What's Iran really up to?

It may not be the destruction of Israel; or at least not primarily. From "Spengler" at the Asia Times:

Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventionalmilitary means.

Iran's oil exports will shrink to zero in 20 years, just at the demographic inflection point when the costs of maintaining an aged population will crush its state finances.... Just outside Iran's present frontiers lie the oil resources of Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and not far away are the oil concentrations of eastern Saudi Arabia. Its neighbors are quite as alarmed as Washington about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and privately quite happy for Washington to wipe out this capability.

Hmmmm.

Yeah, sure, gun "control" works

Our friends in gun-free Great Britain are experiencing a 50% jump in crimes involving firearms:

Figures published this week by the Home Office are expected to show that offences involving guns have soared by as much as 50 per cent in some parts of the country.

And, of course, they have a predictable solution:

There have been widespread calls for tighter gun controls in Britain....

I think it was Einstein who said that the habit of trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a good indicator of insanity.

Clinton eligible to practice law once again

This news from the New York Sun.

Money quote: "Since leaving the White House, Mr. Clinton has shown no sign of being encumbered by his lack of a law license."

First Robertson, now Nagin

Looks like Ray Nagin is taking a page from Pat Robertson's book:

Mayor Ray Nagin suggested Monday that Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America"
and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart
with violence and political infighting.

Both of these guys are idiots. Guess which will get more press, though....

Attention parents! Have some damn consideration!

What is it with people pushing strollers and those stupid oversized grocery carts with kiddie seats in them? Do they leave their brains in their minivans? Or just their courtesy and common sense?

Yesterday I'm shopping for weekly groceries at Central Market in Plano, Texas - a kind of upscale supermarket - and the place was full of them. I can't go one way because someone's blocked the aisle, so I go the other way - and that way's blocked as well. The aisles are a bit narrow, but that's not the real problem - rather, these people have parked their SUVs - uh, I mean, strollers and carts - crosswise in the aisle, and are just looking around with stunned expressions on their faces as though they're surprised that the kholrabi isn't just jumping out of the bins for them. You say "excuse me" and they might move very slightly out of the way like so many cattle, but that's pretty much all you can expect - they're definitely in a different world; one where nobody outside of them and their brood even exists....

At one point I got a bit too close to one of those enormous strollers and bumped it a little, and the guy who was supposed to be handling it glared at me as though I'd given his kid the back of my hand. What, was he going to start something with me right there next to the celery? Sheesh!

Arghghghg

Humor break!

The wags at Fark are satirizing Teddy Kennedy's entry into the childrens' book market.

Why (many of) the childfree hate people with kids

Entitlement attitudes. Mostly they're not this bad, though.

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Fetuses do not count as passengers when it comes to determining who may drive in the carpool lane, a judge has ruled.

Candace Dickinson was fined $367 for improper use of a carpool lane, but contended her unborn child qualified to use the lane. Motorists who use the lanes normally must carry at least one passenger during weekday rush hours.

I mean, really.

And now for something completely different

Joe Bob Briggs has what he claims is a canonical list of euphemisms for the human female breast.

A sampling:

• Ben and Jerry
  
• Dagmars
  
• Flopdoodles
  
• Huggy Bears
  
• Magnificent Pontoons of Love (!)
  
• Paducahs
  
• Sweater Puppies
  
• Warheads
  

There's a joke to be made about Joe Bob having too much time on his hands, but I can't quite put it together....

The coming collapse of western civilization

Mark Steyn's latest column should be required reading for every thinking human being in the West. There's a lot to find controversial about it - it's quite a bit long on religion and social conservatism than I personally care for, specifically - but his demographic information seems solid, and the likely consequences of the trends he descibes are horrifying.

Excerpt:

The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.

Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable "progressives" have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If a population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on the planet--if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions--how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world"?

Read, of course, the whole thing.

A personal note: as one who has chosen a childfree life, I can't help feeling partly responsible for this sort of thing - but, then again, do I want my descendants living in the 9th Century?

Blogworld News

Looks like Ana Marie Cox is leaving Waonkette.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Guess what the latest revelation from Pat Robertson is.

Give up?

Ariel Sharon's stroke is divine retribution for Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

Practically every day that goes by, I'm more and more convinced that we're living in Heinlein's Crazy Years.

Fascinating bit of Churchilliana

The Brits have declassified some documents that reveal some of the inner workings of Churchill's war cabinet. Among some of the things Churchill proposed were the idea of executing Hitler in the electric chair, and bombing German villages in counter-reprisal for the Nazi destruction of the Czech village of Lidice.

Here's a pointer to the source documents themselves. From p. 44:

W.M.(42)74th Meeting 15th June 1942

Reprisal for German Massacre of Village

P.M. Conversation with Benes about possibility of reprisal for savage cruelties now being practiced by Germans in Czechoslovakia. Suggested wiping out German villages (3 for 1) by air attack.
View of A.D. in C. Bomber Command. 100 bombers wd. be required. Low attack 2/3rds incendiaries. Bright moonlight wd. be reqrd. Objection & reasons shd. be announced aftwds.

F.O. in favour.

If thought worthwhile, give RAF discretion to fit it in when they can.

L.P.S. Is accuracy of report beyond doubt?

P.M. Germans announced.

S/S.Air. Disliked it. Diversion of effort fr. military objective. Risking aircraft & crews. Wd we not be led on to do it more & more – if Germans knew we wd. answer thus.

S/Doms. Doubt if it is useful to enter into competition in frightfulness with Germans.

H.O. Wd. like to consider – reprisals on English villages, where no shelter, & low scale a.r.p. Public wd. say “why did you draw this down on to us?”

C.A.S. If they came in low & not far inland they wd. run v. small risk.

F.O. Even so, there might be a deterrent element in this.

M/L. German responds to brute force & nothing else.

Bruce. It might lead to even greater atrocities in Czechoslovakia.

General view that it wd. be wise to think this over.

L.P. Danger is that it costs us something & them nothing. Against it.

General feeling of Cabinet – against doing this. (i.e. L.P., M/Inf., CO., H.O.)

PM My instinct is strongly the other way.

F.O. Strongest argument against – waste of a moonlight night. Bigger diversion than I had thought.

Amery. Why a village? Why not a quiet residential town?

L.P.S. Operational argument against is v. strong.

P.M. I submit (unwillingly) to the view of Cabinet against.

This may be a consequence of Brooks's shorthand, but note the rather dry and humorous - except for the context - tone of "Doubt if it is useful to enter into competition in frightfulness with Germans."

Conservatism Today

A couple of interesting links, provided without much comment, mainly because I understood pretty much none of it:

http://donklephant.com/2005/12/28/conservative-or-republican-2/


http://www.opinionjournal.com/ac/?id=110007730


I plan to seek out the entire Hart series referred to by OpinionJournal, but that may take some time because their search engine absolutely sucks. As it is, though, I understood maybe a quarter of what was expressed in the material behind the two given URLs (and thanks to reader Paul for those), so I don't know if obtaining yet more undigestable verbage is really all that great an idea....

I'll let y'all know.

Heck of a good shot

The Telegraph has a story about an American sniper who's made a really incredible shot.

Excerpt:

Gazing through the telescopic sight of his M24 rifle, Staff Sgt Jim Gilliland, leader of Shadow sniper team, fixed his eye on the Iraqi insurgent who had just killed an American soldier.

His quarry stood nonchalantly in the fourth-floor bay window of a hospital in battle-torn Ramadi, still clasping a long-barrelled Kalashnikov. Instinctively allowing for wind speed and bullet drop, Shadow's commander aimed 12 feet high.

A single shot hit the Iraqi in the chest and killed him instantly. It had been fired from a range of 1,250 metres, well beyond the capacity of the powerful Leupold sight, accurate to 1,000 metres.

"I believe it is the longest confirmed kill in Iraq with a 7.62mm rifle," said Staff Sgt Gilliland, 28, who hunted squirrels in Double Springs, Alabama from the age of five before progressing to deer - and then people.

"He was visible only from the waist up. It was a one in a million shot. I could probably shoot a whole box of ammunition and never hit him again."

Later that day, Staff Sgt Gilliland found out that the dead soldier was Staff Sgt Jason Benford, 30, a good friend.

The insurgent was one of between 55 and 65 he estimates that he has shot dead in less than five months, putting him within striking distance of sniper legends such as Carlos Hathcock, who recorded 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam.

Whoof. I love shooting, particularly at long ranges. I earned a Marksman medal in high school ROTC for some of them. This, however, is two or three leagues higher than I'd ever expect to play.

Gotta love PeTA

For comic relief, anyway.

A 19-year-old PeTA staffer has legally changed his name from "Chris Garnett" to "KentuckyFriedCruelty.com". Really.

Our pals the Germans

Germany has set Mohammed Ali Hamadi free. This is the oxygen thief who murdered a US Navy diver and threw his body onto the tarmac during the 1989 hijacking of TWA 847.

Denials that the action was taken in response to the release of a German hostage being held by terrorists working in Iraq have been issued. I, for one, am ignoring those denials.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/12/20/germany.militant

Breaking: the sky is blue, and grass is green

.. and media bias is real.

A UCLA study has confirmed what anyone with a clue has known since they first learned to read or work a TV remote: the American mainstream media has a leftward bias.

Twenty media outlets studied; 18 lean left. Only Brit Hume's show on Fox News and the Washington Times lean right.

Anyway: check it out. This appears to be a serious study, not just some blowhards giving their opinions.

UPDATE: This appears to be the work product of the study.

The NSA kerfuffle

I'm a bit taken aback by the extent of liberal crowing over today's claim by the NY Times that Bush authorized secret surveillance of international communications originating from within the US after 9/11.

The NSA has monitored electronic message traffic for years, both foreign and domestic (the latter when the message had a foreign origin). The only real change here is that of surveillance of international messages originating in the US.

Additionally, the persons so monitored were those who appeared in the phone lists and email address books of terrorists captured or otherwise compromised overseas - in other words, some obviously very bad people. The program has thwarted attacks on the Brooklyn Bridge as well as British pubs and rail assets, saving possibly thousands of lives.

And yet, despite the fact that it seems impossible, the Angry Left is an order of magnitude angrier with Bush today than they were yesterday - and not only Bush, but anyone who dares contradict the notion that he be impeached, hanged from a lamppost, or worse - I've been called a pig f-cker and a piece of sh-t within the last hour.

Sure, I wish there could be some sort of middle-between-two-ends solution here - perhaps requiring that the FBI obtain a warrant and take over such surveillance after the initial involvement of the NSA, and of course the NSA itself should have to justify such acts after-the-fact. But in case nobody's noticed, there is a war on, and sometimes there just isn't time for peacetime niceties. But the Angry Left will have none of this; better that 1000 Brits should burn in their pubs than one person of indeterminate citizenship standing on US soil should have his conversation listened in upon by someone working in an alphabet agency.

I just don't get it. It's an interesting time to be alive, but I just don't get this.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

Well, the company I was working for turned off the lights and closed the doors on Wednesday. This was not unexpected - in fact, we've known it was inevitable for a few weeks now - but it's still infuriating. If you're going to open a startup, make sure your investors know at least something about your market space,that's all I have to say.

Any of my several readers out there know of any hiring going on in the Electronic Design Automation or semiconductor design spaces?

Drop me an email at shadrasky@mailinator.com. You won't get a reply from there (take a look at http://www.mailinator.com to see why), but you will get my undying gratitude....

Democrats lose yet another election

Not that you'd notice. Coverage of today's historic Iraqi elections - with Sunnis participating in droves this time - was off the CNN web page by late evening.

Ah well. I'm travelling, so blogging will be light (lighter than normal, even), and that's pretty much all I have to say about this today. We'll see what the results look like when we start seeing them in another month or so.