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Wednesday, February 28, 2007
The Enemy Gets a Vote One of those not really too old sayings that
floats around from time to time is about Murphy's Laws for combat. They're
usually a cynical collection of pithy comments on the difficulties of fighting a
war.
• Remember your weapon was built by the cheapest bidder • No plan survives contact with the enemy You get the idea. One of the more important ones is that when judging how well your battle plan works, the enemy gets to vote too. I thought I understood what that meant. But I see now that there is a greater dimension to that adage. Nowadays when we say the enemy gets a vote, we
aren't only talking about the battlefield where bullets are flying. We mean in
the media, where Al Jazeera and CBS put out propaganda to influence public
opinion. This is very important.
But even that isn't my revelation today. Information operations are still done very poorly, but the phenomenon is well understood by us. What is even more profound is that when we say "the enemy gets a vote" it is no longer a figurative statement. The enemy's interests are well represented by Murtha and Pelosi, who have every intention of letting the enemy win. Pelosi, the intellectual featherweight, and Murtha, the thug, want us to quit the war while the enemy is being beaten down but still is not beaten. They want to give up, not because they are pacifists, but because they are on the other side. When we say the enemy gets a vote we mean on the battlefield. We didn't mean in Congress. Monday, February 19, 2007 Speaking of Creeps, Murtha's in Charge A more despicable display of treason has not been
seen in our nation in its entire history. From Robert
Novak:
Murtha has made clear
that the nonbinding resolution, whose merely symbolic nature infuriates antiwar
activists, was only the "first step." In his interview, Murtha, chairman of the
appropriations subcommittee on defense, did not hide the purpose of setting
standards for training, equipping and resting troops: "They won't have the
equipment, they don't have the training and they won't be able to do the
work."
Murtha has failed to convince the American people or
the President to surrender to the terrorists, so now, along with the Democrat
party, he intends to kill soldiers and Marines until we do.
I can't express my disgust and revulsion
articulately enough to stay within the bounds of decent language.
What's especially ironic is that Novak seems to
be critical of Murtha, yet Novak has been against this war since the first day,
too. It's strange that now that Novak has seen the result of his ideology he
seems to be aghast that such perfidy can
result.
Some people are slow learners. Sunday, February 18, 2007 How to catch a Child Molester I read in the news today about a man who was
convicted of molesting an 8 year
old girl on a Southwest Airlines flight. It sounded exactly like a
man I met on a flight last year. The modus operandi was about the same.
On my flight, the creep stood two people behind me in line. The person immediately behind me was a 20ish year old woman who was very, very cute. He started making lewd comments to her while we waited for the gate to open. She left the line and boarded later. While we were boarding the man started chatting to me, expecting consolation for the "rude" treatment he got from the woman. I told him that she thought he was a creep and so did I. On the flight, he sat in the seat across the aisle from me in a seat next to two children, a brother and a sister. The girl was probably 12 or 13 years old. Here's the difference between the creep on my plane and the creep in this news article: In the news article, the man got caught. On my
flight the man got stopped.
I paid the man no further attention until about half-way through the flight the woman in the seat behind him started shouting and pounding on the seat back. She told the creep to get back in his seat and get away from the girl. I had noticed the man was talking with these two kids and that he was moving into the girl's seat as though he were looking through the window, but I didn't pay enough attention to see that he was practically sitting on top of the girl. The woman behind him didn't miss that detail and started howling at him. The creep was resentful, but after several minutes of howling, the flight attendant finally came by and asked him to remain in his own seat. By now the girl realized that something was wrong. So my question is, which is the better way to handle the situation? In our flight the flight attendants had security waiting at the gate to be sure the kids were safe, but the man was not arrested, so far as I know. In the news account, the man was arrested and could get 25 years in jail. By taking action did the woman save the girl on our plane, only to allow him to attack again on another flight? Do the unassigned seats of Southwest Airlines encourage child molesters to seek out children to sit next to? If I were the parents of these children, I would never allow my children to fly unaccompanied on Southwest. I'd trust random seating over unassigned seating any day. In unassigned seating on Southwest, a customer gets to choose, to a certain extent, whom they sit next to. If you fly Southwest frequently, like I did last year, you'd see a very noticeable trend. Few want to sit next to fat people because they take up their neighbor's space in addition to their own. Many people don't want to sit next to old people, people different from themselves, or people with bad hygiene. If you're a pretty girl, you can be sure that you will not have an empty seat next to you. All of this is, I guess, natural and just the way the world works. It's a big problem, though, when it also enables people interested in kiddie porn to pick whom they sit next to. Southwest is successful for many reasons, one of them being the unassigned seats which encourage passengers to board quickly. Reducing aircraft time at the gate is critical for profitability. The downside is not only that passengers are treated like cattle, but that predators can operate freely. Saturday, February 10, 2007 More Al Qaeda Hi Jinks From a blog named U.S. Cavalry
OnPoint:
“AQI is both feared and hated,” Capt Broekhuizen said, referring to Al Qaeda in Iraq. “They’ve been running a brutal terror campaign. No city leaders are left here who will take a leadership role.” Marines from Golf Company said they recently fished two bodies out of the local river: a man had been decapitated, and his 4-year old tied to his leg before both were thrown into the river and the little boy drowned. The killings were a product of Al Qaeda terror. Yeah, but Aircraft Commander Pelosi and her cohorts think we should just give up and leave these Iraqis to their fate. Those goof ball Al Qaeda guys are so fun loving. end .
Wednesday, February 07, 2007 Watergate I imagine that people coming to voting age now
think of Monica Lewinski the same way I think of Watergate; it's one of those
things that people older than me think is much more significant than I do. I
vaguely remember Nixon being president and extremely popular before the scandal,
and I remember him resigning, but I don't really remember much first hand about
it because I was too young. Talk about Watergate bores me and frankly always
has. It's over with, who cares?
So, I can't say that I have followed it very closely, but like any reasonable well-informed person I can't have helped to learn a thing or two about it. Today I was listening to NPR and heard an amazing fact that I've never heard mentioned before and often wondered about. The man who engineered the burglary has died and released his memoirs. The amazing fact I learned is just why the burglary was staged. Perhaps those more aware than I think this is ho
hum, but I learned that there was intelligence that the Soviets were funding the
democrat party (I have decided to no longer call them the democratic party only
because they seem to take offense over such trivialities and it's always fun to
bother sensitive pedants). The burglar, whose name is uninteresting to me, was
quoted as saying that he doesn't regret the job because if they had found the
proof that the Soviets were funding the democrats, then it would have been a
very good thing for the country to learn of it. That the proof was not found
only means that essentially he is a casualty of the cold war and accepts his
fate.
I find this fascinating. I've been speculating for years that the democrat party has been overtaken by communists controlled by the communist international, and I'm not privy to applicable intelligence on the matter. I find this piece of news to be strongly supporting that theory, but still a bit shy of confirming it positively. The communists would be smart enough to not be blatant about funding the democrat party, so it wouldn't surprise me that burglars didn't find proof of it at the democrat campaign headquarters. I still wonder why Bill Clinton went to Moscow for a few months, just like so many Soviet operatives are known to have done so. I wonder why this suspicion wasn't played up in the press more than it has been. Of course the democrat party wouldn't want this to be too public and they have had pretty solid control of the press since FDR's days, so it's understandable how it was stifled. Watergate is still boring to me. It's still fascinating only to people who think of the 70's as good days rather than the economic, cultural and fashion disaster they were. Monday, February 05, 2007 The Governor of Texas Just Called My Daughter a Slut I'm not sure what HPV is, but I'm being told
4,000 people die each year of cervical cancer that someone theorizes might be
caused by it. I'm not going to question that claim, it's beyond my expertise.
Let's assume it to be true.
The issue is what to do about it. A drug manufacturer is about to make a lot of money from coerced vaccinations using their medicine, enabled by the singular act of the governor of Texas. It hardly seems an emergency that requires legislating from the executive branch of government. It would have been nice had there been public debate about this, a vote by our representatives would be appropriate for something as controversial as this. I'm not saying that it's bad to vaccinate my
daughter, it's probably a good idea. The risk/benefit analysis might be pretty
one-sided, but I don't know because there's been no debate or
discussion.
But it's not the governor's job, nor even the legislature's to make the decision or even to perform the analysis, although I welcome assistance from the government in understanding the issue. When weighing the risk to my daughter for this disease, or any other danger, there are only two people that have any business deciding what is best for my daughter, and those are me and my wife. So, we're in the situation where the governor has decided that all children will have sex with people that will give them this disease. I would like to think that the governor does not know my daughter and can't make that decision intelligently, even if he had the right. Maybe my daughter will be the slut he expects her to be, maybe she won't be. But it's not his job to say so. Sunday, February 04, 2007 Polar Bears in Iceland I used to live in Iceland, from 1975 to 1977.
Mostly I remember celebrating the Bicentennial there.
And I remember the snow the first winter and relative lack of snow the second winter. Before we moved there I was nearly paralyzed with fear. Iceland had volcanoes and we would all die in a fiery lava flow, and if it wasn't a volcano killing us, I was sure that an earthquake would. Of course, no such thing happened, Iceland is a beautiful land of fire and ice; of natural, mostly untouched stark beauty. I had a lot of fun while living there, building forts out of lava boulders in the fields behind our house. The other thing I remember is that there are no polar bears in Iceland. But despite the demogoguery of Al Gore, polar bears aren't dying off from lack of ice. In fact the opposite is true, and Icelanders are now concerned that because of the great increase in arctic ice, that there will be a greater threat of polar bears moving into Iceland. Now, Icelanders tend to be extremely socialist,
as least in their rhetoric, and love to jump in to save rain forests and
endangered animals throughout the world. I suppose that's because Icelanders
have killed off all the trees on their own island and don't really know what
trees are supposed to look like. Not having any trees, they think that they are
equally rare across the world, I
suppose.
Likewise with animals. They like to hunt whales. I'm not sure if they're still doing it, but I recall seeing whales being sliced up for meat and other food delicacies in what we used to call "Whale Bay." As Americans we were strictly forbidden to own any ivory, but not so the Icelanders. I don't remember eating any whale meat, but I may have at one time or another, probably during our school band's tour about the island. Icelanders have an equal lack of sentimentality when it comes to polar bears. It seems that on the rare occasions when they do get near the island, they are killed quicker than you can say, "whale steak." On the even rarer occasions that a polar bear has landed on the island, they were dispatched with no tears shed. To this day, the only mammalian predator on the island is the arctic fox. If the fox weren't so sly, I've no doubt that the Icelanders would eradicate them too. They can always claim that it isn't indigenous to the island, it's ony been there for the past 1100 years. But I don't think Al Gore will be reporting the increase in either the arctic ice or the threat from increases in polar bears. Iceland has the longest continuously governing body in the world, the AlÞing (pronounced All Thing), and they aren't much afraid to kill off any plant or animal they come across. Their politics don't get in the way of their common sense when it comes to not allowing the most aggressive and violent animal in the world to inhabit their home. Especially now that polar bears and polar ice are increasing so radically. |