Dean's World

So what are you up to?

Here's a link to among the first of what will be many stories about the contents of the New York emergency 911 operator tapes recorded on September 11, 2001, finally being released.

They've redacted the voices of the victims, pleading for help, crying for their lives, anticipating horrible deaths. These victims were, perhaps, politically speaking, overinflated into "heroes." The real heroes were the police and firemen who ran into the face of danger to save these ordinary people. Passive, unchosen martyrdom is not, generally speaking, heroism. Perhaps that overstatement gave leave to the wicked likes of the boob flavor of the month from a year ago earning his putrid 15 minutes by declaring these ordinary but otherwise morally neutral victims to be, in fact, more than deserving of their fate.

Now we or our proxies can listen to the tapes and, without invading the dignity of the dead, still — by the reflection of their desperation in the voices of the 911 operators — let ourselves abandon the labels. We can reinvest these mothers, father, brothers and sisters with the humanity they were entitled to, and which was robbed of them by an act of religiously-motivated political mass murder.

What, you don't have one? Well, you'll need one if this group gets its way:

It's a picture taken from last week's Illegal Immigration march that is posted at Mexica-Movement.org - a group that calls North America Occupied Anahuac and wants all non-Hispanics to leave. The link came from the Professor, but like a commenter emailed him I too thought it was a joke - only to realize that this group was serious.

A few thoughts: 1. If they want "Occupied Anahuac" returned to "unoccupied Anahuac" (ie Mexico), why aren't they marching - and living - in Mexico?

2. If Mexico is so great - superior to the USA judging by this photo:

Why are they fighting to stay in the USA?

3. What gives them the right to claim this land when "white oppressors", blacks and Asians have lived here much longer than those who crossed the Rio Grande a decade or two ago? My family has lived here for at least 200 years - longer than most if not all of the marchers shown.

4. If "occupied anahuac" only refers to California, New Mexico and Arizona (sorry, there's no way in Hell you'll pry Texas from Texans), does that mean we can deport all the illegals that live and work in the mushroom houses of Pennsylvania and other states that do not have Hispanic heritage?

Better yet, would the illegal immigration flood stop - or would the illegal crossings shift to Nevada, Utah and Colorado?

If not, how does this differ from imperialism and outright conquest?

Kid's never spoken a word, and yet....

Jeff Taylor has a really nasty hit piece on the FBI regarding 9/11 over at Reason Online. It pretty much makes a hero out of one agent named Harry Samit, and blames pretty much everyone at FBI at the middle to upper management level for 9/11.

To be blunt, I'm not buying it. Sorry, but I'm not. Because there's one thing missing here: a description of every other threat that the FBI was juggling in early September 2001, and any explanation of what the thinking was of those who thought that Samit was just on a wild hare.

And we won't get that explanation from this trial.

It may be because I've managed large projects. It may also be because I've had many friends and relatives in the military and in law enforcement. It may be because since 9/11 I've been more concerned with what it takes to prevent a recurrence than finding people to scapegoat.

Whatever it is, it's pretty clear that Taylor is providing a very one-sided view based on a single trial of an accused terrorist, attempting to paint the entire U.S. government as incompetent clowns who ignored obvious evidence. But he hasn't shown me enough to make me believe that's a fair assessment.

If you're not sure what I mean, imagine this:

You have 100 people working for you. Every day, every single one of them tells you "I think X will happen today," and they all tell you something different. One day, one of them gets something right, and says "I told you so, why didn't you believe me?"

I'm not saying Samit was in any way wrong or a bad guy. But this, people, is how large bureaucratic organizations operate every single day.

Being my birthplace, St. Louis has shaped me in ways that other cities and even countries have not. One of the legacies of having grown up in the suburbs of that city is a deep appreciation for baseball. For me Summer will always mean high humidity, the smell of cut grass and the play-by-play called by Jack Buck and his right-hand man, Mike Shannon, on KMOX radio.

Funny thing is that the older I get, the more I appreciate the game even as the sport loses its luster with the public because of the whining, drugged-up multimillionaires that currently populate the sport, as well as the growing popularity of other sports like basketball and football.

But, if you've seen Field of Dreams, you know that for those who appreciate it, baseball is more than the money, and the problems, or even the deadbeat dads who play. So when the wife came home with this, I felt like a kid again and the magic that is the game of baseball came to life:

That's Bill "Ready" Cash's autograph. Bill "Ready" Cash was catcher for the Philadelphia Stars of the Negro Baseball Leagues from 1943 - 1950.

Being a baseball fan in America today, it's hard not to be fascinated by the Negro Leagues. The Negro Leagues of baseball were formed after the enactment of Jim Crow Laws made it legal to discriminate against African-Americans. Prior to that some African-Americans had played on white teams, including Bud Fowler, William Edward White and Moses Fleetwood Walker.

The history of the leagues are just as colorful as the history of baseball itself, with characters like Gus Greeley, an African-American businessman who started a baseball league in order to launder money, only to fall in love with the game and sink his fortune into it. Even Bill Veeck, who once put a midget at the plate for the St. Louis Browns, got into the act by trying to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and bring it over to the Negro Leagues. He failed when the Commissioner of Baseball moved quickly to find another buyer for the Phils.

Baseball history is first and foremost American history - of success and failure, racism and redemption. For the vile events of Jackie Robinson walking to the plate to the sounds of jeering and curses, there is the magic of Hank Aaron's home run on April 8, 1974 when he broke Babe Ruth's home run record. Today with players from all over the world and all skin colors playing Major League Baseball, it's easy to forget that even "Hammering Hank" Aaron regularly received death threats through the rest of his career which ended in 1976.

But before Hank Aaron, before Jackie Robinson there were men like Bill "Ready" Cash, who played the game for teams like the Philadelphia Stars just as well and in many cases better than the men who wore the uniforms of Cardinals, Yankees and Red Sox. Today he is a living legend, and I am thrilled that the Wife was able to meet him.

UPDATE: Bill has written a book, along with a local sports writer, about his experiences on and off the field. They've had a heck of a time finding a publisher.

This is American history and a story that deserves to reach the widest audience possible. If anyone can help, please email me (scott@therazor.org) and I'll pass along the info.

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

Reason has a cool review.

I hadn't realized Hoyle was instrumental in the carbon resonance issue.

A common thing I hear when discussing the need to stop lumping all Muslims together--honestly, I get this argument a lot--is that in World War II, we knew perfectly well that the Japanese were the enemy and we did not worry about offending everday Japanese. We hated the Japs, we knew we hated the Japs, and that was that.

So, the reasoning goes, why should we expect any difference with Americans today who think of Muslims as the enemy?

Leaving aside all the obvious objections, let me take this metaphor at face value. We're fighting an enemy like Japan in 1942. Okay, no problem:

Prior to World War II, it is probably safe to say that your average American could not tell you the difference between someone from Japan, China, or the Phillipines. Were they provinces of each other? Were they allies? The people there sure looked alike and had a lot of the same practices, right? Little yellow people who ate a lot of rice and talked funny, right?

Furthermore, our earliest goal in World War II was the defense of Hawaii, which by coincidence was inhabited by a lot of people of Chinese and/or Japanese descent (such as Captain Gordon Pai'ea Chung-Hoon, winner of the Silver Star and the Navy Cross). Later, as the war went on, our key objectives--long before we even thought seriously about attacking the Japanese homeland--were:

1) Liberate China (especially Manchuria) from Japanese occupation, and

2) Keep the Phillipines out of Japanese hands.

Problem: all those people, they seemed so much alike. A lot of them even had Japanese blood. So, if we hated the Japanese, why didn't we hate them too?

During that war, the U.S. Government, along with many private entities in the press and Hollywood, went out of their way to make sure people knew the difference. Furthermore, patriotic Americans who genuinely cared about the war effort went out of their way to make sure they knew the difference, and that their friends did too.

I am reminded of the classic radio serial The Green Hornet, which ran from 1936 until 1952. It also spawned a comic book that was popular during the War years.

Who was the Green Hornet's sidekick? Kato. What nationality was he? As it happened, he was a Filipino of Japanese descent. He spoke Japanese. He looked Japanese. He knew Japanese Karate, and used it frequently against the bad guys.

World War II broke out. Did they drop Kato? No. They just made sure their listeners knew that he was a Filipino who was not loyal to the Japanese Empire.

(By the way, in case you're remembering the TV show from the '60s: they made Kato Chinese on that show just so they could put Bruce Lee in the role. Fans of the original radio show and comic book could attest, however, that he had always been a Japanese Filipino--always, and voiced throughout the war years by Ray Hayashi, a loyal American of Japanese descent.)

So I have a simple question for you: if it was reasonable to expect 6-12 year old children to understand the difference between Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino in 1942, can you explain why it is unreasonable to expect adults to know the difference betweeen Muslims who are violent enemies of the West and those who are not here in 2006?

Indeed, I'll ask it a lot more rudely: can you explain why you are not as intelligent as your average 8 year old child was in 1942?

Seriously people: the war is not a viable excuse. If you can't tell the difference between this and this, there is something very wrong with you. And you're not doing your country any favors by being so obtuse.

Update: By the way, you can hear a free old episode of the Green Hornet radio program, and order a CD of quite a few episodes, right here. If you're a fan of old-time radio, or are actually old enough to remember this show from when you were a kid, you might enjoy it. Dick Tracey, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Greeen Hornet... now that was kids' radio!

As an employee of Barnes and Noble, I believe that everyone should always boycott Borders and their affiliates (such as Waldenbooks). But that’s just company pride talking...

I’ve been selling books for about 5 years now. Roughly once every month in a half, a customer asks for a copy of Mein Kampf. Every now and then the person requesting the book is a skinhead. As per company policy with any customer request, I smile and walk the customer to the section and put the book in their hands...

Now, my Mother’s family fled to this continent to avoid being killed in Hitler’s mad rage of “racial” purity. I have good and sufficient reasons for hating that book. Yet my job is to smile and put it in the hand of whoever requests it...

See, a bookstore’s only stocking priority ought to be “will it sell”. Once the commercial judgment is replaced with editorial one, a company sets itself up as a censor. It begins to limit access to knowledge, and democracy itself is tarnished...

Because ultimately, who knows what person reading the rantings of a ravaged mind will say “never again” and begin to take up the cause of peace. The Native American populations were decimated precisely because they had never before experienced any but the most mild of disease. A small amount of social toxin can similarly act as an inoculant...

I sympathize with the executives of Borders. Their desire to be safe in their own life is one that is all too human. Nonetheless as booksellers, we are the guardians of knowledge, the purveyors of human understanding. My life will be just as much on the line as theirs will be, I say that the risks are well worth the potential rewards...

Boycott Borders? I don’t know. But shame on their executive’s cowardice. It makes us all the poorer...

The original blog-carnival, the Carnival of the Vanities, is now available at Below the Beltway.

Tim Blair reports that Borders and Waldenbooks are, as they say on the street, "not looking for no trouble" with the Uma — linking to this AP story that says the stores "will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries." (Via IP.)

Now the blog post writes the rest of itself, right? We can just see the links. "Ron Coleman over at Dean's World is calling for a boycott of...." Plus I put up a petition link, right? Great traffic generator — am I the first?

Let's think about this instead. Do we expect bookstores to carry everything, regardless of offensiveness? I am sure not going to march for the right buy the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at Waldenbooks. Bookstores can make their choices in this regard, right?

Well, maybe not so fast. No one is suggesting that the bookstores should carry an edition of the cartoons themselves. This is a work that contains an article about — and evidently reproductions of — the cartoons. Certainly we don't expect that bookstores will not stock books about Holocaust deniers or Protocol-liars, which would almost certainly contain excerpts and reproductions of the original, horrible works. They already do and no one thinks a thing about it.

Is religiously offensive material different? Only if you're religious, or very sensitive to religious sensibilities. But the bookstores are packed, overflowing in fact, with books that criticize, abuse and demean religion; if they made that a section of the average Barnes & Noble it would take up the whole downstairs, so they distribute them in other categories!

No, the nub of it here is that the magazine won't be carried "because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries." They're not really covering up or even, I think, suggesting that Muslims were the victims of these riots in any morally meaningful sense.

What they're saying is, "Sorry. We don't want riots in our stores, okay? We don't want our directors kidnapped. We don't want our employees blown up." Tim Blair think that makes them contemptible chickens. Glenn Reynolds calls them cowards. You know what? On my Likelihood of Confusion blog, where free speech is one of my thematic topics, I have still not reproduced the cartoons. I have a family, people. I can't make a stand on this (supposedly) moral point; I'm not dying on this hill; and as a religious person myself, by the way, I'm not necessarily interested in promoting mockery of the founders of religions in the public forum. (But see here.)

Indeed as a strictly orthodox Jew I have more in common with moderate Muslims than with atheistic, cynical Western Europeans on more than one topic. Violence isn't one of them, no; but my worldview and that of my religious tradition is that you don't stick your finger in the other guy's eye every time you think you can get away with it or have "right" to do it. And when there's a real question whether you can get away with it... better to choose life and live to blog, to sell books, and to fix the world some other way. It's not as if everyone hasn't already gotten the point here.

So you can boycott Waldenbooks and Borders, and I'm not sure you'd be wrong to do so. I myself never shop there anyway, so my pronouncement on the matter would be so much chin music. Bloggers have been accused of occcasionally overestimating their importance in the scheme of things. Sitting safely at a computer at an undisclosed location, it's easy to be a hero. But I think we can and should recognize that these aren't such easy decisions for brick-and-mortar businesses responsible to stockholders, employees, customers, suppliers and their host communities to make. If God forbid something terrible happens to a bookstore employee in the store that took the brave and moral stand, will the brave bloggers write the letter of consolation to that persons' family?

I'm open to persuasion on this. I realize this position represents a moral compromise. But my guess is that people who own businesses and homes, who have families and friends in the real and vulnerable world, will recognize that you have to pick your battles. Waldenbooks and Borders are only book stores. I don't expect the Department of State to be so cautious. But how many armored divisions does Borders have?

Does every mall need to have barbed wire around the food court, checkpoints at the ATM's and metal detectors at Hot Sam's, all so we can make fun of the Prophet everywhere, all the time?

UPDATE: See here for more along the lines of this perspective.

According to a report in Forbes, Saudi Arabia is working on a nuclear program with the help of Pakistani scientists:

BERLIN (AFX) - Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear program, with help from Pakistani experts, the German magazine Cicero reported in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.

It says that during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.

Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them slipped off from pilgrimages, sometimes for up to three weeks, the report quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.

According to Western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998.

Cicero, which will appear on newstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan's nuclear weapons 'because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear program.'

The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.

According to some Western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani-origin are housed inside the silos.

Ohio Republican John Kasich looks at the sorry state of Ohio's Republican Party, and thinks he sees a national trend.

Could be.

I don't remember her name. But I can still picture my sixth grade student's frightened expression when I asked her to give the first classroom presentation that morning.

"Where I come from," she said, in a quivering voice, "girls don't go first." She was an immigrant from a Muslim country in the Middle East whose family had moved to Baltimore a few years earlier. I was a young social studies teacher at her middle school, fired with passion and idealism. I believed in my heart that schools should respect national differences. But I also believed that we should treat boys and girls in an equal fashion.

So how should I have responded?

Four questions:

1) What is this woman's profession?

2) What region of the world is she likely from?

3) What religion do you suppose dominates there?

4) What do you think they'd do to her if she tried moving to modern Iran or modern Saudi Arabia?

To answer at least one question, this dance art form goes by many names, but has been around for thousands of years and has flourished throughout Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, and until quite recently, Iran (where it's now almost completely illegal).

Question to ponder: A certain religion has been absolutely dominant over that entire region for about 1,400 years. How is it even possible that there is such a profession under that religion's rule?

It is almost impossible sometimes to grasp the intricacies of another person's religion. Someone like me, who has a strong interest in these things, may spend a lot of time attempting to do that, but a lot of people don't want to bother. But in some cases, you should bother. You should bother when it leads you to major conclusions that might have dangerous repercussions.

For example, let us take this excellent-as-usual essay by Neo, one of my favorite writers. I actually agree with 90% of it. Make that 99%. The 1% is contained in this troubling statement, when discussing the case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man who was persecuted in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity:

And yes, I'm sure not all adherants of Islam subscribe to the idea that apostates and converts must die. But it seems to be an extremely common position.

Where else is it common? I'll bet you can name, at most, a handful of other countries. But where the mentality also seems most common is in the Western media.

This reminds me very much of the discussion we had in the earlier thread entitled "Let's start to name them and shame them" (see below). The entire discussion boiled down to a disagreement over one word: Sharia*.

What is that?

Is it "politicized Islam?" Sometimes yes, often no.

Is it "systematic oppression?" It can be, but isn't always.

Is it "incompatible with modernity?" A lot of Saudi Arabian theologians would like you to believe that, as would some of the Mullahs in Iran.

Is it "oppressive of women?" Some think so, some don't.

Is all that equivocation? No, it's not. Those are arguments over what it is. What can be objectively said about it is this:

Sharia is the study of Islamic religious doctrine, and the consensus opinion about it that is currently held by scholars of the faith. There are at least five different schools of it, with many sub-schools. Some form of Sharia is found in the body of law in many Muslim-dominated nations. Some of those nations are very medieval by our standards, but some are actually quite modern and tolerant.

That, as it happens, is the factual, indisputable truth. You will find bits of Sharia embedded in the laws of many countries which are not vile oppressors of women, do not embrace slavery, do not murder homosexuals or kill heretics. They are nations which do embrace democratic institutions, separation of mosque and state, free press, free speech, rights for women, and so on. Indeed, the world's largest Muslim nation, which also happens to be one of the largest liberal democracies, is Indonesia. Last year they had a big fight over reforming some of the nation's Sharia laws. The liberals won, as it happens, which is part of why Freedom House noted they'd moved upwards dramatically on civil and political freedoms.

They did not "throw out Sharia." They changed what Sharia meant to them. Americans might find that hard to understand, we're so used to our rigid "separation of Church and State," but I'll bet people like the British and the Norwegians and several other nationalities find that a no-brainer: after all, those are officially Christian nations, and their governments have been known from time to time to define what "Christian law" means to them.

Not long ago I read a blog that darkly warned that "Indonesia is thinking about implementing Sharia." They were referring to news accounts of politicians who wanted to overturn some of the recent Sharia reforms. It was annoying, because they reported it so backward: No one was proposing "implementing Sharia in Indonesia." Indonesia never freaking stopped using Sharia. It's still part of their law today. The radicals were wanting to put in their Sharia rather than the revised Sharia that Indonesia's been working toward over the last decade or so. This is a fight that's still going on over there, and although the good guys are winning, they could use some support (see the case of Yenni Wahid for more).

By the way, if they had "thrown out Sharia," what would have happened is almost certainly a terrible erosion of civil rights, because most people would have thought their government was insane and simply rebelled. Or they would have abandoned their government in droves, setting up their own extra-legal kangaroo courts run by whoever the local bullyboys were. Rather as if, in 1906, the American government declared they were rejecting Christianity and the Bible. People back then would have assumed the government had simpy gone nuts and either revolted or started completely ignoring it.

Which all gets me back to that huge word of Neo's: "seems." How things seem.

Over at Rusty's generally excellent blog, I notice that someone finally asked the $64,000 question that every "conservative" (whatever that means) thinker should be asking: "If it's true that MSM has failed to tell the story about our strategy in Iraq, omitting not only the big picture but most of the successes, why is it not also true that MSM has failed to tell the story of moderate Islam?"

Our friend Matoko says it even better right here: "I mean, Islamic Scholar Writes Book Disagreeing with Fine Points of Haditha just doesn't have the bite that Muslims Threaten to Behead Christian Convert does, right?"

Right. Shouldn't you folks who are so anxious to question the Mainstream Media (the dread "MSM") on certain things, not also be willing to question them on the picture they give us of Islam, a faith of over 1,400 years of history, spanning dozens of nations, hundreds of ethnic groups and languages, spread out over every continent? Given all that's going on in the world, with the War On Terror and all that, is it wise to accept the broadest, crudest, most nasty generalizations about the followers of that faith--and to thereby alienate the many among them who want to be our friends and allies?

So you see some riots over some cartoons--what our friend Aziz so aptly called "The StupidStorm"--and you find out that worldwide, literally hundreds of Muslims rioted, and literally dozens of people died.

Wow. Sounds like what happens when the Lakers win the NBA championship to me.

Or what happens over soccer/football matches in Europe. That's what you call your worldwide Jihad? Uh, please man: get a grip. (The issue of despicable death threats and cowardly censorship is another matter entirely. But let's stick to the subject shall we? No actual death threats have been carried out. The cringing, simpering appeasement of these barbarians by Western so-called "liberals" in response to it all will require a whole 'nother essay. Suffice it to say: let's get a grip on how little some threats actually amount to. And if we're going to hate people just for having boycotts, well, let's start making a list of all the world's boycotts shall we?)

Stacey Philbrick, who's currently woring out of Cairo in Egypt, recently posted a review of a book that's making all kinds of waves in the conservative Arab part of the world: Muhammed Abd al-Malik al-Mutawakkil’s Islam and International Human Rights Declarations. Sadly, it appears to be available only in Arabic at the moment (Arabic citation: محمد عبد الملك المتوكل. 2004. الاسلام والاعلانات الدولية لحقوق الانسان. صنعاء: مطابع صنعاء الحديث للاوفت ). Fortunately for us, Philbrick summarizes his arguments for us in her review. You should read her entire piece, and commenters, but I'll quote her liberally in her overview of his reasoning:

a) The reason that Muhammed took up arms against the Quraysh was because they were preventing people from converting to Islam. It cannot logically hold that he would take up arms in defense of individual choice, and then deny it to others.

b) There are scores of ayat mentioning the offense of kufr (unbelief), but no mention in the Quran of any worldly punishment. There are comparatively few mentions of the crimes of adultery, theft, and murder, but there are clearly articulated worldly punishments in the text of the Quran itself. Despite an ill-substantiated hadith to the contrary, one cannot hold that the immutable and perfect Quran simply "neglected to mention it." The decision – by states or by ulema - to punish a kafir is therefore illegitimate.

c) Those who draw a distinction between a kafir (unbeliever) and a murtad (apostate, or one who has "turned his back" on Islam after previously submitting, by birth or by conversion, to its authority) and advocate killing the murtad simply on the basis of his apostasy are also in error. The foundation of the numerous hadith that justify the killing of the murtad do so on the grounds that he (or, in one particularly well-noted case, she) takes up arms or otherwise conspires to overthrow the Islamic state. This is simply treason, and it should be treated as treason, he argues, not as an issue of conscience.

Each of these points is exhaustively documented by reference to the Quran, the Sunna of the prophet, and the writings of the fuqaha’. What is particularly interesting is that he cites clerics with conservative reputations, thus making the "hard case."

In short, the book is a lengthy fatwa on Sharia. And if its reasoning becomes accepted by a consensus of Muslim scholars of any one of the major branches of Sharia, or even just some sects, it'll be Sharia for those who do accept it.

And it's not written for me or you, or to impress any Westerners. It is not a "liberal" or "moderate" work either. Although there are certainly liberal movements within Islam--start here if you want a place to begin exploring--that's not what this book is. It's a conservative work of religious scholarship, very much in the traditional spirit of Islam.

Back around Christmas, just a few months ago, we saw half a million Mosques in Bangladesh declaring terrorists enemies of Islam. We saw Indonesia's largest Muslim organization rallying to protect Christian churches at Christmas. We learned that Muslim-dominated Senegal loves to celebrate Christmas, despite the fact that they're majority-Muslim, because they just think it's a cool holiday. And while Bangladesh still has some growing to do, Senegal is a liberal democracy, as is nearby Muslim-dominated Mali. And they're not alone, or unique, in that regard.

Indeed, there are a large number of Muslim nations that have never been major exporters of terrorism. The one thing they all have in common; they're at least relatively free compared to nations like, say, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, or Iran. Some of us find it hard to believe that's a coincidence.

What grates the teeth of some of us, even some of us who are very much hawks on U.S. foreign policy, and very much believers in human rights, is when we start seeing people say "Islam is this," "Muslims believe that," "Sharia says this" and so on. There are Muslims all over the world who despise terrorism, repressive governments, and tyranny. There are many here at home as well. Most people I know go ballistic if they're held to answer for everything their coreligionists do or say. Rightly so. Why should muslims--or their friends--be any different?

If you want to help change a nasty part of the world, it helps to know who your real enemies are, and who your real friends are. Before you decide for sure, you should look closely.

--

* - For the record, I usually prefer anglicized words for such terms. After all, people who speak other languages, such as Arabic, feel entitled to do the same with English words and terms. Thus I use Koran, Sharia, Baathist, Hadith, and so on. These are spellings that any American can easily read and pronounce. People who choose to do differently can follow their own practices. I prefer simple readability. I don't expect Arabic speakers to say things like "Presbyterian Synod" or "Transubstantiation" perfectly, and would not presume to "correct" them if they transliterated them somewhat.

Rusty's got the definitive news roundup.

Dean gave me posting privileges and I've been fairly lazy about it but I had a response to Dave Price's post from below but it got very long and I personally think it's an important issue so I'm posting it.

I don't like term limits. It basically says that I'm too stupid to know who to vote for. While I think that many people don't use the care necessary in the voting process, I just don't like people appointing themselves my father to tell me how I can vote. Besides, what you would have is just people trading positions back and forth. Fred runs in district 11 for his term limit. Jack runs in district 12 for his term limit. Then, Fred runs in 12, Jack runs in 11. It could work for senators as well. "I'm running for his seat, not my old one."

I say, get rid of gerrymandering and you won't need term limits. I've heard it said, by Mort Kondrake, that there are something like 25 "open" races. The rest are basically "safe". That means that something like 5 or 6 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives are open in any election and the other 90+% are 'safe'. The state legislatures are no better. That's unacceptable to me. Split the states up into straight line districts or along county lines or, in the case of huge cities like NYC or LA, along borough lines. No more 'safe' seats. That would make the races much more competitive and would also, I think, reduce the polarization where the candidates only have to pander to those people in one party in the 'safe' districts.

You couldn't have extremely conservative Janet spewing her hard-right rhetoric or extremely liberal Jack spewing his hard-left rhetoric. They would have to appeal to both sides in enough numbers to get elected. Right now, Janet couldn't care less what Harry-Joe Moonbat thinks and Jack couldn't care less what Joe-Wingnut thinks.

Kill the Gerrymander. Make the races competitive and you wouldn't have to worry about term-limits. They're why Representatives can last as long as they do. Think about it, look at the chairmanships and ranking members. Duncan Hunter has been elected every two years for 26 years! Tom Davis has been elected every two years for 22 years! Henry Waxman has been elected every two years since 1974! Tom Lantos has been elected every two years since 1980! How is that possible? They only have to appeal to one sub-set of voters, that's how. They can get crazier and crazier (we all have our favorite examples) and still get elected. As for Senators, leave them be. If the people want to vote for Strom Thurmond every six years for about a 1000 years, knock yourselves out. I'm not your father or your mother to tell you what to do. You're adults.

Make the people represent all the people, not just the people in their party and good things would happen. IM(Ns)HO.

Aubrey De Grey vs. the establishment.

Go Aubrey!

Hmm, very interesting. It appears that the American Medical Association is willing to put out bogus polls in the name of medical advocacy.

Makes you wonder what else they're willing to fudge their numbers on. Just how much trust do we give organizations like this... and how much should we?

(Via Glenn.)

Computer scientist J. Storrs Hall has a fascinating take on the emerging field of Artificial Intelligence.

His basic take: we will have supercomputers costing millions of dollars which have as many or more transistors than the human brain has neurons, very soon. He believes that at that point we will be able to create true artificial intelligence... and if so, we need to think hard about how to guide its development.

The number of people who laugh at this stuff grows smaller all the time.

When President Bush calls for “fostering democracy,” one should read this phrase as “helping a people cast off the chains that bind and the fear that paralyzes them.” The difference between tyranny and liberal democracy is that in the former people are in chains, in effect prisoners of the whims and desires of the thugs that rule, and in fear over what might happen or be done to them – metaphorically, the 3am knock on the door.

One should keep this firmly in mind when coming across the assertion that we should not “export democracy.” It’s like saying that we should not export freedom to the victims of a kidnapping. After all, countries like North Korea, Syria, Iran, Libya, Burma, Sudan, and many others, those thugs, or their survivors, who rule took over by the force of arms, and threaten with death those who actively oppose them. Their people have been kidnapped.

So much in politics depends on the viewpoint and use of language. And regarding spreading democracy, lets get this right. Lives and welfare depend on it. And so does ending war and democide, the moral fruits of successfully globalizing democratic freedom.

From Pro Forma: Largely through Rummel's work -- and that of the other DPers [those working on the democratic peace] -- it has become increasingly obvious that democracy has certain consequences in world politics. Why the "realists" are so obtuse about this, refusing to acknowledge reality itself, is curious and disconcerting. What else have they been oblivious about? I wonder what the bozos at Hoover who are so dismissive of the democratic peace are saying now....The recognition that Democracy matters, and that its promotion is realistic and a long time coming, this article by Victor Davis Hanson sums things up nicely, and is a recommended link for Rummel's blog. Hanson says:

The foreign policy Realists want nothing to do with George Bush's idealism. They rely exclusively on deterrence and balance of power to adjudicate relations abroad: We must deal with the world as it is, they say, rather than as we think it should be. Isolationists likewise bristle at the idea of expending blood or treasure in an open-ended commitment to spread our values. And don't expect liberals to applaud the new idealism, as if their 1960s vision of an ethical foreign policy has at last arrived. The Left's attachment to "multiculturalism" long ago ended the idea that the U.S. had any right to place Western ideas of politics over indigenous practices. Other "progressives" are de facto pacifists; for them, any use of U.S. force is a betrayal of global diplomacy. . . .

And while promoting democracy is idealistic, it does not necessarily follow that it is naive. What, after all, prevents wars? Hardly the U.N.; and not just aircraft carriers either. The last half-century of peace in Europe and Japan, and the end of our old enmity of Russia, attest that the widest spread of democratic rule is the best guarantee against international aggression. Ballots substitute for bullets in venting internal frustrations.

Protecting and expanding democracy around the globe is a perennial national security interest for the United States. A standard vehicle for democratization has been economic development. Another factor that stimulates both democratization and economic growth, namely access to information, could be consistent with the historically strong statistical correlation between democracy and development, and might help explain some of the recent unprecedented political changes. This study addresses the relationship between democracy and the new communication media….

"Governance Matters IV: 
Governance Indicators 
for 1996–2004":

This paper presents the latest update of our estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 209 countries and territories for five time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 different organizations.

"Iranian Reformist Website: The Regime is Trying to Silence Internal Dissent Regarding Iran's Nuclear Program":

The reformist Internet daily Rooz recently reported that several reformist papers and news agencies had been threatened by government officials for publishing criticism of Iran's nuclear policies. The media were also instructed by government officials as to the preferred manner of reporting on Iran's nuclear crisis…. reformists avoid criticizing the regime in an explicit and unconstrained manner, since if they did so, they would be presented as enemies of Iran and its national interests. Their forced self-censorship, he says, enables the regime to present a united domestic front, and to claim that there is a national consensus regarding the necessity for the regime's nuclear program.

Click the icon
An attempt to provide feeling and human meaning to statistics of horror, and the characterization "thug regime."

I am pleased to announce that Dean's World has two new contributors:

Legal-eagle and all around good guy Ronald Coleman, that well-known Zionist schemer, and renowned political scientist Rudy "RJ" Rummel.

Please give them both a hearty welcome, even though they've both already posted.

Ace, Lisa, and Katherine in the bottom three.

Lisa goes home.

Well done kid. You came far in a tough field.

The Washington Times (and from what I gather, no other major media outlet) reports:

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president's constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.

According to the article, these judges acknowledged, as they must, that the were not ruling on the issue as such, and that the President's actions were taken "at his peril" because — notwithstanding their views of the matter — the decision to go forward with the wiretapping would be tested both politically and legally. But it is certainly interesting that they came out so strongly on this.

I suppose one obvious question to ask, however, is whether these judges, by virtue of having been on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, were generally "intelligence friendly" (or even Republican friendly) going into the whole thing. It is remarkable that one of them is Judge Allan Kornblum, a U.S. magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. He is described as an author of the 1978 FISA legislation, though I cannot figure out whom he was working for at the time.

Keep in mind that federal magistrate judges are not political appointees. Is this the same Allan Kornblum who was one of the Clinton DOJ staff members who threw up successive obstacles to broaching the "intelligence / crime wall" before September 11th? It appears that this is the same man, who has had a distinguished and unusual legal career, including gigs with the FBI and even the NYPD.

Certainly, considering his experience on various sides of this issue, it appears that his view is worth listening to seriously.

UPDATE: Pick up the story on the reporting of this story here.

Vital Perspectives has the final results of the Israeli election. Interesting that the winning party won slightly fewer seats than initially projected.

Fascinating that out of a total of 120 seats, the ruling political party can govern with only 28. Also interesting that Arabs won ten of the seats. I'd wager that most people don't even know that there are Arab citizens of Israel, and that they can vote and hold political office. And it's not those Arabs who are a problem for them.

Paul Burgess finds the damnedst things.

I want one!

In the International Herald Tribune, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how Women go 'missing' by the millions

As I was preparing for this article, I asked a friend who is Jewish if it was appropriate to use the term "holocaust" to portray the worldwide violence against women. He was startled. But when I read him the figures in a 2004 policy paper published by the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, he said yes, without hesitation.

One United Nations estimate says from 113 million to 200 million women around the world are demographically "missing." Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect...

...Women are not organized or united. Those of us in rich countries, who have attained equality under the law, need to mobilize to assist our fellows. Only our outrage and our political pressure can lead to change.

The Islamists are engaged in reviving and spreading a brutal and retrograde body of laws. Wherever the Islamists implement Shariah, or Islamic law, women are hounded from the public arena, denied education and forced into a life of domestic slavery.

Cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by claiming that human rights are a Western invention. Men who abuse women rarely fail to use the vocabulary the relativists have provided them. They claim the right to adhere to an alternative set of values - an "Asian," "African" or "Islamic" approach to human rights.

This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.

Three initial steps could be taken by world leaders to begin eradicating the mass murder of women:

A tribunal such as the court of justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing.

A serious international effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country.

We need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let's start to name them and shame them.

[link thanks to Charles at LGF]

Glenn Sacks and Mike McCormick note that an important bill to restore rights to fathers and children is coming up for a vote in New York: A330 Would Help New York’s Children of Divorce.

I agree completely.

Trying to cross the border into Cameroon, after the former Liberian president and warlord vanished from his luxury villa in Nigeria on Monday night after Nigerian authorities reluctantly agreed to transfer him to a war crimes tribunal. FOX News reports that he was captured by security forces in the far northeastern border town of Gamboru, Nigeria, nearly 600 miles from where he lived in exile Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is currently in the United States to meet today with President George W. Bush, ordered Taylor's "immediate repatriation" to Liberia. Nigeria had granted Taylor asylum under a 2003 agreement that helped end Liberia's 14-year civil war. Nigeria had announced it would hand Taylor over to a U.N.-backed tribunal in Sierra Leone to be tried on 17 counts of alleged war crimes related to Sierra Leone's 1991-2001 civil war, but the government had made no moves to arrest him before his disappearance. While the Sierra Leone tribunal's charges refer only to the war there, Taylor also has been accused of starting civil war in Liberia and of harboring Al Qaeda suicide bombers. Taylor would be the first African leader to face trial for crimes against humanity.

Well, at least Taylor got caught after that escape on Monday night. That was sheer nonsense. And finally an African leader is going to trial for crimes against humanity! Taylor was shipped off to an international airport near Monrovia, Liberia and has boarded a United Nations helicopter to neighboring Sierra Leone, to face that war crimes tribunal and where a jail cell awaits him. Better tighten up that security detail.

Thanks to reader John S. for forwarding me this Maine newspaper opinion piece proposing that we do away with money.

I mean, just read that thing. He's describing the Soviet and Maoist theories perfectly. Is this guy John Steinsvold guy 16 years old or what? Has he never read anything about Marxism, or the results of every attempt to implement what he describes has actually been?

Well I guess it proves one thing: many ideas never originate with one person, they just sort of zing through the human collective unconscious and show up again and again at various points in history.

I won't even get into this essayists' foolish assessment of modern life and how bad everything supposedly is...

The latest Carnival of the Recipes is up at Morning Coffee & Afternoon Tea.

I am obviously behind: Tim the Soldier had to let me in on the groundbreaking Theory of Advancement in music. The definitive paper on this great scientific endeavor is to be found in An introduction to the highly advanced theory of Advancement, an entirely new way to appreciate Sting, Val Kilmer, C-Murder, and other profound artists by Chuck Klosterman.

(Yes, it's a parody of a certain viewpoint in the music industry. l laughed my head off.)

Amir Taheri notes:

Hassan Abbasi has a dream--a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and that his successor will "run away"? It was to find answers that this writer spent several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New York, meeting ordinary Americans and senior leaders, including potential presidential candidates from both parties. While Mr. Bush's approval ratings, now in free fall, and the increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the "helicopter" theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. as the world knows it today.

I suspect he's right, but I suggest you read the whole thing and come to your own conclusions.

If you go to the Sci-Fi Channel's Galactica homepage you'll find several neat updates, including a link that shows the last two minutes of the season finale (which apparently a lot of people missed because their DVRs cut out too soon) and an update on where the show's going in the future. I can't directly link the video, but as you hit the page, look in the upper right hand column and it'll be there.

Also, Ron Moore has updated his blog.

BTW, from all I'm seeing and reading, there's no way the season finale was a dream sequence. And unlike some people, I'm fine with them pushing the narrative forward more than a year. If they're going to go anywhere with that baby Cylon story, they ned to push ahead somehow, and anyway it's nice to see the show shaking things up and taking chances again.

Waiting until Fall for the new episodes sure does suck though.

(Thanks Kevin D.)

Here are my notes on tonight's performance more or less as I wrote them while watching:

Lisa Tucker: Girlfriend's coming in behind the 8 ball. I dig the new hair. Her voice is wobbly. She's a bit off-key. Oh dear, she is in trouble methinks.

Boiling down the judges comments: Randy sez, "Aw, not good dawg." Paula: "My blood-Xanax levels are at cruising altitude tonight, but I can't think of much good to say." Simon: "You sucked."

Kellie Pickler: "Ahm jest a dumb sutherner. Teey heey. Ahm gonna do Soap'n'Sudz!" Okay, outside of the fact that I hate her: this seems a little thin and weak. Honestly, she has a decent voice but she's not showing it tonight. That big-note ending won't help.

Randy sez, "I can't make myself say how much you sucked." Paula, "Lemme kiss the boo-boo make it better." Simon, "As much as my tongue has been up your butt the last six weeks, I can't even make myself say that didn't suck."

Ace Young: This song was released in the 21st century? I would have sworn it was '90s. Well in any case it's a passionless, listles version of the original. Also that smokey stare into the camera is starting to look fake.

Randy sez, "Bad dawg, bad." Paula sez, "Wine cooler? Whuh? By the way yer hot." Simon sez, "Quite karaoke." Yep.

Man, someone should bring Barry Manilow back. (Did I actually just write those words?)

Taylor Hicks: Has a little ground to make up from last week. Interesting, new haircut and look. Black leather huh? "Trouble" huh? Damn it my DVR glitched in the middle of it! I liked what I heard of it.

Randy sez, "I wasn't excited." Paula, "That rocked." Simon, "Excellent vocal. Don't like the new look."

Mandisa: "Wanna Praise You." Gospel tune eh? Okay. She sounds a little out of breath. Her voice is great but this feels a little rushed. It's not making me want to move.

Randy, "I don't get it dawg." Paula, "All I know is bibble zibble zabble bick. Praise Mandisa!" Simon, "I didn't get it either."

Christ Daughtry: Oho, that version of Walk The Line he did last week was based on the group Live? Well that makes it less impressive. Now we get a Creed song. Well that's pure alt-grunge-rock ain't it? I'm bored. Is it me or is it him?

Randy sez, "I dunno, kinda sharp." Paula, "Please take me. Do me right here on stage." Simon, "You headed too far into the ditch and you're getting into a rut."

Katherine McPhee: "Trust The Voice Within." Okay. That was boring.

Randy, "Good not great." Paula, "Please take me. Do me right here on stage." Simon, "Best tonight so far. It was almost okay." Bwaha!

Bucky: The genuine country guy. Tim McGraw song. He's just cruising along doing his thang. I'm willing to bet he survives another week. He really would be good as a member of an alternative country roots band.

Randy, "yeah dawg!" Paula, "Be careful about your diction, I'm couldden unnerstan yer." Simon, "You were just winging it."

Paris: A Beyonce song? Interesting. Well, this song arrangement sucks. It feels like she's wringing out everything good from it she can though. I thought that was a pretty great performance of a pretty uninteresting song.

Randy, "Best performance of the night so far." I agree. Paula sez, "Awesome!" Simon, "Attrocious."

Elliot Yamin: "I Don't Wanna Be." Interesting take on it. Okay, this is the first song all freaking night that has me nodding my head and tapping my feet. Go Elliot! Very neat arrangement, very well done!

Randy, "Yo yo yo! Another hot one tonight!" Paula, "Yer one funky white boy!" Simon, "Hated it but loved it anyway."

----

Okay, so this episode sucked. I think part of it is simply that if you pick songs that have been released only in the last 5 years, then, you're very limited. We don't know what the classic familiar songs of this decade will be because we're still too close to it. Also, as much as people make fun of him, Barry Manilow probably helped last week, since he really is a world-class producer and arranger (entirely outside his own work, which I don't care for, I recognize his talent).

Anyway, this episode sucked.

The Winner: Elliot.

Predictions:

Bottom three: The suck level was VERY high tonight, but I say Lisa, Ace, and Kellie.

Going home: Lisa.

(No, I didn't put Kellie in the bottom because I hate her. I've given her singing good marks and have never put her in the bottom before. I really believe that performance deserved it, and that southerners are getting fed up with her degrading schtick. But she's not going home anyway.)

Update: More thoughts from Cullen. And there's some even funnier thoughts here.

And now The Queen has weighed in. So has T-Steels.

Well, it appears that Ehud Olmert will be Israel's new Prime Minister.

He's going to have a lot on his plate.

Saddam Hussein was recently interviewed by Al-Fayhaa TV in Iraq through a cell phone. It's a rather remarkable interview, and shows you something about his mentality. Best quote: What is the people worth without Saddam Hussein?! What is it worth? Iraq is entirely Saddam Hussein. "Long live Iraq" means "long live Saddam Hussein." What is Iraq worth without Saddam Hussein?

Translated video and written transcript right here.

I haven't watched last night's AI yet. I'll get it off my DVR in a few hours and post my thoughts then. But, it's time more people be told that Kellie Pickler is an embarrassment to everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line.

I say this somewhat cautiously because technically I'm not southern. True, I was born in Texas and have spent a good part of my life in the south, but I've spent more than half of my life up north. But my time spent down there is probably why I have this perspective on The Pickle: She's embarrassing. Infuriatingly so. And I'm fairly certain that she won't win American Idol precisely because at least half the southerners who watch the show recognize this and feel about the same way: disgusted, insulted, and degraded.

I believed some of this girl's "I'm just an ignorant dumbf**k hick from Hooterville who don't hardly even know what a tee vee is" crap during the first couple of weeks, even though it always seemed like the show's producers were pushing her hard luck story just a little too hard. It was obvious all along the producers just liked her because she's sexy, photogenic, and a blonde.

The real snapping point for me, when I truly knew she was completely full of crap, was when she pretended--yes, pretended--to not know how to pronounce "salmon." It's a freaking color in the 40-color Crayola box for cripes sake. Not to mention that salmon's a popular dish pretty much anywhere you go in the south. It was a lie, a bald-faced lie, and it was instantly obvious to anyone who isn't seduced by the stereotype that southerners are mostly a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots.

Since then her crap about pretending not to know what a "minx" is or what "ballsy" means have just added to my embarrassment and disgust. The real capper, though, was when she started crying when Stevie Wonder entered the room, but then later claimed she had no idea who he was. So either she lied about not knowing who he was, or, she burst into tears upon seeing a blind man. Either way she should have been shot on the spot.

And we already know her claim to have never sung in front of a large crowd was a total lie. Not only was she a frequent contestant in beauty pageants at which she sang, but she was also a contestant on a local TV talent show.

I've never linked the "Vote for the Worst" people before, but they have an excellent compendium of little Miss Pickler's many lies, and this Clyde's All-Purpose Corner piece is also excellent--be sure to take special note of the letters from people from her home town who think her white version of Amos 'n' Andy schtick is as embarrassing as I do.

Yeah, it's just a TV show. I don't care. I literally want to strangle her every time I see her on TV.

Dean joked (in the Taqiyya thread linked to below) about yours truly and Joe Gandelman being part of the International Jewish Conspiracy (of which the ZOG is one of our many fine affiliates). It isn't so funny, however, when the idea is being promulgated by a couple of Harvard profs, now is it? The angle -- as usual -- is Israel, which, divided by Iraq, equals "neocons" (the code word for Jews with too much influence in Washington).

There's a terrific (as usual) roundup of the controversy at Power Line. But perhaps no one slices and dices it as does defrocked lefty Christopher Hitchens:

The essay itself, mostly a very average "realist" and centrist critique of the influence of Israel, contains much that is true and a little that is original. But what is original is not true and what is true is not original. . . .

Mearsheimer and Walt belong to that vapid school that essentially wishes that the war with jihadism had never started. Their wish is father to the thought that there must be some way, short of a fight, to get around this confrontation. Wishfulness has led them to seriously mischaracterize the origins of the problem and to produce an article that is redeemed from complete dullness and mediocrity only by being slightly but unmistakably smelly.

In short, it's about political power... it's about slamming Bush any which way you can... and it's about reaching for history's official Usual Suspects when some heavy hammering is needed. Shocked, shocked!

Illegal immigration is a hot topic this week. With the growing rallies across America, black immigrants - or the children of black immigrants - who went the legal route are piping up about how illegal immigration undermines black economic opportunity.

Ed Brown, a black moderate-liberal blogger, writes: "The Senate judiciary committee released a bill that would reward illegal immigration. My father came to this country, legally, to gain employment and a chance at a better life. But he went through the process. Meanwhile, when one friend was looking for work, he decided to try day laboring. He thought it would be a good way to find out who is hiring and then try to get something more long term. He went to the 'unofficial' day labor pick up spots and tried to get a job. Guess what? He wasn't successful. Another friend works with steel. He's tried to get Black men jobs but it doesn't work out. The reason? Other contractors are hiring illegal immigrants at low wages. When they bid on low cost contracts, guess who wins? So his company has to 'fight fire with fire'. This really stinks."

Ripclawe, a Caribbean immigrant & conservative Republican who acquired U.S. citizenship, writes: "Here is the best part, a bunch of illegals protesting without fear which shows how lax American enforcement has become got the attention of the Amnesty lovers.....All the people like me who went thru the process of getting citizenship the right way, how stupid were we?"

My family has been in America since at least 1822 - the product of slavery - so I have no recent immigrant tale. However, like black moderate blogger Angela Winters and black moderate-conservative blogger Cobb, I vehemently oppose illegal immigration, . It is blacks (along with legal Latinos) who bear the brunt of illegal immigration, in employment rates. And it is lower-income black communities that are often overrun first with illegal immigrants, who drain social services that should go to citizens and legal residents. Los Angeles is a prime example of this point. If black folks must follow the law, then no special rights for anyone else. And no way should illegal immigrants immediately get rights that took centuries for blacks to acquire. Especially when amnesty-in-disguise proposals will only increase illegal immigration, as it did when President Ronald Reagan tried it.

Nor do I buy the "illegal immigrants do jobs that Americans don't do" argument. Who do you think were doing these jobs beforehand? Who do you think often still does them, in areas with few illegal immigrants? Nor do illegal immigrants only do the so-called crappy jobs, but are also in areas like construction. Not to mention the issue of price. Illegal immigrants undermine the wages of low-income black (and other) workers, thus undermining the economic opportunity of lower-income blacks (and others) even further. I have no issues with legal immigration, but I have a huge problem when folks want to illegally get over folks' backs, while pimping off our rich civil rights history to try to get there.

Now we can consider the opposite problem to our sensibilities: Not burning Old Glory but waving the banners of whatever the hell country is your favorite national "team" while you live, work or otherwise take up space here on our sea-to-shining sea real estate.

I say the heck with it. If I'm going to work up a self-righteous patriotic xenophobic sweat over free expression, I'm more bugged by the waving and bumper-sticking of foreign flags (except of course in front of embassies and the like) than by parking lot banner barbecues. Maybe it's the second-generation American in me.

This issue rears up throughout the warm months in the New York area, where I live. During this time there is every couple of weeks a national "Day" parade — Puerto Rico Day, Dominican Day, Israel Day — when some significant section of Manhattan is shut down so that tens of thousands of people living off the fat of this land don the quaint colors of the country they evidently "really" like and march all around waving (never waiving) their "real" nationality, beeping horns and scaring the gargoyles. If you're not thinking, "If you like ____-land so much, why don't you get a steerage ticket back there on the next steamer and let me get across to Lexington Avenue?" then bless you; you're a true Child of the Rainbow, and don't have any work to do today.

We can blame the old Irish immigrants for all this, because by all indications the genesis of this practice is the St. Patrick's Day (not the Ireland Day) parade, at which the mythical, Disneyfied Irish heritage is adopted by three-quarters of the metropolitan area for one solemn day of spiritual contemplation, per the worldwide custom. Yet when the day is over not even St. Patrick's Cathedral is flying the Irish colors. On the other hand, probably a majority of synagogues, and likely almost all non-orthodox synagogues, fly at least one Israeli flag — sometimes right in the sanctuary. What an awful idea — mixing up worship and a state. I know a fellow who has an Israeli flag flying in front of his house on a double-yellow-line street in northern New Jersey. Was he surprised when someone threw a rock through his window? I think he genuinely was.

Mickey Kaus's analysis on the kind of impression it makes for Mexican immigrants to wave Mexican flags at an immigration "rights" rally, linked to above, is right on the money. And it's true not only for Mexicans but for everyone for whom the question of national loyalty is raised, deservedly or not, in a time of strained nationalistic competition: It's one thing to have pride in your heritage or a connection with your roots. It's something else to insist on a loud proclamation to loyalty to another regime by shoving that country's flag in the American national face.

No, it shouldn't be illegal to do fly foreign standards, as divisive and unhelpful as it may be. But you don't develop a broad constituency of affection among the broad swath of Americans (especially in flyover country) by it. And if there are already reasons for people to be jealous of, or suspicious of, you and your fellow — well, foreigners? What exactly are you with that there flag? — your fellow whatevers — it doesn't seem like a great policy to make our own country, supposedly "out of many, one," instead "us" and "them." And you're choosing "them."

UPDATE: It gets worse, not better.

(or: look dad, that was money well spent!)

Professor Rummel has a few notes from the Saddam interrogation. Take a gander at 'em before continuing reading my post.

Ready?

Being able to interrogate Saddam brings some interesting light to Jervis’ theories. In his War and Misperception, Jervis makes the case that countries might go to war even if they had all relevant information. He says that this is because sometimes (perhaps often) the domestic cost of not going to war is higher than the domestic cost of losing a war. Saddam certainly seems to have thought this to be the case...

This also proves the value of being a democracy when deciding about going to war: A) Being that deluded about your capabilities is nearly impossible with a free press and a dedicated opposition party. B) Leaders in a democracy almost always lose power if t