Here's a blog worth mentioning: Disembodied Brain.

This blog by Jeff Dillon is on the San Diego Tribune's website and it cover sci-fi topics. Dillon is obviously a sci-fi fan, not just a reporter assigned to the subject. And unlike a lot of reviewers I've seen in the past, Dillon enjoys what he sees. His reviews and other blog entries aren't the usual non-stop carping one can see elsewhere. His review of Return of The King contains what look like valid criticisms, but overall avoids the kind of tone you can find from other writers. No off-topic rants about how much money the films have made, for example. There is criticism of Jackson for cutting the "Scouring of The Shire" that is quite legitimate. It's also tempered with the admission that there are parts of Tolkien's novels that don't lend themselves to a movie script.

If you're a fan of sci-fi, I recommend a visit to this blog.

Great... Just what the world needs: More flies.

Ann Coulter strikes again...

Vegan Computer Geeks for Dean

No, I haven't forgotten about this page... I've been busy.

"Self defence", UK-style

Briton Tony Martin, who was convicted in a UK court of defending himself against a criminal, has been given a new self defense tool: An air raid siren.

I'm not making this up.

OK... I can tell from that look on your face that you don't believe me; but it's true... all of it. Yes, a man was convicted for what would be a perfectly lawful activity in the US. He defended himself against two teenage burglars who broke into his home. One goblin got his ticket punched, while the other was merely wounded. In the US, this is called a "good shoot". A 16-year old and a 29-year old constitute a grave threat to a 54-year old man. But not only was Tony Martin arrested, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 5 years in prison. And on top of that, the wounded burglar is suing him!

Tony Martin is finally getting out of prison, after previously being denied parole. (Friends mocked the parole board saying that Martin was being kept behind bars because he poses a threat to Britain's burglars.) He's been threatened by local thugs and a wealthy neighbor purchased the siren as some sort of self defense device. I'm sure that the man meant well. After years of being told that defending your own life or property is somehow anti-social behavior, he probably didn't see how silly the gesture really is.

Of course, the siren will merely signal to all within earshot that Mr. Martin has been killed.

The Biased Broadcasting Company

Brian Carnell dissects a highly biased, anti-gun story from the BBC.

Never bring a paintball marker to a gunfight.

I suppose that the question is: Will the State's Democrats lash themselves to the rails and go down with Gray Davis' sinking ship? Or will the rats go over the transom?

Eye in the sky.

The Northrup-Grumman Global Hawk spy plane is going into production. The Global Hawks that provided so much valuable intel in Iraq and Afghanistan were merely prototypes. These impressive spy planes can loiter for nearly a over a target at an altitude that makes them nearly impossible to target and hit with a SAM.

Some bad days lie ahead for the "evil doers".

The FreeRepublic Quote of the Day: "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" from CholeraJoe.

Today is a sad day for the United States: Bob Hope, 1903-2003.

The gun thing didn't work, so now the nation's trial attorneys are going after ice cream.

Another anti-gun lawsuit bites the dust. This is the case from the NAA(L)CP in NY. The funny thing is that the judge in the case was cherrypicked by the hoplophobes. It was supposed to be a slam dunk for them. So even their hand selected judge couldn't come up with a way to make their claims work.

BWAAAHAAAAHAAAAHAAAA!!

"Hurricane" Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) and ten of her Democrat cohorts were caught on an open mic in Sacramento plotting to extend the State's budget crisis for political gain. Their conversation was picked up by a "squawk box" and broadcast throughout the capitol building.

Kinda reminds ya of Frank and Hotlips, don't it?!

Ayatollah bugs

(Not to be confused with a rabbit in a turban.)

I don't know why you're a Democrat either, Tammy.

Some local stupidity...

James Swan documents some of our local stupidity in Bowless in Burbank. The Burbank city council has voted to ban bow hunting in the city. "So what" you ask? Perhaps you think that there's no where to hunt in the city. There is just such an area. The Verdugo Hills stretch from the Foothill Freeway south towards the intersection of the Ventura and Golden State freeways. This is the line of hills you see to the east of Burbank Airport. There are roughly 500 deer in those hills; more than enough to support bowhunting of the herd. There are also small game animals and coyotes to hunt.

The yuppies jogging on the trails (Appearently unaware that the mountain lions who moved into the area attracted by the deer like to chase things that run. They are cats, after all.) didn't like seeing bow hunters hiking into the hills. They whined to the city council, and the city council, in its wisdom, voted to remove the herd's top predator from the ecosystem. Not smart. Without their top predator, the deer will over-graze. When they start to run out of natural food, they'll move into people's gardens. More than a few will wind up bouncing off the hoods of the yuppies' Volvos and Lexuses. (Or would that be "Lexi"?) Of course, the lions will also move into the neighborhoods looking for the deer. But once they get into town, they'll realize that there are plenty of tasty dogs and cats. They may be small , but they're easier to catch than deer. Small children are even easier for lions to catch, by the way.

But none of that mattered to the city council. Deer are cute and fluffy and hunters are Neanderthals in the council's tidy, little world. Let's hope that the DFG or the courts straightens this out before too much harm has been done.

Paul Greenberg: How diversity became Orwellian

Sandra Day O'Conner gets complimented as a "doubleplusgood doublethinker". (Also on FreeRepublic.com.)

The French are always good for a laugh.

Cathryn Crawford writes about Big Brother and his big GPS. An Oregon governmental task force is proposing to install GPS transponders in private vehicles to monitor, and then tax, road usage.

I'm starting to wonder about this "African Uranium" controversy. Are the Dems swinging at a tarbaby?

Here's the sit: Bush, in his last State of the Union address, mentions a British report. That report claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium from an African nation. At about the same time, the CIA had a letter, supposedly bogus, that mentions an attempted purchase of uranium from Niger. This letter and the British report are two different things. The Brits still stand behind their story. (The CIA's letter, BTW, has been tied to France.) In other words, there is no there there. Bush didn't lie, he didn't deceive, he did nothing wrong. The sequence of events is easily explainable.

So why isn't the Bush Administration making that easy explaination?

Enter the tarbaby. The Bushies are, if nothing else, slick politicians. Nothing happens in Dubya's White House by accident. I doubt that the clumsy handling of this controversy is purely accidental. Rove and company may be waiting for that last foot to get lodged in the tarbaby. He and Dubya have left a lot of hoof prints on people who "misunderestimated" Bush. This may be another example of them setting up his adversaries.

Bob Barr does deserve hazardous duty pay!

Instapundit noticed some interesting backpedaling from the anti-gun crowd...

But here's the most revealing quote:

Matt Nosanchuk, litigation director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy group, said there is no evidence that greater access to guns reduces crime.

Remember how anti-gun folks used to say that reducing gun controls would lead to "blood in the streets?" Now the best they can claim is that it probably won't reduce crime.

I guess that Sarah's minions realize that the "blood in the streets" thing needs actual blood in an actual street at least once to be effective.

The Clinton "legacy": Road Ban in Forests Is Leveled

Clinton's land grab attempt out here in the West was overturned. This was a sleazy attempt to use the Wilderness Act to seal off millions upon millions of arces of public land. The harm it did to logging is obvious. Loggers need to cut roads to get to their timber leases. But other suffered as well. There are pockets of private land surrounded by these wilderness areas. Owners were unable to build or, as I understand it, maintain roads to their property. Also, hunters and others use the roads to get into the back country. Letting the roads go to pot prevents people from getting at land that they pay taxes to maintain. What good is Public land if the Public isn't allowed in?!?

A good question: PETA--Legitimate Organization or Cloaked 'Onion' Contributor?

Circular reference

More on my Linux box...

I've been trying to figure out the intricacies of Samba. We have two machines: This dual boot box and a Win2k only box. I could see that other box from Linux, but not the other way around. After a good deal of searching, I found
this page on a FreeBSD site. The suggestions here did the trick as did another page's suggestion that the Win2k box be set (in local security policies: to allow sending unecrypted passwords to a 3rd party SMB server. (We're behind a firewall, so security is less of a concern.)

...Oh yeah. I also added the Win2k box to my /etc/hosts file.

So why blog this? Blogger is owned by Google now. The more places this info is, the easier it is to search it out.

Gun law's author hit right on target

A great profile of Minnesota's Joe Olson. He was one of the driving forces behind that State's recent "Shall Issue" law for concealed weapons.

So where did the out-of-state gun story end up? The A section, of course.

So where will this story end up in tomorrow's L.A. Times? It's the story of a guy going postal, with a gun, at a factory in Missouri. I wonder because this local story about a guy going postal with a sword didn't make the A section, let alone the front page.

One would think that a local story warrants greater coverage than an out-of-state story; however, one lunatic used a gun while the other used a sword. Will the Times hype the gun story? Or will they give it less coverage than the local story they relegated to the B section? We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see.

How does one blog a radio program? I almost drove off the road yesterday laughing myself silly. I was listening to the John and Ken Show. Their guest was Democratic strategist Bob Mulholland. During his entire appearance, Bob managed to avoid answering a single question. John Kobylt, at one point, realized that it was necessary to remind listeners that this was a real guest, not a joke. A caller would ask about the budget and Bob would ramble about abortion and gun control. When asked about taxes, he blurted out something about George Bush. John ased him if he had Tourette's and described the conversation as being like talking to a mental patient. It was great radio, however unenlightening Bob might have been.

Ostensibly, Mulholland was there to tell why Wile E. "Gray" Davis shouldn't be recalled. With friends like Bob...

Will the Skeet-Geeks finally get it? James Swan writes about the UN's small arms conference coming up next week in NYC. He points out what many gun rights activists have been saying for years: The UN would like nothing more than to disarm average citizens. The skeet-geeks are the hardest to get involved in protecting our gun rights. They convince themselves that no one's interested in taking their guns. In fact, groups like the UN view their pretty shotguns as identical to RPGs and machine guns. To them, a gun is a gun is a gun. Let's hope that articles like this one wake them up to that fact.

Has the CA State GOP sprouted some cojones? The State budget is about to slam into a wall and the Republicans in the senate refuse to budge on taxes. Looks like they've found their collective mojo since Mojo left.

Ugliness at Oxford...

A professor at Oxford sent this missive off to a PhD candidate:

From: "Andrew Wilkie" awilkie@worf.molbiol.ox.ac.uk
To: "Amit Duvshani"
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: PhD application

Dear Amit Duvshani,

Thank
you for contacting me, but I don't think this would work. I have a huge
problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from
their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross
human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they (the Palestinians)
wish to live in their own country.

I am sure that you are
perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody
who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the
only UK scientist with these views but I'm sure you will find another
suitable lab if you look around.

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Wilkie

It took chutzpah to write this and then complete stupidity to hit the send button!

Over at The Corner on National Review Online: "CHIEF JUSTICE FUNNYMAN"

I don't know how many times I've self-censored myself on FreeRepublic today. I hit the reply button and then realize that nothing I have to say would fail to be offensive. What have I been censoring? Well... Let's put it this way: There's a nexus between the Texas Sodomy case, California's run-away taxes, and the acronym BOHICA.

Cow...

Here's a cool tool for blogging on the fly. Go to this page on Blogger.com. There's a link called "BlogThis" near the bottom of the page. Drag that to your personal tool bar. It's a little javascript that opens a blogging window. This one's obviously for Blogger.com users. Other services may have their own. Mozilla users should check out MozBlog.

Firearms Industry Wins Another Court Victory

In another significant legal victory for the firearms industry, a New York appellate court on June 24 upheld a trial court's August, 2001 order dismissing a lawsuit brought by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer against gun makers. The appellate court said manufacturers of lawful and non-defective products cannot be sued for allegedly creating a 'public nuisance' when criminals misuse firearms.

From The NRA-ILA News Center

Another nuisance suit quietly bites the dust.

Everybody else is chiming in on the "Texas Sodomy" ruling, so I might as well join in...

There's a lot of talk about the... um... mechanics of the acts involved. As a libertarian, I respect the right of people to do dangerous, immoral, and destructive things to themselves. It's your life; who am I to tell you not to ruin it? And since I don't want you poking your nose into my affairs, I ought to afford you the same courtesy.

However, I'm torn on the larger issue at hand: Should the US Supreme Court be telling the states how to run their affairs? On the one hand, I like the reservation of powers and rights embodied in the 9th and 10th Amendments. Governance in the US was intended to be from the bottom up; not the top down. On the other hand, I don't want things like gun laws written by the loons in Sacramento. In that case, I'd like nothing more than to see SCOTUS use the 14th Amendment to ram the 2nd down their throats.

The garmongous FreeRepublic thread on this is here.

Got that dual boot thing working. (For those who are curious, my old Win2k drive is set up as the master on IDE0 with the new Linux drive as a slave. I let LILO write to the master's MBR and everything's happy.) My next bit of fun is convincing Windows that there's really something to see on that new drive. (Linux sees the Windows drive with no problems.)

Blogger just completed an update. They were down for most of yesterday. Oddly enough, I missed it.

There are some new features to the interface. It ought to be easier to use.

I'm sure that there was something in the news that I could have commented on over the weekend, but I was on vacation. (The mountains were lovely. Thank you for asking.)

I've been playing with Linux this past week. I loaded Slackware 9.0 onto a "new" harddrive. (It came with what was then a new machine; however, it was pre-loaded with WinXP so I stuck to my old drive with Win2k and all my stuff rather than messing with XtraProblems.)

Thus far, I'm impressed. It fired right up, and saw our home network. It's so much easier to monkey with things when the Google is available. LILO isn't happy with how I have the old Win2k drive installed. (Or perhaps Windows is broken.) But I can still see the drive so all my stuff's safely copied to the new drive. (I'll see if Grub can get the old drive to boot later.) For now, I'm having fun tinkering.

The staff at Reason goes after the NY Times and UCLA over a recent study on gun dealers. The NYT headline screamed "50% of Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally, Study Says". But, as Jacob Sullum writes, reality is a bit different...

The question of an illegal straw purchase was broached with a different, much smaller sample:

The researchers also made 20 follow-up calls to randomly chosen dealers and said they needed to buy guns for girlfriends or boyfriends because they were not "allowed to."

In 16 of those cases, or 80 percent, the dealers responded with unequivocal "nos," indicating that the purchases would clearly be illegal. In the remaining four cases, the dealers agreed to sell the guns, even though they indicated that they knew that would be illegal, the researchers said.

In other words, the percentage in the headline for "Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally" was off by a factor of two and a half, and that's assuming the sample of 20 dealers adequately represented gun retailers nationwide.

The original study from UCLA doesn't make the headline's claim, but the abstract can easily leave one with that impression. It does make the statement "Most dealers were willing to sell a handgun regardless of the end user", but one has to go digging to find out that in most cases, the dealer was being asked if they'd make a legal sale. Only a small percentage were asked about blatantly illegal sales. And of those, most in the small sample said "no".

Of course, one can brush off the Times as being only a little more reliable than the World Weekly News. When they start reporting on Bat Boy, let me know. I am, however, disappointed with the study's primary author, Susan Sorenson. I know Dr. Sorenson. And while we may not agree on firearms policy, I would have hoped for better. The study is sloppy and the results misleading. The study compared dealer behavior across jurisdictions. What's shady for one dealer may be perfectly legal for another. And in most cases, the dealers were asked if they would be willing to make legal transactions. (What a shocker; they were willing to do so!) Larger samples chosen on a per jurisdiction basis would have been revealing. Also, though I don't know what difference this would make, the study limited calls to dealers in large cities with more than 10 dealers. Los Angeles is mentioned as just such a large city, but there aren't 10 dealers in the city limits. Thus L.A. dealers should have been excluded. Should the handful of dealers in the nation's 2nd largest city have been included? Perhaps so, but the paper doesn't make it clear if they were or weren't.

All in all, the study confirms that gun dealers are willing to sell guns. Some, though we cannot say with any confidence how many, will sell guns illegally. In the same fashion, we can also guess that tobacco dealers will sell cigarettes; and that some small percentage will sell to minors. In short, some part of any population, like the population of gun dealers or tobacco dealers, will break the law. Most, however, do not. The study's claim that a Federal gun registry would solve the problem is unwarranted. Tracking transactions between law-abiding parties will not do anything to affect the behavior of those who break the law.

Separated at birth??

Heh, heh, heh... Ralph Nader is thinking of running for President again.

Go, Ralph, go!

An incendiary temper is one thing, but this is ridiculous...

Have you ever know a person who goes out of their way to be offended? I'm sure that we all know someone like that; the person who thumbs through dirty magazines looking for pornographic pictures. The person who stands next to a smoker and coughs loudly. The person who reads the L.A. Times opinion page on the look out for naked liberalism. You know the type. They seek out that which gets their dander up. Well there's just such a person who found offense on a dirt road in the middle of the California desert. The source of their displeasure? A cross.

Out in the Mojave Desert, on what's now public land, is a cross. The cross was erected in the 1930's by a group of WWI veterans. They built it as a memorial to their fallen comrades. Back then, the rocky outcrop was in the middle of nowhere. Decades later, it's now part of the Mojave National Preserve. According to the ACLU, that makes it a Federal establishment of religion in violation of the 1st Amendment.

Why did this story catch my eye? Because I know the area where the cross is located. I had never seen it so I did a little research to find out where it is. It turns out that it's on a stretch of road that I've travelled before, though I never noticed it. There is, however, an individual who did, somehow, spot it from this obscure road. And this individual was "deeply offended" by the sight of it.

At this point, you might think that the "deeply offended" party is a local resident. That would explain how they noticed something that I so easily missed. That's not the case, however. The guy who filed suit to have the cross torn down lives about 3 hours away. He reportedly saw it while driving from Rialto, CA to Las Vegas, NV. But as I said, I know the area. He would have driven miles and miles out of his way on a dirt road to see the 6' tall cross in the Mojave.

For the moment, the cross is covered with a tarp. There was a Federal judge who ordered it torn down, but that order has been stayed pending appeal.

This morning, Dennis Prager had an interesting thing to say about Mr. Deeply Offended and his allies at the ACLU. He compared them to the Taliban. And he compared their wish to destroy this cross to the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afhganistan. He said that both the Taliban and the ACLU were motivated by the same thing: Religious radicalism. And he's correct. Both are radical adherents to their respective religions; The Taliban to Islam and the ACLU to Secularism. Both seek to destroy anything that offends their religion. (And neither shrinks from vandalism, which is why I haven't said exactly where the cross is!)

It's June now. I really ought to update this blog more often.

I noticed something odd when I read this AP story
about Kentucky Governor Paul Patton. The Guv may have had his hand in
the cookie jar, and a few other places as well. But as I said, there
was something odd about the story; something missing.

There was no party affiliation mentioned.

I did a little more digging and finally turned up this UPI story.
UPI begins their piece with the words "Democratic Kentucky Gov. Paul
Patton has formally denied..."; nothing left to guess here! But this
UPI piece seems to be a rarity. Several local news outlets (WTVQ Lexington, Courier-Journal, Louisville, WAVE, Louisville) also fail to mention the Governor's party; something that would be automatic were he a Republican.

Using Google's news search, I looked up the terms "Republican governor"
and "Democratic governor". The former turned up 504 stories while the
latter only turned up 362 uses of the phrase. While this isn't as
dramatic a difference as searches of the terms "Arch-conservative"
versus "Arch-liberal" would be, it is still interesting. Reporters are
more inclined to identify GOP politicians by their party than they are
Democrats. Also, a quick glance at those stories that use the phrase
"Democratic governor" shows that in most cases the story was about
politics or elections; cases where one would expect to see party
affiliations mentioned.

(I've started this thread on FreeRepublic for discussion.)

It looks like Instapundit has the same href="http://www.instapundit.com/archives/008912.php#008912"
style="font-weight: bold;">nervous feeling about Dubuya that I do.



Why the nerves? Because someone in the White House is href="http://www.charleston.net/stories/041203/wor_12bushguns.shtml"
style="font-weight: bold;">toying with gun owners by suggesting that the President would support the continuation of Bill Clinton's soon-to-sunset Assault Weapon ban. (I just can't
bring myself to believe that this come from the top. It just style="font-style: italic;">has to be someone else's idea of
"strategery".) Will we be seeing another one-termer named "Bush"?



This "strategery" is a horrible idea. Gun owners put Bush over the top
in 2000. That's not my opinion, nor does it come from the NRA, nor from
any other group seeking to make some political hay. style="font-weight: bold;">Bill Clinton gives gun owners the
credit for Gore's defeat. And he's right. Gore lost his home state and
West Virginia largely because gun owners feared his anti-gun policies. style="font-style: italic;">Had he won either of those normally
Democrat states, "chads" would not be a part of the American political
lexicon. Hillary(!), the presumed '04 Democrat candidate, will
need to pick up only one of these states to win. If Bush pisses off
enough gun owners, they simply won't vote. If they stay home,
especially in states like Tennessee and West Virginia, he's toast.
He'll go from conquering hero to one-term loser as quickly as his
father did.



Dubya, it's time to dance with the one what brung ya.

I've noticed no shortage of Chicken-littles since the fighting has started. They go into a near panic at news of the slightest setback in the Iraq campaign.

Helloooooo... IT'S A WAR!

People get killed in war. Some get taken prisoner by the enemy. The enemy doesn't necessarily play by our rules or follow our game plan. "Stuff" happens. It's to be expected.

Some of the Chicken-littles were, for some reason, expecting a cake walk. If things were going to be that easy, Bush would have sent Rumsfeld by himself armed with a baseball bat. No one expected this to be easy. Fast, perhaps, but not easy. Why? Because a considerable chunk of the Iraqi population have hitched their fortunes to Saddam's. If he goes, they're ruined. They've made their way in the world by torturing and oppressing their countrymen. They could find their necks stretched when this is over and thus have nothing to lose by fighting.

However, they will be overcome.

The stiff resistance in places like Basra and Umm Qasr are being led by Iraq's societal elites. They are, ironically, the most westernized group in Iraq. This is why they're able to function without command and control from Baghdad. But the troops fighting under them are not so westernized. They don't do well on their own; they need to be told what to do and when. When the Special Republican Guard and other Baathist elements in these pockets of resistance are taken out or their communications disrupted, the resistance will falter. The troops under them cannot function independently at those moments and are vulnerable.

These stories of Iraqi resistance aren't worth all the running around and screaming that some are doing.

There's more than one way to skin a camel...

Live feed page at MSNBC

The feeds from MSNBC are hopping around about every 20 minutes. Thus, you may not be seeing that night vision SaddamCam feed.

Another reason why the cam may not be visible is that it could be damaged. Some stray Iraqi AAA almost hit it! The crew picked up the camera for a bit a moved it out of harm's way.

Here's the CBS feed, for the moment...

(I'm undoing the embed. I guess that CBS thinks that the war's over! 4/14)

...or click here

It's the SaddamCam!

MSNBC has been streaming that night-vision equipped camera in Baghdad. When I catch it running, I'll embed the player. Otherwise, I'll have the SkyNews feed running...

Update: I had just proofed the HTML code for this when the AAA started during this last raid. It's being reported that this was another "target of opportunity".

Update: I've switched over to SkyNews from the UK. When MSNBC re-establishes the link to the live cam, I'll put it back on.

Update: OK... so two players at once might be risky. Stop one if you have to!

Let's get ready to RRRRRRRRUMMMMMMBLLLLLLE!!!!!

It's official: The UN is an irrelevant "talk shop". (To borrow Tony Blair's words.) The UN has refused to live up to its obligations and the US must do the job of disarming Iraq "alone". (Just us and our 45 friends!)

This leaves me with a question that was at the back of my mind as I wrote last Tuesday's post. Perhaps Bush was doing a Br'ar Rabbit all along with the UN. Perhaps the purpose of the negotiations wasn't to give the UN one last chance to redeem itself. Perhaps the aim was to give it one last chance to hang itself. In any event, that's precisely what it did. The UN has proved what many of us have been saying for years. It's a paper tiger with lots of fierce words but no resolve. It's good at producing anti-Israeli or anti-American bluster, but little else. In short, it's a waste of US tax dollars.

Why Conservatives should be
spitting-mad at George W. Bush about Iraq and the UN



"They should be mad?" you're asking. Yup. And not for a
reason you'd expect. There are plenty of 'em who are mad; mostly mad
that the war hasn't already started. They're mad because the Bush
administration keeps trying to get the UN to give Saddam his actual
"last" chance. (i.e. one where "last" really does mean "last"!) But in
actuality, Bush isn't trying to give Saddam one last chance. He's
giving the UN one last chance.



And that 's what should be putting a
twist in any conservative's knickers!



George W. Bush is making a heroic effort to save the UN from itself.
He's trying to make it relevant. Most conservatives think, correctly I
should add, that the UN has been the "Unimportant Nations" for quite
some time. It has been America's liberals that have been keeping the
life support plugged in for all of these years. Now, when a
conservative has a chance to kick the plug out of the wall, he's
greasing up the paddles to give the ol' gal another shock or two.



Here's the way things stand in the UN. We're going to kick the snot
outta Iraq whether the UN's bureacrats like it or not. This is an issue
of America's national security. UN votes don't matter here. We cannot
allow the Baathists to provide weapons of mass destruction to our
enemies. Period. UNproductive babbling not withstanding, America will
attack Iraq. It's just the right thing to do. The UN style="font-style: italic;">should be standing by a member
nation who's under attack, namely us. They're not. They're standing
with Saddam, Osamma, and the other aggressors. They're on the wrong
side.



Bush is trying to lead the UN back to the right path. He's giving them
a chance to do what's right. If they can be led back, then the UN will
have been brought back from the grave, something that most
conservatives agree is not a desirable outcome. style="font-weight: bold;">

AAAAAAHHHH!!!! IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN!!

Now the FR backup site is on the fritz. Part of a "vast left wing conspiracy"??

Or more likely, Focault's Pendulum broke the Internet again.

To fellow FReepers coming here wondering where FreeRepublic went, John Robinson says that there's been a mix-up on Verio. They've completely dropped off of the net. You can go to the "backup site" for more info. Click here.

Admit it. You've wanted to do this too.

George W. Bush has a few choice nicknames in Iraq. But it's not what you think. In northern Iraq, they've pinned a few affectionate ones onto him. (They can't understand why Europeans are so anxious to see Saddam stay in power.) Among these new nicknames is Abu Jinan, "a pun on 'Father of Jenna'--meaning 'Father of Paradises.'" according to this article on OpinionJournal.com.

AAAAAAH!!! WHERE IS EVERYBODY?!?

FreeRepublic's down and now I can't get to the "backup" site on Yahoo.

FReeper SirFishalot reports that 9 "virtual protestors" at his workplace were let go yesterday for theft. These people were part of the so-called "virtual march" on Washington DC. It was really more of a DoS attack, though I'm not sure how successful it was.

(Yes, FreeRepublic is really sloooooow today. John says that he's looking into it.)

Long story short, these 9 people made hundreds of phone calls to Washington (~1200!), sent hundreds of FAXes and sent thousands of emails... all on company time! (And before you ask, SirFishalot is an independent contractor using his own laptop and a cellular modem. As he puts it, he's stealing from himself when he's online; not the company.) This company has a very plain, easily understood policy on the use of computers and phones for personal business: DON'T! They also make it clear to their employees that they monitor the usage of these systems.

Now these 9 have plenty of free time to participate in the pro-Saddam demonstrations!

Is there anyone on this planet who doesn't have a blog?!? Even Saddam is getting into the act!

style="text-align: left; width: 100%;">

I've noticed one recurring theme in the comments about the loss of the Columbia: What if... If you go to target="_blank">FreeRepublic.com, you'll find dozens of posts that involve brainstorming about possible was the tragedy could have been avoided. This is, I think, human nature. We want to fix things. The idea that this was simply an unavoidable accident is unpaletable to many people. No one likes that helpless feeling. Granted, it's only been about 48 hours since the accident, but it's looking more and more like damage to the left wing's thermal tiles was to blame. About 24 hours after the launch, reviews of the launch films showed a piece of debris striking the left wing. Worse still, it looks like the exact point of impact may have been the gear well door. This is a weak point in the wing; the worst spot to have a burn-through. href="http://qs240.pair.com/sfnvideo/sts107/030203e212_qt.html" target="_blank" title="QuickTime needed to view clip">A clip of the impact is here. This was about 80 seconds into the flight. If I remember correctly, the shuttle is supersonic at that point. Even a light object will hit with considerable force. The clip shows just such a violent impact. Back to "what if...". Some people have wondered why they just didn't abort the flight. NASA maintains landing sites in Africa and Spain for just such a contingency. The problem, as stated above, is that they didn't spot the problem until the next day. They have a ~4 minute window to bail out of a launch and land at a "TAL" site. "Couldn't they have used the arm to look under the wing?" This mission didn't require the arm. It was removed to save weight. "Couldn't they have spacewalked under the wing?" This brings us to the $64,000 question: Even if they could, what would they have done next? Assuming that they could reach the underside of the wing without causing more damage, the shuttle crew isn't equipped to repair the orbiter's tiles. (Though this leads me to my own personal "What if": What if they had a thermally resistant version of Bondo to trowel into a damaged tile.) Confirming the damage wouldn't have saved the crew. There's currently no way to repair damaged tiles in situ and no way to protect the damaged area during reentry. Rather than surprise at the unexpected loss of the orbiter and crew, we'd have all been treated to the horror of knowing that a crew was about to be lost. style="text-align: left; width: 100%;"> Assuming that this was an accident caused by insulation breaking off of the External Tank, what next? After the Challenger was lost, NASA shut down the shuttle program for over two years. I don't think that such a shut down is necessary this time. When the style="font-style: italic;">Challenger was lost, a "cultural" flaw at NASA was to blame; they were grandstanding. They launched when it was far too cold. NASA's "can-do" attitude had morphed into a "must-do" attitude. That doesn't seem to be the case here. No one could have known that the insulation would break off. And even if we all wince at their estimate of the size of the gash in the tiles, there wasn't anything that could have been done. There wasn't a cultural failure as happened with the Challenger. Thus there isn't a need for a protracted shut down. The bonding method for insulation on the ET needs to be improved. Perhaps a "better-than-nothing" tile repair technique should be designed. But that's about all that needs to be done. NASA could be safely flying by the time the ISS crew needs a ride home. style="text-align: left; width: 100%;"> On a side note: At the time that the Challenger was lost, my wife was working with the same material that went into the boosters' O-rings. She and her co-workers all assumed that the launch would be scrubbed because of the cold. They all knew that the rubber became brittle at cold temperatures. They were shocked to hear that the launch was going ahead.

It's obviously not a good morning.

I remember Columbia's first flight. I was a senior in high school. The day that it returned to Earth, a friend and I ditched school to watch it land at Edwards AFB. That was back in the days before everyone started to think that shuttle flights and landings were mere routine. I still remember the way she looked high overhead when we all heard the twin sonic booms with two chase planes in tow.

France Surrenders to Texas High School

Well that sucks... I just realized that the New Times L.A. is no more. Their website now mirrors that hideous, left-wing, cage-liner we know as the L.A. Weekly.

"Bang Bang, Your Suit's Dead"

I've figured out what it takes to make me a more responsible, active
blogger...



BREAK THINGS!!



In the process of cleaning up the mess, I inadvertently post stuff.

Blixey's pixeys report "Iraq Seems Unwilling to Give Up Weapons"

Nothin' gets by the Swedish Chef, does it?

(OK... I know that it's bogus, but if you look for the exact phrase "French military victories" on Google, it only turns up ~70 hits out of the 3.1 billion pages they've crawled!)

Are liberals starting to see that they've been slugging it out with a tarbaby?

NEWS ANALYSIS
Bush has mastered D.C. politics
Halfway into first term, he's seen as 'far better than his father'

...From the SF Chronicle, of all places.

There's a book called "Dial 911 and Die". (Available here from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.) Its basic premise is that gun control works because enough people have been convinced that Government will protect them. As a result, people get killed waiting on hold. David Kopel shows that it can happen on a larger scale.

In the 1990s, the UN convinced the Bosnia Muslims that they didn't really need arms of their own; UN forces would be there to protect them. This is in keeping with the UN's view that "The spread of illicit arms and light weapons is a global threat to human security and human rights". By this, Koffi Annon means the types of arms we Americans recognize as protected by the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution. These are small arms that one can use to protect home and hearth. The type that the Bosnian Muslims surrendered to the UN.

The kind they could have used when the Bosnian Serbs rolled into Srebrenica on July 11, 1995.

Over 7500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys died there. They died waiting for the UN to come and rescue them. The Dutch troops assigned to protect the Srebrenica area never showed.

Now fast forward a few years. It's Fall of 2001. Four aircraft take off from East Coast airports. Their passengers are mostly Americans who've also been told that their Government will protect them in times of danger. They've been conditioned to think that active resistance to violence on their part is inappropriate. "Just dial 911." They've been told that fighting back against criminals will make things worse. They are all sure of this. And the 19 foreigners on board were all well aware of how the others on the planes were indoctrinated into this thinking.

The rest of that history we all know. We also know how one plane's American passengers realized, unfortunately too late, that they were responsible for their own safety. They realized that Government could not protect them and that action on their part would be their only hope. The passengers of Flight 93 fought back. They lost their lives in the fight, but in doing so, they saved an untold number of lives in Washington D.C.; including, perhaps, many in Congress who would have the rest of us disarm in the belief that Government will always be there to protect us.

All the news that's fit to ignore...

Jonah Goldberg goes after the weasels here.

The Axis of Weasels

Instapundit has a running catalog of "Axis of Weasels" comments. The phrase is growing in popularity. (Perhaps because it fits!)

The phrase is being widely credited to Scrappleface.com, but FReeper Julliardsux claims that a friend first used the phrase here on the Little Green Footballs site.

BTW: The Scrappleface piece is hysterical!

Rumsfeld Sorry for 'Axis of Weasels' Remark

(2003-01-22) -- U.S. Secretary Defense Donald Rumsfeld apologized today for referring to France and Germany as an "Axis of Weasels."


"I'm sorry about that Axis of Weasels remark," said Mr. Rumsfeld. "I
didn't mean to dredge up the history France and Germany share of
pathetic compliance with ruthless dictators."


The Defense Secretary said he was "way out of bounds" with the comments.


"I should have known better than to remind people that these two
nations--which live in freedom thanks only to the righteous might of
America, Britain and their allies--that these nations are morally and
politically bankrupt, and have failed to learn the lessons of history,"
he said. "It really was an inappropriate thing to say--you know, the
Axis of Weasels thing. I really should not have called them the Axis of
Weasels. I think it's the 'Weasels' part that was most offensive...you
know, when I said that France and Germany form an Axis of Weasels. Of
course, I'm so sorry."

So... are the Euros annoying or what?

Happy new year... 21 days late.

Lott's out and perhaps the Dems should learn to be careful what they wish for. Sen. Frist will likely be a much stronger leader than that ol' creampuff from Ol' Miss.

Time for a good rant...



California State Senator Jack Scott, ever impervious to little things
like facts, has proposed href="http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/bill/sen/sb_0001-0050/sb_35_bill_20021210_introduced.html"
target="_blank">SB35. SB35 is Jack Scott's latest pipe dream:
Ballistic "Fingerprinting". (Or as Scott fantasizes, "DNA for guns".)



Back in October, the politicos in DC were proposing this at the
National level. The NRA, of course, opposed this for a variety of
reasons. Now there are plenty of people who refuse to listen to
anything the NRA says. No matter how accurate they might be, there are
people who automatically ignore whatever they say on any subject.



Will you listen to a shooter and
optical engineer who knows a fair amount about computer science?



Why am I qualified to voice an opinion? Because I have a certain level
expertise in the sciences that figure most prominantly in this issue. I
know guns and I know the optical systems that a ballistic
fingerprinting system would use. I also have a fair amount of knowledge
on computer science. First, let's start with some technical background
information...



A ballistic "fingerprint" is a photographic record of the markings a
firearm leaves on an expended bullet and its discarded shell casing.
Whenever a round is fired, the gun leaves marks on its components. The
barrel's rifling leaves a pattern of grooves on the bullet. The firing
chamber, extractor, and firing pin leave marks on the metallic shell
casing. Thus the components from two rounds fired through two different
guns will have different markings. It is thus style="font-style: italic;">possible to match a particular
bullet to a particular gun.



Once the fired components are recovered, they are photographed to
produce a record of the marks. This isn't easy since the bullets and
casings are cylindrical. The photo must "unwrap" the image by rotating
the component on a special stage while it's being photographed.
Preferably, more than one rotation about the circumfrence is recorded
to allow for offsetting while indexing the photo to other images. The
rear of the casing must also be photographed to record the marks left
by the firing pin.



OK... so what's the problem?



Let's start with the gun. That "fingerprint" isn't a fingerprint at
all. Your fingerprints are a permanent
feature of your body. They'll be a part of your body even after it's
been laid low and you're off to your eternal reward. They do not
change. The marks left by a gun, however, are style="font-weight: bold;">not permanent features of the gun;
they are transient features. Barrels wear as ammunition is fired
through them. Different types of ammo cause different amounts of barrel
wear. Lead bullets (as opposed to copper jacketed bullets) leave
residue in the barrel that fills in smaller defects. Thus the scratches
left by these smaller defects vanish if lead is present. Firing
chambers also wear and brass can fill smaller features thus obscuring
their marks. Firing pins and extractors also wear and, if broken, are
easily replaced. Thus time alone changes the characteristics of the
markings a firearm produces.



It is also very easy to deliberately change the markings. Some shooters
polish the bores of their guns to improve accuracy. Something as simple
as a dab of toothpaste on the tip of a round can alter the barrel's
scratch pattern. Chambers can be similarly polished. (To improve ease
of loading and extraction.) Barrels can also be replaced.



(An added note: In many rifle calibers, it's possible to fire a smaller
bullet with a sabot. The bullet will then be left with only the feeble
markings from the disposable sabot; not the rifle barrel. It is thus
possible to fire a bullet that has style="font-weight: bold;">no fingerprint whatsoever!)



Thus by time or by deliberate effort, a gun's "fingerprint" can be
erased. The photographic record becomes worthless.



But what if the gun is neither worn nor deliberately altered? Could the
record be of use then? Perhaps... If you're lucky.



I mentioned that the images must be recorded on a rotating stage. The
wrinkle there is that there is no correct way to index the bullet or
casing in the stage. There's no up or down to the thing. Neither is
there a correct orientation for the back of the case. Thus the before
and after images are aligned to different rotations. Your image
processing system must first deal with this.



The easiest thing to do would be to take a Fourier transform of the
over-rotated image. This records the spatial distribution of the features
in the image. This distrbution is independent of the indexing. This
provides information that a computer can use more easily to sort out
possible matches to the gun under test. (It will still be necessary to
do a final examination of the candidate matches by hand.) However, not
all of the spatial information is useful as not all of the marks were
left by the gun. New cases jostling together in their box on the way to
the gun store will leave marks on one another. So will the pavement
when the expended case hits the ground. Bone will deform the bullet.
All of these things leave their own spatial signature in the transform.
Buried in this mish-mash of data is the spatial signature of the gun.
An image processing system must be able to discard the false data
without losing the real record. This isn't easy. The conditions in the
crime lab will also affect the process. Different lighting or different
optical systems will produce different images. Different technicians
will focus their cameras differently. All of this affects image
quality. To make matters worse, many of the images will be nearly
identical. For example, all of the Smith & Wesson 9mm barrels will
produce very similar results. All of the Glock 9mm barrels will look
very similar. All of the Sig-Sauer 9mm barrels will look very similar.
Why? Because large operations like theirs can produce very consistent
products. The differences will be subtle. (By the way: The more subtle
the differences, the more easily they'll be worn away.) The image
processing system will have to make an initial catalog of these guns
that's able to draw some distinction between articles. Obviously, the
problem gets worse as more and more time elapses between the baseline
test and any subsequent test.



Now the data must be stored and easily retrievable. To accurately
record the details in the data, the image files must be large and style="font-weight: bold;">uncompressed. Compression
algorithms, like the JPEG standard, will distort the data. How large
will the record be? I would guess that 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels (4
megapixels) would be sufficient. The images can be gray scale, so that
limits the depth to 8 bits. However, the resulting .BMP files are still
3.81 MB each! And there are three of them per record plus their Fourier
transforms which are also 3.81 MB each!! Thus each firearm in the
system requires at least 15.24 MB of diskspace. File compression can
lower this somewhat, but not by much.



AB35 counts upon many improbable things happening. It assumes that the
guns in the system will not show wear nor will they be deliberately
altered. It assumes that all test labs will produce image files of the
same quality. It assumes the ability to design a database system will
be able to sort through enormous image files to produce a few possible
matches per test subject.



Even if these impossible conditions can be met, there are still more
hurdles to cross. The one that's most likely to get the bill tossed is
especially relevant in this State: How are your going to pay for it?
This system would cost millions to set up, who knows how much to
maintain, and promises very little in return. Maryland has had a
similar system in place for about three years now. They finally solved
a case with it a few weeks ago. Millions that could be used to hire
more police will, instead, be spent on programers. This is good for the
geeks, but not so go for the rest of us.

Poor Trenty Lotty. He's up and get something stuck in the wringer.

Truth be told, the Teletubbie from Mississippi didn't say anything worse than what's come out of Grand Dragon Bobby Byrd's (D-KKK) mouth. It's not like the guy was on national television going off about "white niggers". However, it was a pretty stupid thing to say. (Or as the Hooded Wonder from West Virginny might say, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty stupid.")

But should Lott step down?

Yes, but not for this.

Lott has less backbone than a washed up jellyfish. He squandered the GOP's power when he briefly held the Majority Leader's spot in 2001. He has a long and infamous history of appeasing and coddling Democrats. It's fitting that he should lose the top spot in what would be the ultimate example of caving-in to the Dems.

No, he should go because of his stupid remarks; but it make as good an excuse as any.

Gosh, Red, how should I vote today?



I'm glad that you asked! Here is Redcloak's California Voter Guide...

Governor: Duh... Vote for Simon!

Lt. Gov.: McPherson Opps... Make that the Libertarian candidate, Pat Wright. (McPherson's an anti-gun weenie!)

Sec. of State: Olberg (Look at it this way: Do you really want a Democrat
in charge of counting chads?)

Controller: McClintock (His Dem opponent was an economic advisor to
Jimmy Carter... 'Nuf said!)

Treasurer: Conlon

Attorney General: Ackerman!

Insurance Commissioner: Mendoza (Didn't we all vote to fire Garamendi
a few years back?)

Supreme Court Justice: Vote NO on Justice Moreno

On the ballot measures...

Prop. 46: It's a tax, vote NO!

Prop. 47: It's a tax, vote NO!

Prop. 48: No. (I don't see any good reason to amend the Constitution to elliminate
an "obsolete" court level. It would take another amendment to change our
minds later, should the need arise.)

Prop. 49: The "Aah-nold" Initiative. It's not a tax, but it may result in
the Legislature taking the "increase" in funds out of the existing school
budget for a net increase of zero. (This is a shell game they play all the
time, hence the pattern you may have noticed regarding the bond issues. The money never goes where they say it will. It's a scam!) Vote no.

Prop. 50: It's a tax, vote NO!

Prop. 51: Use the gas tax for car stuff? Sure! Vote Yes.

Prop. 52: The Voter Fraud Enablement Act, as I like to call it. Vote NO!

L.A. County...

Measure A:  It's a tax, vote NO!

Measure  B: It's a tax, vote NO!

L.A. Unified School District...

Measure K: It's a tax, vote NO!

The City of Los Angeles...

Measure F: Valley Secession...

VOTE
YES!!

Mayor of the new city: Richman

Measure H: Hollywood Secession...

VOTE
YES!!

Could the pundits have been anymore wrong about the Beltway Sniper? So tell us boys, where's that angry, white male y'all have been talking about? Hmmm???

Thus far, the only talking head I've seen who's admitted that they were all way off base on the suspect profile has been former LAPD detective Mark Furman. Furman has been working as a consultant for Fox News of late. As I recall, his exact comment was "Boy were we wrong!" Thus far, I've not seen any other pundit admit that the "angry, white male" stereotype was a load of hooey. Rush Limbaugh also claims that he's not heard any such comments. In fact, he stated on his radio show this morning that one talking head brushed past that issue and proclaimed the herd of pundits a "part of the investigation".

The href="http://www.vpc.org/press/0210snip.htm">Violence Policy Center,
as one might have expected, is attempting to make political hay out of the
DC Sniper attacks. And as
had been feared by some here, their approach to this involves nebulous definitions
of what constitutes a "high-powered" cartridge...

class="484112805-09102002">

Snipers—Predictable Consequence of Gun Industry Marketing

size="2">

According to Tom Diaz, Senior Policy Analyst at the Violence Policy
Center and author of several studies examining sniper culture and their
weapons, including One
Shot, One Kill: Civilian Sales of Military Sniper Rifles:

The recent outbreak of long-range sniper attacks in Maryland, Virginia,
and the District of Columbia exposes two long-term trends in gun industry
marketing:

• Mass marketing of military and military-style weapons, including
  assault rifles and sniper rifles and equipment, to the civilian market.
  The .223 Remington rifle round that has been positively identified as
  the round used in five of the shootings, for example, was originally
  developed as an experimental military cartridge for the Armalite AR-15
  assault rifle, which was later adopted by the U.S. Army as the M-16.
  The round is widely used in such popular civilian semi-automatic assault
  rifles as the Colt AR-15, Armalite M15A2, and various models of Bushmaster
  carbines and rifles, among others.
  
  
  
  


• The most recent industry trend has been the marketing of 50 caliber
  sniper rifles, which fire the largest bullet legal for general civilian
  sale (more than twice the width of the .223 Remington) accurately over
  distances as great as 2,000 yards. The 50 caliber round is capable of
  penetrating light armor.
  
  
  
  


• Cultivation of a sniper subculture within the gun community.
  A collateral aspect of the marketing of military weapons has been the
  encouragement of a sniper subculture in the United States. This includes
  the marketing of books, paraphernalia, training, and assorted gear.
  Thus, although the rifle used in these shootings has not yet been identified,
  the attacks are consistent with a clearly growing subculture.

Although the perpetrator of these attacks and the weapon used is not
yet known, we do know that the round being used is an example of the transfer
of military weapons development to the civilian market, and the attacks
themselves are consistent with a sniper subculture encouraged by the gun
industry at large.

As a bit of
background, the VPC's Josh Sugarman once stated that they spend a great
deal of time studying "gun magazines". (As I recall, "Soldier of Fortune"
was one of the publications he mentioned.) These people pour over such publications
looking for terms of art they can turn to their own purposes. "High-powered"
and "Sniper" are two of the latest. "Assault weapon" was a previous example
of a term hijacked from firearms publications. (A corruption of "assault
rifle".)

class="484112805-09102002">They do this, as they have admitted,
to confuse those who are not familiar with firearms. "Assault weapons",
which we shooters knew to be garden variety semi-auto rifles, were
spun by the VPC to look like machine guns. Reality didn't matter to the
uneducated; only perception mattered. And now we see them attempting to
spin the .223 into a .50 BMG! It's just a matter of time before their spin
machine puts the finishing touches on the term "sniper subculture". What
will come out of the spin cycle will likely bear an uncanny resemblance
to competition shooters and hunters.

Another great column from Tammy Bruce on the vigilence of the American people versus the intellectual dishonesty of the PC Left.

Ok, ok, ok... So I've been an absentee blogger. I was busy.

Ok... Make that distracted.

Lazy?

Anyway... Here is a story that deserves notice.

Here, birdie, birdie, birdie...

I finally learned why that stock augered in. It turns out that management was... How shall I put this? ...less than accurate about potentially catastrophic debt. (A few million here, a few million there...) A few brokerages have already slapped them with downgrades.

But, looking on the bright side, as soon as I forget my price-of-a-new-shotgun-barrel lesson and go back into picking stocks, Datek has a new feature that would have helped on this one. They have a feature they call a "trailing stop". I haven't seen this anywhere else. It's a smart stop order. You set a stop and then if the price goes up, the stop "trails" it upwards. So if you set your stop one dollar below the current price and the price goes up another dollar, your stop price also goes up a dollar. Of course, if your dealing with a volatile stock, then the "T-Stop" may boot you out when there's still some upward movement left on the price, but it sounds pretty cool.

BTW: Don't ask me for stock tips. I stink at this.

OK... Am I just being bitter?

I just dumped a stock came unglued on me today. (And the little stinker was actually in the black just a few days ago!! Grrrr...) And I'm really ticked because I keep thinking of how that money could have been spent on something of lasting value... Like a new shotgun barrel!

So I'm sitting here towards the end of the trading session and I'm watching and now I'm rooting for it finish swirling down the toilet. Is this petty or what?!

It's not like I'm some big-time trader or something, but this really has me steamed. I can't find any reason for the stock to have done this. I keep checking the news and there's nothing at all. In fact, what news I can find ought to have made the price go up!

Where's it at now... GOOD! It's heading back down. I hope it rots.

---

HA!! A new low!!

Coming soon to a theater of operations near you:

War With Iraq

Starring...

George W. Bush as the President

Saddam Hussien as Roadkill

The Saudi Family Singers as One big pain in the rear echelon

And Bill Clinton as The Beaver.

---

But seriously...

Talk of the upcoming campaign against Iraq is bringing back some familiar comments from people. One of those is "Why didn't George H.W. Bush finish the job in '91?" The old answer, of course, is that we didn't have a consensus on this from our coalition allies. And we didn't. But what hasn't been asked is "why?".

The answer ocurred to me the other day. The same coalition allies who didn't want Saddam overthrown 11 years ago still don't want him overthrown today. And the arguments presented to them then, that he's a danger to them, are even more compelling today. That Saddam didn't have the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq has today. They are more likely today to be hit by Iraq weapons than they were then. So why the opposition?

Their main argument presented then holds the answer. They claimed that a worse regime could result if Saddam were thrown out. "Better the devil you know than the one you don't" they told us. It's what constitutes a "worse regime" that frightened them then and terrifies them now.

Fast forward about two years. The US has conquered Iraq. Saddam is a greasy spot in the sand and his Ba'ath Party loyalists are enjoying the Cuban sunshine. What will the US do next? History gives us a clue. What did we do in Germany and Japan after we conquered them? We set up liberal democracies in both nations. Thus it's reasonable to assume that we'd do the same in a pacified Iraq. We'd start democratic reforms. We'd also force them to adopt a free-market economy.

Now fast forward about 10 more years. Where's Iraq? Probably dominating the economy in the Arab world. Her people would be free to elect their governments, unlike any other Arab nation. They would be prosperous. They would be the envy of the "Arab Street". THAT is what constitutes a "worse regime" to Iraq's neighbors. They fear a free Iraq and its effect on their peoples.

Conquering Iraq-the-terrorist-state would be the first step in the creation of a free, democratic, Iraqi Republic. That new republic would prosper as a result of the reforms forced upon them by the Americans. The despots surrounding Iraq would have their hands full explaining to their people how the conquered Iraqis are more free and richer than they are. The blindingly obvious answer would be that the ruling families, such as the House of Saud, are to blame. They actively keep their people disenfranchised and this chills the economy; even to a point where oil revenue does not help the average citizen person. (Citizen isn't an accurate term since they enjoy none of the benefits of citizenship. They are more like chatel slaves than free citizens!) This, when compared to a free Iraq just over the border, would spell doom for their regimes. Their people would demand the same freedoms that the Iraqis will have one day. This is what they seek to prevent. And it is what they sought to avoid 11 years ago.

From the "I told you so" file comes this story from Bruce Bartlett: Smugglers cash in on tobacco

It should be noted that among the tax hikes in the proposed CA budget are increased tobacco taxes. Also, these taxes are regressive in nature. They attack the poor in far greater proportion to income than they do the EvilRich. So not only is the Democrat controlled legislature promoting the interests of smugglers, it's doing so on the backs of the poor!

---

An Update:

I just read that Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson (D) is proposing a $3/pack tax be leveled on the poor!

During the '90s, we were called
"Clinton Haters" for criticizing Bill Clinton. That label implied a mindless
hatred of the man and thus any criticism could be ignored. But the truth is that
there was much to criticize. And now Der Schickmeister has once again
reminded us of the bad ol' days at the end of the 20th Century. Slick now
contends that the disaster in Mogadishu really wasn't his fault; it was
that of George H.W. Bush. (And thus, I suppose, George W.'s by extention.)
He recently let fly with this whopper...

face="Verdana, Times" size="2">"These people ran on responsibility, but as
soon as you scratch them they go straight to blame. Now, you know, I didn't
blame his [President Bush's] father for Somalia when we had that awful day
memorialized in 'Black Hawk Down.' I didn't do that."

This
didn't sit well with the Wall Street Journal. They set the record
straight in target="_blank" title="You may need to register to read this.">this editorial.
The facts are that the ill-fated mission to Mogadishu wasn't part of the original
mission ordered by Bush the Elder. It was an entirely new mission ordered
by, guess who, Slick. And it was the Clintonista White House that denied
the use of armor and air support to the Rangers and Special Forces units.
And it was Slick's Sec-Def, Les Aspin, who had to resign over the whole affair.

I'm still alive... I'm just being lazy.