Is Syria Getting Tough on Terrorists?

Maybe Syria intends to avert an American incursion of its territory after all:

A Syrian policeman was killed and two militants captured during fighting on a mountain overlooking Damascus yesterday in a second day of battles between Syrian security forces and rebels connected with the war in Iraq. The gunbattle, which allegedly involved former bodyguards of Saddam Hussein, came amid indications that the Syrian Government is increasing its efforts to capture militants who use Syria as a staging ground for attacks in Iraq.

Sana, the official Syrian news agency, reported: "The clash took place on Mount Qassioun with a group of people wanted for terrorist crimes, some of whom were former bodyguards. The gunbattle claimed the life of Ahmad Hijazi, a security forces officer, Sana said, which added that two police officers and two other security force officers were wounded.

The agency said that the two people arrested were Sharif Aied Saif Smadi, a Jordanian, and the wife of his brother, Mohammed, who is on the run.

The incident came a day after fighting between Syrian troops and suspected Islamist militants returning from Iraq who were trying to cross into northern Lebanon, near Homs. Two soldiers and a militant were killed in the fighting, the first incident of its kind along the Lebanon-Syria frontier. Syrian troops arrested at least 34 militants staying at a nearby safe house, Sana said.

Lebanese media reports said that among those arrested were Lebanese and Algerians. The al-Jazeera satellite channel named the dead militant as Majdi bin Mohammed bin Said al-Zreibi, a Tunisian. Syria faces pressure from the US to stop militants crossing into Iraq.

Let us hope that Syria will be consistent in applying pressure on those who are using its territory as a safe haven from which to launch assaults on Iraq.

Debka File says that the gun battle broke out as a result of a massacre of Syrian tourists by the terrorists although why they would have done this was not made clear.

Sagan on Skepticism

"But the tools of skepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They're hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although skepticism repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism."

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Sagan is exactly right. He has put his finger on one reason why there is so much opposition from the Neo-Darwinian priesthood to those skeptics who dissent from the true religion.

Moral Equivalency Watch

Apparently Brian Williams' blow dryer has singed his common sense. That's as good an explanation as any for why the NBC anchor would have made this blockheaded statement to Andrea Mitchell the other night. In a story on the newly elected Iranian president, a man who appears to some of the Americans who were held hostage in Tehran in the late seventies to be one of their abductors, Williams said:

"What would it all matter if proven true? Someone brought up today the first several U.S. presidents were certainly revolutionaries and might have been called 'terrorists' by the British crown, after all."

Evidently, at some point in Mr. Williams' educational journey he was taught that George Washington kidnapped and held foreign diplomats against their will for over a year, had them beaten and mistreated and in fear of their lives, which were repeatedly threatened, not because they had committed any crimes against the colonies but simply because they were British. Ah, you say Washington never did that? Maybe it was Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, or Jefferson. Maybe John Adams. It must have been one of those guys because Brian Williams said so on NBC.

For sophisticates like Williams terrorism is relative. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, don't you know. The fact is that the word terrorist denotes something pretty specific in today's parlance. It refers to one who deliberately undertakes to kill large numbers of innocent civilians in order to weaken opposition to whatever goals the murderer might have in mind. At the very minimum a terrorist is a murderer.

Since the word terrorist did not exist in the 1770s, when Williams says that the British might have regarded the founders as terrorists the only meaning he can be ascribing to the word is the meaning it has today. As such, his statement makes him look like a dunce.

Williams, like so many liberals, can't seem to escape the desire to draw a moral equivalence between Americans and America's foes. In their view, if our enemies are evil they're no more so than the very best men this country has produced. Evil, after all, has no objective definition. In the Orwellian Newspeak of the times evil is in the eye of the beholder. Thus, the liberation of fifty million people is a great atrocity, terrorists who deliberately murder women and children are compared by Michael Moore to the Minutemen of colonial America, Bush is Hitler.

It's as pathetic as it is stupid.

The Dems' Dilemma

A couple of Washington Post writers think that the bipartisan filibuster deal struck six weeks ago will make it difficult for the Democrats to stop a conservative Bush nominee for the seat vacated by Sandra Day O'Connor:

The pact, signed by seven Democrats and seven Republicans, says a judicial nominee will be filibustered only under "extraordinary circumstances." Key members of the group said yesterday that a nominee's philosophical views cannot amount to "extraordinary circumstances" and that therefore a filibuster can be justified only on questions of personal ethics or character.

The distinction is crucial because Democrats want to force Bush to pick a centrist, not a staunch conservative as many activist groups on the political right desire. Holding only 44 of the Senate's 100 seats, Democrats have no way to block a Republican-backed nominee without employing a filibuster, which takes 60 votes to stop.

GOP leaders, sensing the Democrats' bind, expressed confidence yesterday that the Senate will confirm Bush's eventual nominee, no matter how ideologically rigid. "I think there is every expectation, every reason to believe that there will be no successful filibuster," Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on "Fox News Sunday."

Under the "Gang of 14" accord, the seven Republican signers agreed to deny Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) the votes he needed to carry out his threat to bar judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules. The seven are implicitly released from the deal if the Democratic signers renege on their end. Yesterday, key players suggested the seven Democrats will automatically be in default if they contend a nominee's ideological views constitute "extraordinary circumstances" that would justify a filibuster.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the 14 signers, noted that the accord allowed the confirmation of three Bush appellate court nominees so conservative that Democrats had successfully filibustered them for years: Janice Rogers Brown, William H. Pryor Jr. and Priscilla R. Owen. Because Democrats accepted them under the deal, Graham said on the Fox program, it is clear that ideological differences will not justify a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.

"Based on what we've done in the past with Brown, Pryor and Owen," Graham said, "ideological attacks are not an 'extraordinary circumstance.' To me, it would have to be a character problem, an ethics problem, some allegation about the qualifications of the person, not an ideological bent."

Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), a leader of the seven Democratic signers, largely concurred. Nelson "would agree that ideology is not an 'extraordinary circumstance' unless you get to the extreme of either side," his spokesman, David DiMartino, said in an interview.

Of course, this all assumes that Democrats can be trusted to keep their word. Even if they violate the spirit of the deal, however, and seek to filibuster a nominee on ideological grounds, it still works to their disadvantage inasmuch as their betrayal would anger perhaps all Republicans and enough Democrats a cloture vote to end the filibuster would succeed.

So if the Democrats refuse to filibuster over ideological differences, Bush wins. If they do try to filibuster, either cloture will be invoked (if the Republicans can get 60 votes), or the rules will be changed to disallow filibusters (if the Republicans can muster 50 votes). Either way, it looks like any reasonably well-qualified nominee will be confirmed.

The wild-card in all this would be the nomination by Bush of his buddy Alberto Gonzalez. There are enough conservative Republicans who will settle for nothing less than a staunch "original intent" Justice on the Court and who are sufficiently skeptical of Gonzalez that the necessary votes to confirm him may not be there. The word among conservatives is that Gonzalez is Spanish for Souter. Another Souter is the last thing the Court, or the nation, needs.

Tough Words

Iraqi blogger Omar at Iraq The Model has some tough but wise words for the cut and runners:

Yesterday [the] interior ministry in Saudi Arabia uncovered a new list of wanted Al-Qaeda members with 36 names on it, 21 of who are believed to be residing in Iraq right now.

Can anyone tell me how can these terrorists be stopped from moving their zone of action to other countries if they weren't intercepted right here and right now? There's no doubt that once Iraq falls in their hands they will start looking for other battle grounds and they will search for the "greatest Satan" in other places. It is the American existence in Iraq that attracted them to a great extent and when there are no Americans in Iraq Al-Qaeda will not simply drop their weapons and start a normal life, they will seek other places where they can find, and kill Americans.

What I want to say here is that it is our fate to fight terrorism on our own land and we (the majority) have accepted to challenge this fate the day we abandoned Saddam and welcomed our freedom but that's not the case for you in America. Actually we've got no other choice but to fight and keep fighting until we win over the terrorists because otherwise we'll have to submit to their will and the damage would be irreversible.

Fighting terrorism for us in Iraq is a matter of life or death so we have no choice but to keep fighting until we kill or lock in jail every one of them and we're doing this whether the world supported us or not but in case we failed, the consequences will not be confined by Iraq's borders. You (the west) can step back and wait for the terrorists to knock on your doors at any minute or you can put your s*** together and fight them while they're thousands of miles away.

This is war, it's not a picnic and don't think that we're enjoying it and we're not expecting you to enjoy it either. By quitting now some might think that needless losses are going to be avoided but that's-in my opinion-is a very shortsighted way of thinking because quitting now will only expose America and the rest of the world to a much greater threat.

I was talking about this to one of my friends and he described this war in an interesting way, he said "this war is much like a fierce boxing match; you punch and you get punched but even if you're stronger than your opponent you should not allow him to catch his breath at any round because he might then give you a surprising punch when the next round begins and knocks you down".

So my advice to the American politicians on both sides but especially those on the left side is: grow up, this is not the time to seek political wins and it's not the time to use other's mistakes to get some publicity. We're facing very tough times so use your skills to find solutions. Bottom line is, talk less, think more and do more.

Unfortunately, Omar is laboring under the illusion that the Left in this country gives a damn about Iraq. They don't. What they care about is abortion on demand, gay marriage, and getting the political power to see that these remain, or become, legal. That means denying George Bush and the Republicans any successes they might otherwise achieve, and that means undercutting our effort in Iraq in any way they can without jeopardizing their own political prospects.

If the U.S. is going to succeed in establishing a stable and free Iraq (and, as an eventual consequence, a stable and free Syria and Iran)it will have to be done without the cooperation of the Left, at least the hard Left of Move On.org, etc.

The Next SCOTUS Retirement?

We don't like to spread rumors, especially internet rumors, but, well, this was too good to keep to ourselves. A blog which specializes in legal and judicial matters says this:

Here's a wildcard for you: I have it on reasonably good authority that an unlikely retirement might be on the way, too. A Supreme Court insider told me several weeks ago that Souter may well retire. He apparently told friends and family that he has always planned to step down upon turning 65, and that he'd rather return to New Hampshire year-round than continue to spend time in D.C. He's 65 now.

If that happens, remember where you read it first. If it doesn't happen, just pretend I never wrote it.

And that we never repeated it. Unfortunately, we don't really think Souter will retire, although he should have done so about twenty years ago. He's going to need some income to buy himself a new house when his current domicile gets converted into the Lost Liberty Hotel.

Thank You, America

The Middle East Media Research Institute has the translation of a column written by a Saudi named Muhammed al-Sheikh. The essay appeared June 18th in the Saudi daily al-Jazirah and was titled Thank You America:

"What have the Arabs given us Saudis in comparison to what we have gained from our relations with America? I know very well that this is an extremely sensitive issue that many would hesitate to address; they are restrained by a culture of fear that prevents them from confronting controversial and sensitive issues head-on.

"The late King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, was a resourceful and far-sighted statesman when he chose the Americans rather than the British to come and search for oil in the Kingdom. He did so despite Britain at the time being an important force in the region, with its colonies and dependencies surrounding the infant kingdom. The politics of the time plus the colonial legacies of both Britain and France made King Abdul Aziz distance himself from them and look to the New World.

"Not long after the Americans and their expertise arrived, oil was gushing from beneath the desert sands and the development of the modern Saudi state began.

"Following World War II, the Arab countries had to choose between the two different world systems - communism or capitalism. King Abdul Aziz chose capitalism, the West, and America in particular. Thanks to this relationship that has lasted for more than six decades, we Saudis were able to invest oil revenues in building our country. King Abdul Aziz laid the foundations for a consistent Saudi foreign policy that held the Kingdom's interests above other considerations.

"These are the reasons why the Kingdom flourished while other countries went down or teetered on the verge of collapsing. Those countries bet on the wrong horse and did not realize that survival lies in economic development and modernization. They chose to confine themselves in a cocoon and remain isolated from the rest of the world, blinded by the illusions of nationalism and other false ideologies. It was indeed very strange to hear those fragile regimes labeling themselves progressive while calling us reactionary.

"We must admit that our relations with America were the cornerstone for our development and progress. In return, we must ask what we have gained from our relations with the Arab world. Speaking frankly and unequivocally, all we got from them was trouble. Our brothers, as they call themselves, conspired against us, attacked us, and used all the means at their disposal to derail our plans for unity.

"History has proven that Arab nationalism is a destructive ideology. We, the Saudis, must set our priorities and carefully read history to extract its lessons while at the same time endeavoring to build something new that does not take anything for granted - as has been the case in the past - but that thoroughly debates and analyzes everything. We must rely on an ideology that treats the national interests of this country as the top priority."

A few more columns like this and the Democrats are going to have to find themselves another myth to substitute for the one about how Americans are despised throughout the Middle East because of our interference in Muslim lands.

Red and Blue Litmus

For years the Democrats insisted that any so-called "litmus test" for Supreme Court nominees was unfair and inappropriate. That was then, this is now:

Democrats called for a deliberate review of any nominee and pledged to press the eventual candidate on issues including abortion and same-sex marriage, while Republicans declared that such specific inquiries were out of line. "All questions are legitimate," Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. "What is your view on Roe v. Wade? What is your view on gay marriage? They are going to try to get away with the idea that we're not going to know their views. But that's not going to work this time."

Senator Ted Kennedy threatened that if the President abuses his power and nominates someone out of the mainstream of American opinion he will oppose the nominee. Sen. Kennedy is not known for his sagacity or clarity of thought, but this is remarkable even for him.

How is it an abuse of power for the President to exercise his constitutional prerogative to nominate anyone he wishes to the Supreme Court? If the candidate is unqualified the Senate can refuse to confirm him or her, but it's just goofy to call a nomination an "abuse" of power. And what constitutes being "out of the mainstream," anyway? Is anyone to Mr. Kennedy's right out of the mainstream? Would Justices Thomas, Scalia, or Rehnquist be out of the American mainstream? Why would a conservative of their stripe be regarded as extreme but former ACLU attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg be acceptable?

But then such questions are idle. Senators Kennedy and Schumer are not interested in rational discussion nor argument. They are interested in imposing their ideological will on the nation through the decisions of the Supreme Court. So, we hope, is Bush. The difference is that Bush has the constitutional right to do it, and the Senators have no right to stop him unless they can muster a majority who feel as they do. All their talk of abuses and mainstreams is so much smoke designed to obscure the fact that their opposition to the president's choices is not at all about qualifications, it's about ideology.

The Big Lie

The Left hyperventilates every time President Bush connects 9/11 to the War on Terror and the WOT to Iraq. They just can't bring themselves to believe that Islamic terrorists like al Qaida and more secular terrorists like Saddam Hussein might actually cooperate. Any claim that they do is regarded by them as another one of Bush's multitudinous lies. They point animatedly at the 9/11 Commission report's finding that no link has been found between Saddam and 9/11 as if that were all the proof they needed that no linkage exists between Saddam and al Qaida.

Melanie Phillips has collated the evidence, however, and as happens with clock-like regularity, it turns out that the President's critics have to simply ignore a mountain of fact in order to maintain that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaida. Here's one significant example of the many she discusses:

The Sunday Telegraph's Con Coughlin, Saddam's biographer, got hold of a top secret memo made available by Iraq's interim government which explicitly linked Saddam's regime to Mohammed Atta, the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11, and the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Written to Saddam by the former head of Iraq's intelligence service, it contained the following incendiary passage:

'Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre - his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision. We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him . . . He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy'.

Note the date: July 1 2001. Note the phrases 'the targets that we have agreed to destroy' and 'under our direct supervision'.

There's much more information like this at her site. Of course, it's not proof, but then nothing would constitute proof for the Left. Even if Hussein admitted that he personally financed the 9/11 operation the Left would protest that he was tortured by Alberto Gonzalez in order to extract the confession from him. These folk are in deep denial. Phillips closes her piece with this:

As I have noted on innumerable occasions, none of this evidence is cast-iron. But there is so much of it, it is simply not credible that Saddam had no links with al Qaeda, even if he was not personally involved in 9/11. And as for his links with other terror outfits, this is indisputable. Saddam's Iraq was the principal training ground for Islamic terrorism.

The anti-western left has, over the course of history, fallen time after time for the propaganda of murderous tyrants who offered a handy platform for bashing the home society by providing the alibi of conscience. The investment of personal, political and moral identity that this represents is so immense that after a short while such gullible dupes are simply incapable of recognizing reality even when it stares them in the face. Hence their stupefaction when confronted with the enormities of Robespierre, Stalin or Mao. To that list must now be added the Islamic jihad and Saddam Hussein. The difference is that this time these useful idiots have taken the middling people of Britain and Europe - and increasingly, it seems, of America - with them into the land of deluded wishful thinking. The result could be that this war against the jihadi terror could be lost -- at home.

Read the whole thing.

Our Amazing Soldiers and Marines

Blackfive has a fascinating account of combat in Fallujah shortly after several American contractors had been killed, their corpses abused and hung from the trestle of a bridge. It's a great read for the Fourth of July and once you start it you won't be able to stop. The courage and toughness of our troops is simply incredible.

Have a great Independence Day.

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

The debate over Intelligent Design usually focuses on the biological component of Design theory and thus many lay-people may be unaware that there is also another, even more powerful design argument based on physics. Some writers have written on this topic for the general public, Hugh Ross, for one, but perhaps the best book I've found that deals with this issue is a work by University of Delaware physicist Stephen Barr. Barr's effort is entitled Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and is an erudite and very comprehensive treatment of the support that contemporary physics gives to belief in a cosmic Designer.

The scope of Barr's study encompasses not only physics but also mathematics, philosophy, and theology. His scholarship and learning are impressive yet the book does not swamp the reader with math or recondite technical concepts. Barr explains the concepts of physics which bear upon the matter of design lucidly and cogently.

The framework upon which the arguments of the book are hung is a comparison of the worldviews of materialism, the belief that matter is all there is and that all phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of material processes, and theism, the belief that behind the phenomena of the world there lies an intelligent mind which has created and ordered the cosmos.

For at least two centuries materialism waxed strong among philosophers and scientists. Materialism was based upon the evidence of our senses, it was the philosophical foundation for science and thus of knowledge. If we couldn't test a hypothesis empirically without invoking immaterial entities and explanations it was dismissed as literal nonsense. Theism was based upon speculation and putative revelation. It was not knowledge, it was faith. Theism began to diminish among educated people during the Enlightenment, and its complete demise was prophesied repeatedly throughout the twentieth century.

Gradually, however, it began to dawn on philosophers and scientists throughout the last century that advances in physics were reversing the momentum that materialism had achieved. It was beginning to become clear that theism was more compatible with the phenomena being discovered by scientists than was materialism and that materialists were having to resort to the most bizarre, untestable hypotheses in order to save their worldview from utter loss.

There were five developments in particular, Barr calls them plot twists, which support the theistic view and which are difficult to explain in terms of materialistic atheism:

1. Big Bang cosmology entails that the universe had a beginning. This is a vindication of the theistic view and a shock to the materialists who were convinced that the universe was eternal.

2. The deep mathematical structure of the universe possesses a beauty, elegance, and complexity that seems incompatible with the materialist notion that the universe just is, that its existence is simply a brute fact that needs no explanation.

3. The physical parameters that govern the universe are so precisely set that deviations of the most exquisitely minute amounts in any one of dozens of these would have made the existence of a universe in which life could emerge and thrive impossible.

4. Increasing evidence from physics, mathematics, cognitive philosophy and neuroscience is leading people who think about these things to the conclusion that there's more to human understanding than just a physical brain. There is increasing evidence that there's something more than matter which comprises our cognitive apparatus.

5. The unfolding of the implications of quantum mechanics has undermined one of the major materialist arguments against free-will, i.e. the idea that in a closed universe there is no opening for freedom. Quantum theory has also raised a powerful argument against materialism in that "a careful analysis of the theory suggests that observers lie, at least in part, outside of the description provided by physics." In other words, one of the entailments of quantum physics, some are arguing, is that there must be something about observers of physical systems that is itself non-physical.

There are, Barr argues, only three ways to explain these phenomena naturalistically: They are the product either of the laws of nature, natural selection, or chance. He argues that only the last of these avoids logical difficulties which beset the other two. Even so, for the universe and life to have arisen in the form it has by chance requires that the materialist resort to "infinities of unobservables." They have to posit an infinitely existing universe or an infinite number of disparate universes, or an infinite number of discrete domains in the present universe, or a near infinite number of planets (to account for the emergence of life), or they have to posit an infinite number of worlds constantly splitting as observations and choices occur. As Barr says, "It seems that to abolish one unobservable God, it takes an infinite number of unobservable substitutes."

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith goes into a great deal of detail about each of these developments or plot twists, and although some of it may seem a little arcane, particularly the discussion of symmetries in physics, almost all of it is quite accessible to the interested layman.

As mentioned above, this is one of the best books available on the contemporary argument for the existence of a transcendent intelligence based on the physical facts of the cosmos. We recommend it to anyone interested in the intersection of science, religion, and philosophy. A published review of it can be found here and the book can be ordered here.

Helping Africa

Amidst all the talk about yesterday's Live 8 concerts and the G8 summit talks Herb London suggests a few pointed questions. Recalling that twenty years ago similar concerts (called Live Aid) were held which raised a couple of billion dollars for African relief he wonders what ever became of that money? Who received it? What was it used for?Who is accountable for it?

"Moreover," he notes, "over the last decade government and private charities have poured over $25 billion into Africa for seemingly little effect. In fact, Africa has had an aggregate g.d.p. reduction of about 25 percent since the Live Aid concerts two decades ago."

Live Aid was derisively called Band Aid by some who argued that unless the corruption which causes poverty on that continent is removed, financial aid is little more than putting a band aid on a gangrenous limb. Throwing money at poverty salves the conscience and makes us feel like we're doing something noble, but if, as Peter Baur, the father of development economics noted, "foreign aid is little more than poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries," then are we really doing anything other than wasting precious resources?

As Hudson says:

Without question the issue at hand is poverty in Africa, but overlooked by well meaning rockers is that as long as tyrannical governments control the distribution of funds those targeted for relief never get it. Starvation is indeed a problem in many parts of Africa, most especially in the Sudan. But in this nation emergency food relief sent by the U.S. and others is used as a weapon to subjugate designated enemies of the government. This has been a pattern observed earlier in Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

"Eliminating poverty anywhere in the world," he goes on to say, "is a worthwhile, if utopian, goal. But, money alone won't do it when those funds aren't used to address the problem. All the serenades of 'We Are The World' and 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' won't amount to a hill of beans unless there is accountability for the billions of dollars that will be contributed."

It is ironic that the people who are most concerned about the terrible level of poverty in Africa are relatively mute about demanding the ouster of the tyrannies which are responsible for it. Perhaps the attention currently being focused on the suffering of the African people will cause a few of those whose hearts sincerely break over the deprivation and misery of these people to realize that in order to bring relief and justice to those in need one must sometimes employ force. Throwing money at the poor just empowers their oppressors and makes their problems even more severe.

Condign Punishment

Brother Bill opines re the BTK killer that:

Personally, I think we should be reading in the news that he "tried to escape" whereby he grabbed a gun from a guard, saw no way out, and shot himself in the head...five or six times.

Bill is showing his compassionate side. What he suggests would actually be kinder than what Rader deserves.

PC "Journalism"

How's this for an amazing piece of media America-bashing? In an article on an elderly woman's birthday in Amsterdam, Reuters seizes the opportunity to shoehorn into the story a ludicrously irrelevant swipe at the U.S., from the 19th century, no less:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch woman who swears by a daily helping of herring for a healthy life celebrated her 115th birthday on Wednesday as the oldest living person on record.

Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, a former needlework teacher, was born in 1890, the year Sioux Indians were massacred by the U.S. military at the Battle of Wounded Knee.

The passionate soccer fan celebrated her birthday in a nursing home in the northern Dutch town of Hoogeveen.

It's a classic specimen of a PC social announcement, one which will be taught at journalism schools to future generations of journalistic novices eager to learn how it's done. Thanks for the tip to Jonah at The Corner.

Despite the utter dopiness exhibited by the writer of the piece, it does inspire one to consider a possible career as a composer of such announcements for Reuters. It seems like easy money. Here are a few of our practice efforts in case they ask to see a resumè of our work:

Joe and Flora Dillone will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary on July 6th. They were married exactly one month before American planes, without warning, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan incinerating 150,000 people in seconds. The Dillones have six children and twenty grand and great-grandchildren.

Frank Standish will be retiring this month from New Tool and Die works of Smithville, PA. Mr. Standish has been with the company for thirty seven years starting as an apprentice in 1968 shortly after U.S. troops under Lt. William Calley massacred 128 civilian Vietnamese at a village named My Lai in a typical act of American savagery during that war.

The Upper River High School class of 2000 will be holding their fifth year class reunion next week to celebrate the anniversary of their graduation in a year fraught with historical significance. It was in that year Republican George Bush, guided by the shadowy, Rasputin-like figure of Karl Rove, stole a national presidential election from Democrat Al Gore who actually had more votes than did Bush.

You get the idea. I bet we'd win the job if we applied.

Here's One To Watch

China's CNOOC, the third largest petroleum company in China (and state owned) wants to buy UNOCAL, a petroleum company in California, in an effort, no doubt, to secure oil reserves to fuel their burgeoning economy. Chevron Corp. has offered $16 billion for UNOCAL and CNOOC has offered $18 billion.

Some congressmen see this as a threat to our national security (sadly, only 40 of them.).

This is creating a dilemma that I knew would occur eventually and the implications could be huge. What we have here is a nation that has accepted US dollars in transactions for goods and services. The US dollar is a promise to pay and lawful tender for all debts public and private. In other words, as declared by the issuing country, these dollars cannot be refused.

In a capitalist economy, the shareholders of UNOCAL are entitled to receive the best offer for the company maximizing the value of their shares.

If it is the case that CNOOC (China) is not allowed to buy UNOCAL, China will undoubtedly question the benefit of holding so many US dollars as the purchasing power of this "money" appears to be limited.

A case can be made that there appears to be double standard regarding the true convertibility of US dollars into wealth. If China comes to this conclusion, it could have a major impact on all things economic in this country as the inflow of dollars from China are largely responsible for keeping our economy afloat.

Read more at the link.

Molly Math

Michelle Malkin calls our attention to this astonishing confabulation from the pen of Texas fantasist Molly Ivins:

Since my name is Molly Ivins and I speak for myself, I'll tell you exactly why I opposed invading Iraq: because I thought it would be bad for this country, our country, my country. I opposed the invasion out of patriotism, and that is the reason I continue to oppose it today.

I think it has done nothing but harm to the United States of America. I think we have created more terrorists than we faced to start with and that our good name has been sullied. I think we have alienated our allies and have killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did.

Really? We're responsible for more than a million dead Iraqis? An e-mailer to Michelle Malkin totes up the numbers:

Take estimates of 500,000-1 million soldiers and civilians killed in the Iran-Iraq war triggered by Saddam Hussein, add the 400,000 dead Iraqi civilians USAID estimates to be in at least 53 mass graves found in Iraq so far, and then add the very conservative estimate of 22,000 dead as a result of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait=1,422,000.

Even using iraqbodycount.net's high-end estimate of 25,000 dead (total, by both sides) the numbers aren't even close, unless you use MollyMath, where a couple of ten thousand and some change is worth more than a million.

In a world where an insistence upon objective truth is seen as a droll vestige of an obsolete oppressive white male mindset, it may seem churlish of us to call attention to Ms Ivins' tenuous acquaintance with factual reality. Nevertheless, we can't help but be amazed that a nationally syndicated columnist, even taking into consideration that she's a liberal, would write such a howler. She'd have looked less foolish, perhaps, had she not made such a point of telling us that she was speaking for herself.

Losing Hearts and Minds

Strategy Page reveals al Zarqawi's plan for winning hearts and minds in Iraq:

Suicide bombers have largely been foreigners. As Iraqis are quick to point out, Iraqis are not into this sort of thing. Neither are the foreigners any more, many of them refusing to undertake missions that just kill Iraqi civilians. So more and more suicide bombers are not volunteers, but men kidnapped and told to carry out the mission, or see family members killed. The bodies of car bombers have been found handcuffed to the steering wheel. Many suicide car bombers have dual detonation systems, one under the control of the driver, another under the control of a distant "supervisor," ready to set the bomb off if the suicide bomber is seen to get confused, or tries to get away from his fate.

The sage thinkers at Move On.org insist we get out of Iraq now and let the chips fall where they may. Where they'd fall, of course, is right into the lap of the people who have no qualms about threatening someone's family unless he kills himself along with a slew of innocent children. Move On doesn't seem to care, though. It's easy to blow the trumpet for retreat, of course, when it's not one's own friends and family that will be targeted for death.

From John Hathaway...

It appears that Mr. Hathaway is a proponent of "Free Gold". "Free Gold" is the term given to the concept whereby gold and fiat currency coexist. In such a scenario, gold serves as a store of wealth and currency is used as a convenient means of conducting everyday transactions.

While one may say, "That's the way things are today.", that is not the case. Gold is not free to express it's true value. Central Banks have been on a campaign to sell their gold holdings into the open market, thereby depressing the price of gold and stifling the measure of inflation.

Additionally, bullion banks have leased gold to private entities at a lease rate of incredibly low levels of interest. The private entities, in turn, sell the gold (causing the price of gold to drop) and use the proceeds for other investments that pay a higher rate of return than the cost of the lease. Later, they buy gold at the lower price and return it to the bullion banks. This is known as the gold carry trade.

This practice fell out of vogue as global interest rates declined over the last five years and, to no surprise, there has been a coincident increase in the price of gold over the same time period.

From the link:

Capital flows into gold under one scenario only: when the lack of investment returns elsewhere, the desire for safety, and the ascendance of a risk-averse psychology at large converge.

In other words, investors come to gold through a process of elimination. It is an odyssey of discovery and realization that investment vehicles thought to be potentially rewarding are in fact filled with hazard and adversity. The current gold cycle began with the collapse of the Nasdaq bubble. The collapse eliminated investor passion for highly speculative equities with little or no operating history trading at absurd valuations. That was five years ago and marked the beginning of a secular downturn in credit. The Nasdaq peak represented the culmination of a credit cycle that commenced in June 1982, when 30 year treasuries were priced to yield 13.92%

The high water mark of the credit cycle, in our opinion, should be measured not by the quantity of debt outstanding, as some would argue. Surely, the Fed's energetic effort to prop up the post 2000 economy has resulted in significantly more debt outstanding than before the Nasdaq crash. Instead, the apex of the credit cycle must be identified in a less quantifiable manner. It is the degree of fantasy present in investor expectations as to future returns. The fact that there is more General Motors paper outstanding than five years ago is not due to GM's improved credit standing or a heightened level of expectations for returns. Obviously, the reality is quite the opposite. A most useful objective measure of credit excess (and fantasy) is the ratio of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the price of an ounce of gold. The DJII traded at 40x the price of an ounce of gold in 2000. Today, that ratio is 24x. At the bottom of credit cycles in the previous 100 years, that ratio was more or less 1x. A rising gold price merely anticipates future downgrades in financial assets of all stripes, including equities, debt, and currencies.

...

The global market cap of mining shares is about $100 billion. Investing in shares is subject to a long list of risks including geopolitical, cost pressures, labor disruptions, mine accidents, and environmental lawsuits to name a few. However, the greatest risk by far is share dilution by financially unsophisticated managements. Over the last two years ending December 31, 2004, the share count for the entire industry rose 33%. Is it any wonder that the shares and share indexes have lost some momentum in light of the additional supply? We wholeheartedly support the scathing comments of Graham French speaking at a mining conference in April of this year: "This industry is so blas? that 90 percent of capital raising is done without consulting shareholders." We would add that the industry consumes huge quantities of capital on which it generates poor returns. It cannot afford to take its shareholders for granted.

While we favor gold shares in most instances over the metal because they offer leverage to the gold price, we can understand why risk-averse investors looking for the protection of gold without the risk of mining would prefer the metal itself. Gold entails no business risk, only the possibility of overpaying. In our view, the potential pool of risk averse investors is considerably larger than the share oriented risk tolerant investor group. Physical gold comprises an asset class at least 10 times that of the mining shares. Therefore in time, it seems reasonable to expect the ETF and similar initiatives to have a market cap proportional in size to the underlying disparity. The recent weakness in the gold shares is a good proxy for investor sentiment. It is at rock bottom. This is confirmed by the Hulbert Gold Newsletter Sentiment Index which has recently matched record low readings. The May 23rd Market Vane sentiment gold barometer was 61% bulls, the lowest since 57% on May 13, 2004 when gold was $379. The bullish consensus was in the 40's in April '03 when gold was $320. The peak recent reading was 83% in October of 2004 when the gold price was slightly below $430.

The dollar price of gold bullion is trading within 3% of a seventeen year high, despite negative sentiment. Over the past five years, the dollar gold price has increased 50% vs. a 16% decline in the S&P 500 and a 18% decline for the trade weighted dollar. Swooning sentiment while gold trades within a few percentage points away from a seventeen-year high? Sounds like a bull market to us. It is the nature of every bull market to take along as few as possible. The recent shakeout, which began in earnest in early March, has done an excellent job of chilling investment sentiment. The early stages of all bull markets are characterized by widespread skepticism. Gold remains in a multiyear bull market that will last another decade. The deflowering of the euro represents a major milestone along the way.

...

We believe that the divestiture of gold reserves by central banks (at a measured pace, of course) offers the possibility of the eventual privatization of gold. There could be no better monetary outcome for the private sector than for all gold to be removed from central bank vaults. Citizens would then be free to choose how to hold their wealth, as they did before legal tender laws became the standard. We have no doubt that sufficient buying power exists through the exchange of questionable paper assets to support a bid much higher than the current dollar price. Would it be possible for gold instruments such as the ETF and Bank Receipts to coexist with fiat currencies? We may be witnessing the dawn of just such an outcome. In a free market for both, gold would offer the superior alternative for capital preservation, while fiat currencies may periodically offer a more convenient medium of exchange.

Nearly sixty years ago, Beardsley Ruml (Chairman of the New York Fed) wrote: "The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency" is no longer true because of the "vast new experience in the management of central banks" and "the elimination, for domestic purposes, of the convertibility of currency into gold." (American Affairs, Jan. 1946) These few phrases foreshadow the sixty year evolution of the Federal Reserve from a traditional central bank into a central planning agency. (See our web site article "Beardsley Ruml's Road to Ruin," November 2004) Convenient though government sponsored currencies such as the dollar and the euro may be, they are first and foremost tools of government policy and serve the interests of the private economy as an afterthought. The dichotomy of monetary interest between the public and private sector will be exposed as the current secular credit contraction runs its course. It will culminate in a grass roots mandate for sound money, and will be expressed as a dollar gold price well into four digits.

WSC

This Indian is Hip Deep in Buffalo Dip

Trey Jackson has links to video and audio of Ward Churchill, phony Indian, fraudulent scholar, and hero to Left-wingers everywhere, uttering these words:

"For those of you who do, as a matter of principle, oppose war in any form, the idea of supporting a conscientious objector who's already been inducted in his combat service in Iraq might have a certain appeal. But let me ask you this: Would you render the same level of support to someone who hadn't conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit?"

"...Conscientious objection removes a given piece of cannon fodder from the fray. Fragging an officer has a much more impactful effect." - Ward Churchill, Portland, Oregon- 6/23/05

Churchill denies any malevolent intent, of course, but its hard to interpret him in any fashion other than endorsing the murder of American officers. Here is an excerpt from the Denver Post story:

Reached at his home in Boulder County on Wednesday night, Churchill said the comments were made merely to spark discussion and not to take a position on fragging, which is the killing or injuring of an officer in combat by a subordinate. He said that his remarks were being taken out of context and sensationalized in an effort to drive him from his job as a CU professor.

"I neither advocated nor suggested to anyone, anything," Churchill said. "I asked them to think about where they stood on things." According to the tape, Churchill, while speaking about being a conscientious objector, asked his audience:

"Would you render the same support to someone who hadn't conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit?"

When one of the forum's attendees said that the impact such a fragging might have on the officer's family should be considered, Churchill replied, "How do you feel about Adolf Eichmann's family?"

Churchill has been accused of plagiarism, academic fraud and misrepresenting his Native American heritage. He is under investigation by the school's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct.

Now the man is advocating murder. How long will he continue to draw a paycheck from the University of Colorado and the taxpayers who help fund it?

The Evil Men Do

If ever you've been inclined to think that no one deserves to be executed by the state or you have ever wondered whether evil really exists or is just an outdated religious concept, you should watch this.

Watch both parts and see if you can honestly say to yourself that this man does not deserve to die.