Why I Rejected Radical Islam

This Brit joined one of those Islamic terror groups. Eventually he saw the light. He says that "toleration of intolerance" promotes this phenomenon in otherwise civilized nations. Britain, he says, is even more "politically correct" sociologically, and that explains why this is more of a problem there. He advocates against people promoting "pride" in their "home" countries, and instead pride in their own achievements, and in a nation of equal protections, personal liberties, and democratic participation. Amen.

Charter School Disaster Recipe

This charter school in Detroit is getting praise, but I foresee disaster for it. I'm happy to learn that the rich white guy in Plymouth (fancy Detroit subburb) now gets to spend his $200 million building charter schools in Detroit. (Previously, Detroit's school board and mayor rejected his offer, which would have pulled more students from the normal public schools. In response, we learn here, state legislators implemented a law that disregarded that rejection.) I am sad to learn that this source of funding is getting spent on this school, University Preparatory Academy High School, which doesn't issue grades and calls its teachers "councilors". I notice that this article omits any standardized test results for this school, which I predict will be low. The school disdains "book learning" for "project based assignments." Nobody would accept such lack of rigor for a basketball team, and with good reason. Why with academics are so many of us susceptible to various easy way outs? The results are going to make charter schools look bad, I predict.

Detroit Teachers #1 Goal: Themselves (part 2)

This article blasts"tax-supported public schools independent of the city school district," which, we learn, also includes the local school board. We learn here that employees of the Detroit Public School District (DPS) are fighting to keep student enrollment from dropping from the current paltry 116,000 below the 100,000 threshold that would eliminate any cap on the number of charter schools in Detroit. Above that threshold, individuals and organizations hoping to open independent charter schools face a cap.

DPS employees -- overpaid and overly numerous administrators, plus teachers and members of the school board -- are taking extreme measures to keep their jobs. No, I don't mean eliminating useless and counter productive levels of bureaucracy, slashing administrative salaries and perks, cleaning up rampant money corruption, or overhauling the curricula to focus on the basics. No, instead they are going door-to-door to explain to parents why they should stick with DPS, and holding abandoned, vacant DPS schools unavailable to charter schools for purchase or leasing.

The article doesn't mention that charter schools get less per pupil govt dollars than do DPS schools, that they have to pay for facilities which DPS gets free from the city, and that DPS is failing despite receiving more per pupil bucks than most metro suburban districts (to which DPS students flee!).

As always I must state my view that charter schools can only truly work if they use their relative freedom from govt regulations to institute back-to-basics education taught by truly qualified academicians.

(Part 1)

Threat from Global Warming... Policies

If global warming is occurring, and if it is undesirable, I assume that governmental action to address it will only lead to unnecessary problems with no benefits. Here a US Senator, Inhofe, speaks sensibly about calming down and, for god's sake, not doing anything about it.

Meanwhile, reports come in of especially cold temps in US Rocky Mountains, South Africa, and California Central Coast.

Petro Retailers Profits Vanish as Prices Soar

Petro station owners are losing their profit margins to soaring petro prices. Some here have ceased selling petro, due to making only only about 5 cents per gallon, or even less, with some losing on the transaction.

Racism in Rural Louisiana / Nooses At High School

Here's what I call a valid case of white-on-black racism today in the USA. In this rural LA town at a school (doesn't say elementary, middle, or high), a color line informally but severely divides the playground. One day three black guys broke the color line and sat on the white side, under a tree. The next day students arrived to find three nooses hanging from that tree over where the guys sat. A procession of incidents flowed from this, including the identification of the white kids who hung the nooses, and some altercations. In all cases the white kids committed worse acts, but received minor official or legal punishment, whereas in the cases where the black kids committed less severe crimes, they received maximally harsh legal charges.

Here's a case of real racism that is unambitious, and I hope this one gets national attention.

White Companies Nab "Minority" Contracts

This story appalls me to my core. A few years back in the Detroit area, bids went out for work on metro Detroit's airport (located in the suburbs), with official procedures calling for some paving work reserved for "minority-owned" businesses. Only one black-owned paving company -- based in Detroit -- applied, got certified to perform the work if it won a bid, but it won no work. Instead, all the paving work reserved for "minority-owned" companies went to a single outfit, which filed as "Hispanic-owned." Turns out that this company was a phony front for two other real white paving companies HQ'd in the suburbs. The feds uncovered the scam, got the two companies to officially admit to it, and fined them collectively $12 mill, about 20% of their collective annual income.

Those companies continue to thrive, while the black company flounders, with no government contracts. The owner of that company asks a very interesting question: Since the fraud of the white companies cost him business, why does that fine go to the federal govt instead of to his company?

As a general rule, I oppose Affirmative Action. However, had this affair worked out as intended, a significant contract would have gone to an authentic, home-grown Detroit business, employing people and spending money in a place that the rest of us tsk-tsk for its civic and business leaders making so many poor choices. Well, here's a business leader making smart choices, and now he's going down the tubes, while cheaters in the suburbs merely get a fine, paid to the government that should have prevented this in the first place.

What a disgusting shame.

Best Gay Military Position: Inclusion!

Nadir's dad and I share one favorite gay military position (actually it's my only gay military position): abolish any mention of it from the military code, except to ban any discrimination based on it. This is a family blog, so we can't print any of Nadir's dad's other favorite military positions, but I can report that in netflix he gave 4 stars to, "Mission Position Impossible," which rules out one (incidentally, the first time Nadir's mom went to church in years was in response to a sign declaring, "Apply Inside for a Missionary Position!").

This article explores Britain's gay military position, which is the one that Nadir's dad and I favor: surprise, it has caused no problems. Another area where we libertarians must hold our noses when we vote for Repos.

Sicko: Cuban Embargo, Moore Prosecution

I hate Castro and his govt as much as the next right wing jerk, but the US embargo has had enough time to prove its effectiveness, and it's failed. Meanwhile, US free trade with other commie tyrannies have worked in Vietnam, Russia, and China, as well as in many non-commie tyrannies, such as Taiwan and South Korea. Let's see what sort of chance freedom has in Cuba if it enters trade similar to that which the US has had with these other autocracies.

This weekend I watched a 3-hour History Channel documentary on Mao's Long March. It reminded me that the evil nit wit Chiang Kai-shek decamped to Taiwan, where under US partnership over the years has produced a prosperous and free nation.

This doesn't always work, of course. Just look at Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, etc. But the US has tried for 40+ years a single Cuban policy, and we know it has failed. Let's try another one that has worked elsewhere before with a pretty good batting average. I sympathize with the Miami ex-pats who believe that Castro betrayed them, that they helped him win (they did all the dirty work in Havana, and handed it over to Castro, whose men fired nary a shot there) only with the understanding that he would replace the Batista tyranny with a democracy, and that he instead simply brought in an even worse tyranny. I get that. But we have to let that go and move on to the situation that has a better chance of producing freedom. We can never achieve "cosmic justice", a fact that lefties reject in too many cases, but righties have their problems with this as well.

A reformed Cuban policy would also include leaving alone Michael Moore, who may have produced an unfair agitprop boosting Cuba's healthcare system. Let's let the facts win that battle, not US fed agents, whose efforts against Moore will surely produce no effect other than to boost his esteem. Only people organized into a government agency could concoct as stupid an effort as to waste our tax funds investigating and prosecuting Michael Moore for this; can it produce anything but extra box office proceeds and international celebration for Moore? Yet another woe for us libertarians who foolishly voted for Bush expecting a smaller government.

Lebanese Govt Fights Islamic Terrorists

The Lebanese military is fighting now something similar to what Israeli's military fought last summer: tyrants who wish to impose religious superstitions on everyone around them. I hope that Israeli political and military leaders pay attention here, to learn what may work against these tyrants. What are the Lebanese doing the same and differently than the Israelis last year?

As with the Isrealis, the Lebanese here face Syrian cross-border support for these tyrants, and have in response imposed border shut-downs. I am curious to learn if the Lebanese army has employed tactics used last summer by the Isrealis, which the international press media, along with hysterical Islamic nuts, condemned; will they also condemn the Lebanese? I am also curious about what the Lebanese army has done differently than the Isrealis, and which of these tactics work and which fail. The Lebanese of course have ways to shut down its own Syrian borders unavailable to the Israelis, who employed bombers to destroy roads and the airport.

Could the Israelis last summer have worked out a cooperative effort with the Lebanese govt's forces?

Interesting outtake from the article: “We wish the government would destroy the whole camp and the rest of the camps,” said another in the crowd, Ahmad al-Marooq. “Nothing good comes out of the Palestinians.” Imagine if an Israeli Jew said this; apparently Lebanon has its own Palestinian refugee problem. "Lebanon’s 400,000 Palestinians remain among the most downtrodden refugees in the Arab world, enjoying few rights and facing strict restrictions on the kind of jobs they can take. Most are limited to menial, low-paying work and face significant prejudices." Might this be even worse than Gaza & the West Bank? Palestinians in Israel surely have full economic and political rights of a modern civilization.

Reminds me that the land of "Palestine", inherited by the British when they defeated the colonial non-democratic Turks, got segmented into several parts, with Israel emerging from one of those parts, and the other parts now belonging to Lebanon and Jordon.

The current internal Lebanese fight began in the northern seaside town of Tripoli. (I didn't know that Lebanon had its own town Tripoli, just like Libya. I wonder if the origins of each derive from the ancient Lebanese colonialists, the Phoenicians, who ruled over Libya.)

Michael Moore's Sicko Call for Socialized Med

Fox News gives Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, high praise. This article also embraces it. Moore seems to have identified many authentic flaws in the US healthcare system. He calls for making it more socialized, but I wonder: do the current flaws derive from too much socialism already included in our healthcare system?

And certainly some huge fraction (I assume well over half) of our healthcare problems derive from people not taking best advantage of the most effective mechanisms for achieving the longest and most disease-free lives: diets and exercise programs taken as seriously as Americans take other aspects of their lives. And don't for get education, which studies show have a greater positive impact on longevity and health than does access to the "health care system". Those factors (diet, exercise, education) lie outside of the pharmaceutical, surgery, radiation, and other high-tech medical features that compose the Medical Industry.

Thus no matter which direction you favor -- more socialization or less --for American access to the Medical Industry, in my opinion, the non-medical factors are far more important. Neither socialism nor capitalism can possibly guarantee every American the equivalent of a spacious three bedroom suburban house, which is easily the cost of high tech treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and the other "degenerative", choice-based diseases that constitute the bulk of US medical conditions. If Americans instead chose to take as much care in choosing food as they do sneakers, TVs, and cars, and if exercise became as important to them as access to high blood pressure drugs, we could have a chance to have a medical industrial system that could effectively treat accident emergencies and other maladies not deriving from poor health choices.

US Iraq Embassy Mistake

Bush is spending $600 mil to build the world's largest and most elaborate embassy ever. And unlike many -- if not most -- US construction projects in Iraq (including power and water infrastructures), this one is on-time and on-budget. Some big fraction of us supporters of Bush's war imagined ourselves supporting a small-government president working to free Iraqi's from a big tyrannical government in Iraq; we did not sign-of on anything like this. And this seems like one factor working against the US efforts in Iraq.

Armed Victim Reduces Crime Pop By One

Not sure of my gun control position. Some stats I recall reading indicate that gun ownership reduces crime. Here a Detroit citizen kills an idiot who elected to forgo America's numerous and enviable opportunities and instead chose to rob people with a gun. Would these sorts of bad choices diminish significantly in Detroit if the righteous people there drastically increased their rates of gun ownership?

Global Warming Makes Him Laugh!

My daughter and I had to leave the park last night -- May 18 -- because it just got too cold. And meteorologist Augie Auer becomes the latest climate scientist to go on record debunking the claim that human activity can explain any global changes that we may notice:

=======================
"We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years," he said. Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained. The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.

However, carbon dioxide as a result of man's activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047 and 0.046 per cent respectively.

"That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then," he said. "We couldn't do it (change the climate) even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates."

===========================================

Is this guy correct? I'm not certain, surely not certain enough to castigate all who refute him, which seems to be the attitude of the average American worried that humans are ruining the planet, including the creation of a catastrophic amount of warming.

Imagine If We Treated Hookers Like Doctors

This article helps explain why socialized medicine (by any name!) cannot work as well as people paying for their own health care. The author imagines a system by which all Americans could have the government pay for the services of prostitutes, vs. the current system by which customers purchase their own hookers.

Lefty Support For "Offshoring"

Newsweek's lefty economics commentator Robert Samuleson opines:
=========================

Remember the great "offshoring" debate? It was all the rage a few years ago. Modern communications allowed white-collar work to be zapped around the world. We faced a terrifying future of hordes of well-educated and poorly paid Indians and Chinese stealing the jobs of middle-class engineers, accountants and software programmers in the United States and other wealthy nations. Merciless multinational companies would find the cheapest labor and to heck with all the lives ruined in the process.

What happened? Well, not much.

... [an economist] examined a survey on "mass layoffs" from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to see how many stemmed from offshoring. The answer: 4 percent. That included both manufacturing and service jobs.

In 2004 and 2005, the BLS counted almost 1 million workers fired in layoffs of 50 or more. That isn't a huge number in a labor force of about 150 million. Moreover, most causes were domestic. The largest reason (accounting for about 25 percent) was "contract completion"—a public works job done, a movie finished. Other big categories included "downsizing" (16 percent) and the combination of bankruptcy and "financial difficulty" (10 percent). Only about 12 percent of layoffs stemmed from "movement of work"—a category that would include offshoring. But two thirds of those moves were domestic.

[he] located a similar survey for Europe.

====================
And here Newsweek's leftish international commentator Fareed Zakaria expresses his similar view.

Devistating Critique of Bush's Iraq War

"A failure in generalship", by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, in "Armed Forces Journal."

This guy served as a combat officer in two Iraq tours, and he summarizes my view of this war thusly: "Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars." T

his observation is crucial, and the Bushies ignored it completely. They failed to account for the fact that about 20% of Americans hate America, blaming it for all problems on earth, and will during many war situations oppose and scrutinize every step taken by US forces, effectively serving as the enemy's public relations arm. Accounting for this population of Americans should have caused Bush to avoid many of his critical mistakes, such as declaring without qualification the existence of WMD and claiming imminent threat, permitting any sort of torture, populating the initial post-Hussein govt with Americans, building the world's biggest and most elaborate embassy, making stupid blustery speeches ("They will hear you!" "Mission Accomplished!") etc, etc.

Through the march into Baghdad, US troops really did get met with cheers, and this anti-US faction in America mostly kept mum, and the entire nation effectively waged the war. Then the mistakes materialized, and the devoted anti-US population piled on, and this took us to where we are.

Instead of ignoring this faction of the US population in its war plans, and railing against it rhetorically, the Bushies should have utilized the concerns of these people, and catered to those concerns. In a democracy, it is not, and cannot be, an assumption of war strategy that once the president and congress authorize and implement a war that citizens will unify and maintain support, simply because loud criticisms by citizens of a democracy at war undermines that war effort. Ultimately I fault not the devoted anti-US Americans for all their angry rhetoric helpful to the tyrants, but rather I fault Bush for not effectively accounting for this phenomenon.

Hitchey Dances on Falwell's Grave

Surely you lefties can join me in applauding this anti-obit!

Detroit Teachers #1 Goal: Themselves

Detroit teachers and school board members have one primary concern, and it's the best possible education for resident children. Rather, it's merely saving Detroit's dying school system, which means for the board members saving the institution that they run, and for the system's teachers and admins, it's saving their jobs. As these people fight to save their fiefdom, their customers -- the students and parents of Detroit -- continue to flee, and the government school system dies.

Consider that this system gets from local, state, and federal taxes pools a total of about $12k per student each year, and all its facilities are paid for. That amounts to $240k for a single 20-student classroom. How are these people managing to produce failure with such a huge budget?

Simple: As this article demonstrates, these people ensure that only they can spend this money. They use all of their waning powers prevent anybody else from taking that money and seeing if they can succeed where Detroit's government school officials have failed. This article reminds us that some racist honkey in the suburbs a few years ago offered to donate $200 million to build a set of private schools-of-choice in Detroit for Detroit residents, provided that (1) these schools operated independently of Detroit's school board; and (2) the schools received for their students that $12k per student budget. Response from those presiding over Detroit's bankrupt (literally) school system, including Mayor Kilpatrick: No.

If they had accepted, I wonder how many Detroit parents would have given it a chance.

Here's an article that touches on the corrupted spending practices of this outfit: A few months ago a new superintendent got ousted, and he says it's because he tried to expose thieving.

Tax (Rate) Cuts Continue Boosting Tax Rev

Bush's evil "tax cuts for the rich" continue to cause those horrible, wicked "rich people" to perversely pay more in taxes even as the rate that they pay is less than before. Elementary students of economics, however, do not regard these dual data (tax rate cuts, tax rev increase) as perverse at all, but rather expected and predicted.

This Saturday I paid $10 to see Nadir perform in Downtown Detroit at the Buzz Bar. Perhaps $10 was Nadir's optimum ticket price: he would have earned less at $9 or at $11. Or perhaps $10 was too much; perhaps at $7 enough more people would have attended to draw even more revenue than did $10. Or, perhaps the same people (or just a few less) would have attended at $20.

In any case, when those misanthropic Republican haters of poor people claimed that certain government fees (which are what taxes are) were above their optimum price (capital gains taxes "on rich people"), they predicted that their proposed price cut would result in increased revenue from these and other tax sources. Lovers of poor people, Democrats, predicted the opposite. Who was correct?

Better Living Via Economic Growth

This writer concludes that economic and political freedom are the keys to better living standards:
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Bemoaning human fecundity has been in vogue at least since 1798, when Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay arguing that since people multiply faster than the food supply, more babies eventually mean more starvation and misery.

Malthus was wrong (as he later acknowledged), but two centuries later neo-Malthusian misanthropy is as fashionable as ever. A report published this week by the Optimum Population Trust, a British think tank, recommends population reduction as the "most effective" strategy to prevent climate change. "The greatest thing anyone . . . could do to help the future of the planet," suggests OPT co-chairman John Guillebaud, "would be to have one less child."

...Since 1950, the world's population has soared by more than 150 percent. Yet food has become so abundant that global food prices (in real terms) have plunged 75 percent. Over the past generation, chronic undernourishment in poor countries has been slashed from 37 percent to 17 percent, while in the United States, staples such as potatoes and flour have dropped in price (relative to income) by more than 80 percent.

Or take infant mortality. Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than one in five. "In the United States as late as 1900," Goklany writes, "infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6." In developing countries, the fall in mortality rates began later, but is occurring more quickly. In China, infant mortality has plunged from 195 to below 30 in the past 50 years.

Life expectancy? From 31 years in 1900, it was up to 66.8 worldwide in 2003.

Health? We are more likely to be disease-free today than our forebears were a century ago. And the onset of chronic illness has been significantly delayed -- by nearly eight years for cancer, nine years for heart diseases, and 11 years for respiratory diseases.

Personal Choice To Beat 91 year-old Man

Here in Detroit the other day a young guy jacked the car of a 91 year-old man, a WWII veteran. Both the thug and the victim are black, and the victim in this video news report along with his wife both offer the same two solutions to the situation: lock up the guy for many years, and the other young men in Detroit behaving this way should alter their behavior.

The choices of these people in Detroit to harm other people and themselves, and to destroy and steal, and to refrain from improving themselves, is a major source of Detroit's troubles. Residents of Detroit live in a democracy, and they have choices to vote. But they also have other choices as well.

I like that this 91 year-old-man was at a liquor store. What was he buying? The interview of him and his wife show that decent, self-respecting, intelligent people can drink healthily well into old age!

Here he rails at the people who stood around watching and chatting while he got beaten.

MSNBC Better without Imus

I must admit after watching MSNBC 's strategy for replacing Imus: they have filled his time with better programming. What they are doing is giving different people 2 and three day blocks. All of these people have the news chat and interviews that Imus had, but only one has wasted a bunch of time with comedy sketches like Imus did. And none of them resort to the way, way over the top comments that on Imus were sometimes funny, sometimes annoying, and usually lacking in any constructive contribution. I find myself watching that time slot now turning less often to the other morning news shows, which are all indistinguishable from each other.

Bonds Steroid Use

I don't really care about this issue. But a contributor to this blog claimed that Bonds never admitted to steroid use, so therefore all the anti-Bond furor represents racism. But here we see that when the training outfit that supplied Bonds with supplements got uncovered as a steroid supplier, Bonds explained that he had used a balm unbeknown-to-him may have been been doped. MLB officials have never stated that all of his tests have been negative, though nor have they sated that any has been positive. However, he tested positive for speed, and blamed that on eating a teammate's snack, which had unbeknown-to-him been doped with dope. I think that the people booing the Bonds HR chase have good, non-racist reasons for doing so.

Honkies Behaving Badly: My Space Party Crashes

Here's a trend involving young white folks behaving like animals: a teen party intended for a couple of dozen gets posted on My Space, hundreds crash it, and the crashers graffiti the house, urinate and vomit all over it, and intentionally destroy all sorts of property inside and out, inflicting tens of thousands of dollars in damages. File this will responding to sporting event wins or loses inspiring nihilistic riots. No wonder the Asians are kicking white folks' butts on the SAT.

Hitchens V. God

This is an interview of Christopher Hitchens, regarding his new book, "God is Not Great." It also covers his position as atheist supporter of Bush's war against Islamic jihad. I post here page 2 of the interview, which cuts to these matters, but also recommend backing up to page 1.

And here's Hitchey debating none other than Al Sharpton on the question of god's existance. You have to hand it to Al: he is charming, quick-witted, and very funny (when he's not pompously demanding the head of Dom Imus!).

Here's an overview of his case against Mother Teresa, which I title, "Mother Teresa Was No Mother Teresa."

Here's a NYT review of his book. The writer takes numerous unsubstantiated and gratuitous cheap shots at our man, but whenever the writer offers a judgment based on facts and logic related to those facts, he sides with Hitchey. As an example, the writer declares that Hitchey's various positions are deliberate contrarian parlor games intended to amuse, though this conclusion can be based on nothing but the writer's own imagination, unless he's a mind-reader. Yet in assessing Hitchey's arguments against god, he admits that Hitchey has convinced him.

More Global Warming Skepticism

Reid Bryson was a pioneer of Meteorology, earning the 30th phd in the field when it was brand new. During WWII he predicted the existence of the gulf streams, which B52 bombers confirmed. He was also the first to predict that human activity can affect climate. But he says that today's global warming does not derive from human activity.

Here's an article about some other scientists who conclude that independent of human activity, global temperatures have always seesawed, and that this explains today's observations.

And here a University of Alaska environmental prof joins the skeptic ranks.

Still more contradictions for the hysterical view, from the man who discovered the greenhouse effect at the turn of the last century, in a paper that described how "global warming" had already begun, that indeed human activity contributed to it, and that it would make the world a more inhabitable place. For one thing, he said, people in Greenland would perhaps regain their ability to cultivate the land there, something they had done prior to a period of global cooling.

Here we have April 2007's ave temp actually cooler than the 20th century ave. That doesn't disprove global warming, or a human cause of it, but it does make you wonder why the hysterics are 100% convinced.

Here's a list of more scientists joining the skeptic camp, including former advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming.

Racist Republicans Going Obama!

Everybody knows that all Republicans are racist (except for the few that are black; those are instead "sell-outs" and "uncle toms"). So why are enough Republican former Bush supporters switching to Obama as to prompt this story? They include at least one prominent neocon who helped cheer along Bush's Iraq invasion, and others who still support that effort.

Some "racist" country. No wonder so many black immigrants move here and stay forever, and so few native blacks ever leave.

Chavez "Nationalizes" Petros, Eyes Banks, Steelers

This will be a very interesting experiment. Perhaps this is what the people of Venezuela want. In any case they are getting it: socialization, communism, collectivism, whatever you wish to call it. Will this attempt overturn the results of USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and all the other attempts at government ownership of the "means of production" and "resources"? I'm confident of the answer and thankful not to be living in that petri dish! Let's wait and see...

Criticizing Israeli action

While Six fumes in the corner, enraged that someone in the U.S. media, somewhere, said something critical of Israel's Lebanon incursion, a hundred thousand people turned up in Tel Aviv to denounce the government's action.

Tens of thousands streamed onto a Tel Aviv square after sundown Thursday, demanding that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resign because of a government inquiry's scathing criticism of his handling of the inconclusive war in Lebanon last summer.

Olmert remained defiant, hoping to beat back a rising wave of calls to step down. A day after his popular foreign minister joined the chorus, Olmert's aides argued it was not a mortal political blow, but conceded a large-scale public protest campaign could bring him down.

Turnout on the square in front of Tel Aviv's City Hall appeared to top 100,000, but police refused to estimate the crowd's size.

The rally drew a cross-section of Israelis -- moderates and hard-liners, secular and religious, young and old, a rare mix symbolizing the widespread dissatisfaction with Olmert.

This isn't the first time an Israeli PM has earned his people's derision after disgracing himself in Lebanon:

In 1982, hundreds of thousands marched to the square to protest Israel's involvement in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut by a Christian militia, a step toward the resignation of then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and the eventual retirement of Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

In many ways, the terms of debate around Israeli actions are much broader in Israel than here.

The Sham of Islam -- Hitchens

Islam is surely ridiculous. This excerpt from Hitchy's new book, "God is Not Great". He also bothers to expose the preposterousness of Mormonism. I'm eager to learn what he has to say about Judaism and Christianity. Of these fables and superstitions, only Christianity has a central, originating character who behaved in any way that I admire, and who offered a set of lessons that I consider worthwhile. Hitchy shows some interesting similarities between the sex-crazed, illiterate, tyrannical, thieving, fabulous, murderous founders of Islam & Mormon: Mohammad & Joe Smith.

Not only did they marry all the cute hos around them, and did so by claiming that god told them to, but they also both claimed that god was revealing his word directly to them... which in both cases turned out to be inaccurate retellings of the Bible (as you might expect from the understanding of a book obtained by illiterate people), except of course all the convenient on-the-spot revelations that satisfied their desires and personal interests. Both also made "revelations" that they later had to retract and blame on intervention from the devil.

In Moh's case, he had to retract a "revelation" that indeed there were more than one god after all, and that thus his band of highwaymen could enter into an alliance with Mecca's polytheists. When his offer got refused, he suddenly realized that must have been the devil telling him that there was more than one god! In Smith's case, his first wife caught onto his phony "revelations" that he had been dictating to a literate acolyte. So she stole a ream of pages, and declared, if god is telling you this, then dictate it again verbatim. He got out of this by claiming god revealed to him that the stolen ream contained text interjected by the devil. Hitchy declines to describe massacres led by each of these horrible men.

I wonder if in his book he considers the massacres of some of the Old Testament so-called heroes. And I wonder if he regards Jesus as I do: intelligent, genuine (except for the harmless fairy-tales), and worthy of admiration.

Here's a very funny Hitchey interview about his new book.

Some Progress in Iraq

By "progress" I do not mean that Tom & Nadir's "freedom fighters" are succeeding in their efforts to build lasting tyranies. Intead I mean that in Anbar Province increasing numbers of Iraqis are standing up to such brutes, and casting their lot with civilization.

Racist USA? 7% of Marriages "Interracial"

Including "sell-outs" Clarence Thomas... and Julian Bond and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun. Nadir constantly reminds us that according to some website our own Westland, MI is the US capital of the KKK. Yet though I've never seen any sheets or burning crosses here (or even heard of any), every day I see "interracial" couples and children. How does the supposedly racist US public view this trend? "Opinion polls show overwhelming popular support, especially among younger people, for interracial marriage."

It takes oil to take oil

Whether the US invaded Iraq to gain access to oil supplies remains a topic of some debate, with this blog forming a bunker of opposition to the idea. Whether in taking and holding Iraq, the military is burning through a whole lot of oil -- that question is settled. Yes, it is -- and more intensively all the time.

In World War II, the United States consumed about a gallon of fuel per soldier per day ... In the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, about 4 gallons of fuel per soldier was consumed per day. In 2006, the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan burned about 16 gallons of fuel per soldier on average per day , almost twice as much as the year before.

Yes, a journalist committed treason by reporting these facts, but didn't dig them up. It comes from a study by a defense consultant commissioned by the DoD. Not that the journalist, as well as the traitor who leaked the report, wouldn't benefit from a stint in Gitmo. This sort of stuff hardly bolsters the war effort.

Said the consultant's president: ""We are at the edge of a precipice and we have one foot over the edge. The only way to avoid going over is to move forward and move forward aggressively with initiatives to develop alternative fuels. Just cutting back won't work."

Who does this punk think he is--Al Gore? Off with his head.