main opposition in companies converting to it comes from middle management who lose their power as gatekeepers because the shop floor workers demand they become facilitators rather than obstructors. As has been mentioned before on this blog? that the most accurate view of any organisation or society comes from below - the lower the better.

>

SIRC_VALENCE: Mondo,

thanks for showing people video of this Chavez guy in action and letting them see his self-centered ranting and preaching to everyone how important HE is to them, and how they NEED him.

It was difficult for me not to laugh, watching this. But as comical as watching people act out a satire of themselves, that should not distract from the threat that they may pose.

Watching a Chavez or a Castro is like being in a time machine and watching Mussolini rally his anti-captialist Blackshirts again - or perhaps more like the early stages of Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party)... Anti-capitalists speak a good game "for the worker", but actually deliver a few or all of the following: tyranny, poverty, misery. Mainly there are two reasons for this;] they don't understand economics or recognize that as the power of the state expands into the realm of private enterprise (the voluntary association or disassociation of the citizen conducting a vast array of economic decisions), it alters the nature of government, making it become a nanny-state.

Regardless of how well-intentioned the uninformed dreamers are, reality catches up. Because men are no angels, as America's founders knew, the power that the socialists put into the hands of big brother to "make people good" naturally falls into the hands of devils, who having no restraints will say anything and do anything to be at the top. And when they get there, the law is no longer the guard of the oppressed, but the instrument of oppression. That's the way it works. America's founders were much wiser than they are portrayed to have been. The pee-ons who presume that they are the true revolutionaries, after taking for granted the gains made in the tradition of the founders, simply have no clue. Capitalism allows individuals to channel their energies in a positive way, whereas socialism, with it's blindness to many economic discoveries, creates the conditions for disaster and stagnation.

(George Reisman, notes the limitations placed on the extremely selfish and wicked by a system of law that knows its place and contrasts it well to one that doesn't; "The Gestapo and the KGB, for example, make private criminal gangs like the Mafia or the Capone mob look not only tame by comparison, but almost kind and friendly—so utterly and massively vicious can governments be.")

Mondo, are you sure that Venezuela needs a man which has passed a law censoring the citizens from insulting him? It seems like a bit much don't you think? Or is he following in the footsteps of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, or Fidel? He is, but I pray that he doesn't follow them too far along that road.. because that path, unabated, would inevitably lead to a river of blood in South America. We have seen it before in other parts of the world.

I do not see that the left is really producing "social justice" and "liberation." This Chavez is a guy who likes to visit Iran (a terrorist exporter) where the "government" will even ban women from entering a soccer stadium. For what purpose ?

(Despite his repeated claims, the U.S. is not trying to assasinate that megalomaniac that calls the U.S. "the grand destroyer of the world, and the greatest threat". I can see no rational explanation for why Chavez has claimed a Bush conspiracy against his life except as agitprop so that the left can excuse this "Progressive" Venezuelan's support for a very brutal terrorist-supporting state with ambitions to develop a nuclear bomb.)

>

ROWAN BERKELEY:Sirc_Valence (what kind of sophomoric name is that anyhoo), let me repeat, no gold, no Mises

>

PARALLAX: Sometimes a little inefficiency is a good thing if it keeps people working....

>

SIRC_VALENCE: That's the second shot that you've taken at the Gold Standard,

Rowwy.

So, are you eventually gonna get to saying something knowledgeable about it?

And Parallax, in a free-market economy, nobody is unemployed that doesn't [choose] to be.

>

SIRC_VALENCE [Again]: Do you want to argue that moving to a 100% Reserve Gold Standard would be a bad move? If so, you should be prepared to argue against the empirical data that has been gathered. Not everyone has been ignoring it. And I know that not everyone has been doing so on purpose.

Let's move the argument foreward, since after seeing you bring up a pertinent matter twice, there was obviously more to say. OK. Since the argument has already been posed and answered, elsewhere, it would be a good time to go ahead and see what has been learned. Hopefully you will identify the answers even before you are able to come up with the questions.

With the Supply and Demand Diagram that Prof. Joseph Salerno illustrates the dynamic between market directed prices and the the nature of the means of exchange (money), with, we can demonstrate what the basis of a sound economy is.

Quote, "if you pay $10 dollars for a compact disc, then the value of money in terms of a compact disc is one-tenth of a compact disc. If a computer has a price of $1,000 dollars, then the value of a dollar in terms of personal computers is one-one thousandth of a personal computer... The purchasing power of money is an array of alternative quantities of goods that can be purchased by a unit of money; our case, the dollar.

"So let's say the amount of gold at a given quantity is fixed, so we draw a verticle line (MS) representing the Money Supply, and we have a certain Demand for Money, there's a certain amount that people wish to hold, and wish to purchase with their labor and other goods that they're selling. And let's say that the money supply, in billions of dollars, is $100-billion dollars.

"Now what would happen if we suddenly have a 10% increase in the supplies of goods and services produced in this economy? In effect, the sellers of those goods would want to sell those goods at going prices. That would mean you would need 10% more money for the economy to be able to absorb those goods.

"..So now the quantity of money demanded, at the given purchasing power of money, (PPM1) would be at $110-billion dollars. But there's no Fed to create this additional $10-billion dollars that we need. So how does the Gold Standard handle that?

"Very simply.

"Let's direct our attention to the high-tech industry for the last 20-30 years. How did they handle the fact that the supply of PCs, and software and so on, was increasing so rapidly that it was outstripping even the inflationary rate of growth of the money supply caused by the Fed in the 80s and 80s? How did those additional computers get sold?

"The point is that because of the technological advances and the increase in investment in those industries, costs fell. So that when the supplies of computers increased on the market, their prices fell.

"To get an idea of the magnitude of this fall, we can go back to recent history and see that a mainframe computer sold for $4.7-million dollars in 1970 while today one can purchase a personal computer that is 20-times faster for less than $1,000 dollars.

"So we had substantial price deflation in high-tech industries, and that did not impair the growth in those industries because it corresponded to falling costs due to technological advances. We could point out that there was an enormous expansion of profits, productivity and output in these industries. This is reflecting the fact that in 1980, computer firms shipped a total of just about one-half million PCs, while in 1999 their shipments exceeded 43 million units to an increased 86-times. And that's despite the fact that quality-adjusted prices had fallen by over 90%

"...as prices begin to fall, each dollar will be able to purchase more of that particular good than it did before... What happens is that as the value of each dollar increases, we move up along the Demand Curve to this point so that at the end of the process, prices are roughly, 10% lower and the purchasing power of money is, roughly, 10% higher.... if we have a situation where the good was originally $10 dollars, and not it's $9 dollars, the dollar could purchase approximately 10% more.

"So if we take this particular good; initially we had a money supply of $100-billion dollars, and we had a price of $10. So the number of units that could be purchased by that money supply was 10 billion. But as the price falls to $9, the same $100-billion dollars of gold which hasn't changed, THERE'S NO FED INCREASING THE MONEY SUPPLY, could now purchase over or around 11 billion units of the good.

"So the market process will adjust the purchasing power of money so as to enable the additional goods and services to be sold on the market and they will be sold profitably on the market because costs are also falling. That is the reason for ecnomic growth [and the economic dimension of innovation and progress]."

I believe that this is a great little lesson on the dynamic of how the free-market adjusts the purchasing power of money. Of course there is so much more that can be addressed, but if you want to learn more, I hope that you do. I would recommend Murray N. Rothbard's The Great Depression, it had some real eye-openers for me when I opened that book up.

I'm going to be gone for some time, so I stayed up to do this post in order that I don't later regret that I didn't. I'm throwing this link in, hoping that people here will read about the best way that civilization should proceed from post-colonialism: http://www.reason.com/0312/fe.ng.poor.shtml(it's in there, just dig a bit)

>

ERLENDA: I guess that Mises guy was a false prophet or America would not live of the rest of the world right now with debts sky high.

The computer industry is the only profitable one and its getting more outsourced, for of course the workers have no say in the matter.

Bill Gates thinks the Chinese are better educated than the Americans, watch him to outsource Microsoft to China.
I think you are so blind by your ideolgy, you cannot even see it, when it stares in your eyes, that American capitalism is a failed system, profiting nobody in the end, but a tiny oligarchy who more or less might even outsource their places of residence to the Barmudas or such places pretty soon.

>

SIRC_VALENCE: erlenda: I guess you didn't read the Reason interview that I linked at the bottom of my post. If you didn't do that you definitely are beyond your league in talking about what "that Mises guy" accurately predicted would happen and why. Almost as if to demonstrate his economic findings, people made the mistakes that he warned them not to. And here you are demonstrating for all what I'm talking about when I speak of people continuing to ignore the truth and choosing instead worn out slogans.

The say in the matter that "the workers" have, regarding outsourced jobs in the computer industry, is, the say that they have as consumers, which is "we want cheaper products and services." And if some Indians can provide the same services that some Americans do, at a lower cost to the consumer, that is a win-win situation. And the reason that third world countries can usually provide cheaper labor and products is because their demand for work, and to better their own situation is much greater than ours. They want to compete in the global market so that their nations can catch up with the rest of the world. People don't like to go hungry, or depend on stone-age technologies for their well-being. Some countries are very much behind where they could be, they are "the developing world." We all are.

It is ludicrous to refuse people in other countries the opportunity to try to compete in the modern economy until their countries catch up to those that are thriving in the marketplace.

Capital flowing out of a nation, to other areas where its more productive, to the third world countries, enormously develops the productivity of labor in such countries while increasing the market for our goods (with the development of spending power that wasn't there before in the hands of those countries) while raising wages and profits in the export industry; Free-market economics gets resources going into their most value productive employments. I'm just describing the science of economics here. From that you should figure out that a few layed off employees or unemployed college grads will just have to learn to adjust to the situation when more needy people compete with them and win in the marketplace of the buying public (which coincidentally happens to include such employees and grads and their relatives). Look at it this way, there is less pain for us, overall, when a company that is started up ignores what the rest of the world is doing, or can offer, and is taken "by surprise" and outcompeted than there is for a country and people if they don't get the chance to participate in a modern economy because some ideologues are hanging on to old worn and disproven ideological concepts.

Bye.

>

PARALLAX: Sirc_Valence,

So where is this free market economy?
The USA you say?

Think, before you reply.

>

SIRC_VALENCE: The United States would serve as the best model, to answer your question.

Now, the fact that it is possible to move away from it, or for that matter, to reenforce it, does not negate the proposition.

I don't mean to criticize every single individual here, or pass judgement on their value as individuals, because people are more than what they know.

BUT, the problem in the U.S., regarding betrayals to the American civilization, such as the recent Supreme Court ruling by its most left-leaning Justices in the Kilo case encroaching upon Americans' property rights- can be traced to the alien ideology of the left.

In 1933, 3 years into the Great Depression (and that started out shortly following the creation of the Fed), "Progressive" President Franklin Roosevelt was sworn into office. Yet before and since, there hasn't been a longer depression (9 years) in the United States of America. At the time, one of FDR's economic advisors, a member of his "Brain Trust", asked whether or not we were going to continue on a capitalist basis! Massive human disasters such as Mao's "Great Leap Foreward" and "Cultural Revolution" are not without without their causes.

An education in harmony with America's values would not have produced the Bureaus and officials that aligned themselves with the Communists in China's Civil War, leaving them the mainland; forcing those more likely to produce progress and freedom to retreat into the Island of Taiwan. And there, they may not be totally safe. The good news is that there have been reforms in China, in the direction of the free market. China is still ruled and dominated by Communist partisans, but the country is not so Communist anymore (though still a potential powderkeg). Then there's Kim Jong Il's whose father fought side by side with Mao's "Progressives."

---

This is what I was talking about before when I pointed out that Mises accurately predicted what would happen, even before WWII, as the assault on free-market economics continued (1927):

"The program of antiliberalism unleashed the forces that gave rise to the great World War and, by virtue of import and export quotas, tariffs, migration barriers, and similar measures, has brought the nations of the world to the point of mutual isolation. Within each nation it has led to socialist experiments whose result has been a reduction in the productivity of labor and a concomitant increase in want and misery. Whoever does not deliberately close his eyes to the facts must recognize everywhere the signs of an approaching catastrophe in world economy. Antiliberalism is heading toward a general collapse of civilization."

The classical understanding of liberal civilization, incorporates free-market economics. And that's why, if we want to promote civilization in the world, as well as defend our own, we must also understand the economic manifestation of liberty, that which we call Capitalism.

>

ROWAN BERKELEY: I don' wanna argue that moving back from fractional reserve banking to a 100% reserve system would be bad (though obviously the deflation would be ferocious and would require precisely central economic planning to manage it) - what I am telling you, o voluble and pretentious one of incomprehensible nickname, is that the USA HAS NO GOLD ANY MORE: http://www.gata.org/

SIRC_VALENCE: Hmm.

It wasn't obvious to me that the Gold Standard caused ferocious deflation. I mean, throughout the 19th Century up until WWII there was a mild deflationary trend - even with the rapid growth caused by the general expansion of industry with a Gold Standard in place. There was both growth and falling prices, somehow.

Maybe it would help me see how obvious these things were if you told me a little more. I do appreciate the link, though.

Later alligator

2005-09-02T19:09:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'm not going to wait just so that my next post is the follow up to my FORTITUDE essay; Although the deadline that I gave myself -a very generous one- has not changed. It is still Sept. 16.

But like that mafia guy said in that mafia movie: "Just when you think you're out -- they pull you back in!" (paraphrasing)

I got into some debates with a few people recently, and I'm getting the impulse to publish again. Gotta scratch the itch.

Next: A DiaLOG focusing on "Participatory Economics" by Me (and a contentious little group of sometimes uncooperative assistants)

FORTITUDE (A Long And Bumpy Road, No Left Turns, And Plenty of Links)

2005-08-30T19:09:00.000-07:00

[THIS ESSAY MAY MAKE YOU LAUGH, IT MAY MAKE YOU CRY. IT MIGHT BE BORING IN SOME PLACES OR LEAVE YOU ASTONISHED AT WHAT A GENIOUS I AM. I KEEP A LOW PROFILE SO SOME WILL BE SHOCKED AND AWED. I DON'T GUARANTEE THAT EVERYONE WILL AGREE WITH ALL OF IT (SOME OF YOU WILL BE ASSAULTED.. OR SHOULD I SAY, INSULTED), BUT I WILL GUARANTEE THAT IT IS A WORTHWHILE READ BECAUSE I DID MY BEST TO DEAL WITH SOME VERY SERIOUS ISSUES. THIS ESSAY IS NOT FOR BABIES (but some will try to read anyway, so I helpfully linked some words to their definition for you) HOPEFULLY YOU CAN HANG ON THE WHOLE WAY.

The alternate title to this was "Fortitude. We Are Going Forward In Iraq." The reasons will soon be Crystal clear. To those that are in denial that an earthquake has shaken the foundations of tyranny in the mideast, I say, read the draft of the new Iraqi Constitution. Here is the Preamble:

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

"Verily we have honored the children of Adam" (Quran 17:70)

We the sons of Mesopotamia, land of the prophets, resting place of the holy imams, the leaders of civilization and the creators of the alphabet, the cradle of arithmetic: on our land, the first law put in place by mankind was written; in our nation, the most noble era of justice in the politics of nations was laid down; on our soil, the followers of the prophet and the saints prayed, the philosophers and the scientists theorized and the writers and poets created.

Recognizing God's right upon us; obeying the call of our nation and our citizens; responding to the call of our religious and national leaders and the insistence of our great religious authorities and our leaders and our reformers, we went by the millions for the first time in our history to the ballot box, men and women, young and old, on Jan. 30, 2005, remembering the pains of the despotic band's sectarian oppression of the majority; inspired by the suffering of Iraq's martyrs -- Sunni and Shiite, Arab, Kurd and Turkomen, and the remaining brethren in all communities -- inspired by the injustice against the holy cities in the popular uprising and against the marshes and other places; recalling the agonies of the national oppression in the massacres of Halabja, Barzan, Anfal and against the Faili Kurds; inspired by the tragedies of the Turkomen in Bashir and the suffering of the people of the western region, whom the terrorists and their allies sought to take hostage and prevent from participating in the elections and the establishment of a society of peace and brotherhood and cooperation so we can create a new Iraq, Iraq of the future, without sectarianism, racial strife, regionalism, discrimination or isolation.

Terrorism and "takfir" (declaring someone an infidel) did not divert us from moving forward to build a nation of law. Sectarianism and racism did not stop us from marching together to strengthen our national unity, set ways to peacefully transfer power, adopt a manner to fairly distribute wealth and give equal opportunity to all. [I have to admit, I take issue with the third part of this sentence, as it was what the kind of rhetoric that the party of "Renewal" (Saddam Hussein's Baa'thists) and other socialist outfits usually employ in order to argue that free-market economics does not result in a just distribution of wealth. As long as someone has something that another individual does not, that in and of itself is supposed to be an injustice. Hopefully this passage is stricken from the text.]

We the people of Iraq, newly arisen from our disasters and looking with confidence to the future through a democratic, federal, republican system, are determined -- men and women, old and young -- to respect the rule of law, reject the policy of aggression, pay attention to women and their rights, the elderly and their cares, the children and their affairs, spread the culture of diversity and defuse terrorism.

We are the people of Iraq, who in all our forms and groupings undertake to establish our union freely and by choice, to learn yesterday's lessons for tomorrow, and to write down this permanent constitution from the high values and ideals of the heavenly messages and the developments of science and human civilization, and to adhere to this constitution, which shall preserve for Iraq its free union of people, land and sovereignty.

The Constitutional charge to "pay attention to women's rights" under this new Iraqi government should serve to inspire Islamic reformers in a positive way. The words of this Iraqi Draft Constitution are absolutely impressive. While women's rights are mentioned more times in the Iraqi Constitution than Islam is, it is clear that the faith will play a central role in Iraqi life. Article 2 of Iraq's Basic Principles in the Constitution reads:

1st -- Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation:

(a) No law can be passed that contradicts the fixed principles of Islam.

(b) No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy.

(c) No law can be passed that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms outlined in this constitution.

It is now in the hands of the Iraqi people, and it will be a test for Islam and Islamic reformers. This can't be understated. The Iraqi people have been liberated from a dictatorship, but their nation, just like Israel, has been targeted by the Islamo-fascists, the terrormasters, and selfish and myopic tyrants who do not want to lose their power.

Click here if you have Windows Media Player. You have to see it to understand what this is all about. Cpl. Signs narrates a brief segment that I'm sure some readers would benefit from watching. These are the sons and daughters of America, risking their lives and reaching out to lend a helping hand to our Iraqi brothers and sisters.. It's a small window into some of the work that our Marines and our other military branches are doing, on the mission that is being carried out. America's armed forces are definitely our best, and that is why they will not be defeated, and why we cannot allow their sacrifices, blood sweat and tears, to go in vain and leave the people of Iraq at the mercy of the monsters that want to take them back to the dark ages..

I agree wholeheartedly with C.S. Lewis' statement that "there is no neutral ground in this universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan." Providence is a force, I believe, that manifests itself through the unity of God's purpose and our determined will to fulfill it. We celebrate the Glory of God by living by His will, not by making ourselves the center of the universe and succumbing to temptations and our weaknesses.

(B.T.W., the reference to bioethics in Mr. Colson's piece on C.S. Lewis reminds me of something that he wrote in The Abolition of Man (pgs 53-55 and 62), where he was trying to warn fellow academics of the effect that secular humanism and socialism would ultimately have: "'Man's conquest of Nature' is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science... Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target for both bombs and for propaganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence... From this point of view, what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

"One of the things they now have to decide is whether they will, or will not, so condition the rest of us that we can go on having the old idea of duty... How can duty help them decide that? Duty itself is up for trial: it cannot also be the judge. And 'good' fares no better.")

Why do some people make the argument that the best way to deal with evil is to condone it, to make believe that it doesn't exist? Of course they won't usually use those terms in admission (unless they are far-left militant post-modernists), but I'm trying to step out of the relativistic into into the objective here.

They appear to believe that surrender to evil is the best way to cope with it. So they reduce the likelyhood of their even percieving its influence in many cases.

Why, since in the long run it isn't?

I believe that they do because they may have been spiritually and intellectually disarmed, to a painfully obvious extent due to a psychological conditioning that can be observed in the French and ostrichlike reaction of the surrender and appease lobby and leadership.

Oswald Sobrino, a blogger that I sometimes read, put it well in one of his titles; "living better is the answer to the problem of evil." I think that Thomas Brewton made a very helpful historical summary that may explain how such an obvious fact can be lost. Some people may view that as an oversimplification, but the beauty of the truth is that it simplifies that which may be distorted or convoluted and shines a light upon it, making it plain as daylight.

The door to totalitarianism was opened in the late 18th century by Immanuel Kant. His celebrated categorical imperative - that one must act as if his every action were to become a universal rule of conduct - is essentially a restatement of the Judeo-Christian command to love thy neighbor as thyself ... he advocated the authoritarian, statist theory that true freedom lies in rigid state control of moral action in a way that prevents individuals from doing wrong deeds, thereby “freeing” them for true liberty. From there it’s only a short step to Mussolini’s Fascist and Hitler’s National Socialist doctrine that the individual has meaning only in carrying out the aims of the political state.

Professor John Dewey, the great exponent of secularity in Progressive education, stated in his pragmatic ethics that Darwin’s evolution hypothesis had proved that everything is continually evolving in response to random and accidental material factors. There is thus no God and no such thing as fixed principles of morality. Pragmatic ethics speaks, not of right or wrong, but of valid or invalid conduct. Valid action is defined as what works to your advantage, with the implication that the end justifies the means. Charles Darwin’s great champion, Thomas Huxley, declared that the evolution hypothesis had eliminated the ignorant belief in God. There is, he said, no such thing as sin (right or wrong); human life is nothing more than the struggle for survival.

The end of the road for all of these alternative ethical systems is either nihilism at the personal level, or totalitarian tyranny at the level of the political state. Nihilism meaning that, if there is no such thing as Divinely instituted order in human life, then anything becomes permissible, no matter how horrible. Every individual is free to make up his own rules. Such is the case among young men in the inner-cities who were spawned out of wedlock by the advent of President Johnson’s secular and socialistic Great Society of welfare entitlements. Drug dealing and drive-by shooting became commonplace; young men could look anyone in the face and kill him without remorse or mercy.

Totalitarian tyranny appeared with the first of the 19th century alternative systems of secular ethics.
The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror was followed by Napoleon’s military subjugation of Western Continental Europe, both in the name of secular materialism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 installed one of the most blood-thirsty, totalitarian regimes in history. Hitler’s National Socialism failed to match Soviet mass killing only for lack of time and interference by Allied military action. Mao’s socialist China resumed the death march.

[M]y firm faith is that the highest and best source of ethics is the religious principles of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Christian morality was the foundation of our unwritten constitution in the United States.

As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that except the Lord build the House they labor in vain who build it.. without His concurring Aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel..."

Maybe he was on to something, just maybe.
Perhaps its something that can help us with the small matter of "living better."
[Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito]

Pertaining to the fighting in Iraq (there's no way for me to get around this so I'll be direct): so-called "Progressives" believe that we should yielded to "world opinion" on Iraq, although we gave it more than enough consideration. I will make that case in my next post, (no later than September 16). The 2004 election results should demonstrate that most Americans agree.

"Progressives" view the problem of anti-Americanism as something caused by the United States instead of by mere foolishness. They think that the criticism of more primative societies like France and Germany, the wimps and barbarians that gave us WWII should be taken more seriously when it comes to America's national security and military policy and interests; they assume and imply that most of the Mideast which blames all their problems on a country that's the size of the state of New Jersey (while oppressing their own people and inciting people to kill anyone that doesn't share their beliefs), have formed legitimate and rational criticisms of what America does or does not do..

Some consider it un-enlightened to view the grievances that the world has against the United States as exogenous to the heart of most issues that they are meant to influence while it is considered enlightened to neglect the fact that such greivances and attitudes are shaped and influenced more by misperceptions than by the subject of their manipulated ire.

It is universally acknowledged that our attitudes are circumstancially affected, and not absolutely independent. "No man is an island.."

For instance, an economic theory may be known to result in disaster, but if we are surrounded by enthusiastic supporters of the theory, we might have the impression and attitude that it is a good theory.

In the same way, other corrupting influences can be accepted, unpercieved and spread.

As I've addressed my Islamic friends in the attempt to highlight what I believe to be important points connected to Iraq; in the spirit of dialogue, I also should address our atheistic and agnostic fellow citizens and readers and state what I believe to be an important charicteristic of God: He is not part of the world. The author of the human soul and the universe is above and beyond our ability to reduce, dissect, and deconstruct.

That is something that many people forget or don't fully realize. That is where prayer and faith come into play. As George Shadroui wrote, "If we can entertain theories about wormholes and parallel universes, anti-matter and quantum mechanics, black holes and infinite universes whose origins remain one of the great mysteries, why not a spiritual dimension to human life? If we humans can transmit pictures and sounds on invisible radio waves, why can't God send messages through prophets?" This point must be emphasized in order to understand nature, because nature is neutral when it comes to good and evil, and she may reflect the purpose of heaven or come under the influence of hell. This is a crucial distinction to keep in mind when hell reaches out from its black pit to pull us in.

Below, I'm posting some key statements elicited by interviewer Wolf Blitzer, regarding the War On Terror, the Iraq front, airing on CNN, June 26, 2005. Some people say that we should not have militarily intervened there. On its face that is a legitimate challenge to pose and to deal with, but some people turn it into a cloak to diminish the historically monumental achievements that have been made, and for the proposition that America should not intervene anywhere at all, not even on her own behalf; i.e. "This country is not worth dying for." But it is more than a piece of land at stake, here.

I'll deal with the case for launching Operation Iraqi Freedom in the next post, but it can't be denied that this campaign is a vital part of the War On Terror that we woke up to that horrible September morning with a nasty wakeup call and grave warning that should have reminded EVERYONE of what Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote inside of a jail in Burmingham: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Sometimes the battle that rages unpercieved manifests itself on the physical realm. Sometimes the enemy has to be dealt with on the battlefield. Sometimes you do have to pick up the sword.

General John Abizaid, in charge of United States Central Command:

"There's only one way for the insurgents to win: That's to drive us out before the Iraqis are ready to assume the battle space... [Michael Moore's "Minutemen"] can't beat the Iraqi security forces. They can cause casualties. They don't really go after the Iraqi security forces. They go after Iraqi civilians. I mean, this is the most cynical strategy I've ever seen... And more Iraqis are dying on the battlefield fighting for their country against the insurgency than Americans.It's a point we've got to understand. We have to respect them for fighting the way that they're fighting.

"Just look at how things were in the American Army in 1775, 1776, as we think about the 4th of July holiday ahead of us. We had a terrible time getting our act together to win against the British, but ultimately we did, and that's what's going to happen with the Iraqi armed forces as well. They need time. They need help. That's what we're giving them.

"I want to also stress that it's not about one man. It's about his network. His network exists inside Iraq. It's connected to Al Qaida. It's got facilitation nodes in Syria. It brings foreign fighters in from Saudi Arabia and from North Africa. It is connected to what is happening in Afghanistan and what is happening in Pakistan. It is a global battle that we face... we should understand, it's a long war ahead of us. It's a difficult enemy that we'll have to fight over time throughout the region.

"We don't need to fight this war looking over our shoulder worrying about the support back home. We need to know we've got the support back home.[The General doesn't mean "please undermine our efforts to bring liberty to Iraq and defeat tyranny."]American soldiers fight best when they know the people back home are behind them.

"We are fighting for all the right reasons, against one of the most despicable and dangerous enemies this nation has ever faced. We need to know that the people are with us.

Iraqi PM Ibrahim Al Jaafari also made some very notable statements, very illustrative of the overall struggle that we're calling the War On Terror:

"There are bases in other countries outside our borders that are feeding these terrorist networks. They are training them. They are giving them money.What's happening in Iraq is not isolated. In fact, those terrorist networks are not simply Iraqis. It is in the context of the whole region. We cannot look at it in isolation. In fact, we should look at the impact of what's happening in Iraq on the whole world.

"...The timing cannot be simply put on a time scale. Withdrawal can be linked to conditions, not to a timeline... If we focus more at the condition of the country, then I think that is a responsible way of dealing with it. Otherwise it will be perceived as yielding to terrorism"

Vice President Dick Cheney was asked why and how if "there are actually more foreign fighters in Iraq now than there were six months ago" he could say that the Iraqi insurgency was in it's last throes. But doesn't the question in and of itself confirm the Vice President's statement and at the same time and emphasize the point that a free Iraq would be a nightmare for those that want to continue to smother the right of millions of human beings to determine their own destiny?

Wouldn't the right thing to call who we are fighting, be: Islamofascists? or in their own words: jihadis? instead of "Iraqi insurgents"? I think that the lable is misleading in a subtle manner when it is used (repeatedly) out of context. I can only pray that God has mercy on their souls, because I don't know that I could for individuals that devise ways to torture and kill innocent human beings, even if they believe in it. What they are doing is unholy and it troubles me sometimes that they have been brainwashed by the tools of despots and wicked men and influences. Many more people would be condemned that way, to that kind of depravity, if we allow the status quo to just continue. Can we really be convinced to abandon the obligation to oppose any such situation? No way. To look the other way while monsters carry out atrocities and injustices takes away from the meaning of the true value of the word peace.

Korean and World War II Veteran, Jim Baxter, doesn't like to mince words (a la "it depends on what 'is' is"):

I have watched and listened to the good-hearted “peaceniks” and their light-headed symbolism- without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that “Peace is not a cause - it is an effect.”

Indeed.

But for some people, truth, and everything else, is accidental. It is no surprise that while reluctant to admit it, many of them posit that it is whatever they say it is. This cartoon illustrates what sort of cartoonlike confusion can result from that attitude (WARNING, do not click that last link if you do not want to see naked liberals).

For some exceptional coverage of real progress in the making, I highly recommend Michael Yon's dispatches from the center of the storm.

Here are a few snippets, you will probably want to read the whole thing:

Every day, the Deuce Four launches dozens of combat missions in Mosul. Recently, a patrol was heading downtown, and its tasks included meeting with Iraqi police. I asked to go along. The Battalion Commander led the patrol, which also included two Strykers led by LT Sean Keneally from Charlie Company

...A couple minutes later, we leave the base and begin the drive downtown, passing spots where so many car bombs and IEDs have exploded.

...At least two terrorists are watching our approach, pretending to talk to a taxi driver. One holds a Motorola radio transmitter in his pants pocket...

We are in a big Stryker. Usually the IEDs just make the ears ring--I wear earplugs--or maybe knock an air-guard or two unconscious, filling the cabin with so much fine dust that it looks like smoke. I've often wondered if this fine dust sometimes ignites when the armor ruptures, adding to the flashover that burns so many soldiers inside.

...

One of the terrorists does a double take at the lead Stryker, blowing his cover. The call instantly goes out to "Block left! Lock 'em down! Two pax!"

...When we turn toward them, one man spooks and bolts. I'm watching on the screen [RWS] inside, as SSG Munch, our machine gunner, tracks this man who runs like an antelope. I follow along on the RWS, and think, Why is he running? How is he running that fast?

The Bionic Terrorist runs into a neighborhood. We take a couple of sharp turns chasing him, driving over a few curbs. Of course, I am thinking, this guy is leading us into a massive ambush...

LT Keneally's voice calls over the radio that when they caught the stripe-shirted man they found an IED radio transmitter in his pocket. Before the message is completed, we've started running, leaving our Stryker behind with a few soldiers to watch over the not-so-bionic terrorist. We cover the few hundred yards to the Yarmuk traffic circle, reaching the spot where the two men were standing when the commotion started...

The Yarmuk traffic circle is fantastically dangerous. On the first mission I ran in Mosul, we lost two soldiers and an interpreter, all killed by a car bomb. Others were horribly burned, scarred for life. Many of our wounded and killed soldiers got it right here, or in the immediate vicinity. The ISF takes serious losses in this part of town. But it's not entirely one-sided--the Deuce Four has killed well over 150 terrorists in this neighborhood in the past 10 months. But almost none of those made the news, and those that did had a few key details missing. [Consequential information omitted from an "MSM" story? Sacre blughgh!, c'est impossible!]

Here's a few more snippets from another one of Yon's reports:

Five soldiers from Recon—Holt, Ferguson, Yates, Welch and Ross—were moving through moon-cast shadows when an Iraqi man came out from a farmhouse, his AK-47 rifle hanging by his side. Suddenly encircled by the rifles, lights and lasers of four soldiers, the man was quickly disarmed. A fifth soldier radioed for the interpreter and together they sorted out that he was a farmer who thought the soldiers were thieves skulking around his property. Recon returned the man his rifle, and started making their way back, umbral and silent across the ploughed fields.

...Some Strykers were scouting for the shooters, while others were working details at Yarmook Traffic Circle. Major Craig Triscari from the 1-17th Infantry from Alaska was with Major Mike Lawrence, "Q," and other soldiers, when he noticed a car with its hood up. The 1-17th will relieve the 1-24th soon, so Triscari has been conducting operations with Deuce Four. The vehicle struck Triscari as odd: it hadn't been there a few minutes earlier.

Automatic weapons fire started coming from at least two places. Bullets were kicking up the dust, and we got a radio call that troops were in contact at Yarmook Traffic Circle. Sitting inside the Stryker with LTC Kurilla and me were two new faces....

You get the idea. His writing style is probably impacted by the fact that he was a Special Forces Soldier. I don't think that you can find better all around on the ground coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom (and maybe from the Afghanistan campaign in the future). You might want to check out the Milblogs, as well.

Hindrocket, of Powerline, recently posted some very interesting musings:

One wonders how past wars could have been fought if news reporting had consisted almost entirely of a recitation of casualties. The D-Day invasion was one of the greatest organizational feats ever achieved by human beings, and one of the most successful. But what if the only news Americans had gotten about the invasion was that 2,500 allied soldiers died that day, with no discussion of whether the invasion was a success or a failure, and no acknowledgement of the huge strategic stakes that were involved?

Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one ... all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don't recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President's home town. ["Somehow", indeed.] In fact, I'll offer a free six-pack to the first person who can find evidence that any liberal expressed concern--any concern--about the 18,006 American service members who died accidentally in service of their country from 1983 to 1996.

In Cindy Sheehan: Commander In Grief, Ann Coulter pointed out that libs "think that since they have been able to produce a grieving mother, the commander in chief should step aside and let Cindy Sheehan make foreign policy for the nation. As Maureen Dowd said, it's 'inhumane' for Bush not 'to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.'"

We're sorry about Ms. Sheehan's son, but the entire nation was attacked on 9/11. This isn't about her personal loss. America has been under relentless attack from Islamic terrorists for 20 years, culminating in a devastating attack on U.S. soil on 9/11. It's not going to stop unless we fight back, annihilate Muslim fanatics, destroy their bases, eliminate their sponsors and end all their hope. A lot more mothers will be grieving if our military policy is: No one gets hurt!

I love Ann because she has a genious for unravelling the twisted and contorted knots of lib sophistry and brilliantly stating the obvious.

FReeper "Baynative" (apparently plagiarizing "Jeff Head") summarized the bottom line behind the latest purile theatrical production of the left:

Cindy Sheehan was a far-left, anti-American before her son was killed. She tried in vain, to talk him out of service to his country. He didn’t listen. After four years of regular duty he re-enlisted and volunteered for Iraq. Once there, he volunteered for a hazardous rescue mission saying, “Where my Chief goes, I go!” He was ambushed and killed on that mission. That is eating at Cindy.

She hated what her son had come to represent and her deep set anger and conflicting emotions are eating her up. Sadly, she has given herself over to the intoxicating glare of momentary fame and it’s bright lights. Now she waves a cross bearing her fallen son’s name and vociferously supports everything her son was against, calling the very people who killed him, “Freedom Fighters”.

She was longing to be a victim which is the highest calling of a contemporary hippie liberal. As a result she is now the victim of those she chose to join in protest. She is living in a self created personal hell and has no way out.

...and it shows in her countenance when she is not prepped for the press...

FReeper "Mr. Silverback" has some questions that he would ask her if he worked for one of the major media outlets. I would feel better in saying that the lib TV news networks were trying to inform people, rather than manipulate us, if they followed any of these three lines of inquiry:

I’d ask why, in an interview with Mark Knoller of CBS News, she said “But now that we have decimated the country, the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in…” (Oh, and I’d ask Mark Knoller why that statement never aired...

I’d ask about the recent incident where these "freedom fighters" rolled an SUV filled with explosives up to a group of children getting candy from American troops and blew them all up. Specifically, I’d ask what freedom those men were fighting for when they [deliberately] killed those children...

I'D ASK HOW PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES 'AL QAEDA IN IRAQ' AND ARE LED BY A BIN-LADEN LIEUTENANT QUALIFY AS 'FREEDOM FIGHTERS'

Before posting this, I discovered that the "poster-child" of the anti-war "Bush-is-a-****wod" crowd, who is supposed to provide their movement some form of moral credibility, in a speech in San Francisco, actually defended a terrorism-supporting lawyer.

Quote:

"In closing, let me say it’s really important we connect the dots here, that we understand that what is happening to our comrade Lynne Stewart is connected to a larger political thing that’s going on in terms of an imperial expansion."

For all of those that don't know, Lynne Stewart was caught, tried, and convicted of supporting the terrorist network of one of the participants in the 1993 attempt to topple the World Trade Center with explosives:

...the government issued a special order that the imprisoned Rahman not be allowed to communicate with his followers, to prevent his inciting them to further violence. He was allowed to communicate only with his wife and with his lawyers, who were not allowed to relay his wishes to his followers.

Stewart promised to abide by those rules. But at her trial, the government produced evidence showing that Stewart and two codefendants on a number of occasions used their privileged access to Rahman to help transmit Rahman's orders to his followers in the Islamic Group.

The bottom line on the Cindy Sheehan production and the media's whitewash of anything that would give Americans a clue about the agenda and background of that outfit is that it is an attempt to provide moral legitimacy to the betrayal of America by the left. I hope that this Sheehan defeatist and leftwing presstitute nonsense backfires, and actually benefits the country, and civilization, by exposing to everyone the results of LIEberalism.

It takes fortitude to oppose evil in all of its forms, in all of its manifestations. I'm not trying to kick a dead horse (as long as it continues to writhe and wriggle it is a stalking horse for the forces of darkness), but I believe that the truth has to reach as many people as possible. Hence, this essay.

Quoting from FrontPageMag's very useful DTN site:

An F.B.I. affidavit prepared by agent Kimberley Whittle detailed the cunning measures Stewart resorted to during her prison visits in order to protect Rahman and assist the Islamic Group's homicidal agenda. According to the affidavit, Stewart "made random comments out loud for the [prison] guards to hear in order to conceal the real conversation" between Rahman and Yousry. During one such exchange, Stewart—all the while pretending to take notes in her legal pad—misled nearby guards by loudly inserting the nonsensical phrase, "Yes, the um...I am talking to you about...him going out on a, uh, chocolate eh...heart attack here" into a discussion between Rahman and Yousry. A wiretap captured Stewart, Rahman and Yousry joking afterwards about Stewart's deception, with the aging Leftist lawyer saying she could "get an award for it," and the Sheikh adding, "as long as the government is using secret evidence we will use secret doves."

Do not allow these people to succeed in their ridiculously disgusting attempts to pass themselves off "as a group of Soccer Moms" who are concerned with America's best interests. (Thanks for the link to Cao, blondie, I found the audio. Hopefully it stays up. Mohammed of Iraq The Model has a very important message, a response to Cindy Sheehan, one that is more generous than the kind that my temperament would usually allow mine to be. Please read it the whole thing.

Operation Iraqi Freedom is absolutely a Just Cause. I am satisfied that I have demonstrated that here for those that may be confused and misled by the naysayers. Next I will deal with the argument in defense of President Bush's case for launching into this grand American Enterprise, as many doubts have been raised that are better dealt with in another FOREWARD post up.

As I've written before:

President Bush's hopeful words and purposeful action in defeating America's enemies abroad also disgraces his malicious opponents (the ones that distort the truth to support their positions). He shames them with his goodness. The day that the Iraqis dipped their fingers in ink as if they were "poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants" to cast their votes, was a powerful demonstration that to be opposed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, based on everything that was known beforehand, and what is known today, was and is to be against humanitarian aid. The future of those born recently, and not yet, in Iraq will be better because they have been liberated from monsters. Some monsters remain (as far as history goes, some always have), but are no longer in power and in control of the future of the Iraqi people. Not many greedy imperialists these days leave the countries that they invade better off than before they invaded them. The specious claim that "war is wrong" can be negated by the fact that the use of force by the good guys against the bad guys is not.

"We will rebuild our defenses beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge. We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors. The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake. America remains engaged in the world, by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom." -- President George W. Bush, January 20, 2001

Ultimately, as the president has repeatedly stated, peace in Iraq will require competent security forces and government. Competent security forces and government officials require the development of civil institutions and the encouragement of human potential. The obstacles and opponents to the achievement of those objectives have to be overcome. And those are not just terrorist insurgents. What we need to do is avoid dwelling on pessimistic speculation and keep our eye on the ball. As of this date, the development of Iraqi military forces and their governing structures are being put together. This is why Iraq is currently at the center of the War on Terror, and will remain a part of this long and difficult global conflict for years to come. But progress is definitely being made.

Here's Edward Morrissey, on February, 2005, saying it better than I could:

In the past two months, we have seen an explosion of momentum in Southwest Asia for political reform and democratization. Despite European warnings that democracy cannot be imposed at gunpoint [nevermind Japan and Germany], two longtime tyrannies (Afghanistan and Iraq) successfully held popular multiparty elections for the first time in their histories, freeing almost 50 million people from two of the most oppressive governments in modern history. Just before that, Ukrainians took to the streets to bring down a puppet government and a sham election that would have perpetuated it, and now we see popular demonstrations for liberty where we would least have expected it -- on the streets of Beirut and Cairo. The pro-Syrian puppet Lebanese government has fallen today as a result, while Hosni Mubarak has managed to stay one step ahead by promising multiparty elections later this year for the executive.

For twelve years, the international community sat on its hands while Saddam Hussein, the Assads in Syria, and other tinpot dictators openly oppressed their people and defied international calls for reform. All of that changed for the US after 9/11, when the product of all that simmering rage at political repression took out 3,000 of our citizens who committed the sin of going to work on Tuesday morning. Bush, Blair, and Howard correctly calculated that continuing with so-called realpolitik and cutting deals with the oppressors only created more risk..

After watching nothing but stagnation for decades and an Arab populace that appeared resigned to oppression all along, one has to ask: WHAT CHANGED? Why now?...

The answer lies in the 150,000 troops currently stationed in Iraq and the will to act that put them there. Does anyone think that Syria would have stood still for a spontaneous demonstration against their puppet government if Saddam Hussein was still defying the UN in Baghdad? Would Hosni Mubarak have suddenly transformed into a democrat without watching the Anglosphere demonstrate a will to act rather than just continue talking tough?

"Every lesson of history tells us that appeasement does not lead to peace. It invites an aggressor to test the will of a nation unprepared to meet that test. And tragically, those who seemingly want peace the most, our young people, pay the heaviest price for our failure to maintain our strength." -- Ronald Reagan, as governor of the Golden State, 1972, future GOP presidential candidate and U.S. President.

The credit for this essay should really be given to all of America's patriots and friends. It is with their words, inspiration, and sacrifice that I am able to present this essay in their honor. This is who this essay is dedicated to. I just hope that more of us recognized and actually supported them, instead of just saying so. They are the true holy warriors, as far as I'm concerned.

"Proclaim Liberty throughout All the land unto All the Inhabitants Thereof" Lev. XXV; X

God bless America.

Libboleths

2005-04-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

I was just reading about the slaying of Catherine Genovese and noticed how many lib shibboleths, in action, (and in inaction) could be traced back to the narcissistic "moral" thinking of the Left.

The following are exerpts from Michael Dorman's Newsday retrospective on "The Killing of Kitty Genovese. Her public slaying in Queens becomes a symbol of America's failure to get involved."

Only one person called the police when almost 40 people heard a woman's cries for help. One man shouted from his apartment window, "Let that girl alone." The attacker walked away as apartment lights went out and windows shut. Then Winston Moseley returned and stabbed Catherine Genovese again. When the murderer saw that people turned their apartment lights back on after hearing Catherine scream and beg for help (AGAIN), Moseley, took off in a car.
A neighbor called the police at 3:50 AM, that March 13, 1964. The cops got there minutes later and found her body and discovered that at least 38 people were aware of her cries as she was being stabbed to death. The attacks came at three intervals within a half-hour period. The commander of the Queens detective department was shocked by the ethical insouciance of the victim's neighbors, stating, "If we had been called when he first attacked, this woman might not be dead now."

Quoting from the article:

"Madeline Hartmann, a native of France, was 68 at the time of the murder and
lived in the building where Genovese died. On the 20th anniversary of the
murder, she said in an interview she did not feel bad about failing to call the
police. 'So many, many [other] times in the night, I heard screaming,' she said.
'I'm not the police and my English speaking is not perfect.'

"Three months after Genovese's death, Moseley went on trial for her murder in State Supreme Court in Queens. He pleaded insanity and testified in painstaking detail about how he had stalked and stabbed Genovese to satisfy his supposedly
uncontrollable urge. On June 11, 1964, a jury found him guilty. The following
month, he was sentenced by Justice J. Irwin Shapiro to die in the electric chair
at Sing Sing prison. 'When I see this monster, I wouldn't hesitate to pull the switch myself,' the judge said.

"But in 1967 the State Court of Appeals reduced the punishment to life imprisonment on the ground that Shapiro had erred in refusing to admit evidence on Moseley's mental condition at a pre-sentence hearing. [Thanks libs. Really. Thanks for robbing the victim of justice and corrupting law, being the perverts that you are.]

"A year later, taken from prison to a Buffalo hospital for minor surgery, Moseley struck a prison guard and escaped. He obtained a gun, held five persons hostage, raped one of them and squared off for a showdown with FBI agents in an apartment building.

"During one parole hearing in 1984, Moseley volunteered that he had written Genovese's relatives a letter 'to apologize for the inconvenience I caused.'

"Moseley also told the board the murder was as difficult for him as his victim. [Only a thoroughly indocrinated lib would fall for that one and think that it made any sense.] 'For a victim outside, it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair,' he said. 'But, for the person who's caught, it's forever.'" [How enlightening. No wonder Dems want to give these people more influence than they already have in this world]