30 April 2007

Like a leather wearing member of PETA

[source]

Apparently the al Queda honcho Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, who we have stashed at Gitmo…is the guy who, among many many nasty deeds, organized the London Tube bombing that killed 52 people.

So the Brits are happy, right? The info this guy has will may help them them to save innocent lives. That’s good, right?

Ha ha ha, what a stupid notion. There’s a hitch. Dafydd writes:

…Because Tony Blair’s government has gone on record demanding that we shut down Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay and end all interrogations there, it just doesn’t seem, well, entirely cricket for agents of MI5 and MI6 to trundle off to the place they don’t believe should exist, to interrogate people they don’t believe should be at the place that oughtn’t exist — and possibly even use techniques that should never be used on the people who shouldn’t be at the place that oughtn’t exist in the first instance.…

Of course there will be a work-around. The info will be extracted by the Yanks, while the Brits posture and preen in their moral superiority, and spit on us.

Jerks. Phonies. Frauds. If I was running things I’d publicly announce that al Iraqi had spilled LOTS of beans, including plots against Britain, but we are so impressed by the prodigious moral purity of Britain, as compared to us dirty horrid Americans, that of course we will honor their wishes and tell them none of it.

This is, of course, why so many governments engage in such obtuse moral posturing — we, the USA, are enablers for it by accepting the costs while delivering the benefits to others.

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29 April 2007

Fake story, fake blame

American Thinker debunks the claim that the mythologized Jessica Lynch was a creation of the Pentagon. I think the current effort to pin it on the Pentagon is a standard framing to avoid Old Media getting caught making things up once again.

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28 April 2007

Mental health exceptionalism

For cranky right-wingers who think politicians don’t listen to them, this week I give you elected Democrats running like scared schoolgirls from the media’s demand that they enact new gun control laws in response to the Virginia Tech shooting.

Instead, Democrats are promoting a mental health exception to the right to bear arms. We’ve banned mass murder and that hasn’t seemed to work. So now we’re going to ban mass murderers. Yes, that will do the trick!

This is a feel-good measure that is both wildly under-inclusive (the vast majority of nutcases receive no formal court adjudication of their nuttiness) and wildly over-inclusive (the vast majority of nuts don’t kill people). The worst thing most nuts do is irritate everybody else by driving their electric cars on the highway.

As lovely as it would be, we cannot identify mass murderers before they have broken any law, and mass murder is often the first serious crime they commit. No one can be locked up permanently for being potentially dangerous.

Even stalking laws can put away a person known to be dangerous for only a few years — at best — which is generally not worth spending a day sitting in court, facing your stalker, and then waiting a month for the court order.

So on one hand, the mental health exception is a feel-good measure that would be largely pointless. But on the other hand, it’s no skin off my back. Liberals go to therapy. Conservatives go to church. And I think we’d all sleep better knowing that David Brock could not buy a gun.

In fact, I think we should expand the mental illness exception to cover First Amendment rights as well as Second Amendment rights.

I note that before mass murder, the only harassment the Virginia Tech killer was guilty of involved speech: creepy e-mails, creepy short stories, creepy phone calls. Stalkers, too, engage in frightening speech — but that is protected. Revealing a stalking victim’s address is “speech” but is little different from being the one to pull the trigger.

This small measure would have taken Dan “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” Rather off the airwaves years ago, preventing him from presenting doctored National Guard documents to the American people to try to throw a presidential election. A mental illness bar would deal a quick blow to Air America and both its remaining listeners. It would also free up about 90 percent of the Internet.

And it would end the public lunacy of Jim Wallis, the Democrats’ Christian. Wallis’ first remark on the massacre at Virginia Tech last week was to hail the remarkable “diversity” of the victims. True, Cho murdered 32 people in cold blood. But at least he achieved diversity!

Anyone who thinks a single-minded fixation on diversity must be the ultimate goal of every human endeavor, including mass murder, is not the sort of person who should be able to buy a gun or to publish his daft ruminations in public forums.

But just to get this straight: Democrats are saying we should be able to jail “strange” or “angry” people, but we can’t deplane imams who demand extra-length seatbelts after boarding?

Ann Coulter

Nothing but net by Coulter.

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27 April 2007

What's the opposite of "leg-work"?

Confederate Yankee reports on Old Media spreading the falsehoods of anonymous sources because they’re too lazy to ever check anything that suits their political agenda. In particular, they make claims that the VTech killer purchased magazines at Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods, neither of which sells them in any store. But hey, corporate America (except for Old Media corporations) is evil, so no harm, eh?

Posted by orbital at 8:42 PM | View 0 TrackBacks | Trackback URL

At what point do we admit that university administrators actively hate their students?

[source, source]

The University of Oklahoma has put up a memorial to a student who died when a homemade bomb exploded near the OU football stadium.

A stone with the name of Joel Hinrichs III was placed outside the OU student union by the student affairs division.

Hinrichs died Oct. 1, 2005, when the bomb he built detonated as he sat on a campus bench near Memorial Stadium while a football game was under way. University officials ruled the death an accidental suicide. Hinrichs’ father — Joel Hinrichs Jr. — said the university offered to have the stone placed.

Just think, if he had succeeded in mass murdering his fellow students, he would have had to share the memorial with them.

Posted by orbital at 8:37 PM | View 0 TrackBacks | Trackback URL

Objective, objectionable — what’s the difference?

[source, source]

According to the Harvard Crimson, four students were arrested for heckling FBI Direct Robert Mueller during his speech there.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, two of the hecklers were editors for the school’s newspaper, the Crimson.

Can we question his objectivity now?

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25 April 2007

Preferring pre-packaged to accurate

Via Little Green Footballs, a report on how Old Media became a propaganda tool of Hizb’allah, along with the PDF of the original study. It seems to me that it’s more a matter of laziness that leads to accepting pre-packaged narratives more than actual enthusiasm for Hizb’allah, although I suspect there is some of that as well.

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23 April 2007

In the desert, a few blades of grass

[source]

Just back inside some civilized wire (Camp Fallujah) and am reading Harry Reid’s declaration then track back on the war in Iraq being lost.

The odd thing—is that I think there are parts of Al Anbar province where the war may be over and we just don’t realize it.

The following post explains…

A lot of interesting information. We must endure this kind of slow, painful progress or revert to Roman style foreign policy.

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