Israeli music video.  (H/T)

Hubbard posted this at 2:54 PM HKT on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 as Another Great Victory For Jihad, Those Wacky Foreigners

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It appears that at least some liberals have realized that Joe Lieberman could well be the next Zell Miller or Jeane Kirkpatrick: nobody can bash Democrats quite so hard as a former Democrat. Terence Samuel writes:

Say, for example, Lieberman wins in November. The Democratic Party’s approach to the war then becomes an unresolved argument inside the party that dogs them into the 2008 cycle. Despite the narrow margins, Lieberman’s primary defeat was an unequivocal triumph for the idea that the war is discredited, both in its rationale and its prosecution. But the victory is anything but final. A re-elected Joe Lieberman will be more than just a resentful, scorned suitor who gets the last laugh. He becomes the phoenix, a holy man who has survived the hell-fires of partisanship. Suddenly he’s Eliot’s Lazarus, “come from the dead, come back to tell you all…”

With a career prolonged by re-election, his self-righteousness vindicated and his credibility burnished, Lieberman emerges as the living expert on Democratic pathology: He becomes the go-to guy on what’s wrong with Democrats — their ambivalence on national security or problems with people of faith, their consuming partisanship, and their unfitness to govern the country. He’ll be the darling of the conservative commentariat, and who can deny the dazzle of a new romance?

Samuel concludes that a Lieberman defeat should be the Democrats’ top priority in 2006; corollary to this, every dollar spent on the Lieberman-Lamont race is a dollar not spent beating up on Republicans in Minnesota or Maryland or Washington or Michigan or Pennsylvania.

Michael Barone made a shrewd observation not too long ago:

The Connecticut primary reveals that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved, from the lunch-bucket working class that was the dominant constituency up through the 1960s to the secular transnational professional class that was the dominant constituency in the 2004 presidential cycle. You can see the results on the map. Joe Lieberman carried by and large the same cities and towns that John F. Kennedy carried in the 1960 presidential general election.

Ned Lamont carried most of the cities and towns that were carried by Richard Nixon.

Kennedy did carry Connecticut in 1960 and won nationally. In short, the Ned-heads have wasted the resources of the national Democratic party, potentially created the keynote speaker at the 2008 Republican convention, and are following the 1960 tactics of Richard Nixon.

Hubbard posted this at 7:57 PM HKT on Friday, August 25th, 2006 as Philosophy, Politics

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Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru jointly wrote an article about conservativism that—given how much we like to debate it—seems worth posting.  They note that, when liberals attack conservatives, the words may change but the music remains the same:

A few common themes pop up again and again at every stage of conservatism’s supposed degeneration. First, liberal amnesia. Liberals reinvent yesterday’s conservatives in order to exalt them. Would liberals really want to trade the racial attitudes of today’s conservatives for those of yesterday’s? Would they prefer the Smith Act to the Patriot Act? The House Un-American Activities Committee to John Ashcroft? In recent decades, liberals have been particularly prone to cast yesterday’s conservatives — especially Reagan and Goldwater — as more socially liberal than they were. (A few years ago, we learned in The New Yorker that Friedrich von Hayek, too, was really a social democrat.)

Second, liberal presumption. Liberals have always been far more likely to lecture conservatives about what conservatism truly means than conservatives are to return the favor. This tendency is so deep-seated as to invite the speculation that liberalism has a tropism toward intellectual imperialism: It constantly wants to create a kind of house conservatism in its own image.

Third, a double bind. Anti-statist conservatism is always condemned as radical, while a conservatism that is insufficiently anti-statist is condemned as proto-fascist. If conservatives were ever simply to declare the status quo ideal, one imagines that liberals would start reading us that bit from Burke about how a state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation.

Fourth, an opportunistic use of disaffected conservatives. Conservatives have usually been eager to debate first principles and their application. But in every generation, some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism — so long, that is, as the scolds are out of power.

One of the signs of good writing is that, thanks to its author’s (or authors’) sense of history, it has perspective; today’s fads don’t touch it; thus good writing lasts.  Goldberg and Ponnuru have done an excellent job defending conservatism. I suspect this article will be a classic.

Hubbard posted this at 5:32 PM HKT on Friday, August 25th, 2006 as Conservatism, Philosophy, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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This $149 jacket named after Fidel Castro offends me.

And what’s a triple five soul?

Dorothy posted this at 12:36 PM HKT on Friday, August 25th, 2006 as Uncategorized

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Some guy near DC has now been sentenced for aiding terrorists.  He shipped paintballs to a group in Pakistan that trains for terrorist operations using paintballs. I don’t know much about the case, which sounds a little weird (and I hope that there was more to the case than just shipping 50,000 paintballs to Pakistan), but this struck me:

Chandia, who is a third-grade teacher at a Muslim school in College Park, is one of eleven people convicted by the government in its investigation of what it called a “Virginia jihad network” that used paintball games to train for global holy war.

Teaches at an Islamic school.  Northern Virginia has a pretty big Muslim population.  Since I’ve lived here, I’ve often thought how good it is that Muslims in America are more integrated and Westernized that European Muslims.  At the same time, I think only a fool wouldn’t be at least a little disturbed by so many of them living near the nation’s capital, in the seat of the military-industrial complex.  Comparisons to past wartime discrimination (the Japanese internment, anti-German sentiment in World War I) are a little ill-placed here, as the thing that binds our enemies is not loyalty to a state (which is most likely less in those who immigrate) but to something that transcends national boundries.

The story serves as a reminder both that American Muslims are probably the least militant and most tolerant Muslims in the world,  and that there are exceptions to that rule who are dangerous to us and our allies.  We walk on a razor’s edge when dealing with them.

Apollo posted this at 11:36 AM HKT on Friday, August 25th, 2006 as Amer-I-Can!, Global War on Terror

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Now that Pluto is no longer a “traditional planet,” lots of stuff has to be changed.

For Ben Kranner, 13, of Madison, Wis., one fewer planet will require a new planetary mnemonic device. ” ‘My very excellent mother just served us nine pancakes’ will become ‘My very excellent mother just served us nine. . . .,’ ” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Change is always traumatic.  This boy sounds like a conservative in the making.

Apollo posted this at 10:21 AM HKT on Friday, August 25th, 2006 as Science!

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Some time ago, Jon Rowe and Jason Kuznicki noted similarities between antisemitism and homophobia: Jews and gays can both pass, there’s a debate about whether Judaism is inborn or a chosen religion that can be changed just like the debate over whether homosexuality is inborn or a chosen lifestyle that can be changed, etc.  Apparently, gay porn star Michael Lucas thinks along the same lines.  After news of his plans to entertain Israeli troops drew the expected reaction from people (sample comment: No Wonder IDF lost the war…. they r all Sissies!!!), Lucas responded:

Contrary to the opinions I’ve been reading, the Israel that I know and love is a democratic, free, fun-loving society, seen as a blemish in the eyes of Arab nations. I am sure these countries would like to destroy Israel for its tolerance and open-mindedness.

Did you ever think how many parallels can be drawn between gays and Jews? This letter would be way too long if I even started to list. But for one, we were both persecuted and hated throughout centuries, and we both gave the world the biggest artists, scientists, writers, actors, musicians. So maybe we both are chosen people.

There is a big enemy Israel is facing and the enemy is Islam, not homosexuals. Do not confuse the two.

My first thought was, “Good grief—everybody’s got a blog these days!”  My second thought, “Gays and Jews as the chosen people?  I think that’s going a bit far.”  Although it does remind me of a joke—

God was explaining the blessings he was showering on the Jews to the angels: “They’ll be artists and scientists; they’ll enrich the culture of wherever they are.  I’ll give them a land overflowing with milk and honey.”  When one angel suggested some balance, God said, “Wait till you see the neighbors I’ll be giving them.”

Random thought: do the straight Israeli troops get porn star entertainment, too?

Hubbard posted this at 3:51 PM HKT on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Global War on Terror, Uncategorized

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Evidently someone in the House is getting concerned about the status of our intelligence on Iran. This reminds me of a story from almost a year ago citing a “major US intelligence review” predicting that Iran was 10 years away from a nuclear weapon.

I think the story about us knowing nothing is far more accurate than the 10-year prediction. U.S. intelligence has never accurately predicted a non-allied state going nuclear. The Soviets, Red China, Pakistan, India, North Korea all caught us with our pants down. In the most recent of these instances, North Korea went nuclear while we were still providing them with nuclear material for their “peaceful” purposes, so I think it’s safe to say that there’s no evidence our problem has gotten better. The closest we came was in the late 70’s with South Africa, but that was only because the Soviets tipped us off. After the intelligence fiasco of 2002-03, I think we should trust American intelligence about as far as we trust the New York Times: Sure, the stories might be interesting, but they might also be wildly inaccurate or even wholly fictitious. Caveat lector.

A nuclear Iran is simply too big of a risk to rely on American intelligence. If we aim to prevent them, we should do it sooner rather than being “surprised” later when our estimate is, again, completely inaccurate.

Apollo posted this at 9:12 AM HKT on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 as Global War on Terror

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Both are good movies. I’m going to talk a bit about them, and since I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes, I’ll put the discussion below the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hubbard posted this at 1:48 PM HKT on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 as Belles Lettres, Kulturkampf

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Thomas Sowell is in a bad mood this morning:

It is hard to think of a time when a nation — and a whole civilization — has drifted more futilely toward a bigger catastrophe than that looming over the United States and western civilization today.

Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and North Korea mean that it is only a matter of time before there are nuclear weapons in the hands of international terrorist organizations. North Korea needs money and Iran has brazenly stated its aim as the destruction of Israel — and both its actions and its rhetoric suggest aims that extend even beyond a second Holocaust.

Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

This is not just another in the long history of military threats. The Soviet Union, despite its massive nuclear arsenal, could be deterred by our own nuclear arsenal. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred.

Fanatics filled with hate cannot be either deterred or bought off, whether Hezbollah, Hamas or the government of Iran.

And he only gets more cheerful later.  Now if he’d given some concrete proposals to work with beyond working unilaterally, it’d be a tour de force.  As it is, Sowell has laid out problems, but left the solutions for later.

Hubbard posted this at 8:41 AM HKT on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 as Amer-I-Can!, Another Great Victory For Jihad, Arafatistan

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Yikes.

Israeli reservists, fresh from fighting in southern Lebanon, demanded yesterday that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resign over what they describe as the debacle of the monthlong war with Hezbollah.
The calls of the reservists will make it more difficult for Mr. Olmert’s Cabinet to avoid appointing a formal “state commission of inquiry,” panels that helped bring down two prominent Israeli leaders [Golda Meir and Ariel Sharon] in the past 33 years.
Reservists told of insufficient provisions, of having no water in the summer heat and being forced to drink from canteens of dead Hezbollah guerrillas, shortages of combat equipment and indecisive orders.
One group of about 200 from the reservist Infantry Brigade 8101 gathered in front of Mr. Olmert’s office after a protest march through the city.
“When a CEO fails, they usually fire him. There were big mistakes — mistakes that even the simple soldier could see,” said Yossi Avigur. “They didn’t give us the tools to win, and they didn’t give us the momentum to win.”

The Hezbollah war looks, thus far, like a tragicomedy of errors.  Nobody really wanted it, and nobody covered themselves in glory during it.  The war itself will probably be less important than the lessons that Israelis and Arabs learn from it.  Here’s to hoping that the State Commission of Inquiry draws the right conclusions.

Hubbard posted this at 8:33 AM HKT on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 as Politics, Those Wacky Foreigners

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There are two rules that are true of any MSM story regarding citizens fighting against illegal immigration:

1. The reporter will obstinately refuse to note any distinction between illegal and legal immigration, often to the point of confusing the reader
2. Opposition to illegal immigration is everywhere and always about race

These two rules are showcased beautifully in this morning’s Post. It’s about a town in Pennsylvania (doesn’t it sorta say a lot about the issue that a town in Pennsylvania is fighting illegal immigration?) that has enacted a pretty strict-sounding anti-illegal immigrant law:

The act imposes a $1,000-per-day fine on any landlord who rents to an illegal immigrant, and it revokes for five years the business license of any employer who hires one.

The act also declares English to be the city’s official language. Employees are forbidden to translate documents into another language without official authorization.

Of course, this legislation is denounced. The legal issues seem silly, but are something I don’t know enough about to discuss. On the second page of the story is where you start getting the real story.

But the big change came half a decade back when Latinos — Puerto Ricans, who are citizens of the United States, and Dominicans — began driving west on Interstate 80, fleeing the high housing prices and cacophony of inner-city New York, Philadelphia and Providence. They found in Hazleton a city with an industrial base and cheap housing (an old Victorian could be had for $40,000 five years ago).

Okay, the story tells us about Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Are the Domincans legal or illegal? Not a clue. Where are the illegals from? Not a clue? Earlier in the story, the mayor references a reported drop in business at “Mexican” restaurants as a sign that the law is having impact. Are there Mexicans in this town? The journalist is either clueless or doesn’t tell us.

Latino-owned markets, restaurants and clothing stores sprang up along Wyoming Street, and property values tripled. Hazleton’s population has jumped from 23,000 to 31,000 in the past six years.

Population increase of 35% in six years? That’s pretty traumatic for a town. We know how much the town has grown, now how much of that growth is illegal immigrants? Not a clue. Not an estimate.

Daniel Diaz stands behind the cash register in his supermarket filled with plantains and tamales and Goya products. The gray-haired grocer was born in the Dominican Republic but spent 31 years in New York City. He moved here in 2000. He loved the mountain air and bought properties and invited friends to move here, too.

“Five years ago?” He’s incredulous you might think it was better then. “It was d-e-a-d. It’s gotten better and better.

“Now? Business is down. I don’t get it — they don’t like this revival?”

So someone who moved to the town six years ago says that the town has gotten better in the last five years, during which time he’s invited his friends to move there. Allow me to accurately rephrase what Mr. Diaz just said: “This town is much better since me and my friends moved here.” I’m not sure asking Mr. Diaz is the fairest gauge of whether things really have gotten better. It obviously wasn’t bad six years ago, or else he wouldn’t have moved there.

[Mayor] Barletta says it’s not that simple. He says his epiphany came in May, when several illegal immigrants walked up to a local man at 11 o’clock one night and shot him in the forehead. One suspect had four false identity papers. “It took us nine hours of overtime just to run down who he was,” Barletta said.

This, he said, came on the heels of crack dealing on playgrounds and pit bulls lunging at cops.

“I lay in bed and thought: I’ve lost my city,” he recalls. “I love the new legal immigrants; they want their kids to be safe just like I do. I had to declare war on the illegals.”

In truth, the crime wave is hard to measure. Crime is up 10 percent, but the population has risen just as fast. Violent crime has jumped more sharply, but on a small statistical base.

Crime has gone up, the population’s gone up: Eh, who knows?

Is there no statistics on the “crime rate”? Is this really as confusing of a problem as the reporter makes it out to be? The reporter writes this as though it’s his job to obscure the relevent informtion, to deflect what the mayor’s saying. I mean, “crime is up 10 percent, but the population has risen just as fast.” Actually, we just got finished reading that the population’s up 35%. So has crime risen slower than the population? Well that’s news, and it runs counter to most analyses of illegal immigration that I’ve read. Or did the reporter not give us comparable statistics? Of course, we don’t know anything about the illegal immigration in this town, not even the vaguest of guesses about the most important question: “How many?” This is a classic example of a news story raising more questions than it answers.

Barletta insists there’s no whiff of racial antagonism. “This isn’t racial, because ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’ don’t have a race,” he says.

It’s not hard, however, to discern a note of racial grievance. Many whites who attended the council vote serenaded Latino opponents with chants of “Hit the road, Jack!” A prominent Hispanic leader said Hazleton had become a “Nazi city.”

Are they serenading illegal immigrants, or random “Latinos”? They called them “Jack,” not changing the name to Juan or Pedro or anything snarky like that. And then their reasonable opponents call them Nazis (why would 8,000 people immigrate to a city run by Nazis?).

But it’s a complicated tapestry. To walk Sixth Street, near the ridge line, is to hear white old-timers warn about the gang graffiti and drug dealing on playgrounds, and then listen as Latino homeowners echo those complaints. A Puerto Rican metal worker and a ponytailed white truck driver swap stories about Mexican laborers driving down construction wages.

Finally, three paragraphs from the end, we find out there are Mexicans. So here is whitey and a “Latino,” both complaining about illegal immigration. Well that’s a different story from the racial whites vs. Latinos story line, isn’t it? Maybe the reporter should consider for a moment that perhaps the tapestry is not really that complicated, that perhaps nobody, regardless of race, likes having illegal immigrants in their town. That’s a pretty simply tapestry, really, and one to which most people can relate.

Connie and David Fallotovich sit on their porch on a cool summer evening. They sort of miss their sleepy old white city, and they favor a crackdown — why should an illegal immigrant get a break? They also see their new Dominican neighbors as a big improvement.

David, a custodian, jerks his head at the house next door. “The couple now is really nice. Tell you the truth, buddy, a white family lived there for 20 years and they were a . . . nightmare.”

Wait, what the hell’s going on here? Are the Dominican neighbors illegal immigrants? If not, this is quite nearly a non sequitor. And wouldn’t that hint that, despite what the journalist is telling us, it’s not about race or immigrants, it’s about illegal immigrants? And did the people really say that they missed their “white” city? Judging by the actual quote from the people, I think that’s a little bit of the journalist’s biases getting involved here: “Well, they said they liked their town, and it used to be almost all white, therefore they miss their old white town;” the essence of so much modern journalism is fact without truth.

So the reporter concludes this story-which is filled repeatedly with assertions that it’s not about race, and people in the town behaving as though it’s not about race-by more or less asserting that it’s all about race. Why else would it be of interest that some white couple likes their Latino neighbors?

Like I said, this story is not at all as complicated as the reporter would have you believe. It appears as though there’s a town that doesn’t like having a bunch of illegal immigrants, so they’re trying to remedy that situation. At what point does this become a story about race?

P.S. The Post story has the following picture beside it:

The picture is captioned: “Hispanic demonstrators outside the Hazleton, Pa., city hall protest a law that makes it illegal to rent to or hire an illegal immigrant.” Really? They have signs that say “Journalism should not be BIAS. It’s Illegal!” What does that mean?

It would be nice if the Post were interested in publishing explanations of things like “What’s going on in our pictures?”

Apollo posted this at 8:14 AM HKT on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 as Amer-I-Can!, Journalism

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From Kate O’Beirne:

Should Mitt Romney join a 2008 race that included John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and George Allen, the only guy in the GOP field with only one wife would be the Mormon.

Admittedly, the first divorced and remarried man to win the presidency was not Nelson Rockefeller but Ronald Reagan.  Still, we’ve come a long way.  As a side note, it gives Mitt Romney an opening if anybody in the Republican primary debates makes an anti-Mormon crack: “I may be a Mormon, but I’m the only guy here with only one wife.”

Hubbard posted this at 4:20 PM HKT on Monday, August 21st, 2006 as Kulturkampf, Politics

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One of the best maxims for living that I ever heard of was the mafia rule: assume that everyone you meet, no matter how seemingly silly or stupid, might have family members who may make you suffer.  Wayne Buckle had clearly never heard of this rule:

A gang of petite but ornery lesbians pummeled and stabbed a DVD bootlegger in the West Village early yesterday after he tried to pick up one of the women – and then spat on her when she rebuffed his advances, police and witnesses said.Wayne Buckle, 28, was jumped by the women at 2 a.m. in front of the IFC movie theater on Sixth Ave. after allegedly cursing a 19-year-old gay woman because she rejected him.

“She’s my girl, and no one hits on my girl!” one of the women yelled during the bloody beatdown, a police source said.

The women – all from Newark – whipped Buckle with belts before 4-foot-11 Patreese Johnson allegedly stabbed him in the belly with a steak knife, police said.

“He called us [homophobic slur] and he said he was going to f- us all,” one of the women said hours later as cops led the seven suspects out of the 6th Precinct stationhouse.

“He spit on us and threw a cigarette,” another woman said. “This is a hate crime.”

Buckle, a fixture on W. Third St. and Sixth Ave., was in critical but stable condition at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan’s intensive care unit with tubes snaking into his mouth and his eyes swollen shut.

While I’m not opposed to seeing sleazy guys get knuckle sandwiches, I draw the line at stabbings.  Although Buckle is in intenstive care, it seems odd to me that the women are claiming it’s a hate crime on his part.  Any thoughts?

Hubbard posted this at 2:19 PM HKT on Monday, August 21st, 2006 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!

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I love this comment:

There is one sure way to ruin a smart kid. If you take a smart, hurt kid, and give him anything by Ayn Rand, all hope is lost. I haven’t read any Rand, so I can’t argue content with anyone. But I can tell you how Rand works as a black box. You put a hurt, smart kid through Rand, and you get out an insufferable, pleased-with-himself Libertarian. It is a loss to all of us, of course, but more of a personal tragedy for the kid. You can hope that one day that kid will want to get laid enough to rejoin society, but too many of those kids are irrecoverably lost.

I wonder if Megan, author of the above comment, heard of what Miss King said of reviewing books in general and Rand in particular:

DO NOT review any book about Ayn Rand. Even if you rave it, her gremlins will find something to go bananas about and write you a letter: “Dear Social Metaphysician! Examine your anti-Objectivist premises and you will see that your epistemology stinks!!!”

Ah, stinking epistemology.

Hubbard posted this at 8:54 AM HKT on Monday, August 21st, 2006 as Belles Lettres, Kulturkampf

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