Core wars, Bohr wars


Professor Polistra has solved a mystery.

She has been puzzled by the recent refusal to name the enemy or acknowledge the existence of war, and the apparent decision to stifle all discussion of possible enemy action or involvement in events like the Mpls bridge collapse.

She has been annoyed for a long time by the fake "measurement" of inflation used by official economists to set things like interest rates and Social Security income. "Core inflation" is "measured" by removing all the items that inflate, so you're left with the items that don't change.

A new puzzle provided the key to all of this. Last week, Bush invited several loyal brand-R talkers to a confidential conclave, where notes and recordings were prohibited. Only feeeeeeliiiings could be conveyed to the proletariat. Glenn Beck was one of the invited insiders, and he said that Bush is sharp, incisive and harsh when in an unrecorded situation like this, but whenever he's being recorded by cameras he turns into the familiar bumbling idiot who can't speak English.

This bizarre scenario finally struck a note and connected all three mysteries.

Answer: Bush is running a Quantum Government.

All three mysteries resemble the familiar Heisenberg principle* by which an atomic particle exists only while it's being measured. By refusing to measure inflation, we can make it disappear. By refusing to name the enemy, we can make war disappear. By refusing to record Bush, we can magically transform him from a mental defective into a Churchillian leader who is never verified.

See how easy it is?

Of course all of this is bullshit. The mysteries and contradictions of quantum physics fall away if you abandon the notion of particles and treat everything as energy carried in wave-like patterns. Waves exist whether you're looking or not. Inflation exists no matter how you measure it. And we are really under constant attack by Mohammed-fueled Arabs and their allies, whether we name them or not. In each case, we will do a better job of answering reality and solving the problems if we get rid of the Quantum idea, no matter how exciting and avant-garde it may seem, and simply work with the dull old physical reality.

= = = = =

*Tech note: Prof Polistra knows that Heisenberg's theorem is really far more specific and narrow, but the common meaning of the Uncertainty Principle is a useful metaphor.
  ¶ 6:36 PM

  Bravo Sarko!



Bravo Sarko! He was vacationing in New Hampshire, and a couple of American Communists (called, for obscure historical reasons, "journalists") were harrassing him. They were actually following his boat. So Sarko turned around, boarded their boat and gave them a tongue-lashing in French. Full story here.

This man should be emperor of the world.

However! The most interesting aspect of this story is not Sarko's refreshing behavior. The most interesting thing is that he is in the US, apparently trying to keep a low profile until this incident. Not far from the Bush family retreat at Kennebunkport, which may be relevant.

Why would a French President take his vacation in America, when France has so many excellent resort spots? This gives credence to the growing sensation that something large is about ready to happen, something large enough to require participation of the full Alliance.

Reminds me of the secret shipboard meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, near Newfoundland, on August 5, 1941. The Alliance was set up at this meeting.
  ¶ 7:58 PM

  1992 again: Confirmed.
Via the Jawa Report blog, from South Carolina:

GOOSE CREEK (WIS) - Authorities demolished a suspicious item found in a car that led police to close a highway outside Charleston Saturday night.

WIS News 10 spoke with officials at the Berkeley County Detention Center who said 24-year-old Ahmed Mohamed and 21-year-old Yousef Megahed, the occupants of the car, are still in police custody.

So far they have only been charged with possession of explosive devices, but the FBI is working to see if more crimes have been committed.

The Berkeley County Sheriff's Department tells WIS News 10 the two men are not US citizens.

From Reuters:

"There's no (terrorism link) that we've identified at this point," FBI spokesman Richard Kolko told Reuters.

"They got pulled over and had just enough suspicious things to warrant investigation. We don't think there's that much to it. They had some materials to make some pretty good-sized homemade fireworks but not bomb stuff."

No charges were filed in the case...

Yessir, Mister FBI man, we'll go along. This is just a couple of fine upstanding young Middle Eastern ENGINEERING STUDENTS with good old Quaker names, just out for a jolly time with a trunk full of fireworks. Why, I used to work with engineering students, and fondly recall how every Friday they would say "Hey fellas, let's all drive down to the nearest military base that stores nuclear weapons and has a jail holding enemy soldiers, and scare the crap out of them with heavy explosives!" A fine student lark, merry hi-jinks indeed.

Interestingly, this story seems to have been yanked down at Lucianne.com, which was covering it with the usual diligence until an hour ago. Might be a technical glitch, or something worse.
  ¶ 6:43 PM

  Must be something in the air ... or the culture ...


Calling Diogenes! The alleged and so-called "Moderate Muslims" or "Peaceful Muslims", so often falsely claimed, may actually exist. In Korea. Their imams came out strongly and firmly against the hostage-taking on the first day of the crisis, with no buts.
  ¶ 11:29 PM

  Ends and means


Polistra likes to learn from dogs, our perpetual teachers of civilization. Dogs get straight to the end. When the goal is truly important, a dog will take a straight line to reach it, regardless of obstacles. When there's a horse that needs herding, a border collie will leap through barbed wire to reach it. When there's a snake menacing a family member, a chihuahua will jump in front of it and take the bite.

Conservatives like to criticize leftists by saying "Marxists believe the end justifies the means." This statement is factually true but woefully incomplete. "End justifies means" is not a characteristic of Marxism; it's a trademark of Marxists because MARXISTS ARE SERIOUS ABOUT THEIR ENDS AND NON-MARXISTS ARE NOT SERIOUS ABOUT OUR ENDS. That's the difference.

Worst of all, non-Marxists generally get so tangled up in discussing and implementing the methods [e.g. insuring that judges have the last word even when we know the judges are enemy agents; following the Geneva Convention even though it was specifically meant to discourage terrorism, not to assist terrorists] that they forget about the ends entirely. Leftists are only too happy to assist our entrance into this briar patch, as when they get Nixon, Bush or Gonzalez immersed in discussions of that grand old question "What did you know and when did you know it?" This generates all sorts of defenses and research, and accomplishes precisely nothing except to move the enemy closer to his goal. The only appropriate answer to such questions is as follows, verbatim: "FUCK OFF, YOU GODDAMN COMMIE." Perhaps accompanied by an appropriate action, such as "Edward Kennedy, I hereby arrest you for treason. Marshals, shackle him. I will try and execute him immediately, here and now."

When I see THAT happen, I will know that we are finally serious about defending civilization. When I see THAT happen, we will finally have a chance of winning this war.

The Iraq section of this war has become pure process with no end at all. Its original plan, as formulated by those dreaded Neocons, did include a proper and meaningful goal: to show Arab tyrants that sponsoring terrorism was a futile course. As soon as we captured Saddam, we should have killed him on the spot and begun withdrawing, leaving Arab-on-Arab chaos behind. That would have accomplished the purpose of transferring futility to the enemy while leaving us free to fight in other ways and places. Instead, we're locked in an inescapable process with the nominal but worse-than-delusional goal of imposing Free And Fair Elections on Arabs. Worse-than-delusional because we've already seen that such "elections" lead directly to rule by the enemy. So we own all the futility.

As said before, the experiments of history have already been performed. We have the data. We know how to convince a fierce and determined enemy to stop. Oddly enough, the proper method is democratic in a way, though it has nothing at all to do with elections. Fact is, any successful tyrant rules with the enthusiastic consent of a majority of his people. When that consent disappears, his regime collapses, though not always immediately. We accomplished this collapse in 1945, after three years of killing soldiers and generals had failed to remove the people's consent. What finally did the trick? Killing huge numbers of civilians, with no regard for the traditions and laws of fighting. Churchill and Roosevelt violated all the rules of civilization for several months, used totally evil methods and means for a short time, because they were certain of their own good ends. They knew that Britain and its allies were the permanent carriers of humane civilization, they had tried all lesser methods without success, and they also knew that decency and goodness would leave this earth for a very long time if the Krauts and Nips continued their enthusiastic consent for imperial fascism.

We will have to do the same thing sooner or later in the current war, because we are the people who learn from dogs, and Mohammedans are the people who refuse to learn from dogs. If we continue to agonize about the Christian purity of our methods, we will simply die and there will be nobody left in the world to carry and defend Christianity.
  ¶ 6:30 PM

  Pons asinorum II
An extreme irony: As the bridge was collapsing, Rep. Oberstar (the NON-ENEMY congressman from the Mpls area) was on the House floor managing debate on a bill to increase funding for infrastructure on the upper Mississippi, and he was discussing problems with locks, dams and bridges. He really deserves to shout "I told you so".

More logical suspicion: The feds have ordered a crash program to "inspect" all similar bridges. First: this doesn't make sense from an engineering standpoint; these bridges were built at different times and experience different climates, different levels of maintenance and traffic conditions. Thus they shouldn't all be ready to collapse right now. The only reason for an emergency inspection of all such bridges RIGHT NOW is if we suspect the enemy has planted, shall we say, foreign objects, on all such bridges. Second: the inspection method doesn't look appropriate. Fatigue assessment generally requires a long-term set of precise measurements, as detailed in this research paper which happens to deal with the Mpls I35W bridge. You won't really learn much by a single visual inspection WITH BINOCULARS FROM BELOW, as the inspection teams are doing. The latter method would be highly effective for detecting foreign objects placed on the structure of the bridge.

The predictable: As usual the brand-R and brand-D politicos are using this event to create a false choice. D says we should be spending less on rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and more on our own. R says we should be spending less on social programs and other 'pork'. In some ways both are right, but unfortunately neither side has any right to say it, because neither side has put any money into infrastructure for the last 20 years. Anyway, it's a matter of will, not a zero-sum game. For instance, Spokane is not a rich city by any means, but it has managed to rebuild three major bridges, pretty much from the ground up, in the last four years, using a mix of bonds, state and federal money. All without depriving other useful gov't programs of any funding.
  ¶ 7:56 AM

  Pons asinorum
Homeland Security "assured" us that the Mpls bridge collapse was not caused by enemy action. I note that Prince Walid News Channel has already taken this "assurance" for gospel, and has already totally excluded hostile action from their thinking.

Sorry, that doesn't work. You simply cannot reach that conclusion within the first few hours after the destruction. First, the Mpls-StPaul metro area is a hotbed of enemy agents, so hot that they've even elected their own enemy penetrator to Congress. Second, we know that the enemy has been trying to target bridges, and has cased and examined many of them. Third, the collapse happened suddenly and nearly simultaneously, after reports of "jackhammer" sounds. This pattern resembles a deliberate explosion more than a typical structural failure, though the latter is certainly not excluded.

An official in DC could reach a positive conclusion instantly if he had info about the activities of local enemy groups, or perhaps a verified claim of responsibility. But he could only say immediately that this was not an act of war if he had continuous security footage of all sides of the bridge for the last few years, showing conclusively that nobody had planted any foreign objects on the bridge. Such footage might exist, but I severely doubt it.

= = = = =

Friday: It still wouldn't be possible to determine for sure that no explosives were used. I'd guess it will be several days before the wreckage is even stable enough to permit that sort of search. Nevertheless, we see the crawl on the cable stations running like this : " ... CAUSE OF DISASTER UNKNOWN ... DISASTER NOT CAUSED BY TERRORISM ... NICOLE RICHIE PREGNANT ..." Doesn't the juxtaposition even catch anyone's attention? Am I the only one in this country with a functional brain? If the cause is UNKNOWN you can't say the cause is NOT TERRORISM.




Obviously we're back in 1992. Bad things just sort of happen, and we are forbidden to even consider the possibility that we have an enemy. All we can do is put teddy bears on the owies and hope the Dow keeps climbing.
  ¶ 7:45 AM

  Our dear Young Democracy friends


Won't see this picture on the Nightly News.

Might help us realize who the enemy is.

Can't have that, now can we?
  ¶ 3:30 PM

  Why do they hate us?
As I've said many times before (but not lately!), this is a bad question, a weakening question.

In all periods of human history, half the tribes and nations hate the other half. If hate were the relevant variable, all nations would be at war all the time. In fact war is relatively rare and isolated, so hate is simply not the relevant variable when your goal is to maintain peace.

War starts when Nation A decides that Nation B is weak or distracted, and when Nation A can gain something - land, resources, power, macho mojo - from the attack. This can happen with or without hatred.

Nevertheless, sometimes the question just can't be avoided.

I've mashed together two pictures here: the Korean mission school in Afghanistan, and a Mohammedan mission school (madrassa) in Tanzania.



See the difference? All the kids have head coverings, but the kids being taught by Christians have something else as well.

Joy.

This also explains why Western Leftists are Allah's best allies. Both of their gods (Gaia and Allah) are strictly concrete gods, who reside in specific places. Gaia lives in the entire earth, and Allah lives in Mecca. Concrete gods order their believers to worship in concrete ways: avoid certain substances and sacrifice real innocent human beings.

For Gaia, the substances to avoid are tobacco, carbon dioxide and meat. For Allah, it's pork and alcohol. For Gaia, the sacrifice is abortion, euthanasia, and ultimately the entire human species. Allah's sacrifice is less universal but more dramatic: Jihad. Both gods hate capitalism, banking and Jews. And above all else, both gods hate Joy.
  ¶ 7:46 AM

  Martyred 2


The sub-bestial Mohammedan camel-humpers have martyred a second member of the Korean missionary team. This time it's Sim Sung-Min (심성민) who is the second man from left in the group picture below.

There's some indication that Korea is getting angry enough to do something about it. Let's hope so, since we're not going to do anything about it.
  ¶ 9:42 PM

  Skirts, cars and 202s
I'm alternately annoyed and amused by Hollywood's tendency to miss the culture and style of earlier periods.

The most annoying and universal tendency is pure Socialist Realist propaganda: they depict the normal taboos and prejudices of the earlier era as evil and repressive, by contrast with the Ahead-Of-Her-Time Heroine who proudly carries this month's rigorously orthodox Leninist taboos and prejudices. She manages to Re-Educate the more Enlightened Ones of the Evil and Repressive Natives in that Horrible Time, and the remaining normal people Nazis continue to Heil each other in their Swastika-bedecked Pigpens.

Hollywood's errors in style are not so intentional or heavy-handed, but still annoying. Can't they hire someone who lived through the '50s or '60s? Surely some of their writers and producers are old enough to remember these things accurately.

Focusing on this point today for two reasons:

1. The new series Mad Men on AMC refreshingly avoids the standard propaganda tricks. Mad Men depicts the taboos and prejudices of 1966 with amazing accuracy and sympathy, and doesn't shove modern taboos and prejudices down our throats to Raze Our Consciousness. The show even distinguishes between 'enlightened' and 'less enlightened' views by the actual standards of a 1966 adult, leaving the viewer to decide which era's peculiar bigotries are preferable.

Despite such careful objectivity, Madmen misses the mark on style. The female hairstyles belong in 1959, and some of the clothing dates from 1948. The cars are also too old on average. It's true that 50's cars were still around, but only in the hands of teenagers and old ladies. No self-respecting social-climbing businessman would dare to keep a four-year-old car, let alone a 25-year-old clunker. This failure is especially puzzling because the three-year obsolescence cycle was created by the same admen featured in the show!


*** Much later note: As I was searching for something else, I noticed an error in this entry. For some reason I thought Mad Men was set in 1966. In fact the first year of the series was set in 1960, so the 1959 hairstyles were just right, and the 1958-59 cars were also within the 3-year obsolescence cycle designed by the ad men. In other words, the show is 100% accurate! ***


2. I've acquired a little more sympathy for the writers and producers, after encountering a period puzzle of my own.



Polistra is displaying a digital model I'm building: a Western Electric 202 phone. It's destined to become part of the furnishings in my version of Nelson's Dream Village Motel, a Route 66 landmark in Lebanon, Missouri. The Dream Village grabbed my esthetic soul for some reason, and I've been working on it sporadically, as a background project when other work wasn't pressing, for quite a while.

Here's the puzzle. Nelson's Dream Village was built in 1934, and its heyday was in the late '30s. When I set out to give the cabins a room phone, I knew that the 'candlestick' phone was still common at that time, but wasn't sure if the newer square style would have been available. Perusing online sources, I found the 202 was supposedly the most common phone in the '30s.

Yet I've never seen a real 202 before, and I'm reasonably certain that it wasn't used in Missouri or anywhere in the Midwest. Why certain? First, before the ATT breakup most folks kept their phones forever. It was just too much trouble and expense to switch the company-owned phone. I saw plenty of candlestick-style phones still in use through the '50s and '60s, but I never saw a 202. Second, I've been focused on electrical gadgets since birth, and spent a fair amount of money and time collecting old phones and radios. If this strikingly beautiful phone had been in a house or motel anywhere within my travels, I would have remembered it with affection; if it had been in an antique shop or auction, I would have bought it with joy. So I'm sure it wasn't used by Bell in the central part of the country, but it must have been common elsewhere, perhaps in the Northeast, judging by the number of 202's available on eBay.

Well, what to do? I finally decided to include it in the Dream Village model on the shaky grounds that it's the sort of thing Colonel Nelson would have wanted in his motel. He had an eye for style, and if this phone had been available from Bell, he certainly would have used it. (No, the actual reason is that it's the sort of thing I like, and I enjoyed building it!)

= = = = =

Much later note: The 202 ended up as part of the Arcade Hotel set, after the Nelson set didn't sell well.
  ¶ 12:58 PM

  Imposing your morality....
Listening to C-Span interview with Romney, in which Mitt was given several of the Youtube questions from the last brand-D debate. Inevitably, one of the questions was about torture, and Mitt gave his standard answer again: Never, not under any conditions at all.

Why doesn't anyone ask the followup? Like this: "Okay, so you're perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives of 300 million Americans to satisfy your own personal ethical standards. You will knowingly allow complete national destruction to preserve your own precious pure-as-the-driven-snow conscience. What kind of twisted conscience is that? How dare you impose your morality on the lives of 300 million people????!!!!"

= = = = =

As said before, I deeply appreciate Brownback's true and valid morality on this question [it's better to sacrifice one evil life than many innocent lives] and I'm sad to see that Brownback has essentially dropped from the race. His campaign website has been static for more than a month.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 6:34 PM

  Korea's Dan Rather
Apparently Korea has its own problem with elite media sophisticates. While reporting on the martyred missionaries in Afghanistan, MBC's main anchorman Um Ki-Young (엄기영) switched to a remote report and didn't realize he was still visible on a split screen.

He leaned over and laughed to a colleague, as if vastly enjoying the plight of the martyrs. MBC was quite appropriately barraged with nasty emails!

A short FLV video of the chortle is in the middle of this webpage.
  ¶ 3:22 PM

  Crackin' those ACORNs
While the national political mechanism collapses, states are carrying on in their usual fashion, which is sometimes pretty damn good. Here in Wash, the state is finally prosecuting the Communist-front group ACORN for voter fraud, which probably led to the election of brand-D Gregoire in 2004. Can't undo the election, but it's mighty satisfying to see a Leninist group get crunched.

ACORN has been causing nationwide mischief for 35 years, while rarely gaining publicity. It was founded as part of LBJ's welfare entitlement, to help organize welfare recipients into a private army for The Party. It has faded since Clinton phased out the entitlement, but it's still around and still making trouble.

From the Seattle Times:

Workers accused of concocting the biggest voter-registration-fraud scheme in state history said they were under pressure from the community-organizing group that hired them to sign up more voters, according to charging papers filed Thursday.

To boost their output, the defendants allegedly went to the downtown Seattle Public Library, where they filled out voter-registration forms using names they made up or found in phone books, newspapers and baby-naming books.

One defendant "said it was hard work making up all those cards," and another "said he would often sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out cards," according to a probable-cause statement written by King County sheriff's Detective Christopher Johnson.

Prosecutors in King and Pierce counties filed felony charges Thursday against seven employees of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, claiming they turned in more than 1,800 phony voter-registration forms, including an estimated 55 in Pierce County.

This is a good example of a phenomenon I've discussed before: each state has a permanent political culture, either honest or dishonest, totally uncorrelated with party affiliation. Wash is on the permanently honest side, which means that voter fraud by the Left gets harshly punished by a totally Dem state government.

I made this observation as I moved back and forth between Kansas and Oklahoma over the years. Kansas gradually shifted from R to D, and Okla shifted the other way, but Kansas remained culturally honest and Okla remained culturally dishonest. Such basic cultural factors are never mentioned, perhaps not understood, by the usual experts and commentators, even though they explain trends and behavior far better than "the issues" or ideology.
  ¶ 12:06 PM

  Fairness pt III
Not necessarily an objective judgment, because I'm a bit crankier than usual lately for no particular reason. Maybe a gut feeling of impending disaster.

Subjective or not, it seems that the brand-R talkers are just begging for the Fairness Doctrine to be reimposed.

Normally, when you get a 'warning ticket' indicating that the gov't is about to come down on you, what's your response? You clean up your act just a bit. You slow down, or park away from fireplugs, or mow your lawn more often, or in this case you would try to make your opinions and talk more substantial, less trivial, less brazenly monomanical.

Nope, that's not how the talkers are behaving. With a couple of exceptions, they are accelerating the raw ego, turning up the blind Bush-loyalty, screeching the Hate Hillary feedback, amping the Ayn Rand. They are converging toward a single line of squawk, which goes something like this:

"I am Lord of Lords and God of Gods. I contain all galaxies and universes within my Mighty Soul. I know everything; nothing which was created was not created by Me. You tiny atomic particles out there, I can scarcely see you, but I know that you are all Weirdos, Perverts, and Losers Losers Losers Losers Nyah Nyah Nyah! Losers, Losers, Losers!!!!!! I need nothing except Zero Taxes. When I have Zero Taxes, the world will be perfect."

Even a normally loyal conservative loses patience with this bizarre and ferally contemptuous verbiage, and wishes for something different, even something diametrically opposite, in its place.
  ¶ 3:55 PM

  Martyred


One of the Korean missionaries has been martyred by the savage subhuman Mohammedans in Afghanistan.

= = = = =

Update: This first martyr was the group's pastor and the founder of the church, Bae Hyung-kyu (배형규). He's the one standing on the right side, slightly separate from the three rows, in the group picture below.
  ¶ 2:55 PM

  Spokane: Boom! Dallas: Boom! Where next?
A big explosive fire in Dallas is all over the TV this morning.



On Monday, Spokane had a very similar and equally dramatic explosive fire, which didn't make the national media for some reason. [Actually the reason isn't mysterious: there was a vastly more important story about some Paris Hilton-type celebrity critter, which pre-empted all minor trivia such as disasters and wars.]

A fuel distribution company caught fire with a tremendous mushroom cloud, and continued exploding and burning wildly for several hours as thousands of oil drums ignited individually. They had to call in a foam-spraying "crash truck" from the airport to calm it down. Several nearby businesses were damaged or destroyed, but no injuries or deaths.

Investigators quickly decided it wasn't an accident, but they haven't found - or at least haven't announced - a suspect yet.

KREM has lots of videos and pictures and the latest dope.

Are we seeing a planned cross-country bomb-fest? Is this a test of a technique to divert the crash facilities from airports?

= = =

Later: Tie this in with today's TSA warning about "dry runs" for bombs on airplanes and it gets real interesting. Fox mentioned that none of the people who brought "blocks of cheese with wires and batteries" to airport checkins had been arrested. This tells me with 100% certainty that the dry-runners are clearly identifiable Mohammedans. If any of them had been Christians or (heaven forfend) conservative Christians, they'd be in the Seventh Circle of Supermax, getting the 24-hour waterboarding treatment. Mohammedans are, as we all know, naturally immune from arrest.
  ¶ 8:26 AM

  Hunter & Kaptur on SPP
Very interesting bit of discussion in the House, shown on C-Span a few minutes ago. Duncan Hunter teamed up with Marcy Kaptur of Ohio to introduce an amendment relating to the "Security and Prosperity Partnership", the giant borderless highway from Mexico to Canada. Their amendment is primarily aimed to eliminate spending for various stages of planning and design on the SPP, but the stated secondary motive is to bring some kind of Congressional oversight on the SPP.

Hunter and Kaptur described the project and its likely security problems quite accurately. They were opposed by Knollenberg, brand-R from Michigan, who called the project "mythical", and by some old guy named Olver, brand-D of Mass, who simply appeared to be senile.

This [the amendment, not Olver's senility!] is especially interesting in two ways. First, whether the amendment passes or not, it plants the existence of the SPP into the record, with two solid "witnesses" behind it.

Second, watching Hunter and Kaptur work together leads me to think that the real "partnership for security and prosperity" would be Hunter for Pres and Kaptur for VP. Both have long records of favoring American blue-collar workers and heavy industry against the inroads of Mexican and Chinese semi-slavery. Both are strongly in favor of maintaining sovereignty and security. Back in 1996, I think, Kaptur was considered for VP on the Perot ticket; I don't remember if she got nominated or not. And of course Hunter is the only brand-R candidate who accurately understands our current situation.

= = = = =

Later: the amendment passed 362 - 60! Though it's only a cut above symbolic, such a huge majority represents a sound rebuke to the Borderless Establishment, by most members of both parties.
  ¶ 3:49 PM

  Amok
The phrase political correctness run amok is being thrown around every hour or so in news broadcasts and various discussions. Those who use the phrase seem to think it's a tough and hard-minded form of expression, but in fact the phrase is itself a euphemism.

This phrase is generally used in describing situations like the Flying Imams, where our government allows the enemy to use all the weapons of Due Process and Rights against us. These situations are far more serious than the self-censorship properly denoted by political correctness. These situations are in fact forms of surrender to the enemy in time of war.

Our current enemy, Arabs and their allies fueled by Allah, is perfectly willing to use our court and political mechanisms against us. Their political branches, such as CAIR and ACLU, know how to run these mechanisms. Their internal agents, such as Keith Ellison and Abu Hussein Obama, are in a position to take over these mechanisms. When we allow this to happen, it's not political correctness run amok, it's aiding and abetting sabotage.

= = = = =

Later: On this same topic, I just noticed something in the previous entry about Korean missionaries ... something that should have caught my attention but didn't.

The Taliban spokesman said: "Afghanistan is an Islamic republic where conversion from Islam or attempting to convert Muslims is regarded as a serious crime in several areas."

And just who set up this republic? We did. Good old helpful Uncle George, always ready to assist the enemy in achieving his goals.
  ¶ 9:17 AM

  The new Noah will be named Kim or Choi.
Koreans are probably the most serious and most exemplary Christians in the world. I've been noticing this for a while, and now it shows up in a news story.

A large group of Korean missionaries were captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan on Thursday. The kidnappers claim that they want Korea to remove its small contingent of troops from that country, but I suspect the missionaries themselves, not the troops, are the irritant. If anyone can manage to convert Mohammedans to Christ, it's Koreans that will do it.

Here are the 23 young missionaries just before they left for Afghanistan:



In an interview with the Arabic satellite TV channel Al Jazeera on Saturday, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a purported spokesman for the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, said that the detained Koreans were carrying out "missionary activities." He added, "Afghanistan is an Islamic republic where conversion from Islam or attempting to convert Muslims is regarded as a serious crime in several areas."

And here's the school where they were planning to work:



A kindergarten in Kandahar, Afghanistan which a missionary group from the Saemmul church in Bundang, Gyeonggi Province planned to visit before they were kidnapped. Since its opening in 2005, the kindergarten has admitted about 100 war orphans and children from destitute families. Two classrooms and the teachers' room were burned down in an arson attack last year.
  ¶ 7:41 AM

  Time capsule: Pangborn and the Kamikaze


In 1935, America was fully preoccupied with its own problems. FDR had made a bad start on fixing the Depression (National Recovery Administration), and his second try (WPA) hadn't quite taken hold yet. Europe was starting to boil over but hadn't yet exploded into open warfare. As I've detailed before, the isolationist mood was nearly universal until 1940.

Not quite universal, though. Here's an NBC commentary by Edwin Hill, December 1935, which sounds a lot like us modern hawk types. Hill complains that American diplomats are naive and innocent, always expecting other nations to behave decently, and always shocked when other nations behave like nations. "Good old Uncle Sam, always hopeful, always patient in the face of European skulduggery."

Hill also mentions a Congressional hearing in which the noted aviator Clyde Pangborn warned us about Japan's real intentions. "America is threatened by only one enemy, and that enemy is Japan. Japan has perfected man-operated aerial torpedoes in which the plane and the bomb are one, an instrument deadlier than any known weapon. Certain to bring death to the operator, yet thousands of Japanese have already volunteered for the honor of dying as pilots of these infernal modern weapons."

We had plenty of warning, just as we had warning of the Mohammedan version of the "man-operated torpedo".

There's one important difference, though. In 1941 FDR, learning from Churchill and from Canada, was cured of American naivete and decided to fight the war with total 'skulduggery' and nastiness; decided to get through the war quickly so that we could resume our natural decency. In 2007 George W. Vichy has learned nothing. He is still Shocked! Shocked! Shocked! that our enemies are not Episcopalian Gentlemen, and still cannot bring himself to fight effectually. His idiotic "long twilight struggle" is a guarantee of defeat, a guarantee that we will never be able to return to normalcy.


Listen to Edwin Hill.

= = = = =

Update 7/23: Now "good old hopeful Uncle Sam" is talking with the Persians. According to a report on Prince Walid News (aka Fox) just now, "US diplomats hope to get the Iranians to help stabilize Iraq, which is in Iran's best interests. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that Iran is responsible for helping to destabilize Iraq."

Aside from the basic idiocy that "stability" should be our goal, this is just silly and self-contradictory. In the first sentence Fox says that "stability" is in Iran's national interest, and in the second sentence we hear that Iran is helping to "destabilize" Iraq. Can't we understand that other nations always act in their own interest? Can't we learn something from this?

If we had any sense at all we'd understand that an "unstable" Iraq is in EVERYONE'S best interest, and we'd throw millions of weapons into the mess then stand back and watch the fun. THOSE ARE ARABS KILLING EACH OTHER. ARABS ARE OUR ENEMIES. IF THEY KILL EACH OTHER, IT SAVES US THE TROUBLE AND EXPENSE.
  ¶ 7:49 AM

  Breaking science: Natural gas is a RENEWABLE resource!
There has been a lot of disputation about the idea that oil is constantly produced by bacterial action; the conventional wisdom is that all fossil fuels were laid down in Fred Flintstone's era, so the supply is strictly finite.

Apparently liquid oil is still dubious, but it turns out that a significant portion of natural gas - maybe 20% - is known to be generated steadily and presently by bacteria. This fact is not publicized for some reason, and I'd never heard it before, but it's settled science.

"In 1993, researchers with the USGS reported pockets of biogenic gas across the US and predicted that 20 percent of all known natural gas deposits worldwide were formed by microbes."

Jennifer McIntosh at the Univ of Arizona is trying to determine whether the right kind of microbes can be injected into shale deposits that bear a likely combination of hydrocarbons. Goal: start methane generation where it isn't already occurring!

From New Scientist, 7/21/07 print issue.
  ¶ 2:52 PM

  Dammit, Roger!
Normally I find Roger Hedgecock to be superior to Rush when he substitutes.

Today he's missing the point badly, and I'm sure intentionally.

On the question of giving citizens immunity from enemy lawsuits, which is being pushed by the heroic Peter King, Hedgecock is strictly blaming the Dems in Congress for obstructing the law.

In almost the same breath, Hedgecock knocks Congress for trying to pull us out of Iraq, saying CORRECTLY that Congress isn't supposed to run the war.

Yes, the executive is supposed to run the war.

So why in the hell isn't the executive protecting citizens from enemy lawsuits? Bush could enforce this by executive order.

Instead (breaking news just this moment) he has IMPOSED THE GENEVA CONVENTION ON OUR INTERROGATION OF TERRORISTS BY EXECUTIVE ORDER.

Well, anyone with half a brain can no longer wonder about it. Bush is on the other side. He enthusiastically prosecutes our soldiers and border guards when they dare to do their job; he allows the enemy to use courts against Americans; and he orders our interrogators to stand down. He uses up our treasury and our military in an effort to accomplish a goal that no rational human believes to be possible.

How much more evidence do we need?
  ¶ 10:50 AM

  Visually impoverished
I've pet-peeved for many years on the odd lack of visualness in television. Even though each subject has thousands or millions of photographs and clips available, news stories use precisely one standard 'icon' for each subject. If a story involves DNA, we see a technician using a pipette to fill a grid of gels. If a story involves smoking, we see the side view of a cigarette assembly line, and we see a closeup of some old unshaven dude smoking. If a story involves obesity, we see fat people without heads walking down the street. If a story involves an Amber Alert, we see a teddy bear. You know the pictures I'm talking about, because you see the same ones on your TV no matter where you live.

In other words, TV might as well be radio. It was intended to bring us actual pictures of events, but instead it brings us a standard font of icons, with as much visual meaning and variety as the desktop icons on a computer screen.

And for a story about al-Qaeda, we see tall Osama with his scepter of authority, walking grandly through the mountains, and Soldiers of Allah being trained on jungle gyms and martial arts.

Think for a moment about the jungle gym and martial arts. Does this bear any relationship to even one known attack by the Army of Allah? Has any Christian or Jew been knocked down by a flying ninja kick? No. All attacks to date have been high-tech attacks, using airplanes, cars, bombs, and guns. No athleticism required. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to use clips of actual attacks for the stories about Mohammed's Military? Clips of stockbrokers jumping from the WTC, beheadings, cars smashing into innocent college students ..... Those clips would keep us mindful of the specific forms of attack we can genuinely expect.
  ¶ 10:01 AM

  Teams again
Listening to Bill Bennett interviewing Tony Snow ... Snow says he is about to start giving our side of the war, using facts and graphics. Bennett says Okay, fine, glad to hear it.

This is a perfect example of the cheerleader phenomenon.

In a war that involves propaganda more than any previous war, our side finally decides to gingerly tippy-toe into the water, to start telling our own side, after five long years of dead silence, five years of letting the enemy possess the media, five years of letting internal enemies leak with no punishment.

Those of us who want our side to win have been screaming at the TV for five years now: "What's wrong with you, George Bush? What's your defect, Snow? This isn't complicated or mysterious, dammit! Your job is not to pal around with Helen Thomas, your job is to tell us what we're doing and why! Look at what FDR did in WW2!!! He took full control of the media, and WE WON THAT WAR!!!!!"

But the people who were in a position to carry those complaints to the administration have never done it; they just said "Yay Bush! Yay Bush! Bush is God! Hillary is Satan! Bush is God! Hillary is Satan!" It would have been far more helpful to the team if people like Rush and Medved had asked the hard questions directly and publicly.

Briefly: I don't expect people to be heroic. I do expect them to use their resources and position for good ends. If you are in a position to speak directly to administration officials, you must use that position to give them honest information, and to ask the questions they won't hear from Helen Thomas or David Gregory. You're not entitled to simply complain and moan like any ordinary citizen.

  ¶ 5:42 AM

  Fairness, part II
Excellent rant by the 2nd-string talk host Jerry Doyle tonight.

His point: Republican talk radio has done more to ruin the Republican party than anything else.

His basic argument: When was the last time the R brand won in a landslide? Reagan in 1984. When did the current model of talk radio start? Roughly 1988. And what's happened since then? Talk radio and talk cable TV have turned into a sporting event rather than a discussion, with two teams. Team R cheers for everything the Republican party does; Team D cheers for everything the Democrats do. There is no flow of advice or information; nothing to guide the politicians. Just cheering for the mere existence of each team. So the teams have deteriorated, lost their principles, until both sides are just playing to waste time and money.

Reagan won because he had no automatic cheering section. He couldn't count on loyal courtiers to take his side no matter what he did, as e.g. Michael Medved does for Bush. Reagan had to craft a solid message that could break through the filters, so that's exactly what he did.

Picasso said "There is no great art without a resistant medium." True of any craft or discipline. If you want to create a meaningful product, you need to fight your way through obstacles, thus learning new facts and techniques.

This ties with my recent essay on the Fairness Doctrine. I was mainly talking about cultural matters, but it applies equally to politics. When every station has to devote a certain amount of time to covering public affairs in a factual way, competition leads to quality. When that requirement is gone, political coverage depends purely on ratings, which leads to bottom-feeding and triviality. When serious commentary is required by license, stations will offer serious commentary.

I think the Web also contributes to the team effect. For reasons I've never plumbed, all discussion on the Web is crammed into a two-team template. Whether the subject is software, sex, spirituality or spam, every online forum splits into Team A and Team B, with precise lists of permitted statements on each side. Woe betide the discussant who tries to speak between or outside the bounds. If you try to show that a third position exists, or that A and B are both false, or A is right for B's reasons, you'll be beaten with four-letter sticks and stones until you leave.
  ¶ 8:19 PM

  Scary predictive ? dream
Putting this down for the record, regardless of meaning.

Dream happened this morning (Thu 7/12) about 5 AM Pacific time. In the dream, a bomb was narrowly averted when a little old lady driving a '62 Rambler started to drive across it; she noticed it, got out of the car and started to move it out of the road. I recognized it as a bomb (it seemed to be sort of L-shaped) and shouted her away from it. The bomb was supposedly meant for a red-haired "candidate" ? whose name was Smithfield or Maxfield, or perhaps the name of the constituency or district was Smithfield or Maxfield. The named district would imply Britain, because our congressional districts have numbers, not names.

In my "mental iconography", the '62 Rambler undoubtedly means Romney, but the rest doesn't make any particular sense. (Especially the part where I was the hero ... that part doesn't make a lick of sense!!!!)


= = = = =

A bit of Googling finds that there isn't a Smithfield constituency in Britain, but there is one in the Australian state of New South Wales, and the MP from Smithfield (in the NSW state assembly) is an Assyrian Christian named Ninos Khoshaba.
Assyrian Christians are definitely endangered by Jihadis, who consider them to be traitors to the Arab cause. I've never heard of this Khoshaba and never paid any attention to New South Wales, but I do pay attention to dreams that have the asterisk of significance.



  ¶ 5:26 AM

  Chertoff's gut
Homeland Security head Chertoff says he has the gut feeling that an attack is coming soon.

Refreshing! Our gov't and corporate officials have fallen into the habit of saying only what their lawyers approve, which means a narrow range of verbatim boilerplate phrases like "Out of an abundance of caution" or "We have no specific credible information". Such meaningless phrases form a huge part of our loss of trust ... we sense that leaders don't respect our intelligence enough to speak to us as adults. So I congratulate Chertoff for treating us with respect and giving us his human judgment. This is closer to the way Roosevelt and Churchill spoke.

For what it's worth, Madame Polisztra isn't getting the same dire sensation, and her gut is usually pretty accurate.

= = = = = = = = = =

Wednesday: I spoke too soon. It turns out that Chertoff was not really offering a bit of genuine human feeling; he was trying to pre-empt or soft-pedal a report that he knew was coming out today. The report says that every bit of our war effort has been completely pointless and misdirected. Spending trillions of dollars and thousands of American servicemen has accomplished precisely zero. Al-Qaeda and other divisions of Allah's Army have rebuilt to their original strength while we were trying to impose Free And Fair Elections Monitored By Jimmy Carter on fucking Arab savages. In other words, the report says exactly what we hawk-types have been saying for the last three years.

Will the administration change course and start fighting? Of course not.


Please, Lord, send us a Pinochet before it's too late.
  ¶ 9:04 PM

  Spirit of a sissy, part II
Continuing this theme........

I used to think the Episcopalians had "gone about as fur as they could go" along the road of turning Christianity into a social club for Communists, lesbians, and enemies of civilization. Surprisingly, it looks like Rome is grabbing the prize from the Piskies.

This story from the Seattle Times:

The Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, a local Episcopal priest who announced she is both Muslim and Christian, will not be able to serve as a priest for a year, according to her bishop.

During that year, Redding is expected to "reflect on the doctrines of the Christian faith, her vocation as a priest, and what I see as the conflicts inherent in professing both Christianity and Islam," the Rt. Rev. Geralyn Wolf, bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island, wrote in an e-mail to Episcopal Church leaders.

...

Redding, who until March was director of faith formation at Seattle's St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for 23 years.

In June, she announced publicly that, for the past 15 months, she's also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Muslim prayers left her profoundly moved.

Ah, but she's found a new "spiritual" home:

Redding is scheduled to start teaching part time as a visiting assistant professor at Jesuit-run Seattle University this fall.

What's that high-pitched screeching sound I hear? Oh, it's the gyroscopic spin of Ignatius Loyola's ghost. Loyola founded the Jesuits to be literal soldiers of Christ, and their main campaign in his lifetime was to convert Mohammedans to Christianity.
  ¶ 6:55 PM

  No stars, no stripes


Polistra finds nothing to celebrate today. US and UK are led by mental defectives. Our leader spends our entire army and treasury on a completely pointless war, which accomplishes nothing except to spend our entire army and treasury. Britain's new leader thinks the enemy will go away if he doesn't name it. Rome is eagerly embracing Mecca. Among the consequential nations, only France and Australia are truly and honestly on the side of civilization.

September 1939 wasn't this bad.
  ¶ 6:50 AM

  England is dead.
From the Daily Express:

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the ­terrorism crisis.

The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on ­terror” is to be dropped.

The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair.

I thought there was something exceedingly odd about PM Brown's first public statement; he uttered a few Bushian platitudes about "being vigilant", but didn't say anything meaningful. Blair would have told the straight truth, in language that would brace the nation for whatever needed to be done. I was willing to tentatively forgive Brown on grounds of newness and perhaps a different style.

Then I thought Jacqui Smith's statement "These terrorists are criminals" was even more wrong-headed. Again I was ready to discount for inexperience and accidental word choice.

But I didn't realize just how bad it is. This is not inexperience, this is intentional and premeditated total surrender.

This is so utterly cowardly, so completely suicidal, that it should call for an instant correction from the throne, even a takeover from the throne. Elizabeth Regina, are you there?



  ¶ 7:35 PM

  Pius XIII


Here's the man who should be Pope. He has the same kind of guts as Pius XII, the kind of guts needed to lead the Church Militant when a true Crusade is called for. Benedict has unfortunately shown himself to be just another standard EU bureaucrat, eager to surrender to Allah.

Here's the kind of man the world needs:

Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, has openly called for the overthrow of the government led by President Robert Mugabe.

In an interview with the Sunday Times of London the archbishop said: "I think that it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe."

Archbishop Ncube later told BBC that while he suggested intervention by Great Britain, the former colonial ruler of the African country, he could justify action by any other power to ease the suffering of the people of Zimbabwe. Some action is required, he said, to oust "a government which is ready to sacrifice the lives of its people."

"We have to choose between two evils," the archbishop explained. He said that Zimbabwe is facing a desperate situation, with widespread crop failures aggravating an economic disaster that has seen the annual inflation rate rise toward 15,000%.

...

Archbishop Ncube has said in the past that he is prepared to face death in order to bring about change in his country. Now he told the Sunday Times, "I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing."

His logic is easy to follow: A pastor is shepherd of his flock. Sometimes a shepherd has to shoot wolves. That's how a pastor becomes a Crusader.
  ¶ 8:32 PM

  Shocked! Shocked! Shocked!
Headline on Prince Walid News Network, aka Fox:

"Today residents of UK woke up to the shocking news that two of the terrorists are doctors; that they don't fit the usual model of disaffected youth."

What goddamn usual model?

Al Qaeda is an army of doctors and engineers. Doctor Zawahiri invented it, Engineer bin Laden funded it, and all of the 19 soldiers who pulled off 9/11 were professional-class men. That's exactly why al-Qaeda is so dangerous and successful.

The "newscasters" have been reading these facts for several years now, with no exceptions. Why does this idiotic poor-and-disaffected idea persist when it has never been supported by a single fact?

Serious terrorists, even before the current Mohammedan set, have always come from upper-middle class backgrounds. The low-level recruits in a place like Palestine may be poor and disaffected youth, but that situation is more of a guerrilla army than a band of terrorists.

= = = = =

And while I'm growling and grumbling: Why in the hell are the terrorists still described as "alleged attackers" and "suspects"?????

When you have footage of a man covered in flames crawling out of a burning car, and he pushes aside people who try to put him out, while shouting "Allah! Allah! Allah!" ... this man is not an alleged suspect. He is an enemy soldier.

The continual use of these legalistic terms keeps our response locked in the court model. The military model does not assume enemy soldiers to be "innocent until Mike Nifong decides they are guilty"; the military model assumes the enemy soldier needs to be killed until his commander or national leader surrenders completely.

One more thing: the fact that he was shouting "Allah! Allah! Allah!" has been completely censored from all American coverage of this event. His Mohammedan loyalty has been tossed in the Memory Hole. Censorship is needed in a war, but the correct job of censorship is to prevent the enemy from knowing our plans, not to prevent us from recognizing the enemy.

= = = = =

Later: Now that we have at least three MDs involved in this plot, my suspicions about biological agents are tingling wildly. Wonder if any of these docs are specialists in bacteria?


  ¶ 8:06 AM

  "Amateurish"
Listening to some of the "terror analysts" being interviewed, particularly someone named Bill Durodie on Fox. Durodie pulled a classic bit of leftist bad logic, and didn't get called on it. He said we need to avoid over-reacting; we need to be careful about closing down public places or detaining suspects without warrants. Those are two precisely opposite actions. Closing down public places without specific reason is indeed over-reacting, and does indeed fall into the category of "letting them win", though I find that phrase abhorrent. Detaining suspects without jumping through all the legalistic hoops is NOT over-reacting. The distinction is obvious. Closing down or over-tightening public places would interfere with INNOCENT people and would weaken our culture and economy, which is what Osama wants. Interning everyone who ever attended a mosque would amount to taking the GUILTY out of circulation, which will increase our security without interfering with any innocent people.

We are in a war, dammit. After six years, we still haven't figured out who the enemy is, and what we're fighting for. Or rather, we [the people] have figured it out just fine, but our governments haven't.

Another piece of bad logic is the notion that these particular attackers in London and Glasgow are "amateurish". We don't know that at all, and the continued use of that term will cause us to underestimate the enemy. The Mercedes near the nightclub was a fully professsional bomb, which would have caused huge damage if it hadn't been detected and disarmed. That's not a failure or bad engineering; it's a case of excellent and courageous police work. The threat was absolutely professional, but the police were more professional and perhaps a bit lucky. The Glasgow car-into-airport appears to have been less effective in causing death and destruction, but it still succeeded in closing down the airport indefinitely. That's not a failure, and it may have been the fully intended plan.

Reminder: In a war, not every shot or bomb hits a target. In WW2, it's estimated that 10000 bullets were fired for each achieved death, and 100 bombs were dropped for each achieved death. War is inefficient.
  ¶ 12:55 PM

  The 5% Solution
It's well known that Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal bought a 5% interest in Fox News a couple of years ago. Until now, the effect of his part ownership wasn't obvious to me. As of this latest London incident, the effect has become blazingly clear. Maybe he has increased his stake recently?

Comparing Fox with MSNBC and CNN, the distinction is now very clear. The other two nets, while normally leftish in their general slant, are nevertheless covering this set of events evenly, referring to Jihadis when appropriate. Fox has been exceedingly delicate and euphemistic in contrast, hitting the "tiny minority" theme as hard as possible. Fox hosts have shushed experts who tried to describe Jihad accurately. Right now (Sat morning), Fox isn't even touching the story of the bomb attempt in Glasgow, while CNN is carrying coverage from Rupert Murdoch's Sky News!

= = = = =

Update: My first thought on the flaming car in Glasgow was that it might be a bio-bomb rather than a bang bomb... that the flames were meant to distract from a sprayout of smallpox or anthrax or something. Now we hear that the hospital where the driver was taken has been evacuated. Hmm.
  ¶ 8:46 AM

  Integration
Headline coverage of the recent Supreme decision on school integration reveals a sometimes hidden truth. The decision is a good one, making it harder to discriminate, yet all the newscasters say the following, nearly verbatim:

"Cities will have to find new ways to achieve diversity in the classroom."

Thus acknowledging, without even needing a pullquote or a fact-check, that the sole purpose of government is to advance Stalinism. No balance needed here; nobody even says a nice polite compromise phrase like "Cities will have to consider the possibility of stopping their official discrimination." That's so laughably absurd that we don't even have to think it.

We're always told that the latest Supreme decision is "The Law Of The Land", but it's obvious that "The Law Of The Land" only holds valid when it agrees with Stalin. On these once-in-a-lifetime occasions when the Supreme Court happens to agree with the Constitution, the decision is immediately declared invalid by the rest of the government, and the proper duty of all officials is to disobey the Court. Anything else is DoubleplusUnthink.

= = = = =

Despite all that, the decision is correct, and does agree with the actual Constitution. Schools should not favor one race over the other.

My point here: it's correct but unhelpful.

And the discussion of the decision on both sides is incorrect and unhelpful, because both sides are talking about the inputs (what we do to the students while they're in school) rather than the outputs (what we expect the students to do when they're finished with school). Both sides assume that the current structure of public schooling, where we trap kids inside a building with "School" on its signboard for 12 years, is God's Law, Eternally Unalterable.

And of course, both sides are jumping around like crack-smoking crickets to avoid the most important fact, which is that Blacks, Whites, and Orientals are different. People from Africa have stronger muscles and weaker minds; Orientals have stronger minds and weaker muscles; and the average Caucasian is in the middle on both scales.

If we're going to get this right ... if we want genuine equal opportunity in life, not just in the 12 years of captivity ... we have to start with the facts, and we have to decide what output is really needed, decide whether and why we need anything resembling public education. When we see these accurately, we then have to reshape a few other things along with public education to get the needed result.

How do we measure or quantify the desired output from schools? It can't be a certain number of grades completed, because that number means something different for blacks and whites. It can't be a test score, because blacks will perform poorly on a test. All of our attempts to match the races on these measures have failed and will always fail.

Peel the onion down by layers. First we have to ask: Equal opportunity for what? The Declaration gives us the deepest answer: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have somehow translated this to mean "Equal opportunity to receive a piece of paper called a Diploma from Harvard." All of our legal decisions are based on this bizarre re-interpretation. Every decision along the way must be focused on a Diploma From Harvard. Perhaps such a Diploma is an ingredient of the pursuit of happiness if you're going to be a federal judge; perhaps these sheltered people can only see into their own past. But the pursuit of happiness means something very different for nearly all ordinary Americans, and specifically for males with low academic potential. It means being able to raise a family. Able to provide a home, cherish and protect a wife and kids. That's what it means, and that's the output we need to be watching as we redefine the government contribution toward that end.

Peel one more layer. What's the minimum expectation of any public tax-funded utility? Though the Constitution doesn't go into detail here, I'd say public utilities provide the basic means for a safe and dignified life. They provide the bare underpinnings for civilization, but not much more. We don't expect a water system to include coffee, tea and Chivas; we don't expect to have a personal policeman constantly at our side. A street system should carry most vehicles without ruining them, but if you want to ride a donkey or run a Maserati at 150 MPH, you have to do it off the streets.

By that standard, how much of the public education system is capable of carrying most vehicles without ruining them?

We know the answer. The first four grades. Reading and writing and nothing more.

Beyond that point the average black is incurably lost, and beyond that point the average Korean is incurably bored. In fact, beyond that point almost nobody is gaining knowledge or experience that couldn't be gained far better elsewhere. For most kids, trade schools and apprenticeships should kick in from age 10 to 17, with at least token wages paid from the start and increasing with experience.

If you have a truly special talent or skill, you already know it by that point, and your parents should be able to find a school or situation to develop it. Every biography of a notable politician, pianist or preacher contains the same line with minor variants: "At age 9 I found a way to practice my profession." Sometimes it's through a mentor or apprenticeship, sometimes it's more of a play situation, but the real expert always starts practicing at 9.

By keeping all the kids in school all day after that point, we are only taking away time from such play-practice, for all but the richest. And by keeping those with less specialized skills out of the world of work, we are depriving them of a sense of usefulness and worthiness.

= = = = =

Now, how about the "few other things"?

Look at these pictures.




This is a 1919 Dodge ad. If you can suppress your modern conditioned eye-rolling response to the "stereotypes", you might notice something more interesting. Who's got the dignity in this picture? Who has a sense of usefulness and service? And who's lollygagging around doing nothing?

Got it?




This is a 2007 ad for something or other. I think he's a rapper. Who's got the dignity here? Nobody. Who's doing the service? Maybe the ho. Who's lollygagging around doing nothing?

Got it?



Now this is a graph of black poverty through part of the 20th century. Note the steady decrease, clearly beginning before 1959, and the flatline from about 1970 until the 1996 welfare reform broke the pattern. What caused the steady decline in poverty? Henry Ford and FDR, working in different ways and for different motives, brought blacks off the plantation and into industrial jobs where their particular combination of physical and mental skills was ideally suited and well paid. And what caused the flatline? Two things, again simultaneous but unconnected: the loss of industrial jobs to Japan and China, and LBJ's Marxist/Maoist decision to create a victim class and maximum chaos. We stole both the pay and the respect from the kind of job a black man could do well, and we substituted welfare and Ludacris expectations. He's no longer able to provide for a family, and he's not expected to do anything but commit crimes and look cool.

Got it?

Moral of the story:

We need to take back our industries from China. Obviously we need to do this for a thousand other reasons, such as national defense, an unpoisoned diet and national survival. But maybe, just maybe, we'll do it a little faster if we realize that a vibrant industrial sector is the best way to restore the dignity and fatherhood of black men. We owe it to them, since LBJ, operating under the theories of Comrade Frances Fox Piven and Comrade Richard Cloward, deliberately stole it from them in 1965.

And as we revive our industries, we can shape the trade schools, both private and public, to meet their needs.

= = = = =

Edit: The economic side of this discussion also applies to white kids with lower academic skills. They are equally damaged by an economy that considers college degrees to be the sole meaningful credential and brings in Mexicans to lower the wages of physical jobs. But the cultural and welfare pressures are exclusively racial, so the problem weighs most heavily on young black men.

Labels: Experiential education, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:30 PM

  Oh, Sam. Ya coulda been a contender, Sam.


Polistra is sad that Sam Brownback has muddied up his own "brand", and thus his chances for the Presidency.

As oft repeated here and elsewhere, we are in desperate need of a wartime leader. Sam has many, even most of the necessary qualities. He stands on the long-running intellectual tradition of Rome, and decides modern questions based on that tradition.

He's been willing to carry the logic of true value and respect for life into distinctly unpopular places, such as torturing human time-bombs and forbidding abortion after rape.

He speaks clearly and precisely, though perhaps a bit too sparely, in old Kansas style. (More buzz and repetition is needed today; it's not enough to say a thing once. "I have spoken" is good when your listeners can accurately say "I have listened.")

Brownback has not taken the hard line on immigration. This would be fine if he had clearly and precisely stated his position and its justification. If he had shown how the economic interests of Kansas are best served by the McCain-Kennedy approach, no problem. He is still a senator, after all, so his primary job is serving the interests of Kansas, not running for President. Instead, he has evaded and backed away from the question, and on the final vote he played a Kerryish No-Then-Yes trick.

Problem.

When your main selling point is a principle-based mind, a highly rational decision process, and clear communication even when unpopular, you can't afford to knock out one of those pegs.

There's still time for "redemption", but it's getting narrow.
  ¶ 8:18 PM

  Something going on here? Bosnians?
AG Gonzalez was here in Spokane today, supposedly to trade info on gang activities with police. Several city council members tried to get into the meeting but were refused. This seemed strange, since the council has been trying to shape a new anti-gang ordinance to fit in with federal standards and to obey the ACLU even more slavishly than before, which is rather difficult.

KREM-TV was at the meeting for a while, and asked Gonzalez why the city council was turned away. He said that he knew nothing about the ordinance, and was sharing "top secret information" with the police.

Here's why the top-secret-ness seems especially interesting:

Back in February, Northtown Mall was evacuated, and several people hospitalized but not seriously hurt, when an unknown gas was released into the air-conditioning system. It could have been plain old teenage assholery, but if it was more serious, my suspicion went toward Bosnians, who have a considerable colony in that part of town and who have formed a sort of mini-Mafia. When there's trouble in that area of town, the Bosnians are often at the center of it. The next day, a Bosnian Soldier of Allah shot several people in a mall in Salt Lake, which tended to assist my suspicion.

Yesterday, local TV reported that the feds are now taking the February incident more seriously than before, but gave no further details. Today we have the AG visiting police and sharing top-secret information.

Stay tuned.
  ¶ 7:33 PM

  Fairness


Lately there's plenty of yakety-yak about the horrors of reintroducing the Fairness Doctrine, and about the wonders of our modern Hundred Flowers as opposed to the old uniformity.

Being thoroughly soaked in 1940's radio, I've been pondering this for a while. I've also been bemoaning the modern disconnect from classical forms of culture ... not in terms of availability but in terms of commonality. You can certainly enjoy Bach or Whitman today, but you can't expect anyone else to understand a reference to Bach or Whitman. I've said that before, but tonight I've realized something new.

Let's compare a forced cross-section of 1941 and 2001.

What was on the average American's radio when Pearl Harbor sliced into their lives?

And what was on the average American's TV when 9/11 smashed into our lives?

= = = = =

On Sunday afternoon, when the first solid news from Honolulu interrupted regular programming:

NBC's Blue network had "University of Chicago Roundtable", an academic discussion of Canada's enthusiastic participation in the European war, including Canada's total mobilization of industry and placement of saboteurs and dissidents in concentration camps. [The Mayor of Montreal attempted to make Montreal into a sanctuary city. He was slapped in prison for the duration!] Strange as it may seem today, FDR was consciously emulating Canada's hard-ass example in mobilizing for war, and these academics didn't like it much.

CBS had a musical program of folk favorites by tenor John Charles Thomas, followed by the New York Philharmonic.

NBC's Red Network (which later became ABC) had two separate feeds: a program of Bach harpsichord music by Sylvia Marlowe, and "National Vespers" with a wonderful sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick.

= = = = =

9/11 happened in the modern cable era, when you can get "anything you want" on TV. Nevertheless, the main networks are still around in some form, and NBC has grown several branches again.

So let's examine the wild cornucopia of diversity available on TV at the moment when Arabia attacked us:

ABC had a program of celebrity trivia falsely described as news.

CBS had a program of celebrity trivia falsely described as news.

CNN had a program of celebrity trivia falsely described as news.

Fox had a program of celebrity trivia falsely described as news.

NBC had a program of celebrity trivia falsely described as news.

MSNBC had a program of celebrity trivia falsely described as news.

CNBC had a program of stock-market hype designed to get suckers to
buy the right stocks so insiders could sell them at higher prices.

Yessir, diversity. Six flavors of shit and one flavor of fraud.

The networks justify this on the basis that the public wants it.

Basic problem with that logic: if you're never going to try anything other than shit and fraud, you don't have the slightest goddamn idea whether the public might want or appreciate anything other than shit and fraud.

The old law, set up by Herbert Hoover when he was Secy of Commerce in the '20s, and formalized in the Communications Act of 1934, required broadcasters to spend a certain amount of time on religion, education, and the arts. Their managers may not have liked it, but they carried out the mission with gusto and tremendous quality.

Why the gusto and quality? Because everyone had to offer some culture and religion; thus there was no competitive advantage in bottom-feeding. You had to compete with good stuff at least part of the time, so your advantage arose from finding the best and most interesting cultural and educational material.

And that's the new realization. We capitalists like to say that government regulation always pushes things downward, and letting "the market" function leads to highest quality. Nope. It doesn't always work one way or the other. FCC regulation of radio and TV pushed quality upward, and kept quality available to anyone who wanted it. This worked for several decades.

= = = = =

Under the newer setup, you can find preachers on Christian channels, and you can find Bach on your local NPR radio station. So what's the problem?

The problem is not availability but segregation, and segregation cuts three ways.

(1) The simplest effect is that ordinary people never get exposed to Bach or Whitman, because most people stay within their comfort zone.

(2) If you live in a big city with an NPR station, you can pick up Bach or Stephen Foster, but you'll need to have a fast finger on the Mute button if you don't want to hear Marxist propaganda immediately afterward. Might call it the Crackerjack Principle. If you want serious culture, you have to dig through the box of Communist Crunchies to reach it. Lenin is tightly coupled with culture, and pro-American thinking is tightly coupled to - God save us all - Charlie Daniels and The Oak Ridge Boys.

(3) Performers and creators of serious cultural products don't get exposed to wide audiences, which means there's no commercial motivation for good formal art or music. The performers thus stick to their academic ghettos, pleasing only their avant-garde colleagues. In religion, preachers talk only to the converted.

In sum, the modern segregated arrangement insulates ordinary people from the pleasures and benefits of high culture or religion, and insulates the purveyors of culture and religion from the pressures and rewards that would lead to understandable and universal works.

Is there an exception? A saving grace? Oddly enough, ABC's Nightline comes mighty close. Since the departure of Comrade Ted Koppel into the comfort of the NPR ghetto, and the hajj of Imam Dave Marash to al-Jazeera, Nightline has been reshaped into a mix of serious culture, religion, and ordinary but interesting lives, served up with a constant level of respect that Bob Trout would have understood perfectly.
  ¶ 12:12 AM

  NIMBY? Surprisingly not.
Listening to Tom Sullivan subbing for Rush ... Tom is saying that the main reason for lack of new oil refineries is regulatory problems and NIMBY.

This was certainly true until a year ago, and I've certainly joined the chorus begging for some relief by government, to get more capacity under way.

But it turns out the oil companies have a plain old market-based reason for their laziness.

Ethanol.

The numbers speak for themselves.


Gasoline production from US oil refineries is 136 million gallons per day.

Ethanol production right now is 13 million gallons per day.

Total demand is expected to rise to 161 mgpd by 2017 (ten years from now)

Based on plans to build more plants, etc, ethanol production is expected
to triple over the next ten years, which will take up all of that increased
demand.

So even if the feds broke through the legal obstacles, oil companies wouldn't have a normal economic reason to increase their capacity.

I must say, this fact makes me more sympathetic to the Brand-D attempts to impose some kind of windfall profit tax. If there is never going to be a reason to build more capacity, the whole justification for huge profits disappears.
  ¶ 10:03 AM

  Wacky World of Mirrors
The Brand-D politicians are fond of saying that Bush "puts ideology over science" in such matters as abortion, stem cells and the fraud of global warming.

Despite his peculiar and inscrutable intentions, and despite his extremely luke-warm position on Kyoto, Bush stands - accidentally or not - on the side of science, as any genuine scientist understands. "Life begins at conception" is a purely logical and scientific statement. There is absolutely no other choice. Drawing the line anywhere else must be a moralistic or religious statement. On the climate the data shows, and has shown for half a million years, that CO2 is not the cause of heat, but a by-product of increased evaporation when the earth gets warmer.

But oddly enough, Bush has put ideology over the science of economics on the subject of immigration. Just now his main economic advisor, Charles Lazear (sp?) on C-Span, stated baldly that illegal immigration RAISES the wages of non-immigrants competing for the same jobs. No, I didn't mistype, and he didn't misspeak. He is actually claiming that immigration RAISES the wages of other Americans competing for the same jobs.

I'm sure there's a way to rig the computer models to get this result. I've done some simulation modeling myself, and I know how to tweak parameters. Perhaps these economists are using the same idea as Core Inflation: Measure inflation by excluding all the prices that go up, so that you can have a number that doesn't go up.

Whatever they're doing, it simply does not comply with any of the known facts. This is the same kind of quackery that the Algore side performs in the realm of climate: ignore all facts, make predictions on carefully chosen theories and models.
  ¶ 2:04 PM

  New Nukes! (sort of)


I note that Bush was celebrating the opening of a "new" nuclear plant in Alabama. This has been somewhat misreported; it's not really a newly built plant, but a re-opening of a plant built in the '60s and closed in the '80s after a fairly serious accident.

Still and all, it's more nuclear power than we've had, and I'm glad to see the Pres endorsing it.

He should do far more: he should clear out all litigation obstacles by executive order, for instance.

Congress did free up a few regulatory obstacles last year, and we have some real progress on the nuke front. Two genuinely new plants are now in the planning stage, with permits from NRC to proceed.

Polistra is happy, at least for today.
  ¶ 9:58 AM

  The spirit of a sissy


Pope Benedict, after an ever-so-brief flirtation with courage at Regensburg, has fallen back into standard modern multiculturalism, touting the "Spirit of Assisi". In direct terms, he is surrendering to Mecca on behalf of Rome.

As part of his pilgrimage to Assisi, Benedict paid tribute to Francis, who essentially converted to Mohammedanism and tried to mix the two religions.

Benedict issued "an urgent and heartfelt appeal for all the armed conflicts bloodying the earth to cease, for arms to fall silent and everywhere for hatred to give way to love, offense to forgiveness and discord to union. ... Our thoughts go out particularly to the Holy Land, so beloved by St. Francis, to Iraq, to Lebanon, to the entire Middle East." He urged international efforts to stop "the horrors of combat, of terrorism, of blind violence" there and in other trouble spots.

Kumbaya to you too, Bro Bennie. Wanna toke?

= = = = =

For comparison:

Here's Pius XII in October 1939, in his very first encyclical. At that point Hitler had just started all-out war. Catholic Poland had already been swallowed, Catholic France was getting ready to fight, and Episcopal Britain was wavering.

Who among "the Soldiers of Christ" -- ecclesiastic or layman -- does not feel himself incited and spurred on to a greater vigilance, to a more determined resistance, by the sight of the ever-increasing host of Christ's enemies; as he perceives the spokesmen of these tendencies deny or in practice neglect the vivifying truths and the values inherent in belief in God and in Christ; as he perceives them wantonly break the Tables of God's Commandments to substitute other tables and other standards stripped of the ethical content of the Revelation on Sinai, standards in which the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Cross has no place?

Who could observe without profound grief the tragic harvest of such desertions among those who in days of calm and security were numbered among the followers of Christ, but who -- Christians unfortunately more in name than in fact -- in the hour that called for endurance, for effort, for suffering, for a stout heart in face of hidden or open persecution, fell victims of cowardice, weakness, uncertainty; who, terror-stricken before the sacrifices entailed by a profession of their Christian Faith, could not steel themselves to drink the bitter chalice awaiting those faithful to Christ?

Soldiers of Christ ... incited and spurred on to vigilance ... we have now rediscovered the fact, well-known at the time but distorted by Stalinist propaganda, that Pius was deadly serious about "determined resistance", and Hitler knew it.

Seems to me that Pius is speaking across the decades to his successor, when he talks about desertions.
  ¶ 8:18 PM

  Tired of Paris? Tired of missing blondes?
If you want to truly learn something, you can listen or watch a rousing speech by the incomparable Brigitte Gabriel, a speech by Bibi Netanyahu, and several less exciting but more informative speeches by Israeli scientists and officials.

Listen here.

Gabriel reveals several things that I hadn't known:

Saudi has taken advantage of 'Title VI', an academic program set up after WW2 to insure that Americans learned more about other countries so that we would be more effective diplomats and intelligence agents. Saudi has basically hijacked Title VI by funding "endowed professorships" and the like, insuring that most universities are serving Arab purposes.

The 25000 Americans who were "stuck in Lebanon" last summer when war broke out, and who were "rescued" by American military ships and planes, were largely Hezbollah associates, and they were in Lebanon to receive training.

= = = = =

Think about that ... Did our "government" know who those people were? If they didn't know, they are criminally incompetent. If they did know, they were explicitly helping the enemy.
  ¶ 8:06 PM

  Close but no paddlefish
Derbyshire at NRO is discussing the essential difference between believers and non-believers.

... He wants certitude; and anything that is not a hundred percent certain seems wrong to him. Scientific truths, which are always relative and provisional, leave a bad taste in this guy’s mouth.

In a lot of other people’s, too. There are people who yearn for certitude, and who believe they have found it in sacred books. To people with this cast of mind, the relativism of science is abhorrent. Contrariwise, there are others to whom the questing, testing, curious, provisional approach of scientific inquiry, is very fascinating and exciting. To this company, the certitude of believers is disturbing and presumptuous.

I think Derb is carving this turkey from the wrong angle. Nobody really likes looseness. The real difference is not between certitude and provisionality, but between two locations or styles of certitude. Some people are "formulaic", and need certainty in the form of verbatim agreement or orthodoxy. Others are experiential, and need certainty in the form of a predictable relationship or connection between actions.

I first noticed this when I was teaching electronics. I'm strongly experiential; I learn by making a mess or by observing how things happen, and not by hearing stories or lectures. I can't remember a story or joke to save my life. So my teaching was strongly experiential: try this circuit, see how this works, now can we turn this into math? Some of my students were "formulaic". They wanted the math first, so they could remember the formula and plug it into their calculators. I eventually gave in to their needs, but I didn't like it much.

Neither side is relativistic or tentative; neither side is comfortable with leaving things unsolved or undecided. But each side sees the other as sloppy or imprecise. The experiencer asks: How can you just memorize the formula without feeling the underlying mechanism? The formulizer asks: How can you try to remember a series of things that just sort of happen?

Most people who reach the heights of science are experiential, so it's understandable that they see the more orthodox religionists as shallow and rigid. What Derb and Hitch miss is that religion includes both styles of thinking. There are plenty of Christians who focus solely on memorizing scripture and plugging the exact formulas into the liturgical "calculator", and there are plenty of Christians who focus on learning - as directly and experimentally as possible - how God works. Rome has specific slots for both types: priests are expected to be accurate liturgical keypunchers, but highest honor goes to saints who experience or work in the spirit.
  ¶ 10:49 PM

  In Adam's fall sinned we all ... even paddlefish.
Recent trends among evolutionary biologists are intriguing, to say the least. They are beginning to focus more on loss than on invention.

The basic idea, in a strictly limited context, is very old. It's been known pretty much forever that some types of animals are degenerate or simplified versions of earlier forms. The easiest example: Fish that live in caves gradually lose their eyes. More generally, when you find yourself a cushy niche that requires very little effort, you'll lose parts of your nervous system, musculature or limbs over many generations.

Now some geneticists are taking the idea of original perfection and original complexity far more deeply and broadly.

Quote from a New Scientist article:

The entire tree of life has been built on the assumption that evolution entails increasing complexity. So, for example, if two groups of animals were considered close because both had a particular prominent feature, then someone discovered a third line that lacked that feature but shared many other aspects of the two groups, traditional phylogenists would conclude that the feature had arisen independently in the two outlying groups, by a process known as convergent evolution. They often did not even consider the alternative explanation: that the feature in question had evolved just once in an ancestor of all three groups, and had subsequently been lost in the intermediate one. Now a handful of molecular biologists are considering that possibility.

Another example:

Last month, Marcus Davis of the University of Chicago and colleagues reported that a species of paddlefish shows patterns of gene expression during development that were previously thought to be exclusive to land-living vertebrates - in other words, those with limbs. This paddlefish is the living species that most closely resembles the bony fish of the Palaeozoic era, which lived more than 250 million years ago. Davis concludes that primitive bony fish may have had something like limbs, which were lost in their descendants.

In other words, the classic image of fish growing legs as they marched onto land doesn't make sense ... the legs were there already, even before the fish left the water.

Let's repeat that last point, as Roger Hedgecock likes to do:

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

THE LEGS WERE THERE ALREADY, BEFORE THE FISH NEEDED THEM.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


If this turns out to be the dominant pattern, we may soon find that large and disconnected groups such as insects and vertebrates are both simplified versions of one grand blueprint.

Instead of starting with the basics and randomly adding new parts, some of which happened to work pretty well ... it's beginning to look like we all started from one big complicated genetic plan, and each type of critter skipped building the parts it didn't need. But when it came time to build a new wing (yeah, lame pun) the plan was ready and waiting.

I'm surprised that the Intelligent Design folks haven't leaped into this with both feet (or all 12 or 24 feet, or whatever the original plan specified!)

The main ID website, Discovery Institute in Seattle, doesn't have any articles on the subject.

Letting Professor Polistra have the final (Greek) word on the matter:








= = = = =

Uncanny sidenote: An artist who picked up the same essential idea through a much more direct channel. Look at "Epoch" by Michael Meissner in the middle of this website.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 12:53 PM

  Rohrabacher finally on Youtube!
Last week I referred to a masterful speech by Rep. Rohrabacher, expertly dissecting the complete problem of immigration, not just the illegal side and not just the stupid spiderweb of details in the latest Senate bill. I was hoping this speech would reach wider distribution, and sure enough somebody has placed it on Youtube!

Up till now, the only Rohra-clips on Youtube were placed by America-hating Communists, using him as a prime example of ... well, you can fill in the four-letter words as well as they can.
  ¶ 11:44 PM

  Smelling the roses


Haven't been doing much political-type thinking this week. The weather is just too perfect. Spokane has been blessed with a long run of gold-standard weather ... which is actually typical for May and June. Last year was so awful, so scary and dangerous from May of '06 through Feb of '07, that the typical June now seems especially relaxing by contrast.

So I've been spending more time outside than usual, grooming the lawn and trimming the bushes, walking to the store, actually killing dandelions for the first time in my 40 years of domesticity. Feels good to look out the front door and see a lawn that's solid green.

In the evening I listen to old radio soap operas. Some of them, like "Pepper Young's Family", are quite good ... well-acted, well-written, moral without sanctimony, while others are just as awful as anything in modern entertainment.

I like to imagine Jim and Bertha, the original occupants of this house in 1944, sitting in this same room, listening to the same Bob Trout newscasts and the same soap operas, smelling the very same rosebushes. Important difference: Jim and Bertha knew that America was winning the war. By the summer of '44 we had essentially finished off the Krauts and could see our way clear to knocking out the Japs. In 2007, I have no such confidence. I see all parts of our government and culture totally paralyzed by the virus of Leninism, busily and cheerfully surrendering to Lenin's satanic new friends in Allah's Army.

And now we're unfortunately back to politics.
  ¶ 8:42 PM