Depleted Uranium

Migration To WordPress

2007-02-03T19:29:00.000Z

Depleted Uranium has moved to WordPress here.

http://depleteduranium.wordpress.com/

Farewell Google, and thanks for all the fish!

Google's Last Post

2007-02-03T13:12:00.000Z

Google has demanded I register with it immediately to continue using Blogger. Since I consider Google complicit in the enslavement of the Chinese people, today will be my last Blogger posts.

Google is racing to buy users, and having bought them, to first lock them in and then make money from them - that's capitalism.

Since buying Blogger, Google has developed a new version that requires Google registration. Until today that's been an option, but now it has announced registration is mandatory to blog after today.

Google collaborates with the Chinese tyrants by censoring the searches of their captive peoples. Its creepy founders say this is no different from the elected US government tracking communications with foreign terrorists.

I'm guessing they'll delete blogs that don't register, so have archived all posts.

If I can find a less flawed organization to host this blog today, I'll post a link.

Otherwise, thanks for your interest and support.

Israel Alone (2)

2007-02-02T18:22:00.000Z

The political battle around Israel's defense against Kassam and Katyusha rockets suggests its pols expect a US arms embargo.

Short range missile defense options are:

- C-RAM, a battle tested US system that's available now. It's short range, but very effective for point defense.

- THEL, a US-developed laser weapon that would cost several billions to deploy but be effective against all targets and - with its 5 Km range - provide area defense.

- an Israeli developed anti-missile rocket.

The Defense Minister just opted for the third solution, even though it will take 2 years to deploy (my emphasis):

The system chosen by the defense minister is dubbed “Iron Dome”, manufactured by RAFAEL Armament Development Authority Ltd.

"Israel requires an additional security layers for the home front that will allow for more political freedom and provide more security for the population," Peretz said.

That's probably triggered by this:

A preliminary report by the American government has confirmed allegations Israel used American-made cluster bombs against civilian targets during last year's war in Lebanon in violation of an agreement with Washington.

The findings of the US state department's initial inquiry, which was passed to Congress, showed Israel broke an undertaking only to use the weapons against military targets.

"There were likely violations," said Sean McCormack, the state department spokesman.

Hizbollah launched all of its rockets from civilian areas, so State is being its usual slimy self in condemning Israel's "violations". As it happens, the Israelis make their own - rather better - cluster munitions. If they didn't they'd now be facing a US embargo of a crucial homeland defense against Hizbollah's next attack.

But now the Prime Minster has intervened on the missile defense issue

Defense Minister Amir Peretz's decision to choose a short-range rocket defense system developed by Rafael - Israel's Armament Development Authority - as the system the defense establishment will develop to defend Israel against Kassam rockets has apparently sparked off a new argument between him and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Olmert is probably objecting because Condoleezza Rice told him to - his recent transfer of $100 million to the Palestinians while they continue to rocket Israel only makes sense as a response to State pressure.

RAFAEL should develop the weapon whatever Olmert decrees. Eventually the Israelis will replace him with a more robust leader who will buy the weapon. Plus it will make a great export.

Chinese Junk In Orbit

2007-02-02T16:58:00.000Z

Eighteen days after the Chinese Communists tested their satellite-killer, the Hubble telescope went dark. It's possible these events are related, but even if they aren't, the Chinese have shown they can interdict near-earth space, where our intel satellites fly.

I initially figured the Chinese weapon was a paper tiger, since using it would be a very expensive act of war. But they may be smarter than I thought.

The test and its aftermath (my ellipsis):

The Chinese test, carried out on Jan. 11, was at once complex and very simple. An old weather satellite, passing 537 miles overhead, was targeted by a missile launched from a Chinese military base. The missile hit the satellite with deadly precision. The missile carried no bomb because it didn't need one. The satellite was pulverized by the impact.

But what followed was chaos in space. As of today, Kelso (a surveillance specialist) reports that American radar is tracking at least 525 pieces of debris from the collision -- each at least the size of a baseball.
There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller ones.

The pieces are gradually spreading out in a ring around the Earth, creating a vast area where spacecraft face increased danger of being hit.

"We've already seen in the range of 500 to 600 events where some piece of debris from this one event was coming within 5 kilometers [about 3 miles] of some payload," said Kelso.

Debris much smaller than the size of a baseball can knock out a satellite, and 18 days later:

The primary camera on the Hubble Space Telescope has shut down and is likely to be only marginally restored, NASA said Monday, a collapse one astronomer called "a great loss"...An initial investigation determined its backup power supply had failed, NASA said.

The Hubble needs servicing, so this may be coincidence. But it's a reminder that China could, with a few more such "tests", apparently innocently sterilize the 400 to 500 mile orbital band that's used by our intel satellites.

That probably this explains this tough reaction (my emphasis):

The Bush administration has suspended plans to develop space ventures with China, including joint exploration of the moon, in reaction to Beijing's Jan. 11 test of an anti-satellite weapon that left orbiting debris threatening U.S. and foreign satellites.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Jason Sharp said the weapon test undermined an agreement reached between President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao during an April summit.

"We believe China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the constructive relationship that our presidents have outlined, including on civil space cooperation," Mr. Sharp said.

He said there were "some initial discussions looking at where there were mutual interests where we could cooperate with the Chinese," but there are no plans for future discussions. The two presidents had hoped to work on joint moon exploration and space-debris avoidance.

I hope we're deploying lots of surveillance UAVs to Taiwan - our intel satellites could be a wasting asset.

In Their Hearts They Know They're Idiots

2007-01-31T18:18:00.000Z

The Canadian Prime Minister observes, correctly, that the Kyoto treaty is a socialist scheme. And his critics confirm that global warming theory is an apocalyptic religion, not a scientific theory.

Mr Harper (via Drudge):

He says Kyoto requires that Canada make significant cuts in emissions, while countries like Russia, India and China face less of a burden.
Under Kyoto, Canada was required to reduce emissions by six per cent by 2012, while economies in transition, like Russia, were allowed to choose different base years.

"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations," Harper's letter reads.

How true, although its presented by the Canadian equivalent of the BBC as if he'd revealed a penchant for snacking on babies.

Presumably inadvertently, the piece then neatly exposes the mindset of the global warmers:

Liberal MP Mark Holland told the Canadian Press on Tuesday that the leaked letter shows that Harper isn't actually committed to climate change.

Of course one should never be "committed" to a scientific theory, since all but the most recent have been disproved, and its only a matter of time before they bite the dust.

That's because science advances through a cycle of measurement, and theorization plus prediction - as soon as the theory fails to predict correctly, it's discarded. Global Warming theory does not predict historic climate change, so as a theory at least it has ceased to be.

The author of this book shrewdly observes that the supporters of discredited theories always try to censor discussion of alternatives; hence even Canadian Liberals know the game is up.

Bolton's Hubris and Nemesis

2007-01-29T16:54:00.000Z

Saturday was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when the world observes Holocaust Memorial Day. Except, that is, for the northern Brit town of Bolton - it followed Muslim policy and opted out. This hubris will be followed by nemesis.

The Hubris

Holocaust:

The Jews of Europe were the most numerous of the victims of the Holocaust in what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"...or "the cleaning"... It is commonly stated that approximately six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, though estimates by historians using, among other sources, records from the Nazi regime itself, range from five million to seven million.

Brit Muslims:

The Muslim Council of Britain...currently maintains a policy of refusing to send official representatives to any of the official events associated with Holocaust Memorial Day.
In September 2005, Muslim advisers to Tony Blair suggested the event be ended and replaced with a Genocide Day, which would commemorate victims of all genocides without attributing uniqueness to the Holocaust.

The Nemesis

January 2007

Bolton axes Holocaust Memorial Service:

Widespread criticism has been levelled at Bolton Council for scrapping the town's annual Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony.

Town Hall chiefs have instead decided to hold an event as part of a genocide memorial day in June. The council says that would be more inclusive.

A poll of young Brit Muslims found (among other insanities):

Forty per cent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 said they would prefer to live under sharia law in Britain, a legal system based on the teachings of the Koran. The figure among over-55s, in contrast, was only 17 per cent.
In some countries, people found guilty under sharia law face penalties such as beheading, stoning, the severing of a hand or being lashed.

January 2017

Fox News reports:

Cops Hunt Islamophobes.
British police mounted a major manhunt for hooligans who rioted in the northern town of Bolton last night. The riots caused extensive damage to many of the city's 40 mosques.
The riots followed Bolton's hosting of England's first execution under sharia law.
Following Iranian precedent, a woman was hanged from a crane on the town's Victoria Square. The 15 year old woman was convicted by a sharia court of having sex prior to marriage with a 50-year old man. Sharia courts were given authority in designated areas of England under the "Ramadan Agreement" between the Muslim Council of Britain and Prime Minister Cameron.

To preserve the privacy of the perpetrator's family and her victim, her identity cannot be revealed. However a 10 minute video of the hanging is available on Snuff Google.
Greater Manchester police have issued a Hate Speech Suppression Order to all British news media. This means that adverse reflections on these lawful events will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law under the Religious Hate Speech Act (2012).

January 2027

AP reports:

The British government reported the elimination of the North of England Caliphate, marking the "Final Clearance" of the UK.
After last week's fall of Manchester, Deportation Authority Forces subdued the neighboring town of Bolton. Armored forces backed by RAF Lightening ground support bombers, and Army attack helicopters swept through the town, engaging insurgents in the town's 60 mosques, all of which were destroyed with UAV-mounted laser cannon.
A "Churchill" mini-neutron bomb were employed to cleanse fanatics from the National Heritage listed Town Hall, which suffered little material damage to its historic fabric.
This final elimination of the caliphate and its peoples from England was welcomed by the Prime Minister as she entered Downing Street. "Rejoice, Rejoice! she cried to assembled reporters.
The Deportation Authority announced a total of 350,000 insurgents and their families have now been shipped to the Islamic Reservation in the north of the former Pakistan, and a further 75,000 were en route, escorted by 4 super carriers of the Republic of India. With the elimination of the caliphate, a further 20,000 survivors remain to be deported.

January 2037

BBC World reports:

The council of the English town of Bolton has declined to observe Caliphate Memorial Day, which marks the elimination of Islam's last bastion in the UK.
A spokesman said "Of course we regret the destruction of European Islam, and the death of 20 million Muslims. But they died in accordance with their belief in death, whereas our lads who died cleansing them wanted life. Our thoughts will be with them on Remembrance Sunday."

Twilight Of The Vanities

2007-01-27T17:33:00.000Z

Brit cops are turning into political hit men as Blair fades from power. Unless the president hangs tough, the US faces the same fate over the next two years.

Brit cops are hunting political targets, leaving the bad guys to run free.

The cops are hunting Blair by leaking fantastic tales:

Police used computer experts to obtain confidential material, and are also believed to have approached Number 10's internet suppliers to gain access to government email records.
....

The cash-for-honours investigation took another dramatic twist last night after it was alleged that detectives had uncovered a secret computer network at Downing Street from which potentially crucial emails had been deleted.

This is nonsense.

"Government email records" are highly protected. For example, all systems at Number 10 will be TEMPEST rated, preventing external eavesdropping. Plus the emails will be encrypted and their servers heavily protected against intrusion and attack.

If the cops "computer experts" successfully hacked this system, a) they committed a criminal offense, and b) the Security Services personnel responsible for the security of government communications should be fired.

And of course if the highly compromising emails were deleted, how come the cops know they were "potentially critical"? Anyway, this confirms it's a political hit:

Police are expected to report to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide if there should be any prosecution, next month. ITV News said that charges were unlikely because of the difficulties of proving any criminal intent.

Meanwhile (my emphasis):

Scotland Yard is close to submitting a report to the Crown Prosecution Service to ask it to consider whether there are grounds to extradite a Russian businessman in connection with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, it was claimed last night...

Downing Street, fearing major damage to Anglo-Russian relations because of emerging evidence that there was a "state-related" Russian source of the polonium, is alleged by Yard insiders to have asked police to keep quiet about the inquiry.

Actually, the cops are bound in law to "keep quiet" about inquiries except in tightly controlled circumstances.

While all this is going on, the cops have left untouched Muslim preachers who were shown on Brit TV committing serious criminal offenses.

It may not matter much if Brit cops paralyze its government, but if the same happens in the US, the world will be left to the tender mercies of the North Koreans, Chinese, Russians, and Iranians.

Incidentally, I'm not a fan of Blair - I think he's a manipulative fantasist with lousy management skills. But I am a fan of the Brit police, and detest their degradation by Blair's enemies.

Italian Lessons For Iraq

2007-01-26T18:02:00.000Z

Iraq is a brave attempt to bring democracy to a brutalized people. But it seems increasingly probable it won't work, because the level of corruption and associated low social capital can't support a democracy.

These dark thoughts are occasioned by four days trying and failing to put a deal together in Italy - a nation halfway between the US and Iraq in its corruption level.

A measure of the amount of social capital - and hence trust - in a nation is its Corruption Perceptions Index rating, which tracks corruption in public officials. Finland is least corrupt with a score of 9.6, the UK comes 11th equal with a score of 8.6, and the US is 20th equal with a score of 7.3 (I suspect dragged down by the likes of Louisiana).

Italy comes 45th, with a score of 4.9, the most corrupt of the "old" EU nations other than Greece, which scores 4.4.

Buying real estate in Italy is an agonizing process - we've had three deals fall through when the vendor upped the agreed price after he thought we were hooked. That's typical of a low trust society.

We live part of the year in another nation that scores somewhere between Italy and the US, and as previously noted observe the people there gain social cachet from behaving dishonestly and selfishly.

Modern economies and democracies depend on contracts, both based on trust. Absent that, economic players spend a lot of their time insuring against breach, while politicians play that game for money, not vanity. So, in spite of the enormous talents of the Italian people, their economy struggles to keep up with the other EU nations, and their politics are a corrupt farce The low CPI might even explain the very low Italian birth rate - marriage is a contract!

Now consider Iraq. It has a CPI score of 1.9, making it the third most corrupt nation in the world - even the Iranian kleptocracy comes in at 2.7. If Italy struggles at 4.9, its hard to see Iraq building a modern, democratic economy at 2.7.

There's some hope - Iraq will likely hide islands of integrity, and if the US does concede defeat, perhaps those islands will survive - the Kurds for example.

But if we can't help corrupt nations to modernize, their future is bleak,

Cellphones and Security

2007-01-22T19:14:00.000Z

Brit security often combines maximum inconvenience for consumers with zero added safety. X-raying babies' shoes at airports is an example - and here's another on their tracking of cellphones.

We live in three separate countries, so use SIM-free cellphones, plugging in local SIMs when we get off the plane - that saves paying over $2/minute for local calls.

Cellphones broadcast for each call a) the phone's unique ID, and b) the SIM card's unique ID. So if you have a database of phone and SIM IDs linked to the names and addresses of their owners, you track who makes calls to who, and when.

I just tried to replace my phone in the UK, and found all Brit online stores won't deliver unless you provide some mix of name, address, age, DoB and occupation. The one I chose then accessed the (I thought private) Brit Electoral Register to check if I'm registered to vote at my address & finding I wasn't demanded an identity thief's cocktail of utility bills, passports and driving licenses "to confirm my identity". This is vastly more intrusive than the credit checking imposed by the folks who sold me my ThinkPad - which costs 10 times the phone.

The SIM purchase process also requires an address - but that's not verified, so you can invent one.

So it seems the Brits track cellphone calls.

That sounds like it would help catch terrorists looking to repeat the Madrid or London bombings. But it wouldn't - any sane terrorist will buy phones anonymously from a Pakistani market stall, and UK SIMs using false addresses.

So the net is an incremental cost for non-terrorists and no security gain.

And I'm buying my SIM-free cellphone in Italy.

Blair, State Criminal (2)

2007-01-22T18:27:00.000Z

Blair is finding that undermining the rule of law hurts him just as much as the Northern Irish.

There's currently a fuss about him giving Lordships etc in return for cash contributions to his Labour party. I think this is overblown - all politicians reward their supporters this way, and absent a smoking gun, it's impossible to prove linkage.

Still, Blair is now weak, so his enemies have set the cops on him, IRA style:

One of Tony Blair's most senior advisers was arrested in the cash-for-honours probe today on suspicion of perverting the course of justice and over alleged honours offences.
Ruth Turner, No 10's Director of Government Relations, was arrested at her home in London this morning. She was questioned at a London police station and bailed to return pending further inquiries.

So she was arrested without charge, questioned without charge, and had to post bail to obtain her freedom. And presumably, since she wasn't charged, she wasn't read the Brit version of her Miranda rights or allowed to call her lawyer. That's dirty pool.

Still, it'll cheer up the poor bloody Northern Irish.

The bad news is that Brits have to live with the loss of their ancient Common Law rights. As William Penn observed:

"... However, this I leave upon your Consciences, who are of the Jury (and my sole Judges) that if these Ancient Fundamental Laws, which relate to Liberty and Property, and (are not limited to particular Persuasions in Matters of Religion) must not be indispensably maintained and observed, Who can say he hath Right to the Coat upon his Back? ..."

Blair, State Criminal (1)

2007-01-22T17:10:00.000Z

Tony Blair boasts of installing democracy in Northern Ireland, while handing the province to IRA criminals. Their latest coup is a hit on the cops who fought the them to a standstill.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC):

...was the police force in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 2001. At its peak the force had around 8500 officers with a further 4500 reservists...

303 officers were killed and over 9000 were injured during the troubles (mid-1960s to late 1990s), of whom 277 were killed in attacks by the...IRA.

That's a higher casualty rate than the Brit Army in Iraq, every year for 30 years. But they died in vain - Blair folded to the IRA, abolishing the RUC and replacing it with the Police Service of Northern Ireland - dropping "Royal" to emphasize the new cops serve the Irish, not Brits.

The RUC (and Brit army) had defeated the IRA when Blair took power and folded to the terrorists. Not surprisingly, they've used his support ever since to pursue RUC cops. Here's their latest (my ellipsis):

The Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch protected a paramilitary gang linked to 15 murders while members were run as police informers, a report said today.
The report published today by Nuala O’Loan, Northern Ireland’s police ombudsman, revealed the extent of police...collusion that gave (a Brit Loyalist) and his henchmen a form of immunity from the law.
Police agents with the Mount Vernon UVF were linked to 10 murders, 10 attempted murders, 13 punishment attacks, a bomb attack on Sinn Fein offices in Monaghan, drug-dealing, criminal damage, extortion and intimidation.

That sounds pretty conclusive, and you'd expect the perps to be waiting trial. Except they aren't, because (my ellipsis):

No police officers are expected to be prosecuted in connection with the report, because of a lack of evidence.

So this woman is just another IRA catspaw using Blair's cover to libel brave men and women and tarnish the memories of their 10,000 dead and wounded.

Adam Smith said "there's a lot of ruin in a nation". In destroying the rule of law, Blair has ruined the wretched Northern Irish.

I Shot The Infidel, er, Armenian

2007-01-21T18:44:00.000Z

There are two quite different accounts in the Brit quality media of the murder of a brave Turkish-Armenian - which do you believe?

London Sunday Telegraph (my emphasis):

A prominent Turkish journalist who campaigned for Armenian rights was shot outside his office in central Istanbul by suspected Turkish nationalists yesterday, days after saying he had received anonymous death threats....

Witnesses said the assailant was a teenager wearing a white cap and jeans. "He shouted 'I shot the infidel' as he ran away," said Muharrem Gozutok, a restaurant owner.

London Sunday Times (my emphasis):

Witnesses said that as Dink, who had received numerous threats, emerged he was shot three times in the nape of the neck by a young man. His murderer fled, shouting, “I have killed an Armenian”.

The two accounts can be logically related, since Armenians are Christians, and hence - to a Muslim - infidels. But the words "Armenian" and "Infidel" must surely be quite different in Turkish, since the former describes a racial group of millions, while the latter identifies us 5 billion "kuffaars".

So either the Telegraph wants to give the impression that Turkey is infested with Muslim killers, or the Times wishes to hide that fact.

Arrest The Brit Muslim Godfathers

2007-01-21T14:36:00.000Z

The trial of the July 21 London bombers began last week, and a TV documentary showed Muslim leaders committing and soliciting multiple crimes including mass murder. The cops responded with a deafening silence. That's a shame, because if this criminal incitement isn't stopped soon, Brits are ready to turn on all Muslims.

The TV is on LGF here, and a summary here.

The program shows named Muslim leaders preaching directly, via video link, and through DVDs. The individuals committed directly, or incited others to commit, the following criminal acts:

Sedition: The overthrow of the Brit democracy and sovereign and its replacement by an Islamic dictatorship over native Brits (the preachers call us Kuffaars).

Treason: Praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.

Murder: Of apostates, homosexuals, Jews and Brits.

Sexism: Stating that women should be treated as inferior beings.

Pedophilia: Advocating men marry prepubescent kids.

Child abuse: Advocating the beating of 8 year old girls who refuse to wear veils.

The crimes were committed at mosques in Birmingham, Derby, and London and the perps were Saudi, Brit, and American. They were all named and clearly IDd, so can easily be tracked and (if in the UK) apprehended.

Tne trial of the second (failed) wave of London bombers, told us this:

The CCTV footage showed Ramzi Mohammed, 25, wearing a rucksack and boarding the busy Northern Line Tube at Stockwell, south London. He turned his back towards a mother with a child in a pushchair before detonating his device. The detonator exploded, although the main charge, made up of liquid hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour, failed to go off.

This pervert and his fellow would-be killers were incited by the likes of the above, so it's essential Brit police arrest and charge them.

If they don't, people will deal with the problem themselves - not difficult given the Muslim custom of congregating in mosques.

Most Brit Muslims are decent people working hard to assimilate, so that would be a tragedy.

Wayne's (and Kenneth's) World

2007-01-20T19:27:00.000Z

Devotees of the ageless Yes Prime Minister will be delighted to see the State Department displaying traditional Foreign Office craftsmanship.

State (my emphasis):

US contingency planning for military action against Iran's nuclear program goes beyond limited strikes and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former US intelligence analyst said on Friday.

"I've seen some of the planning ... You're not talking about a surgical strike," said Wayne White, who was a top Middle East analyst for the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research until March 2005.

"You're talking about a war against Iran" that likely would destabilize the Middle East for years, White told the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank...

Wayne's backup filed an alternative plea (my emphasis again):

Middle East expert Kenneth Katzman argued "Iran's ascendancy is not only manageable but reversible" if one understands the Islamic republic's many vulnerabilities.

The economy is mismanaged and "quite primitive," exporting almost nothing except oil, he said.Also, Iran's oil production capacity is fast declining and in terms of conventional military power...

"Iran is a virtual non-entity," Katzman added.

No Foreign Office mandarin would ever be called Wayne, but he might be a Kenneth. And he'd never reveal military secrets in public - preferring to do so do in private (to the Russians).

Yet Wayne and Kenneth are following the playbook nicely described in the Yes Prime Minister parody of the Foreign Office "A Victory For Democracy":

Jim (Prime Minister): Apparently the White House thinks that the Foreign Office is full of pinkos and traitors.

Bernard (his Civil Service aide): Not it's not, well not full.
....

Sir Richard (Foreign Office Chief): Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. In Stage One we say that nothing is going to happen.

Sir Humphrey: Stage Two, we say something may be going to happen but we should do nothing about it.

Sir Richard: Stage Three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Sir Humphrey: Stage Four, we say maybe there is something we could have done, but it's too late now.

Readers will note Wayne is arguing Stage Three - he'll switch to Stage Four after Iran nukes Israel. And, just in case, Kenneth is arguing Stage One.

All in all, a fine piece of American pinko/traitor craftsmanship.

Upcoming Chinese Turkey Shoot

2007-01-19T13:03:00.000Z

The Chinese dictatorship is working to take out US surveillance satellites, no doubt to facilitate its conquest of Taiwan. That's dumb - China has little chance of suppressing US space assets, so its forces will likely star as victims in a 21st Century Marianas Turkey Shoot.

Last time:

The Battle of the Philippine Sea was an air-sea battle of the Pacific Campaign of World War II fought between the U.S.Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) on 19 and 20 June, 1944, off the Mariana Islands. The action was a disaster for the Japanese forces, who lost almost all of their carrier-borne aircraft and a third of the carriers involved in the battle. After the battle, the aircraft carrier force of the IJN was no longer militarily effective.

Here's why there'll be a rerun.

US Military Space Assets

These assets are highly secret - the NYT hasn't gotten to them yet - but there's a plausible description here.

US imaging satellites are essentially big Hubble telescopes facing earthwards. Others use infrared and radar. All transmit real time data back to NORAD and its backups via a separate high-bandwidth satellite network. Plus, there are the 24+ satellites in the GPS network.

There are dozens of US military satellites spread between low orbit (a few hundred miles up), and high (like the geosynchronous detectors NORAD uses to keep tabs on the antics of Santa and Dobbie).

How to Kill Satellites

Satellites are easy to track from the ground, since they move predictably, are in plain view, and can’t afford to carry much propellant to dodge about. Low orbit ones are easy to reach and hit, high orbit ones are much harder.

Assorted bad guys – including the Chinese – have been trying to blind US imaging satellites with lasers. That’s dumb, since to do damage you need a tight beam - about 1 yard diameter at the target - and the beam has to be come from precisely where the camera is looking.

To avoid his system being blinded, the satellite operator just has to image at an angle. Combined with the burnout protection satellites use to avoid damage from looking at the sun, this makes lasers a paper tiger.

Then there are really high energy beams, but nobody has gotten them to work (except possibly the US), since they need vast power to drill through a hundred miles of energy-absorbing atmosphere.

Nukes detonated in orbit work quite well, but the collateral EMP is too messy except in existential wars.

That leaves anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles with kinetic or HE warheads, and the US has had these for 20 years – the best known is air launched by an F-15.

What China Wants

To successfully invade Taiwan, China has to prevent detection of a prolonged invasion buildup (probably 500,000 troops, 500 air transports, 1000 ships, 1000 attack planes, and 1000 medium range rockets). Then, to achieve tactical surprise on D day, it has to keep the location of its ships and planes secret as they to head to Taiwan (30 hours by ship, 2 hours by transport plane).

China also has to blind US satellites that might spot its subs, so they can get close enough to knock out US carriers without starting a major war. The subs would use wake-homing torpedoes to take out the carriers' propulsion systems (without propulsion, the carriers couldn't launch their planes).

Such an attack would inflict minimal US casualties, and the Chinese dictators would reasonably calculate that the US wouldn’t escalate with 10,000 US sailors as sitting ducks.

The Chinese Plan

Hence the recent Chinese test:

A kinetic kill vehicle launched by a medium range ballistic missile destroyed an inactive Chinese weather satellite. The Chinese Feng Yun 1C (FY-1C) polar orbiting meteorological satellite had been launched in 1999. The ASAT was launched from or near the Xichang Space Center, and intercepted the target at an altitude of variously reported as either 530 or 537 miles. This altitude is consistent with the operational altitudes of American and Japanese imagery intelligence satellites.

Why It Won't Work

1. Too Many Targets

By the time China invades – probably after 2009 – there will be about 20 imaging satellites it needs to target. These will be in different orbits, and exponentially harder to kill than an old weather satellite. And if China misses just one, it gets the Turkey Shoot treatment.

2. Guaranteed Warning

By attacking US satellites, China gives excellent early warning of its intentions, enabling US carriers to fly off their planes to Taiwan..

3. Guaranteed Retaliation

The Chinese attack can’t be covert since the US imaging satellites will track the ASATs being launched from China then heading towards them – their final images will be nice pictures of Chinese kinetic warheads.

Even the UN, NYT, France, and Russia couldn’t oppose the US and its allies retaliating against such a blatant attack (just kidding).

The obvious US response would be to take down every Chinese military satellite.

It would also take down the EU’s Galileo GPS system, if it’s flying by then. This is part owned by the Chinese, and gives them GPS guidance for their missiles and bombs that’s independent of the US. Taking out half of Galileo's 30 satellites would cripple it. The Euros could hardly complain about US self-defense against such clearly documented aggression (kidding again).

3. Even If Chinese ASATs Work, Their Forces Can't Hide

Taiwan is deploying UAVs, which in an invasion can keep track of the Chinese mainland and the air and sea invasion fleets. So loss of satellite coverage isn’t a terminal failure. In fact UAVs have advantages over satellites - they're more flexible and can fly below cloud cover.

In conclusion, a Chinese communist ASAT capability won’t dent the US ability to help Taiwan defend itself.

However dictatorships are unpredictable and they might try their luck, poor fools.

NYT 10, America 0

2007-01-18T18:24:00.000Z

The administration should not have agreed to allow judges to oversee the NSA's surveillance of terrorists.

After 9/11, the NSA began to monitor calls (and other communications) between individuals in the US and known or suspected terrorists residing outside the US. In 2005, the NYT published this program's existence using information provided to it by lawbreaking insiders.

The administration argued the program was legally authorized by the president, but has now caved, to the delight of the felons at the NYT (my ellipsis):

The Bush administration, in a surprise reversal, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to give a secret court jurisdiction over the National Security Agency's wiretapping program and would end its practice of eavesdropping without warrants on Americans suspected of ties to terrorists.

The Justice Department said it had worked out an “innovative” arrangement with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that provided the “necessary speed and agility” to provide court approval to monitor international communications of people inside the United States without jeopardizing national security.

Since the surveillance program was publicly disclosed in December 2005 by The New York Times, the White House has maintained, in scores of court filings, policy papers and press statements, that the president has the inherent power to conduct wiretaps without a court warrant even though a 1978 law put intelligence surveillance under judicial review.

This has consequences.

1. Allied intelligence agencies will reduce even further the information they share with the US. With the CIA fatally compromised, the NSA has been the only reliable US touch point. Now US allies know their information will be provided to judges, who will be just as politicized as their foreign counterparts. So the faucet will be turned off.

2. The NYT will be let off the hook, so will continue to betray US secrets. Prosecutions of the people who leaked the NSA program to the NYT will now be impossible - they'll just claim they were trying to force the administration to obey the law it has now accepted.

3. Terrorist surveillance by the US will be curtailed. That's because judges hate to be rubber stamps, so the FISC will prevent or delay some wiretaps. Plus the NSA managers won't propose wiretaps they fear FISC might reject since rejection would hurt their resumes. The net is less terrorists will be tracked.

4. By caving on this national security issue, the administration is feeding the defeatist Congress. That'll encourage it to demand more appeasement.

Let's hope the administration is husbanding its strength to focus on taking out the Mullahs.

Mr Ban Goes To Washington

2007-01-18T17:21:00.000Z

Like his predecessor, the new UN leader expects the US to fill his begging bowl while he insults America's elected leader.

The begging bowl:

At a Washington meeting with congressional foreign-policy and budgetary leaders...Mr. Ban asked to amend a legislation that allows Congress to approve payments of no more than 25% of the U.N. peacekeeping operations, while the United Nations assesses American dues at 27%. America pays over $1 billion for U.N. peacekeeping annually.

"There is a shortage of two percentage points, which will result in annually a $150 million or $200 million shortage of American contributions, which will, if it is accumulated, create very difficult constraints in smoothly carrying out peacekeeping operations," he told reporters yesterday.

But the issue isn't how the UN "assesses" the US contribution, but whether its peacekeepers are capable of more than raping kids and providing air cover for terrorists. And whether the UN secretariat can spend US cash honestly, given its perpetration of the biggest scam in history.

Instead of addressing these issues, Mr Ban damned the president with insincere praise:

...while visiting the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Ban called Mr. Bush a "great leader." Mr. Ban felt compelled to explain to reporters yesterday that "in diplomacy, it is appropriate to address heads of state or government with due respect and courtesy."

Ban is probably more fool than knave, but either way he can't be trusted with US tax dollars.

Israel Alone?

2007-01-17T19:31:00.000Z

Israel is building its own defense against mortars and rockets. That's odd, since a US defense is available off-the-shelf. There may be a hidden US arms embargo here - if so, the consequences will be terrible.

Palestinians have fired over 100 Kassam rockets into Israel since their "cease fire" and Israel is developing its own defense:

The system under consideration is based on two anti- missile systems being developed by Rafael: one involving a solid laser that will have the ability to intercept Kassams in mid-air, the other a small and cheap anti-rocket missile with a kinetic warhead...

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet...will need to allocate additional funds to the defense budget to pay for the development of the system.

The Israelis are great weapons engineers, but even they will take over a year to build and deploy a system. Waiting for a solution is odd, since a solution - as previously noted - is readily available:

The U.S. Army has seen rocket and mortar casualty rates drop “to nearly zero” where its Counter-Rocket, Artillery, Mortar Program (C-RAM) system has been deployed, says the manufacturer, and now the service plans to buy more.

On Jan. 16, Northrop Grumman’s Tactical Systems Division received a $78 million follow-on contract to continue systems engineering, integration and installation for the C-RAM program. Deployed last year in Iraq and elsewhere, the system uses sensors and radar to warn U.S. and coalition troops about incoming mortar rounds and rockets...

The C-RAM can detect a weapon firing “tens of kilometers” away, and quickly figure out where the munition will land...

C-RAM, in combination with automatic 20mm cannon, provides effective protection of Baghdad's Green Zone and other US bases.

It's possible this is just Israeli NIH, but that's unlikely - Israel has plenty of other weapons to spend its money on.

So maybe the Israeli cabinet faces a covert US arms embargo now that State is back in control. For sure the Israelis can have no confidence in Ms Rice's attempts to force them to talk to the Palestinians.

If the US has embargoed Israel, it has pretty well guaranteed that the next Mideast war will be nuclear.

Asymmetric Information Warfare

2007-01-16T14:43:00.001Z

Our MSM uses the terrorist technique of asymmetric warfare to distort the news it presents. That could be fatal.

In asymmetric warfare, non-state actors exploit the vulnerabilities of states. Thus terrorists dressed as civilians can deploy IEDs by exploiting our desire to avoid civilian casualties. Our MSM supports this view by ignoring or minimizing the crimes of non-state actors, while howling with outrage at every supposed state infraction.

Example 1: The Head Hackers

Starting with Danny Pearl, Muslim terrorists have been recording their sawing the heads off living innocents. Our MSM have reported this in much the same way that it reports crime - a quick splash, then silence. Here's how Amnesty International supports these war criminals (my emphasis and ellipsis):

Many of these killings by armed groups, in Amnesty international’s view, constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. As such, there is an obligation on both the Iraqi government and the international community at large to ensure that the perpetrators of these crimes are identified and brought to justice.

Without doubt, Iraqi civilians have paid a high price for getting rid of Saddam Hussain’s regime, and continue to do so.

So it's all America's fault for getting rid of the odious dictator.

When however, one such head hacker is caught, tried in an open court, found guilty, and hanged, the fact that he loses his head causes international condemnation:

Iraq's government drew worldwide condemnation yesterday when two of Saddam Hussein's closest allies were hanged, including his half-brother Barzan who was decapitated during a bungled execution....

A government video showed the blood-soaked body of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, formerly chief of Saddam's intelligence service, lying on the floor, with his severed head a few feet away.

This man was responsible for:

...summary and arbitrary executions... the use of rape as a political tool and...enforced and involuntary disappearances...public beheadings of women who were accused of being prostitutes, which took place in front of family members, including children...a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq (that)...resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 100,000 people), many of them women and children.

To her eternal shame, Condoleeza Rice complained:

"It did not reflect well on the Iraqi government that it came out that way. There was no doubt it should have been handled with dignity."

Example 2: The Traitor

Sandy Berger is a self-confessed liar and thief who stole papers from the US National Archives and destroyed them, in an apparent attempt to hide the Clinton administration's handling of al Quada:

Mr. Berger knew exactly what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was wrong. According to interviews with National Archives staff, Mr. Berger repeatedly arranged to be left alone with highly classified documents by feigning the need to make personal phone calls, and he used those moments alone with the files to stuff them in his pockets and briefcase.

...during three of Mr. Berger's four visits to the Archives in 2002 and 2003, the former National Security Adviser did have access to original documents of which no adequate inventory existed or exists.

Only the WSJ has picked up on this, I suspect because Berger is a civilian. Unlike Lewis Libby, who after a multi-million dollar investigation into a non-crime is faces a Soviet-style show trial - there's a good summary of the players here.

It's possible Libby did mislead investigators, but since no crime was committed (the Plame woman was not covert) and Libby didn't out her (Armitage has admitted he did), then Libby did no harm.

But this case, and its consequences will likely still be running when Berger is free of his plea bargain in 2008.

So our MSM has a systemic fault, possibly because the people who work for it hate authority.

That fault may be the death of them. And us.

Italy Good, RyanAir Good, Stanstead Bad

2007-01-16T12:22:00.000Z

Italy was wonderful, but the UK is feeling increasingly like a badly-run prison.

We used London's third airport (Stanstead) for the first time and found it grim. On a low traffic day with no alerts, clearing security took 35 minutes - poor signage and work flow, and 2 separate checkpoints. The second forced all passengers to remove their shoes for x-ray, causing mothers with kids a lot of hassle. In spite of this rigor, I noted three serious security vulnerabilities.

We flew Ryan Air for the first time. It's an excellent low cost airline with well trained staff that flies modern planes nicely adapted for short haul (I don't own their stock).

Italy was foggy, giving amazing views from the mountains of fog lakes, fog rivers, and fog falls. And we found a nice plot of land and - in a triumph of hope over experience - embarked on our third Italian real estate transaction (the last two aborted for highly Italian reasons).

Arriving back in Stanstead, we had to go through two passport checks - one on exit from the plane and one at immigration. Apparently illegal immigrants destroy their passports in flight, then refuse to tell immigration which plane they flew in on so they can't be deported back. That tells us Stanstead doesn't have CCTV on its gates.

Then the train link to London was down. Sigh.

Wide Open Borders

2007-01-06T20:19:00.000Z

We predicted the Dem victory would lead to open borders, and it has.

Armed men overran a National Guard observation post along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona this week, forcing the soldiers to retreat and prompting an investigation by the U.S. Border Patrol that has focused on the intruders' identity.

No shots were exchanged and no one was injured in the incident, which occurred shortly after 11 p.m. on Wednesday. The National Guard troops were members of an entry-identification team, assigned to monitor major illegal-alien and drug-smuggling corridors.

After forcing the soldiers to flee, the unidentified men retreated into Mexico.

National Guard Sgt. Edward Balaban said the troops did not know how many men were involved in the attack "because obviously it took place in the dark."

Several Border Patrol agents in the area told The Washington Times yesterday the armed men might have been trying to find out what the Guard troops would do if they were confronted by drug or alien smugglers. They said the increased presence of troops and additional Border Patrol agents in recent months had frustrated many of the area's drug and alien smugglers.

"I guess they got their answer," said one veteran agent. "When in doubt, the troops will run."

Someone decided to deploy a National Guard surveillance team at night without night vision equipment, and unarmed and unprotected in an area full of armed lawbreakers.

Such deliberate sabotage is typical of what happens during a management reorg - bureaucrats anticipate future policies.

Now watch the bureaucrats take down the Minutemen.

EU Flight Horrors

2007-01-06T19:22:00.000Z

The new EU cabin baggage regulations mean you can't carry a laptop plus 4 days clothing. That's a shame, because it invalidates the EU's only decent idea - a single market of 27 nations.

The EU just cut the IATA cabin allowance of 22" x 18" x 10" to 21.6" x 15.7" x 7.9". Tomorrow we're flying from London (where they'll be anal about this limit) to Italy (where they won't, but they'll pinch checked bags).

So instead of blogging, I just spent an hour proving you can't fit a laptop plus 4 days clothing into an EUbag. That means the road warriors who keep the US economy humming can't operate in the EU - another reason its economy is in the tank.

These regulations happen because all EU nations are modified monarchies, so the ruling elites don't share the experiences of their subjects. In comparison the US Senate and the TSA are benign.

Anyway, the laptop has to be left behind, so no blogging for a week.

Keep It Up, Mr Moon!

2007-01-06T16:49:00.000Z

The new UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, is changing his team to bring it closer to the average UN member - Syria.

Here's his new number 2:

The new head of the United Nations picked the Tanzanian Foreign Minister as the first woman deputy yesterday, an appointment widely regarded as a blow to flagging hopes for reform of the organisation.

It's a blow because Tanzania is - to put it politely - a corrupt dump.

- It's as corrupt as Syria - CPI 2.9 (a tad worse than the average corruption level of all UN members).

- It's rated Partly Free - same as Venezuela (and about 60 other UN members).

Still, at least she's educated:

Her background is in law; she gained a PhD from the University of Konstanz in Germany in 1992.

In 1990 she wrote a paper on Tanzanian politics, entitled The Dynamics of Election Organization in a One-Party Democracy.

That must have been quite a paper!

The good news is that an even more corrupt and incompetent UN will be a less effective anti-US and anti-Israel platform for France, Russia and China.

The bad news is the little kids will continue to be raped by the UN's "peacekeepers".

Crunchy Frogs

2007-01-05T18:22:00.000Z

Blair's legions of bureaucrats armed with EU laws have turned England into a Monty Python skit .

Police have refused to release photographs of two escaped murderers, claiming it might breach their human rights. Killers Jason Croft and Michael Nixon are among 13 inmates to have absconded from Sudbury open jail in Derbyshire in the past two months.
A spokesman for Derbyshire Police said: "When making a decision to release any photograph, police forces must take into account numerous factors including the public interest test, whether there is a strong local policing purpose and, of course, the Human Rights and Data Protection Acts.
"Photographs of named people that are in police possession are classed as data and their release is restricted by law.
"Acpo (Association of Chief Police Officers) guidance states that releasing a 'wanted' photograph of a named person should only happen in exceptional circumstances where officers believe that the named suspect may be a danger to the public."
"Unfortunately, once people abscond, it's up to us to trace their whereabouts," the spokesman added.

The spokesman is clearly Superintendent Parrot:

We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.

We must hope the escapees are allowed to continue with their light killing unmolested, enabling Superintendent P to get back to his speed cameras.

Privatize Space!

2007-01-04T15:13:00.000Z

Competition between privately funded space launchers is set to produce winners that are much better than any single NASA solution. We should use the same approach to building the moon colony.

Bert Rutan's sub-orbital SpaceShip Two is planned to start carrying Virgin Galactic passengers next year, while Geoff Bezos' Blue Origin vehicle may be available commercially in 2010. They're quite different designs - one is an air launched like the Bell X1, while the other is a ground-launched vehicle straight out of 1950s SciFi magazine.

Plus there are another 10 private space programs, using yet more design approaches and technologies. Engineering is like any other human endeavor - competition and diversity yield the best solution. So we can be confident that low cost sub-orbital and orbital launchers are just around the corner.

Meanwhile NASA is planning a permanent moon base by 2024, so here's an excellent suggestion from the WSJ ($): S

Say NASA believes it can build a permanent moonbase for $100 billion in today's dollars. Why not take half of that and offer it as a bounty to the first private company to build the station and man it.

A prize in the neighborhood of $50 billion is bound to attract plenty of interest -- and that number is probably much less than a realistic guess of what it would cost NASA in the end. The taxpayer would save 50% of NASA's cost to build the base, and the result would be much more likely to be attractive to the private interests that NASA wants to draw to the project.
It's an open question whether a moon base is most valuable for mining, tourism, science or some combination of the three. A private competition along the lines of the Ansari X prize for private space travel would have the added benefit of helping to sort those questions out without prejudging the outcome. So back to the moon. But let private speculators figure out the best way to get it done.

A commercially viable and permanent moon base would be an historic step in humanity's development, and would underpin US strength. So I hope the president can devote time and energy to getting the moon base done right - if nothing else, having the first off-planet human settlement named after him would be a splendid legacy!

Time To Fight Or Retreat

2007-01-03T16:33:00.000Z

Iran is directing and feeding the destruction of the struggling Iraqi democracy. That leaves the US two choices - attack Iran or retreat. History suggests the former will be most conducive to a peaceful world, and president should act soon.

A report says the Mullahs are supporting both Sunni and Shiite terrorists in Iraq.

Iran is supporting both Sunni and Shiite terrorists in the Iraqi civil war, according to secret Iranian documents captured by Americans in Iraq.
An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups."

...Another American official who has seen the summaries of the reporting affiliated with the arrests said it comprised a "smoking gun." "We found plans for attacks, phone numbers affiliated with Sunni bad guys, a lot of things that filled in the blanks on what these guys are up to," the official said.

Iran can do this because the US has left it untouched.

Granting aggressor nations safe haven status has been the pattern since WW2:

- In Korea, we faced the Chinese Red Army which operated from safe bases in China.

- In Vietnam, the Communist North waged unrestricted war on the South without paying any penalty until the very end, when the US trashed them in 12 days with Linebacker II.

- We stopped the Guld War after we'd chased Saddam out of Kuwait.

None of these wars produced a satisfactory result - North Korea is set start the next nuclear war, Vietnam is still a basket case after its talented people fled (or died in the attempt), Saddam killed a million people and almost perfected nuclear weapons after the Gulf War.

In all probability, when the US leaves Iraq, there will be a bloody war in which the Turks suppress the Kurds, the Shiites slaughter the Sunnis, and Iran takes the remains of Iraq. Thus enriched, it will be better able to nuke the Israelis.

Conversely, wars we have faught to the finish have stayed won - Germany and Japan now don't fight. This is probably because we defeated both nations in detail.

The peoples of China, North Vietnam, and Gulf War Iraq paid no price for the aggression of their leaders. Indeed, the current problems in Iraq stem from the successful efforts of the US military to defeat Saddam with minimal enemy causalities and theatrical "Shock and Awe".

It follows that successful wars can't be fought with half measures - you either destroy the enemy in detail, or - EU style - you don't fight.

It's easily within the power of the US to take down Iran - an extended Linebacker II-style assault would destroy over 90% of the following Iranian assets in a few weeks of air, missile and special forces attacks:
- air defense system: radars, planes, missiles
- air offense assets: ballistic missiles, bombers, helos
- nuclear infrastructure
- power plants
- ground forces: C&C and bases
- ports
- oil extraction, distribution and storage
- transportation hubs: airports, ports.

Most of these facilities are reasonably remote, highly visible, and can be destroyed - using modern weapons - with less civilian casualties than Linebacker II inflicted (about 1,600).

Taking out Iran as an oil supplier would cause a big spike in oil prices, but that would only speed up our move away form dependence on Mideast and Russian oil.

Of course such an attack would be political suicide for the president, but he's gone in 2 years anyway and surely doesn't want his legacy to be the enslavement of the Iraqi people liberated at such cost in US blood and treasure.

So this is a no-brainer. Provided, that is, the Dems can't or won't shut the operation down. If they're smart, they won't - even blue staters don't like losing wars.

Pelosi Should Scrap The TSA

2007-01-02T18:54:00.000Z

Travelers (other then terrorists) see the US Transportation Security Agency (TSA) as an omnipotent Big Brother. In reality it's closer to the Keystone Cops and has achieved a reduction in travel by innocent folks without improving US security. If the Dems shut the ramshackle mess down, they'll sweep the board in 2008.

A Brit view:

Britons flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington.
By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account...
Much of it is routine but some elements will prove more contentious, such as a passenger's email address, whether they have a previous history of not turning up for flights and any religious dietary requirements.
Initially, such material could be inspected for seven days but a reduced number of US officials could view it for three and a half years. Should any record be inspected during this period, the file could remain open for eight years.

This is worthless - any self-respecting terrorist will pay in cash, take the standard meal, and use a throwaway email account. Innocent fliers will do the same if they distrust the TSA's ability to protect their personal data. And some will no longer fly as the risks and inconveniences of travel exceed their personal thresholds.

To match its incompetence in tracking visitors, the TSA has given up tracking departures (hat tip Bruce Schneier):

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 — In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say.

Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.

Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired.

But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.

Domestically, the TSA adds cost and harassment to every domestic flier. A current example is its plan to test an X-ray machine at Phoenix that shows passengers effectively naked. Last year the Brits tried it out at Heathrow Terminal 4 but have abandoned it - I suspect because they'd never get a Muslim woman (or Muslim man dressed as a woman) to submit to it, and that made it rather pointless. In spite of which the TSA is pressing ahead with its usual incompetence (my ellipsis):

PHOENIX — A test of an X-ray security scanner that can see through clothing and take clear pictures of the human body along with concealed weapons, has been delayed until early this coming year at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Critics say the high-resolution images are too invasive, and the (ACLU) has called it a virtual strip search...

The (TSA) initially said one machine would be operating at Sky Harbor's Terminal 4 by Christmas. However, the agency said technical difficulties were creating problems in setting up the equipment so it work properly with the airport's wireless connections.
It also decided the holiday season was not a good time to start. "The last thing we wanted to do was start this during one of the busiest travel times of the year," said Nico Melendez, an agency spokesman...
The TSA says it has found a way to adjust the machine's images so the normally graphic pictures can be blurred in certain areas while still being effective at detecting threats.

So terrorists will simply hide weapons in their "certain areas".

The TSA is failing not just because it's run by incompetents, but because it's been chartered to do the impossible, providing an impermeable barrier protecting all US air travel. But Games Theory tells us that can't be done, because the number of possible targets is enormous, and all screening is porous and limited by economic costs.

Instead, threats are best contained by focusing on the relatively small number of potential attackers - that's how our intelligence agencies work.

The TSA is a great target for the Dems - it's widely detested by US travelers, foreign visitors, and people whose livelihoods depend on visitors. It annoys the ACLU, it'll drive CAIR crazy when it images Muslim women naked, and most non-Muslim women will be equally unhappy.

Ms Pelosi would be smart to take it out.

Energy Independence Starts Now

2007-01-01T19:33:00.000Z

An interesting piece in OpinionJournal says that until now the big barrier to dumping the Saudis and the other crackpot oil producers is...the Saudis. The good news is they've lost their leverage, and 2007 should see big moves to regain our independence.

Investors are wary of oil substitution because they're:

...driven by memories of the mid-'80s and the late '90s when sharp drops in oil prices, driven in part by increased production from Saudi reserves...bankrupted such undertakings as the Synfuels Corporation.

(But now)...Indian and Chinese demand and peaking oil production may make it much harder for OPEC today to use any excess production capacity to drive prices down and destroy competitive technology.

The new technologies are the best kind of engineering - incremental.

Cheap Ethanol

Ethanol's appeal rose a few years ago when it became clear that genetically modified biocatalysts could break down the cellulose in biomass and thus enable ethanol's production from a wide range of plant life...

...two years ago the National Energy Policy Commission...estimated that just 7% of U.S. farmland (the amount now in the Soil Bank) could produce enough biomass to provide half the fuel needed by U.S. passenger vehicles, and that production costs for cellulosic ethanol were headed downward toward around 70 cents per gallon.

Still, Ethanol needs a lot of new plant, whereas the next technology needs none!

Plug-In Hybrids

If hybrid gasoline-electric cars are provided with advanced batteries (GM's announcement said its choice would be lithium-ion) having improved energy and power density--variants of the ones in our computers and cell phones--dozens of vehicle prototypes are now demonstrating that these "plug-in hybrids" can more than double hybrids' overall (gasoline) mileage.

With a plug-in, charging your car overnight from an ordinary 110-volt socket in your garage lets you drive 20 miles or more on the electricity stored in the topped-up battery before the car lapses into its normal hybrid mode. If you forget to charge or exceed 20 miles, no problem, you then just have a regular hybrid with the insurance of liquid fuel in the tank. And during those 20 all-electric miles you will be driving at a cost of between a penny and three cents a mile instead of the current 10-cent-a-mile cost of gasoline.

Utilities are rapidly becoming quite interested in plug-ins because of the substantial benefit to them of being able to sell off-peak power at night. Because off-peak nighttime charging uses unutilized capacity, DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimates that adopting plug-ins will not create a need for new base load electricity generation plants until plug-ins constitute over 84% of the country's 220 million passenger vehicles.

Further, those plug-ins that are left connected to an electrical socket after being fully charged (most U.S. cars are parked over 20 hours a day) can substitute for expensive natural gas by providing electricity from their batteries back to the grid: "spinning" reserves to help deal with power outages and regulation of the grid's voltage and amperage.

That last feature is very neat, since it solves the problem of storing electricity (currently only possible on a large scale with two-way hydroelectric). That might make wind power viable. Because wind is unpredictable and only available about 30% of the time, all wind capacity needs an equivalent quick-reacting conventional generator to back it up so wind actually adds to capital costs. But plug-ins reduce the need for such wind backup.

Plug-ins work fine with our existing generating capacity - all we have to do is replace old plants with nukes when they come to be retired.

So there's a good prospect that, in 10 years time, our dependence on Mideast despots will be a distant memory. As will Europe's dependence on the Russians, so if you're building plug-ins, you might want to install Polonium 210 detectors...

Call Al Nino!

2007-01-01T18:02:00.000Z

A Brit newspaper says 2007 will be the hottest year on record. The same paper told us Israel used nukes in Lebanon - so prepare for an arctic year.

Back in October, the London Independent's reporter Robert Fisk said Israel used:

...some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon...or...a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium.

Now the same paper tells us:

A combination of global warming and the El Niño weather system is set to make 2007 the warmest year on record with far-reaching consequences for the planet, one of Britain's leading climate experts has warned.

As we've come to expect from this organ, the article then debunks itself (my emphasis):

The cause of the phenomenon is not fully understood but in an El Niño "event" the pool of warm surface water is forced eastwards by the loss of the westerly trade winds...

The co-relation with global warming is as yet unclear. Archaeological evidence shows El Niños and La Niñas have been occurring for 15,000 years. But scientists are investigating whether climate change is leading to an increase in their intensity or duration.

If the "leading scientists" and Independent don't understand the one copper-bottomed 15,000 year-old climate change mechanism, their predictions are fantasies, not science.

The Independent would do better calling the guy who fixed the last El Nino (my ellipsis):

(March 1998)...a retired naval pilot from Nipomo in California is being accused of the greatest feat of global manipulation ever. And all because his name is Al Nino.

...Alphonso Nino, to give him his correct first name, has been deluged with telephone calls accusing him of being the cause of all the climatic trouble.

Mr Nino has taken a diplomatic approach to the public vitriol against him and says he tries to deal with the calls with good humour.

"Some of them absolutely curse me out and others just ask me, in a rather grudged way if I can just stop the rain." "I told one man who'd called me to ask me to stop the rain, that I'd stop it for him. He called me three days later to thank me for making the rain stop."

Mr Nino is listed in the phone book as, Nino, Al, (he's the only Nino in the book) but he says he won't change his listing to stop the calls. "I've rather enjoyed it, I'm thick skinned ... I'm an old Navy man so I like to trade barbs with the people that call."

A Toast For 2007: To The Collapse of The EU!

2006-12-31T17:37:00.000Z

Evil dictators commit genocide, but even benign ones cause human suffering by destroying wealth and liberty. Fortunately all dictatorships are unstable, and in 2007 the Euro is quite likely to collapse, taking the benign dictatorship of the EU with it.

Winston Churchill's famous words in 1947 addressed benign dictatorships:

We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

The subsequent failure of communist and socialist economies (including that of the Brits) confirmed his analysis.

But the local petty dictators were replaced by the continent-wide dictatorship of the EU - 80% of Brit laws are now imposed by corrupt, statist and unchecked EU bureaucrats, who are fast destroying Brit freedoms built on centuries of incremental economic and social improvement.

Still, the EU's "angels" are just as fallible as their predecessors, and the only glue left holding their institution together is the Euro. That grand project is now hated by a majority in all the big nations using it - Germany, France and Italy. That's because it has made them poorer, and without democratic support, it's bound to collapse like the Soviet ruble block.

For a variety of reasons, currency collapses are never predicted by the markets and so the Euro blowup could come any time.

So Brits should raise their glasses tonight to drink to an EU-free 2007.

Crime And Punishment

2006-12-30T15:53:00.000Z

The execution of Saddam Hussein is a rare act of justice - most genocides die in their beds. If we want to make the world safe, we need such hangings to be the rule, not the exception.

The other three big post war mass murderers dodged the hangman's noose:

Pol Pot killed up to 3 million Cambodians, was given sanctuary in Thailand and China, then returned home to face a court that sentenced him to lifelong house arrest (the Vatican no doubt deemed this harsh). Just when it seemed likely that he'd face a real trial, he died peacefully in bed.

Idi Amin killed between 80,000 and 500,000 people, was given shelter by our friends the Saudis, and died there after 23 years in exile.

Slobodan Milosevic, was responsible for genocide in the former Yugoslavia. After his defeat, he was unfortunately extradited to the UN's International Criminal Court for a trial that was still going strong after 5 years, when he upped and died.

So a genocidal dictator has a 3 in 4 chance of dodging the noose. A 75% chance of escape is way too high since the only way of deterring genocide is a near certainty that perps will be killed. That's why nuclear deterrence worked during the cold war - the Soviet rulers knew they would be fried if they started a war.

The first step is to define the A list of candidates for the noose. As well as current mass mirderers, this should include intended mass murders. Here's the top four:

Kim Il-Sung, who runs a state based on concentration camps, mass murder, rape and starvation, and has killed about 2 million North Koreans. With nukes he can double that number.

The Iranian Gang, who hang rape victims and are working on a second holocaust. Their Supreme Leader Khamenei, his 12-man Council of Guardians, and their front guy Ahmadinejad will need a total of 14 nooses.

Robert Mugabe, the 21st century Amin.

The Hutu leaders of the Rwandan genocide who killed about 1 million Tutsis. The surviving Tutsis are dealing with the retail hatchet men, but the leaders scattered to safe places, including the UK. The Brits have finally decided to extradite four of them, but only if their victims promise not to execute them. So these four are on the list.

When this bunch have swung, there's a B list to work on: the Janjaweed mass murderers and rapists in Darfur; Putin, who slaughtered the Chechens, armed the Mullahs, and is deploying ICBMs to dodge the US BMD on their way to kill Americans; and of course the Chinese thugocrats.

Additional suggestions are welcome, and a future post will suggest how we implement this planetary clean-up.

He's On His Way!

2006-12-24T13:54:00.000Z

North American AeroSpace Defense Command (NORAD) is tracking Santa, and your kids can stay in touch by going here.

NORAD is based in Colorado Springs and provides surveillance for the US and Canada, and:

...uses four high-tech systems to track Santa - radar, satellites, Santa Cams and jet fighter aircraft.

Right now he's over Fuji in Japan.

Have a great Christmas.

On Brit Eccentrics

2006-12-23T18:19:00.000Z

Britain is famed for its nutty eccentrics, and two made news today - a Saddam-boosting archbishop, and an anti-semitic historian. The historian is the harmless one.

Brit eccentrics are, like all eccentrics, wrong. But some are evil while some are harmless.

The archbishop is an evil eccentric:

Christians in the Middle East are being put at unprecedented risk by the Government’s “shortsighted” and “ignorant” policy in Iraq, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, says today.
In an extraordinary attack, Dr Williams accuses Tony Blair and the US of endangering the lives and futures of many thousands of Christians in the Middle East, who are regarded by their countrymen as supporters of the “crusading West.”

The archbishop is head of the Church of England (C of E), an organization in decline for decades - when new Army recruits state their religion as "none" they're put down as C of E.

The archbishop's eccentricity is to confuse cause and effect. Christians have been persecuted in Muslim nations for centuries. And even if it has gotten worse because we've deposed a monster who killed millions, how can he treat inconvenience to Christians as worse than that genocide? This goes beyond eccentricity to real harmfulness because he absolves the people who persecute Christians of responsibility for their crimes, so they'll keep on persecuting

By contrast, David Irvine is a harmless eccentric:

British writer David Irving wasted no time Friday offending Jews and black people at a news conference, a day after his return from Austria where he was imprisoned for denying the Holocaust.
At a news conference in London, Irving endorsed actor Mel Gibson's drunken comments earlier this year that Jews were responsible for all modern wars.
He also referred to his success as an author in the 1970s by talking about how be used cash to buy a Rolls-Royce - the color of which he described by using a racial slur against blacks.

Mr Irving follows in the grand tradition of the likes of the historian Alan Clark, who famously seduced many of the women he encountered but was so likable that his talented and beautiful wife tolerated his foibles. Irvine's oddity is different - he doesn't like Jews. But he is IMHO a very good historian, writing the definitive history of the German V-1 and V-2 programs.

And his acerbic comments are understandable after 12 months locked up by the self-satisfied and pompous Austrians, whose parents included many of Hitler's most efficient Jew killers.

Irving, like all Englishmen, is entitled to his opinion, no matter how lunatic - only fellow-lunatics will agree with him while the rest of us can use our right to free speech to disagree with him.

So Irving is harmless and the archbishop is not.

AP Is Bad, But Not All Bad

2006-12-22T17:45:00.000Z

The AP, deep in the hole on its flawed reporting from Iraq, is still digging furiously. But it has some decent employees, and thanks to them we know Sandy Berger is a crook with something big to hide.

AP's false reporting from Iraq has been exposed by Curt at Flopping Aces, who in his day job is a cop in Los Angeles. It turns out AP relies on Iraqi stringers who front for terrorists and have fed AP overstated reports of the violence.

That's regrettable but understandable - getting objective truth is hard in the (few) areas of Iraq suffering sectarian violence. What makes the affair reprehensible is AP management's attempts to cover up.

Here's AP's bright side (WSJ, $):

Bill Clinton's former National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, has already recanted his initial claim that he removed documents from the National Archives "inadvertently" back in 2003 while preparing for testimony to the 9/11 Commission. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in 2005 and paid a $50,000 fine. But now the report of the Archives' Inspector General has come to light, and it suggests Mr. Berger knew he was engaged in a bit of hugger-mugger when he secreted the after-action memos he was reviewing out of the building.
According to the report, obtained by the Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request, Mr. Berger removed the documents and hid some of them under a trailer in a construction site before returning to retrieve them later. This is not the behavior of a man with a clear conscience. And it's astonishing for a man who served in a senior White House position that made him familiar with the obligations of handling classified papers.

Thanks to AP, we now know that Berger took huge risks to remove and destroy classified documents - which tells us he thought them highly prejudicial.

Let's hope the AP stays on the case and finds out exactly what these were.

Time For Linebacker III

2006-12-21T17:30:00.000Z

In spite of our difficulties in Iraq, it's unlikely the thugocracies running Iran and Syria will survive the next two years.

The Brit Times:

President Bush conceded for the first time yesterday that America is not winning the war in Iraq and said that insurgents had thwarted efforts to stabilise the country.

Since the insurgents are supplied and armed by Iran and Syria, we just need to change their regimes out, and that's not hard.

Good Cop

In this approach, dictators are removed by helping their domestic opponents.

Iranians aren't happy with their fundamentalist government, even when it rigs elections:

Iranians made their feelings plain about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week by voting to reject his allies in municipal elections and in the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that theoretically has authority over Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Syria has an opposition too, and the administration is helping it:

The US government confirmed Thursday morning a Time magazine report that it was working to secretly strengthen factions opposing the Assad regime in Syria.
The Time Web site revealed a report Wednesday that said the US government was working to affect its support for the opposing factions before the Syrian election in March 2007, in an effort to push towards a true democratic regime in the Syrian state.

The opposition is rational - the Syrian and Iranian people want their place in the sun along with the rest of the world. But, unlike us they've seen their living standards plummet, their freedoms diminish, and they now face slaughter in a nuclear war.

But this good cop approach won't work with the current players in Washington. The pro-democracy programs will be run by the appeasers at State, the Dem Congress will crimp the funding, and the NYT will blow the security cover of the Iranian and Syrian opposition.

Bad Cop

So that leaves bad cop, as last practiced by President Nixon to bring the North Vietnamese 11 days at the end of 1972:

Operation Linebacker II was a U.S. seventh Air Force and U.S. Navy Task Force 77 aerial bombardment campaign conducted against targets in the Democratic republic of Vietnam (DRV) during the final period of the American commitment to the Vietnam Conflict.

By Christmas most of the legitimate targets in North Vietnam were in a shambles...By the eleventh and final mission (29 December), there were few strategic targets worthy of mention left within the DRV...Total bombing was rounded out by sending (B 52s) on Archlight missions in the southern DRV and in South Vietnam. Once again, there were no aircraft losses to AAA fire, MiGs, or missiles.

This confirmed the US can completely destroy its opponents, even when they're protected by the latest Soviet weapons.

Our objective in Iraq is a lasting democracy - unitary, federal or 3-state. Given the limitations the US lefty opposition will place on the good cop approach, the bad cop will also be needed, though probably not on the scale of Linebacker II.

The targets are Iran's nuclear infrastructure and both Iran and Syria's rocket forces. Both can be eliminated with minimal civilian casualties, and their destruction will reveal the powerlessness of the ruling dictatorships and pave the way for their removal by democratic forces.

And the good news is that such a strike can be authorized by the president, just like Linebacker II.

EU'll Be Sorry

2006-12-21T16:39:00.000Z

The EU enables cash to flow to Hamas while France provides air cover for Hizbollah's re-armament. So they'll end up part of the eventual Mideast nuke-fest.

The EU (my ellipsis):

EU monitors overtook the responsibility of operating the crossing (from Egypt to the Gaza strip) in November 2005 after the implementation of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal plan from Gaza.

(But) Some $60 million have been smuggled from Egypt into the Gaza Strip through the EU-controlled Rafah border crossing, Gen. Pietro Pistolese the head of the team of monitors said Thursday.

Fortunately, the Israelis did stop this (my ellipsis):

(The Israeli) Defense Minister Amir ordered the closure of the Rafah crossing in Gaza Thursday to prevent (the Hamas leader) from returning to the Strip with dozens of millions of dollars in aid that he had received from neighboring Arab nations and Iran, during his recent trip around the Middle East.

Still, $60 million funds a lot of suicide bombers and rockets.

The French have had similarly delivered on their UN commitment to disarm Hizbollah (my ellipsis):

Syria...(has) used the past four months since the end of the war to transfer - sometimes on a daily basis - truckloads of advanced rockets and weaponry to Hizbullah in Lebanon. The weapon transfers...were not even executed covertly, but were conducted "out in the open" for the entire world to see.

None of this is surprising, given the EU's corruption & incompetence and French antisemitism. But these guys are stoking a nuclear war, which their in-theater forces won't survive, and their capitals may not.

That's dumb.

Time To Mobilize Our Scientists

2006-12-20T17:21:00.000Z

EU Referendum has a helpful Christmas gift list of weapons for the Brit forces in Iraq and Iran. To add to that, here are three weapons we might develop to improve the combat effectiveness of coalition forces in both theaters.

EU Referendum's suggestions seek to upgrade the quality and quantity of Brit fighting equipment to US and Israeli levels.

But across all coalition forces, there's a need for new weapons to defeat the proxy armies of Iran and Syria. That's because our current weapons were developed for an intense European land war, and the battles we're now fighting are quite different.

Increase our rate of developing new weapons and tactics

In WW2, we produced a flood of new weapons, from the radar that won the battles of Britain and Malta, the Enigma code breaker and its US equivalent that cracked Japanese codes, through the Mulberry Harbor that enabled the D-Day landings, to the gyroscopic gunsight that enabled our slower fighters to knock down two Germans jets for each loss of our own.

One major reason for that was the mobilization of the scientific and engineering establishment - in the UK this included the splendid Dr R V Jones.

So far as I know, the only scientific mobilization in the GWOT has been the US counter-IED program - here are three other suggestions.

Non-nuclear EMP weapons

Electromagnetic Pulse weapons create very high energy fields that fry electronics.

Our forces in both theaters face massive infiltration of fighters and weapons across borders - from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and Syria and Iran into Iraq.

A regime of EMP interdiction could sanitize these borders - men would still get through, but their electronic equipment - including vehicles - would not. So they'd have to fight without communication or mobility.

The Brits are developing non-nuclear EMP weapons, and that program needs national priority to get more money and the best engineering and scientific talents.

Automatic force protection

This weapon would use radar to track incoming bullets and RPGs, and automatically fire back to destroy the shooter. It has to be small enough to mount on a Warrior, Bradley, or Stryker so it can provide convoy and point protection.

The naval Phalanx system shoots down incoming missiles, and the clever Canadians have ripped theirs off ships to defend against Taliban mortars and rockets. The land based C-Ram version defends Baghdad's Green Zone.

Because bullets and RPG rounds are smaller than mortar shells and rockets, force protection radar has to be higher resolution - probably millimetric. Also in a firefight there are thousands of objects flying, so it needs faster computing and smarter software than the Phalanx.

I think this is a solvable engineering problem, and the sooner we start, the sooner our troops and bases will be protected. The Israelis are building a tank protection weapon along these lines for their Merkava, so we might solicit their help.

Suicide bomber tracking

Individuals carrying suicide bombs behave differently to normal people - that's why expert Israelis spot all but a tiny percentage of would-be Palestinian "martyrs".

With good remote sensing and pattern recognition software, that can be mechanized - it won't perform as well as the skilled Israelis, but should be much faster and so capable of carrying out mass screening at airports, mosques and marketplaces.

The Brits developed very powerful face recognition systems to track the IRA, which they now use to ID speeding drivers. That's a good base to start from.

Any one of these weapons would transform our capabilities in the current wars, and if we will it, we can probably get them all!

Nuclear Deterrence Is Our Future

2006-12-19T13:33:00.000Z

The US just agreed to share its nuclear technology with India, the world's largest democracy. That's sensible - the failure to stop the dictatorships in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran from building nukes means we must now rely on nuclear deterrence to maintain our freedoms.

President Bush yesterday signed a bill establishing civilian nuclear ties with India, a dramatic break in three decades of U.S. nonproliferation policy but a step that the Bush administration said will closer bind both nations and redraw the balance of power in Asia.

"After 30 years outside the system, India will now operate its civilian nuclear energy program under internationally accepted guidelines -- and the world is going to be safer as a result," Mr. Bush said, signing legislation that could allow U.S. nuclear technology to be shared with India for nonmilitary purposes...

Opponents, though, said the agreement marks a retreat in the United States' stated goal of containing nuclear proliferation. Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, called it "an historic mistake."

"It has shredded the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; it has emboldened Iran's nuclear-weapons program and has vastly increased India's capacity to make nuclear weapons to 40 to 50 nuclear bombs per year from two to three nuclear bombs per year," he said.

With the NPT already shredded, that leaves Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine that saw us through the Cold War.

This still works:

China only has twenty missiles that could reach the United States. These are liquid fueled, take hours to get ready for launch, and spend most of their time off-line. And even if these missiles were made ready, they could only threaten the Western United States.
Meanwhile, the United States has over 800 missiles that could reach China, and most of them are ready to fire 24/7. How many of those missiles are aimed at China is a well-kept secret, but China has about 200 nuclear warheads, while the U.S. has over 9,000.
Perhaps China realizes that the chances of the United States using, or even threatening to use, nuclear armed missiles against China are slim to none. In that case, why should China spend a lot of money trying to match the American arsenal.

The world's democracies - including the UK - best assure their survival by following India's example and increasing the quality and quantity of their nuclear weapons.

Mideast Cause And Effect

2006-12-18T18:08:00.000Z

Baker, Blair and the EU are wrong to claim the Palestine-Israel conflict causes Mideast instability. It's the other way round, and acting on their faulty analysis will cause disaster.

Tim Hames in the London Times diagnoses the three current wars (my ellipsis):

First, what was, atypically, an Israel-Hezbollah-Lebanon crisis has returned to normal — namely, a Syria-Hezbollah-Lebanon crisis with Hezbollah attempting to bring down a legitimate Government in Beirut, helped by Damascus.

...Hezbollah is not attempting to topple the Beirut Cabinet because of Israel but because it does not care for the Lebanese Prime Minister and his comparatively secular and technocratic team, which includes a strong Christian element.

Secondly, the fragile Palestinian Authority has moved ever closer to civil war between Fatah and Hamas....Fatah and Hamas are not at each other’s throats over a diplomatic strategy towards Israel but are engaged in a battle between nationalism and theocracy.

Thirdly, what had been a contest in Iraq between a US-led “occupation” and a so-called “insurgency” has mutated into dire ethnic cleansing between Shia and Sunni Iraqis. And of all the possible explanations for Shia and Sunni Iraqis slaughtering each other, we can discount the possibility that it is a dispute over Israel’s precise boundaries.

What we are witnessing is a profound disagreement about the political role of Islam in the modern world and which version of Islam is the more valid.

He concludes:

It is clear, then, that to expect an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to somehow deliver harmony throughout the Middle East is both wildly optimistic and intellectually ludicrous. The minimum that a “two- state solution” needs for any serious negotiations to start, never mind succeed, is two states — not one state and one fratricidal non-state.

In this situation, the best the West can do to encourage harmony and prosperity to emerge is to nurture and support the Mideast democacies - Israel and Iraq.

Conversely, undermining Israel through forced concessions and abandoning Iraq consigns the entire region to darkness.

Of Muslims And Elephants

2006-12-17T18:49:00.000Z

Currently both seething Brit Muslim leaders and Northern Assam elephants are under attack. My sympathies are with the elephants.

The seether (my ellipsis):

A senior Muslim invoked Hitler's 1930s Nazi regime while attacking the (Brit) Government over its treatment of British Muslims...the head of the Muslim Council of Britain (which gets £50,000 a year from the Brit taxpayer), criticised the Government for "unfairly targeting" Muslims, and said that it was undermining their status as "equal citizens".

He warned that blaming extremism on "a small, largely deprived community" leads to a "deterioration of community cohesion and fuels xenophobia".
"We have been told to accept that greater numbers of Muslims will be stopped and searched and also to 'inform on our children'. You will understand our worry about where all this is leading. Some Muslims have even sought the MCB's advice on whether they should change their names in order to avoid remarks.

But the Brit Muslim community singles itself out, by murdering Londoners, telling us in polls that many want to murder more, refusing to observe Holocaust Memorial day, and threatening in public to kill us if others disespect their religion. In spite of which the Brits have killed no Muslims, and continue to subsidize many - including this seether.

Contrast Brit Muslims' situation with that of the poor Assam elephants:

A killer elephant named after Usama bin Laden by fearful villagers was killed by sharpshooters, officials said Sunday. The animal was blamed for 14 deaths in the northeastern state of Assam...The elephant evaded two previous attempts by officials to kill it.
Confrontations between humans and elephants have escalated in northeastern India in recent years as the elephants' natural habitat has been destroyed, forcing the animals to forage for food in areas where humans live.

In the past five years, more than 250 people have been killed in Assam by elephants, while angry villagers killed 268 elephants during the same period, officials said.

Unlike the Muslims - who chose to come to the UK - these noble and intelligent creatures have had their neighborhood invaded and their food sources destroyed by an alien species. The elephants have sought no state handouts but tried to support themselves, And when, starving, they kill people, they are themselves killed.

So pity the elephants of Assam, not the Muslims of the UK.

Blair Is Right

2006-12-16T18:27:00.000Z

This unusual title for a DU post concerns Blair's stopping an investigation into Saudi corruption.

The SFO was investigating the £150 million Al Yamamah arms contract with BAE systems following allegations that middlemen had been paid millions of pounds.
The Saudis threatened to cancel a £10 billion order for Typhoon fighters unless the investigation was halted, threatening thousands of defence industry jobs.
The importance of good diplomatic relations with the Arab country were cited as the main reason for abandoning the investigation

The Blair bashers argue:

Britain is a signatory to the 1999 OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, which stresses that investigations should not be “influenced by considerations of national economic interest, the potential effect upon relations with another State or the identity of the natural or legal persons involved.”

Blair can reply that yes, the Brits did investigate - which is a damn site more than any of their OECD "partners" have done for similar offenses alleged on their turf.

And all of the oil states (barring Iraq) are corrupt dictatorships, but that doesn't stop the West buying its oil from them under unusual commercial arrangements.

And the UN and EU are riddled with corruption, but the Brits pay folks there in cash or kind to advance Brit national interests. For example the entire Security Council turned a blind eye to the biggest fraud in history - the UN Oil For Food scam.

Finally, it's a vital Brit national interest to keep the BAE Filton plant busy. We likely to need a lot more of its Typhoons and F-35 Lightings to face an aggressive Russia, a vindictive Europe, or a holocaust-repeating Iran. Or all of the above.

Another Unintended Consequence

2006-12-16T17:49:00.000Z

Japan has drawn the right conclusion from the new Congress and the ISG report.

After the horrors it inflicted - and suffered - in WW2, Japan developed a unique military:

The Japanese military is severely limited by...the Japanese Constitution which states:
"The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes" and that "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained."
Based on the Self-Defense Forces Law of 1954, the nation's defense establishment is organized to ensure civilian control of the armed forces.

In spite of which:

Japan's USD $45.8 billion/year budget makes it the fourth largest military spender in the world, after the United States,...China and Russia.

This powerful force just lost a slab of those constitutional limitations:

Japan's conservative government chipped away at the country's postwar pacifism yesterday by requiring schools to teach patriotism and upgrading the Defense Agency to a full ministry for the first time since World War II.

The measures, enacted in a vote by parliament's upper house, are key elements of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's push to bolster Japan's international military role, build up national pride and distance the country from its post-1945 war guilt.

This is just 58 days after Secretary Rice promised the Japanese full US protection against North Korean nukes.

The legendary politeness of the Japanese misled commentators to believe that she's put Japan back in its box. But there was no chance of that - with a Dem controlled Congress and the US looking to abandon a liberated ally, realistic Japan will look after itself.

Don't expect any highly publicized changes - the Japanese will just quietly build a complete and world-beating nuclear deterrent. And last time I looked they had enough enriched uranium and plutonium for 30,000 warheads.

Another victory for the Dems and Baker.

UN Fails The Parking Ticket Test

2006-12-15T16:34:00.000Z

Annan's replacement at the UN vows to clean house but since the UN reflects its mostly corrupt membership, he's bound to fail.

Here's his promising start:

Ban Ki-moon was sworn in yesterday as the new U.N. secretary-general and...shifted the mood at the U.N. General Assembly, vowing to launch an "Operation Restore Trust

...the former South Korean foreign minister condemned Iran's recent conference of Holocaust deniers and its president's call to wipe Israel off the map, calling both "unacceptable."

This shows the enormity of the task:

....since 1997, foreign diplomats in New York have forgone payment on over 150 thousand tickets – some $18 million in unpaid tickets. The researchers also say that they found a direct correlation between the list of parking violators and the results of the study by the World Bank on global corruption in the countries cited in the report.

The study also says that the countries that did pay their fines were also the countries with the least violations.

The UN's champion parking violator? Kuwait, with 246 unpaid tickets per diplomat per year – over the past five years. Egypt comes in second with half that amount, followed by Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania, Angola, Senegal, Pakistan, Cote d'Ivoire, Zambia, Morocco, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Syria, Benin and Cameroon.
Only 20 countries – including Israel – have paid all their parking tickets. The list includes Canada, Britain, Japan, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. class.
A diplomat who was caught violating parking laws twice, and does not pay his fine – will have his diplomatic license plate removed from his vehicle and he returns to being exposed to towing, fines and all the other penalties familiar to regular citizens.

People in high trust nations find such behavior inexplicable because we're contemptuous of lawbreakers, and that's a huge sanction over and above fines and towing.

But in low trust societies people who behave dishonestly or antisocially are admired, so these scofflaw diplomats will have enhanced their reputations with their corrupt UN peers.

And Mr Ki-moon can't change that.

Why The EU Is Statist

2006-12-14T17:39:00.000Z

The EU is destroying the economy Mrs T built for the Brits. That's in part anti-Anglo vindictiveness, but also because the average EU nation is statist, and the Brits are not.

Statism is:

A form of government or economic system that involves significant state intervention in personal, social or economic matters.

Statism doesn't work - here's a current example (WSJ, $):

America's rate of growth in CO2 emissions from 2000-04 was eight percentage points lower than from 1995-2000. By comparison, the EU-15 saw an increase of 2.3 points...
Europe's dismal record is explained by its approach to reducing emissions. The centerpiece of the Continent's plan is a carbon-trading scheme in which companies in CO2-heavy industries receive tradable permits for a certain amount of emissions. If they emit more CO2, they must buy credits from firms that are under quota. The idea is to force companies to emit less CO2 by making it prohibitively expensive to keep the status quo.

All this scheme has done so far is provide further proof that government cannot replicate the wisdom of markets. A red-faced European Commission recently admitted that it allowed more permits than there were emissions in 2005-07, keeping permit prices low and undermining the entire system.
When Brussels tried to make amends by ordering several member states to cut carbon permits by 7% more than expected for 2008-2012, industry and national capitals squealed. The market hadn't priced in such a dramatic reduction. With carbon permits trading relatively cheaply, firms have been able to get by with minimal changes to the way they do business. That has minimized Kyoto's economic impact.

The EU is statist because its member states are mostly statist. And since EU employees come from these same states, they're statist too. Here are the numbers.

The Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom (IEF), measures the extent to which nations have free markets - the lower the IEF score, the freer (and less statist).

The EU has 25 members and the UK is its economically most free large member with an IEF of 1.74 - only two small EU nations beat it (Ireland IEF 1.58, Luxembourg IEF 1.6).

We can compute the average IEF for the EU by summing the population-weighted IEFs of its members - excluding the UK, that's an IEF of 2.3. This makes the EU much less economically free then any Anglosphere nation - the US has IEF 1.84 and even nanny state Canada has IEF 1.85.

In fact the closest EU nation to an IEF of 2.3 is socialist Portugal (IEF 2.29) - which, appropriately, supplies the current EU chief.

Thus from an economic perspective, the EU is Portugal writ large, so it's bound to screw up markets. And the Brits.

EU At Last Converges - With Russia

2006-12-13T17:01:00.000Z

Russia's heist of Shell's $20 billion oil project makes it a pariah state for foreign investors - just like the EU.

Russia:

Foreign energy companies will be welcome in future as subcontractors but not as owners in Russia’s energy industry, the Kremlin signalled yesterday as Gazprom moved closer towards wresting control of Sakhalin-2, the giant Siberian gas project, from Royal Dutch Shell.

The Russian gas giant confirmed that Shell had made a new proposal in negotiations over Gazprom’s participation in Sakhalin Energy, the company building a $20 billion (£10.2 billion) liquefied natural gas scheme in Eastern Siberia.

Here's how they did it (WSJ, $):

Connoisseurs of Russian black humor can appreciate the methods used to wrest control of the Sakhalin-2 project from the Dutch-British energy giant. In recent months, local authorities went after the company for "unauthorized tree felling" and other environmental and labor violations -- finding about 100 in all.

Last week, the Natural Resources Ministry threatened to pull permits needed to proceed with the exploration work over allegedly misused water permits. This is the same Russia whose environmental record includes Chernobyl and the dry Aral Sea, among other offenses.

The EU just used similar extra-legal trickery to shutter a Brit company.

So it seems the EU, rather than declining into an Islamic dump, will become a province of Russia. Schroeder, the last German Chancellor, seems to think so.

For the rest of us, the message is clear - stay away.

Israel Should Declare Its Nukes

2006-12-12T15:26:00.000Z

Prime Minister Olmert is pumping smoke on Israel's nukes. However Israel's security would be greatly improved by a clear statement of its nuclear weapons capability and intentions

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reiterated three times during the 30 min press conference he gave alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel during his visit to the European country that Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity has not changed.

Ambiguity made sense when there was a chance the UN, US or EU might persuade Iran not to develop nukes. But now it's clear that won't happen so Israel faces nuclear attack.

Worse, Israel's current nuke-armed enemies now threaten it directly - Russia building the Iranian breeder reactor, and France giving Hizbollah air cover.

So Israeli strategists are planning for a nuclear war, which will at best leave Israel severely damaged, tens of millions dead, and Europe poisoned with fallout.

A clear deterrence statement might just stop this Armageddon by triggering regime change in Israel's enemies. All three are unstable: Iran's students are demonstrating against the Mullahs, Russia is collapsing, and the French are demoralized.

If the populations of these three nations realize their current leaders are exposing them to mass slaughter, they might just change those leaders out.

So Olmert should announce:

a) That Israel has abundant nukes;

b) That they are very high yield;

c) That Israel won't use them unless it's attacked with WMDs of any description, or if its second-strike capability is threatened (that's to stop the Russians or French going after Israel's subs);

d) And that the weapons are deployed for a second strike,

It might just work.

A New Morality Of War

2006-12-11T17:34:00.000Z

We must change of codes of warfare to deal with enemy combatants who hide behind civilians - here's how.

Warfare has always been governed by moral codes, but they've evolved with time. For example in ancient China, commanders refused to attack an enemy because he was disadvantaged while crossing a river - they judged an attack dishonorable. But such codes only work if they're reciprocal, and over time cheaters emerge and new codes have to be developed.

This book explains the evolution:

Established "codes of honor"...are the products of past experience and social structures, as well as past war fighting techniques. Aa a result they become obsolete at the start of new wars.

For example when in WW2 Germany changed the rules protecting civilians from attack, the allies eventually adopted the same rules.

Our enemies are forcing another big change in the morality of war:

Mohammad Abd al-Hamid Srour moved missiles across southern Lebanon under cover of a white flag. Hussein Ali Mahmoud Suleiman used the porch of a private home to fire rockets. Maher Hassan Mahmoud Kourani dressed in civilian clothes, hid his Kalashnikov in a tote bag and stored anti-aircraft missiles in the back of a green unmarked Volvo. The three men, all members of Hezbollah, were captured by Israel during last summer's war.
Now their videotaped interviews form part of a remarkable report by retired Lieutenant Colonel Reuven Erlich of Israel's Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. Relying heavily on captured Hezbollah documents, onsite and aerial photography and other first-hand evidence, the report shows how the Shiite group put innocent civilians at risk by deliberately deploying its forces in cities, towns and often private homes.
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, has accused Israel's military of "indiscriminate warfare" and "a disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians." Mr. Erlich demolishes that claim, and in the process shows the asymmetric strategy of Islamist radicals.
...In the town of Qana--site of an Israeli bombing on July 30 that killed 28 and that Hezbollah's apologists were quick to label a "massacre"--an arms warehouse can be seen adjacent to a mosque.

Use of civilians for cover isn't entirely new - in WW2 the Germans (who seem to pioneer these things) herded Dutch civilians around their tanks to ward of air strikes and our airman had no choice but to kill them. But when that war ended, we hoped such barbarism was an aberration and reverted to the old rules.

Now the rules must change, our political leaders should make a formal declaration that our forces will seek out and destroy enemy combatants, in or out of uniform, at home or on the battlefield, in a place or worship or on the street. And that the responsibility for civilian casualties lies entirely with the enemy, not with us.

We must not undertake to minimize civilian casualties - as the Israelis have found, that leads to the dictatorships of the UN Human Rights Committee daring to investigate Israel for artillery misfires when it was trying to stop deliberate Palestinian rocket attacks.

So that's the new rule - if you hide behind civilians, we will kill you in the most effective way, regardless of collateral damage, and the blood of innocents will be on your hands.

This is a horrible rule, but our enemies have chosen it and if we don't follow suit, we'll perish.

There Goes The EU

2006-12-10T18:17:00.000Z

The EU just forced the Brit government to pass a law killing a specific company that operated quite legally. That makes the EU toxic for business, and my new company will be registered outside the EU. Other new companies will follow, so there goes London's lead over NYC.

The sad tale (my ellipsis): .

..Bowland Dairies in Nelson (was) an £8-million-a-year business making curd cheese, mostly exported to five EU countries,.... On June 12, inspectors of the European Commission's Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) visited the plant for 90 minutes, looked through the paperwork and, after misinterpreting one document, issued a "rapid alert notice" that its products were unsafe. The milk in the cheese, they claimed, broke EU rules on antibiotic residues.

The Brit food safety organization rechecked the company and confirmed there wasn't a problem, But the EU insisted, so the company appealed to the European Court of Justice, which also ruled the company was fine.

So the EU just made a law against the company (my ellipsis and emphasis):

..(The EU) warned (the UK) that (it) was about to carry out a full audit of Britain's £5-billion-a-year cheese industry... (and the UK) bowed to the commission's diktat.

On October 16 it rushed through a statutory instrument, the Curd Cheese (Restriction on Placing on the Market) Regulations 2006, to take immediate effect. Section 3 read "No person shall place on the market any curd cheese manufactured by Bowland Dairy Products Limited".

That finally worked and the company is now gone.

This section oif the EU is run by a guy from Greece (CPI 4.4, highly corrupt), so it's likely the company didn't pay the right bribes.

Of course the EU is all about corruption - that's why its accounts have been qualified by its auditors for 11 years running. But forcing a member state to take out a named company that is operating legally makes SOX pale into insignificance as a business killer.

Because from now on any EU business that doesn't make nice to the Eurocrats will be shut down.

We were planning to register our next company in the UK - now we won't.

How US Appeasers Will Arm China

2006-12-10T17:14:00.000Z

Israel's arms exports this year approach Russia's, in spite of Israel bowing to US demands not to export to China. So if State slaps a US arms embargo on Israel, it'll simply compensate by upping exports to China.

...Israeli arms exports stand at $4.2 billion in 2006, (triggering) concern over another possible US attempt to limit sales to China.

In 2006 the Israeli Military Industries ended the year with an all time record sum total of $4.2 billion in exports....(and in) the first nine months of 2006 Israel Aerospace Industries sales stood at $2 billion.

..as recently revealed by President Vladimir Putin, will drop to $6 billion.

Baker and his cronies in State wants to solve the Mideast "problem" by forcing Israel to give up the Golan Heights to the Syrian dictatorship. But this summer's attacks from land Israel had ceded shows that this would be suicidal - especially given Syria's past use of the Golan to invade Israel.

So Baker and his buddies at State must be planning massive US pressure to force Israel into this unnatural act. Their main levers are cutting off US aid - about $600 million - and more importantly cutting of military joint ventures (a hidden form of aid), notably on BMD.

But if Israelis judge territorial concessions to be suicidal, they'll simply junk the JVs and plug the gap in their finances by shipping modern weapons to China.

What will State do then?

Why Socialists Love Man Made Global Warming

2006-12-09T17:55:00.000Z

The Brits just got hit with higher travel taxes by the creepy Scot set to replace Blair. He used the Theory Of Man Made Global Warming (TOMMGW) as cover, following the lead of US socialist Al Gore. This post explains the connection between socialism and the TOMMGW.

The taxes:

From February 1, (air travel tax) will soar from £20 to £40 for economy class travellers outside the European Union and from £5 to £10 for those within the EU.

The new Green Brown Chancellor also raised duty on petrol by...5.68p per gallon.

He's a repeat offender, having poured subsidies into wind farms, which it turns out only work in, er, Scotland (my ellipsis and emphasis):

The first independent study to rate farms according to how much electricity they produce shows that wind farms south of the Scottish border are not generating as much as the Government assumed when it set the target of producing a tenth of Britain's energy from renewables by 2010 and 15 per cent by 2015.

Despite millions being spent on wind turbines, the study by the Renewable Energy Foundation shows that England and Wales are not windy enough to allow large turbines to work at the rates claimed for them.

The foundation says that too much subsidy...(that) gives wind farms 60-70 per cent of their annual income has encouraged wind development in poor sites.

In the UK, conservatives (with a small c - the Tories are socialists) have debunked TOMMGW, notably Lord Monckton, and Nigel Lawson (who led the UK's economic revival under Mrs T).

It's the same in the US, where the socialist Democratic party promotes TOMMGW and the conservative Republicans debunk it. Thus Senator James Inhofe's report of the Environment & Public Works Committee exposes Gore's "facts", including this one (my ellipsis):

...the 48 scientists who accused President Bush of distorting (global warming) science were part of a political avocacy group set up to support Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

Here's why these socialists love TOMMGW.

1. It gives them cover to increase taxes, moving an ever greater percentage of GDP into the command economy they love.

2. It reduces the individual freedoms socialists detest - for example by forcing people out of their autonomous cars into regimented trains and buses.

3. It promotes class war - for example by taxing the "rich" who use airplanes.

4. It's promotes the goal of all good socialists - harming America. That's because a US deprived of its energy-consuming transport infrastructure would be much poorer and weaker.

The good news is that socialist economies always tank, leaving the future to conservatives.

The bad news is the poor Brits have a wall-to-wall socialist governing elite, so face a rough decade.

WW2 All Over Again

2006-12-08T16:47:00.000Z

Messrs Bush and Blair did the right thing yesterday - they warned the appeasers that if nuke-armed Islamic dictatorships win out in the Mideast, we're looking at a rerun of WW2, with the Europe defeated, the Brits standing alone, and the US (hopefully) coming to the rescue.

Prime Minister Blair's decision to appear with President Bush at the White House yesterday was intended as a signal that, even though he is in the closing months of his own leadership, Mr. Blair has no intention of backing a quick withdrawal of troops from Iraq or an imminent summit with the Iranians and Syrians, no matter what the Iraq Study Group recommended.

The presence of Mr. Blair on the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor seemed to lend more meaning to the president's words. "It's a difficult moment for America and Great Britain. And the task before us is daunting. Yet our nations have stood before in difficult moments. Sixty-five years ago this day, America was jolted out of our isolationism and plunged into a global war that Britain had been fighting for two years. In that war, our nation stood firm," he said.

The WW2 analogy is a good one, since Europe is very vulnerable to Islamic takeover, the US is not, and the UK is somewhere in between.

That's because most European nations have aging and falling native populations, large and growing un-assimilated Muslim communities, lack strong cultural roots, and will be reachable by Iranian nukes. So it won't take a lot to push these nations from atheistic multiculti liberalism to Sharia Law. Germany will likely be the first domino since it's furthest down the path.

By contrast, the US population is expanding, its Muslim population, although manipulative, is relatively small, and about half of Americans - the Red Staters - have strong Christian beliefs. Plus Iran is decades off being able to reach America with nukes.

The UK is somewhere in between. So a rerun of WW2 is not unlikely.

Inside The Mind Of The Betrayer

2006-12-07T14:00:00.000Z

The men proposing the US betrays Iraqi democrats, Kurds and Israelis are sociopaths, not realists.

To betray is to refuse to be bound by the past. This can be an advantage in business - if you base your investments on what's happening right now, you can make a lot of money. This book says George Soros is such a person - apparently he looks at the world anew every day.

But most humans aren't like Soros; we're strongly tied to past commitments.

We're this way because honoring commitments brings huge survival advantages. For example, if each morning you recompute whether your spouse is optimal, you'll end up with a diminishing string of partners. Or if you break your promise to watch a comrade's back in battle, no one will watch yours.

That's why people who do this are termed sociopaths - they don't display social behavior. They survive in the gene pool because there's some survival advantage to being a sociopath provided most other people are not, and that's why the likes of Soros and Baker are with us.

Sociopaths are poison to armies - here's the former head of the Brit Army giving a morality lesson to Blair:

"It is our soldiers who pay the cost in blood; the nation must therefore pay the cost in treasure," he said.
Britain's troops should be "properly equipped, thoroughly trained, decently paid, and together with their families, decently housed. They deserve nothing less."
Problems in these areas had led to recruiting becoming a major challenge.
Commenting on the Iraq Study Group's conclusions, Sir Mike said: "To leave Iraq before the Iraqi security forces are fully able to deal with the current violence would be both morally wrong and a fundamental strategic mistake."

Note: he talks about morality, not just strategy.

The Brits fought WW1 to honor their commitments to France, and WW2 to honor their commitments to Poland. These wars cost the UK an enormous sacrifice of blood and treasure, but created a Europe that's peaceful and prosperous. And that's good for the UK - Europe is its largest export market and its biggest supplier.

Conversely, if the Brits had betrayed France and Poland, they would now be living next to a Teutonic charnel house, and would be much poorer and less secure.

In summary, sociopaths can get big short term gains but long term they get killed. And that's why most humans behave honorably.

And that's why we must honor our promises to the Iraqis who died in the cause of the democracy we promised them.

NUTS!

2006-12-06T18:19:00.000Z

Baker and his cronies want the US to abandon the Iraqis to neighboring fear states, allow the Mullahs build nukes, and screw the Kurds and the Jews. The president should respond as above.

The last such call for a US surrender was during the Battle of the Bulge (my ellipsis):

By December 21 (1944) the German forces had surrounded Bastogne, which was defended by the 101st Airborne Division and Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division.
Conditions inside the perimeter were tough—most of the medical supplies and medical personnel had been captured. Food was scarce, and ammunition was so low that artillery crews were forbidden to fire on advancing Germans unless there was a large, heavy concentration of them. Despite determined German attacks, however, the perimeter held. The German Commander sent this request to the American commander in Bastogne.

"To the USA Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne: The fortune of war is changing. This time strong German armored units have encircled the USA forces in and near Bastogne ... There is only one possibility to save the encircled USA troops from total annihilation; that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town ... If this proposal is rejected, one German Artillery Corps and six heavy AA Battalions are ready to annihilate USA troops ... all the serious civilian losses caused by this artillery fire would not correspond with the well-known American humanity..." -The German Commander
When General Anthony McAuliffe was awakened by a German invitation to surrender, he gave a reply of annoyance that has been variously reported and was probably unprintable. There is no disagreement, however, as to what he wrote on the paper delivered to the Germans: "NUTS!"

Baker's surrender demand is a bit longer than his German predecessor's - it makes 79 recommendations, the essence of which is as follows.

Form a committee of fear states to "help" Iraq

Baker wants to put Iraq in a hen house full of foxes (WSJ, $, my ellipsis):

...all the states bordering Iraq (that's the Saudis, Iran, Kuwait, Syria, Jordan and Turkey); the key regional states, including Egypt and the Gulf States (but presumably not Israel); the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (that's Russia, China, France, UK and US); the European Union; and, of course, Iraq itself. Other countries—for instance, Germany, Japan and South Korea—that might be willing to contribute to resolving political, diplomatic, and security problems affecting Iraq could also become members.

This coalition of tyrants, terrorists and appeasers will make quick work of the Iraqi democrats.

Let the Mullahs build their nukes

The issue of Iran's nuclear programs should continue to be dealt with by the United Nations Security Council and its five permanent members (i.e., the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) plus Germany.

Cut And Run

The United States must make it clear to the Iraqi government that the United States could carry out its plans, including planned redeployments, even if Iraq does not implement its planned changes. America's other security needs and the future of our military cannot be made hostage to the actions or inactions of the Iraqi government.

We should seek to complete the training and equipping mission by the first quarter of 2008...

Thus al qaeda just has to keep blowing up Iraqi women and kids through Q1 2008 and the US will walk. That'll show them.

Screw the Kurds

Although Shiites, the blue-eyed, matriarchal Kurds are quite different from Arabs. Saddam forced them from their holy city of Kirkuk, they've repossessed it and a referendum is committed that will probably formalize its return to Kurdistan. So of course:

A referendum on the future of Kirkuk (as required by the Iraqi Constitution before the end of 2007) would be explosive and should be delayed.

That way the US gets to undermine its only steadfast ally in Iraq and violate the constitution all those purple-fingered folks risked their lives to vote for.

Abandon The Jews

Baker proposes the Syrian fear state makes a bunch of temporary concessions and in return Israel permanently gives it an improved rocket launching zone.

In exchange for these actions and in the context of a full and secure peace agreement, the Israelis should return the Golan Heights, with a U.S. security guarantee for Israel that could include an international force on the border, including U.S. troops if requested by both parties.

It's unlikely the Israelis will be impressed - by leaving the Iraqi democracy at the mercy of a nuke armed Iranian dictatorship, Baker devalues US security guarantees for all time.

In summary: NUTS!

A Real Job For Bolton

2006-12-05T18:04:00.000Z

The US depends on its emerging Russian enemy for the uranium to fuel its switch away from oil. That's a deadly exposure, which can only be fixed by a superlative manager - step forward John Bolton.

Russia has become another USSR. It's prepping the Iranians to kill the Jews:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that imposing wide-ranging sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program would be "irresponsible."

And murdering its opponents (my ellipsis):

Despite a formal pledge of cooperation with the team of (Scotland Yard) detectives who have flown into Moscow, Russian authorities threw up a succession of obstacles to the inquiry.
Yuri Chaika, the Prosecutor General, ruled out any interviews with leaders of the FSB, the secret service agency suspected in Whitehall of masterminding the murder of Mr Litvinenko with the radioactive poison polonium-210.

So it's intolerable that the US depends on Russian uranium for its nuclear power program (WSJ, $, my ellipsis and emphasis):

The Bush administration's plan for a "renaissance" in nuclear power may be crimped by tightening world-wide supplies of uranium and a lack of enrichment facilities to turn the uranium into fuel for power plants.
In a recent setback, an accident in October flooded the world's largest uranium mine, which was set to open in Canada next year. That nudged prices for processed uranium ore, already up more than 800% since 2001, even higher
...Russia...provides about half the enriched nuclear fuel used in this country (the US).
However, the "Ad Hoc Utility Group," an industry collective that represents 85% of the utilities involved in producing nuclear power is nervous about securing adequate fuel supplies for nuclear power plants over the next 10 years. The group is lobbying the administration to allow Russia to sell enriched fuel directly to U.S. utilities.
The accident at the Canadian mine highlights the supply problem. In October, the ceiling of the nearly completed mine, located in Saskatchewan, collapsed and let in a flood of water. The mine's owner...says the mishap will delay completion for as long as three years. The mine could eventually supply 17% of the world's uranium demand, (it) says.

This mix of committees and the messed up projects is no doubt further complicated by the fools at State.

Fixing it is a classic program manager's task, and the president should set the goal of US energy independence and appoint a tough manager to bash heads and direct national resources to get US enrichment facilities built, and bring that Canadian mine on stream.

He should appoint Bolton to the task. I'm sure Bolton will enjoy the job - unlike draining the UN swamp, ensuring US energy independence is an achievable task with a tangible and valuable outcome.

Europe Lines Up Against The Jews

2006-12-04T18:05:00.000Z

The Euroweasels are, as predicted, lining up against Israel. Sadly, that includes the Brits.

Blair seems to want his legacy to be a second holocaust:

Tony Blair flies to Washington this week hoping to capitalise on signs that President Bush and Congress are at last focusing attention on the long-stalled Middle East peace process as part of a solution for the trouble-torn region in general — and Iraq in particular.
The Prime Minister, who is said to be “deeply frustrated” that Mr Bush has failed to fulfil his promise of spending “political capital” on brokering a settlement between the Arabs and Israelis...

Blair's "frustration" is a tad unfair - the president did encourage Israel to withdraw from Gaza, so providing Hamas with its rocket launching fields.

Blair is presumably thinking of Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and maybe the transfer of its thermonukes to the trusty French-led UNIFIL.

Speaking of which, the Socialist candidate pitching to replace Chirac has been stumping the Mideast to impress the French "car-torching youth" vote (my ellipsis and emphasis):

Miss Royal...embarked on a hastily organised tour of the Middle East over the weekend...with stops in Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Israel...
Miss Royal...sought to put into practice her credo of "participatory dialogue" by meeting and talking to all the regional actors without exception.
These included Ali Ammar, a member of the pro-Syrian, Iranian-backed Hizbollah party, who, during a meeting with Lebanese MPs, likened Israeli incursions into southern Lebanon to Nazism. "The Nazism that has spilt our blood and usurped our independence and our sovereignty is no less evil than the Nazi occupation of France," he was reported telling Miss Royal.
He attacked the "unlimited dementia of the American administration" and called Israel the "Zionist entity".
Not mentioning his first comments, Miss Royal said: "I agree with a lot of things that you have said, notably your analysis of the United States," adding that Israel was a recognised country.

"Recognized" - that's a doughty defense coming from a citizen of the nation that did this in WW2 (my ellipsis):

...the Vichy government...collaborated with Nazism...The (French) police...worked as the Gestapo's aid (and) rounded up 75,000 Jews for deportation to concentration camps.

What The US Owes The UN

2006-12-04T17:13:00.000Z

John Bolton was always wasted on the UN. Its secretariat - and average member - is a corrupt dictatorship that hates the US and Israel. Rather than trying to reform it, his replacement should encourage the UN to follow the League of Nations into the graveyard of international institutions.

The best way to do that is for America's new man at the UN to speed up and intensify the upcoming Mideast nuclear war, and that needs the very opposite of Bolton. He needs to be a vapid, incoherent, ignorant, dishonest, cowardly appeaser - so the president and Congress should line up behind this man (my emphasis):

"There are many qualified candidates from across the political spectrum with the respect and experience necessary to be effective in this crucial post," added Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.He said a new nominee must be confirmed "with broad bipartisan support."

Civilized London

2006-12-03T17:27:00.000Z

Flying in to London from the Southern Med offers an instructive contrast in cultures.

Security at our departure airport was quite unaffected by the silly rules the EU just adopted to placate Blair. So we both carried 2 bags on board unchallenged and nobody asked to see our toiletries. That's because the Southern Med states are all low-trust, which means people - cops included - ignore petty laws (and unpetty ones too). The downside is there's less community spirit.

London is the flip side - people are much more law abiding, no matter how daft the law, but also much more courteous and helpful. Here are 5 examples from our trip from Heathrow to our Central London flat:

1. The ticket inspector on the Heathrow Express joked self-deprecatingly while checking our tickets.

2. A London Underground inspector, seeing me cursing my maxed-out electronic payment card, personally topped it up at an automatic payment machine.

3. A guy in the underground train gave up his seat to Mrs G.

4. Another guy jokingly offered me his seat.

5. Arriving at our flat we met the grocery delivery guy waiting in the rain, 2 minutes ahead of our delivery slot. He cheerfully carried up and checked the delivery for breakages.

These were all Londoners, but they hailed from:

1. France
2. West Indies
3. Pakistan
4. England
5. Poland

Londoners benefit hugely from their willingness to accept, accommodate, and integrate outsiders. And that acceptance is based on high-trust rules of courtesy and community that don't exist further south.

There's yet another flip side though. The cheerfulness, tolerance and fortitude of Londoners (and Brits) makes them incredibly slow to object to the sheer awfulness of their political elites.

So they now face a political consensus that's about tax their air travel to "reduce global warming"; tax peak-time road usage rather than build more roads (ditto); has built the biggest DNA database in the world - mostly from innocent citizens interviewed by cops but never charged; is setting up a database that tracks the life of every Brit from birth (to "prevent child abuse"); and will ban all smoking in pubs, restaurants and offices - even in specially constructed smoking rooms.

The good news - as the Germans found in WW2 - is that when the civilized Brits are provoked beyond endurance, they become implacable. So we may yet see the heads of Blair, Cameron and co in the Tower of London.

Amazing Grace

2006-12-01T19:10:00.000Z

The Baker Commission is expected to recommend the US makes a "graceful exit" from Iraq, to the president's evident irritation.

Mr Bush has repeatedly rejected a wholesale pullout or what he calls artificial deadlines. "This business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all," he said yesterday.

The educated fellows at State will no doubt convert him using examples from recent US history.

The Graceful Exit from Somalia

The Graceful Exit from the Lebanon

The Graceful Exit from South Vietnam

Compelling British examples include:

The Graceful Exit from Northern Ireland

The Graceful Exit from Dunkirk

The Graceful Exit from Singapore

Just compare the benefits these acts of grace conferred on millions with the miseries inflicted by the US and Brit ungraceful non-exits from Europe and Japan in WW2 and their subsequent confrontation with the USSR.

Eek! British Airways Does Run The UK!

2006-12-01T18:15:00.000Z

Seems I was wrong to criticize BA for acting like an arm of the state - its former CEO is setting the future course of the Brit economy. Downwards.

The Brit future:

Motorists should pay at least £1.28 a mile to drive on the country's busiest roads at the height of the rush hour, the Government's transport adviser said in a report published today.

In his long-awaited report, Sir Rod Eddington said that without such a scheme in place by 2015 the taxpayer would face a vast bill for a new highway building programme to cope with the mounting congestion. "For me in the end, road pricing is an economic no-brainer," the former British Airways chief executive said today.

A national road pricing scheme would be worth £28 billion to the economy by 2025 and congestion would be cut by half, which alone would be worth £22 billion.

This statism will harm rather than help the UK economy.

1. Driving in the rush hour is not harmful behavior - like smoking - to be discouraged by a tax. Modern economies are tightly synchronized - for example BA pilots need to be at Heathrow at a specific time to use a takeoff slot. Penalizing synchronization reduces economic efficiency.

2. Increased taxes do harm. Taking money off commuters and handing it to the government ensures it's moved from its most efficient use (an individual spending their own money on themselves) to the least efficient (government spending other people's money on third parties).

3. Central planning is a terrible alternative to the market. One of the reasons the USSR collapsed was its poor infrastructure - most roads more than 50 miles from Moscow were dirt. Left to themselves, businesses and employees will make efficient decisions to relocate or switch employers when commutes become intolerable. Or they can vote in pols who commit to build more roads.

The good news for Brits is they can now see the future their society - it's BA.

State Of Ignorance

2006-11-30T13:30:00.000Z

With is favored party controlling Congress, the State Department is free to step up its attacks on US allies.

First the Brits:

A senior American official has spoken of "the myth of the special relationship" between the United States and Britain, arguing that Tony Blair got "nothing, no payback" for supporting President George W Bush in Iraq.

Kendall Myers, a leading State Department adviser, suggested that Mr Blair should have been ditched by Labour but the party had lacked the "courage or audacity" to remove him.

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, was "shrewd, astute" to have distanced himself from America.

Mr Myers, a senior analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Analysis and Research, was speaking in a lecture in Washington at the School of Advanced International Studies, part of Johns Hopkins University.

A State Department spokesman said: "The views expressed by Mr Myers in no way represent the views of the United States government."

At least State admits it's not part of the US government - rather supporting America's enemies.

Next Israel:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, standing alongside Abbas at a joint press conference in the West Bank city of Jericho, said the US hopes to accelerate efforts to find a solution to the Israeli-Paelstinian conflict and to extend the scope of a recently declared ceasefire between the two sides.
Rice also said the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories, including what she called "humiliations," must be eased.
In a gesture of support for Palestinian aspirations, Rice said any future Palestinian state should be "viable" and "contiguous" and said no actions should be taken now to prejudge the outcome of a final peace deal. That was an apparent reference to Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank.

Rice doesn't mention that the "humiliations" would stop if the elected Palestinian government would stop "killing" and "kidnapping" Israelis.

And the fledgling Iraqi democracy:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki abruptly canceled the first round of face-to-face meetings scheduled here last night with President Bush, just hours after publication of a classified memo from the president's top security aide that says the Iraqi leader is either "ignorant," devious or incapable of governing right now.
The cancellation and the leaked memo by National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley set off a day of "background" briefings by White House officials who refused to be named but tried to explain the ups and downs of diplomacy.

Actually this is about betrayal, not "the ups and downs of diplomacy".

These three episodes damage vital US interests, while revealing the monumental ignorance of the US diplomatic elite. These are the three realities they don't get:

1. The Brits (and Canadians and Australians) don't support the US because it's always right, but because we're joined in blood.

2. If the US forces Israel to concede territory to terrorists, they'll use it to kill Jews, making a Mideast nuclear war not just probable but certain.

3. The poor bloody Iraqi PM is no more able to control what goes on in Iraq than the Coalition. Demanding that he magically sweep away the Iranian and Syrian sponsored killers is beyond his means.

I'm Hanging On To My Dollars

2006-11-29T16:54:00.000Z

I predict the dollar's drop against the Euro will continue, will cause nasty consequences for the bad guys, and will be reversed when Americans elect a financially responsible Congress or Europe goes under.

Here's the WSJ ($):

When U.S. economic policies look like they might take a turn for the worse, dollar-denominated assets lose some of their allure. So, for example, when the new Democratic majority in Congress talks about raising taxes on capital gains and dividends, investors in U.S. financial and corporate assets get the jitters.

The good news is a weak dollar will tank the Euroweasels and China, because the US won't be able to import from them.

It shouldn't effect US energy prices because oil is priced in dollars. But even if that changes, it'll just trigger the US to drill for its own oil and/or build nuke power stations.

And when a new US Congress goes back to cutting taxes, and/or the weasels gets nuked by their Iranian buddies, the dollar will pop back up again.

What's not to like?

Civil War Stories

2006-11-29T15:28:00.000Z

The usual suspects are dishonestly painting Iraq as a civil war. That's so they can justify leaving the people of Iraq to the mercies of the brutal dictatorships in Iran and Syria.

Here's OpinionJournal:

Which brings us back to the alleged "civil war." The term seems to have acquired a totemic meaning in Iraq, although the U.S. has intervened successfully in civil wars before: the Balkans and Afghanistan, most recently. Regarding Iraq, the goal of the "civil war" chorus seems to be to delegitimize the war by painting what is a false picture of the balance of power and legitimacy between the Iraqi government and the terrorists.
The sectarian violence is a horrible problem. But by any reasonable definition, a "civil war" implies at least two militarily strong factions with a popular claim on political leadership. Neither of those conditions exists in Iraq.
The country's elected, pan-sectarian government and its several hundred thousand security forces remain the only legitimate power center. The Sunni insurgents, meanwhile, are a mix of Islamists and Baathists who enjoy little support and are capable only of terrorist-style attacks.

But the MSM is energetically promoting the false description:

NBC News has decided...that the situation in Iraq, with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas, can now be characterized as civil war.

The above is quoted approvingly by lefties who conclude:

Now that everyone agrees we can't solve Iraq's problems, and since the country wasn't a threat to us in the first place, can we just go home now?

Kofi Annan adds his words of wisdom:

“At some stage, I think it would be helpful to have a conference, a conference that brings everybody together, along the lines of what we did in the former Yugoslavia and others, but I think we need to work slowly to get there...”.

Of course the sole contribution of the UN to the Yugoslavia civil war was to help the Serbs commit genocide in Bosnia.

Naturally the NYT has piled in:

"After consulting with our reporters in the field and the editors who directly oversee this coverage, we have agreed that Times correspondents may describe the conflict in Iraq as a civil war when they and their editors believe it is appropriate," Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, revealed in a statement. "It's hard to argue that this war does not fit the generally accepted definition of civil war.

We can safely assume that assertions made by NBC, Kofi Annan and the NYT will be both false and intended to provide aid and comfort to our enemies.

Indeed the excellent Flopping Aces showed how AP creates "civil war" stories using quotes from fake Iraqi police officers, causing Centcom to write AP thus (my emphasis):

Dear Associated Press:

On Nov. 24, 2006, your organization published an article by Qais Al-Bashir about six Sunnis being burned alive in the presence of Iraqi Police officers. This news item, which is below, received an enormous amount of coverage internationally.
We at Multi-National Corps - Iraq made it known through MNC-I Press Release Number 20061125-09 and our conversations with your reporters that neither we nor Baghdad Police had any reports of such an incident after investigating it and could find no one to corroborate the story. A couple of hours ago, we learned something else very important. We can tell you definitively that the primary source of this story, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI employee.

We verified this fact with the MOI through the Coalition Police Assistance Training Team.
Also, we definitely know, as we told you several weeks ago through the MNC-I Media Relations cell, that another AP-popular IP spokesman, Lt. Maithem Abdul Razzaq, supposedly of the city’s Yarmouk police station, does not work at that police station and is also not authorized to speak on behalf of the IP. The MOI has supposedly issued a warrant for his questioning.

This dishonesty is systemic - here's the London Times yesterday:

Hassan Mahmoud has the build of a bouncer. But as he sits on a couch and talks about Iraq’s secret religious prisons his broad frame shakes, he clutches himself and weeps.
“It hurts me when I remember what happened,” he says, recalling his brush with death inside a Shia prayer room where he witnessed the beheading of a fellow kidnap victim.

The story is not tied to a single objective report, so is impossible to verify.

We must pray the president has the strength to stand by the people of Iraq.

Travel Tips From The Lying Imams

2006-11-29T11:26:00.000Z

Reports of the airplane security probe by six US Muslim "clerics" provide us with useful hints on recognizing and defeating hijackers.

The six were part of a group of 140 US Muslim leaders who met with a new Muslim Congressman in Minneapolis last week. On their US Air flight out they either set up an actual hijack or probed for one - gathering information on the effectiveness of airline and ground security.

These "Flying Imams" were removed from the flight and claimed discrimination - hence the post title. This is what you can do faced with the same situation.

Be alert for Muslim males behaving oddly at the departure gate

Muslims are most likely to be of Mideast or Pakistani appearance, but bear in mind that one of the London killers was a black convert and Richard Reid was a white one.

This was the odd behavior of the lying Imams:

...three of the imams were praying loudly in the concourse and repeatedly shouted "Allah" when passengers were called for boarding...

If you see such behavior, alert your traveling companions. If one of you has a cellphone with camera, discreetly record the behavior - the cops will need it later.

On boarding, look for the group splitting into hijack formation:

...the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks -- two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin.

...a federal air marshal who asked to remain anonymous (explained). "They now control all of the entry and exit routes to the plane."

The team appropriated 2 first class seats:

...The gate agent told police that when the imams asked to be upgraded, they were told no such seats were available. Nevertheless, the two men were seated in first class when removed.

On boarding, you should be alert for arguments with flight attendants and passengers as the pairs take seats not assigned to them. If that happens and you can see the group has split into pairs in the front middle and back of the plane, you are now at high risk of hijack. If possible, start taking discreet photos with your cell.

Look for the team arming itself

In this case:

Three of the men asked for seat-belt extenders, although two flight attendants told police the men were not oversized... Rather than attach the extensions, the men placed the straps and buckles on the cabin floor...

The seat extender makes an effective flail - like the "can in a sock" you use in unarmed combat - and in a hijack it would be used to subdue unarmed flight attendants and passengers.

Look for co-ordination

In this case:

A flight attendant said one of the men made two trips to the rear of the plane to talk to the imam during boarding, and again when the flight was delayed because of their behavior.

Look for aggressive behavior

In this case:

...witnesses told law enforcement that the men spoke in Arabic and English, criticizing the war in Iraq and President Bush, and talking about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

That tells you it's probably a security probe - in an actual hijack they'd stay quiet. Still, real hijackers might calculate that an aggressive display reduces their chances of being ejected.

What to do

Raise the alarm immediately the group splits into the hijack seating formation. If the crew won't eject the team, you should deplane, explaining why. On your way out try to use your cellphone to take pictures or the the team and its weapons.

If you can't deplane, use your cellphone to call 911 (112 in Europe, 999 in the UK) and ask the cops to stop the flight. Send them any pictures you've taken to help make the case.

If the cops can't or won't stop the flight, work with the other passengers to prepare for a United 93 type battle. Fit and well trained passengers should re-seat themselves behind the rearmost pair, disable them, then work forward.

None of which is an incitement to go round attacking innocent Muslims - but if they pass all of the above tests, they aren't innocent.

Finally, the safest thing to do right now is fly US Air.

BA Re- Nationalized

2006-11-28T12:24:00.000Z

Turns out the CEO of British Airways thinks it's a government department (my ellipsis):

Last week Mr Straw (a minister in Blair's government) attacked the airline’s stance (of banning employees wearing Christian symbols but letting them wear Hindu and Muslim symbols) as “quite intolerable”.
Mr Broughton (the CEO) asked Mr Blair: “Given that the police, the army and other government uniformed staff have an identical policy to BA in relation to crosses outside of the uniform, do you find the Government’s policy wholly inexplicable?”

GOP Denial

2006-11-27T15:41:00.000Z

To recover in 2008, the GOP needs to clearly understand why its base didn't support it in the mid-terms. Instead, it's in denial.

My ten cents is that the GOP voters objected to three things:

1. The failure to fight the GWOT aggressively (e.g. letting the NYT and other enemy combatants off the hook).

2. The failure of the GOP-controlled Congress to control spending.

3. The Senate/Presidential illegal immigrant amnesty/open borders campaign.

Here's OpinionJournal in denial on the third issue:

Everyone knows that Intel, Yahoo, Google, eBay and Sun Microsystems are wildly successful U.S. technology companies. Less well known is that immigrant entrepreneurs played a role in founding each one--and a whole lot of others....

The piece goes on to make the legitimate case for increasing the number of visas the US grants to skilled workers. But its conclusion shows it just doesn't get why GOP voters are riled about illegals (my ellipsis):

It's unfortunate that so many of...GOP (Congressmen)...were more interested in using the immigration issue (in the mid terms) to help demagogue their way into the minority. They'd have been better off embracing immigration as a major source of American economic vitality.

If a GOP supporter like the WSJ can't understand the gut distaste of the GOP voters for illegal acts, both paper and party deserve to be marginalized.

UPDATE

There's a chink of light on issue 2 above elsewhere in OpinionJournal (my ellipsis):

Mr. Coburn (R Oklahoma) says...Republicans are learning some lessons from their stinging loss of Congress three weeks ago. "By either staying home or not voting Republican, many voters were sending a message that they don't want to give the spending favor factory that Congress had become their stamp of approval," ...

Overall federal spending has gone up by 49% since 2001...

Israeli Missile Defense

2006-11-27T14:37:00.000Z

The latest Palestinian truce will be no more reliable than its predecessors, and Kassams will soon be falling again. Israel needs to stop this pest without diverting the IDF from its prep for the big war. And that needs an anti-Kassam defense - here's some analysis of its feasibility.

A recent post suggested the land derivative of the Phalanx anti-missile system should knock down most Kassams. Now StrategyPage, that most useful source of weapons information, suggests the system won't work on the Kassam. I don't agree, but could be wrong, so here are the arguments.

StrategyPage (my ellipsis): I

Israel is urgently trying to get their hands on an aid defense system that will knock down the home-made Kassam rockets Palestinians are firing from Gaza into southern Israel. So far, the biggest obstacle has been the poor construction quality of the Kassam rockets, and the resulting erratic flight path that misleads most radar systems designed to spot and predict the path of rockets and artillery shells. Professionally made projectiles are more accurate, and fly a more predictable path, which makes interception more likely.

...a U.S. adaptation of (the) Phalanx naval 20mm autocannon (which works) against conventional artillery, mortar and rocket projectiles (has) trouble with the erratic Kassams.

I'm skeptical of this because the Kassam's unpredictability must be confined to its boost phase. That's in the few seconds when the rocket engine is burning, probably unevenly, causing the weapon to jink and show varying acceleration.

But after this brief burn the weapon follows a ballistic trajectory which be predicted with basic math. The Kassam launchers pictured show an approximately 45 degree elevation, probably for maximum range. That means a flight time of tens of seconds, of which well over half is ballistic - plenty of time to spot the weapon by radar and shoot it down.

The Kassam might tumble during its ballistic phase, which would cause some drag-induced course deviation, but predictive software should be able to correct for that.

The problem of tracking missiles with irregular boost trajectories and some ballistic instability is not new. Modern ICBMs use both to reduce the effectiveness of BMD systems, by "stuttering" the engine during boost and using gas thrusters during the ballistic phase.

Israel has the world's first mid-course BMD, the Arrow system, so should have software to deal with these problems.

If not, it has to develop it ASAP, not only for Kassam defense, but to keep Iranian Shahabs from nuking its cities.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

2006-11-26T16:29:00.000Z

Coalition soldiers in Afghanistan have started posting combat videos on YouTube, where the IDF posts videos of captured Hizbollah bunkers. Even the enemy gets to post too. So - just like that - AP, Reuters and AFP have lost their monopoly, and our enemies their propaganda arm.

London's Sunday Telegraph explains how Brit soldiers improvise helmet-mounted digital cameras, and give a couple of examples:

Under a clear blue Afghan sky an enemy position comes into focus. Ulster accents are heard as one soldier asks another the whereabouts of the RAF. Suddenly, there is a roar of aircraft engines, the briefest glimpse of a bomb, and the scene explodes.

This clip tells more about the quality of Brit close air support than the proverbial thousand words.

Try browsing YouTube under News and Blogs - there's even a funky post from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry!

Gathering Storm (1)

2006-11-26T15:40:00.000Z

Israel is quietly mobilizing.

The London Times (my ellipsis)

..the Israeli armed forces have launched a programme to correct their failings. Many Israeli officers regard this year’s battles as a “dress rehearsal for the real thing” — a war against the combined might of Hezbollah and Syria, and possibly Iran.
A big effort is already under way to improve training in the battle brigades. “We can’t afford to send our paratroops to chase Palestinian kids in the West Bank,” said the source. “They should train day and night for a real battle.”

The Jerusalem Post:

The Givati infantry Brigade, which had been conducting anti-Kassam operations, left Gaza early Sunday morning.
The IDF was still holding a defensive posture, however, along the Gaza security fence.

Israel still as a lot to do, and I'm guessing State will block the US providing much help. So Israel's ordnance factories will be running flat out to build inventory of the 10 different weapons the IDF is going to need.

Waiting Out Russia

2006-11-25T16:20:00.000Z

By 2050, Russia will be a mid-sized half Muslim nation with a Palestinian-quality economy. But as it disintegrates, it'll do a lot of damage - here's how we minimize it.

"We" are the Anglosphere and the old Soviet satellites - from the Baltic states through Poland and Georgia to the Caucasus. The weasels - Germany, France, Spain, some Nordics, Belgium, and maybe Italy will stay pusillanimous, so won't make it.

1. Support The Ex Soviet Satellites

NATO is led by an idiot and a leading member gives Russian-backed Hizbollah air cover, hence NATO can't be relied upon. The US and UK need to provide bilateral security guarantees to these nations that Russia's dictators will try to re-incorporate

2. Embargo Technology Transfer

The Russian are great missile designers - I learned weapons control systems design from a Russian textbook. But their centralized society produces lousy computers and software.

When the USSR collapsed, the West relaxed its technology embargoes on Russia, enabling its designers to carry out huge upgrade to use our computer systems. For example the TORs they're installing to keep the Israelis off the Mullah's nuke plants:

The computer control of the Tor system is a giant leap for Soviet\Russian technology. The digital computers allow for a high degree of automation, similar to the US Patriot missile system. Target threat classification is automatic and the system can be operated with little input from operators required, if desired. This is one reason for the high degree of accuracy, ability to intercept small, fast and highly maneuverable targets, and the very fast reaction times of the system.

We need to turn off the faucet, fast, denying them the IT technologies they need to stay current.

The US and UK also need to impose technology embargoes on their NATO "allies" - otherwise the likes of France and Germany will keep Russia current, for money.

3. Beef Up Our Security Services

MI5 performed better than the spy-infested, politicized, CIA during the Cold War. But now MI5 is focused on Islamic terror and needs more money and people to swing its attention back to the Russians. If the CIA can be rescued, that needs more money too.

4. Switch To Nuclear Power

Nuke plants are the most secure way the UK can protect its energy supplies. It should also encourage and protect the new non-Russian oil sources and pipelines Dick Cheney negotiated. But it can't rely rely on them - few "accidents" to these pipelines will leave the UK high and dry.

The US has plenty of indigenous oil and gas, but vested interests (beginning with the letter "D") prevent its exploitation. When oil goes through $200/barrel, voters will no doubt change the pols or their attitude.

5. Keep The UK Out Of Any EU Energy Policy

The UK is the only major gas and oil producer in the EU.

When Russia tightens its energy knot on Europe, the weasels will start howling for the Brits to "share" their energy resources, under the guise of EU solidarity. Most of those nations are doomed, and the UK must resist the impulse to throw good money after bad.

6. Rebuild Our Militaries

The UK now spends just 2.32% of its GDP on defense, compared with the US 3.2% (even France spends 2.57%).

During the Cold War, both the US and UK were spending between 4% and 5%, and they need to return to these levels. That isn't hard - just a matter of turning pork into guns.

The money is needed for bigger missile defense systems, more space defenses, more and better planes and much bigger air-mobile armies.

****

Nations take a while to notice new threats - Churchill's Iron Curtain speech was a year after the Soviets turned the lights out in Eastern Europe. So none of this will happen immediately. But happen it must.

Europe's Peril

2006-11-24T17:35:00.000Z

With Russia now a rogue state, expect the euroweasels to start howling for US protection - which of course it should refuse.

Today Russia pulled off a double nuclear whammy. As well as apparently poisoning a dissident with Polonium (an element commonly used as a neutron booster in A-bombs), it started installing its anti-air defenses around the Iranian nuke plants, to stop the US or Israel taking them out.

That's as well as building the Mullahs a big nuclear reactor, which will give them Plutonium and hence a second route to their A bomb if they can't get their Uranium cascades to work.

Even if the US administration wanted to defend the European ingrates, the isolationist Dem Congress will stop it.

Germany and France had better look to their defenses.

Dutch Language Primer

2006-11-24T15:19:00.000Z

The current head of NATO is a Dutchman named Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and he wants NATO's resident weasels to send fighting troops to Afghanistan. They won't of course, so his plan B is for the US and Brits to cut and run from Iraq - to Afghanistan. So now we know "Jaap de Hoop" is Dutch for "total idiot".

It's well known that only the Anglos (US, Canadians, Brits & Australians) plus soon the Poles are actually fighting in Afghanistan.

Jaap de Hoop's Plan A is to get the weasels to step up to the plate:

Unless nations including France, Germany, Italy and Spain agreed to drop the many caveats that prevent their combat troops from fighting in the most perilous areas, Afghanistan would again become “a black hole for terrorism”.

Absent the weasels, he suggests:

It would “of course make a difference” if Britain and America was able to draw down several thousand troops from Iraq and make them available for Afghanistan, he added.

He's dead right it would "make a difference" - Iran, Syria and Al Qaeda would switch their victorious forces to finish off NATO in Afghanistan.

Still, at least now we know what Jaap de Hoop means in English.

UPDATE: Dutch special forces are fighting in Afghanistan, so they're clearly not Jaap de Hoops.

Happy Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T16:54:00.000Z

Our Thanksgivings in the US have always cold and wet, and this year is maintaining that tradition without our presence.

But the natives are snug in Grandmother's house, so indifferent to the weather.

Lacking a local grandmother, I once made the mistake of introducing Mrs G to NYC by taking her there for the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.

Since then she has stubbornly refused to return, insisted that this great city is lacking in restaurants, deserted, cold, and rainy. So it goes.

BA Forgets We Have a Choice

2006-11-23T15:09:00.000Z

British Airways (BA) is going through another authoritarian phase and should be avoided if you're a male Christian.

Until 1987 BA was a typical customer-hostile state enterprise - our kids called its ratty flight attendants "Grims". Then Mrs T privatized it and it flowered as new managers put the customer first. By the early 90s it was the world's most profitable airline and my lifeline between San Francisco and London - vastly better than United and American.

But the new managers died or retired and BA has been losing passengers since 2002 as it reverted to its old ways - here are two examples.

In October 2006...a Christian employee of British Airways, was asked to cover up a necklace which depicted a Christian Cross and was placed on unpaid leave when she refused to do so... Christian groups accused British Airways of double standards, as Sikh and Muslim employees are not prevented from wearing religious garments at work.

This is a wonderfully ignorant policy - the flag BA flies is made up of the Christian crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick. And BA's competitors capitalize on their national dress - Emirates flight attendants wear cute headscarves and JAL's wear natty Kimonos. Now even Brit Members of Parliament are protesting.

To BA, not just its national religion is toxic - male passengers are too!

...British Airways has a policy of not seating adult male passengers next to unaccompanied children, even if the child's parents are elsewhere on the plane....The policy came to light following an incident in which ... a retired journalist, was asked to move from his seat next to a 9-year-old girl...

The poor guy (he's 76) commented (my ellipsis):

"The discussion (with the flight attendant) went on for several minutes but she refused to back down and said we could not take off until the problem was sorted out. I heard her muttering to a colleague that everyone would have to disembark.
"She didn't seem embarrassed - just rather irritated that it was taking up so much time.

So BA is back to being Grim - thus do incompetent managers destroy shareholder value.

Male Christians (and everyone else) can find better airlines than BA here.

Unintended Consequences Of "Realism"

2006-11-22T16:32:00.000Z

The "realists" - Blair and Baker - while encouraging Syria and Iran to kill Mideast democracy may have inadvertently strengthened it.

Natan Sharansky, a survivor of the Soviet Gulag explains that dictatorships are just gangs that use force to monopolize a society's wealth. That means dictators have no way of retiring - having killed, mutilated and raped to stay in power, they have millions of sworn enemies and can't retire to a condo on the Euphrates.

That makes democracy a death sentence for dictators. They used to escape to London and Paris, but globalization makes these no longer safe even for good guys. So dictators have to hang on to power.

That means they have good reason to hate and fear the growth of democracy in neighbors - they set a bad example to their own subject people. That's why Iran and Syria are destabilizing the new Iraqi democracy, and why Syria is killing Lebanese politicians and has nourished Hizbollah as its army of occupation.

The "realists" don't get this because they can retire without being killed - after Blair leaves power, he's safe on the Anglo lecture circuit, and Baker has survived comfortably in spite of his complicity in the policies of Bush 41. So in offering deals to the dictators of Syria and Iran, they don't understand these folks have no choice but to eliminate all trace of democracy from their neighborhoods.

But good may come of their ignorance. By encouraging the Syrian dictator to return to his murderous ways, they've made a Lebanese civil war almost inevitable. Here's the leader of the Lebanese Druze (my ellipsis):

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the country's Druze community who has turned against Syria in recent years, said he expected the regime of (Syrian) President Bashir al-Assad to carry on attacking troublesome MPs.
"We have to expect, and this is my impression unfortunately, more assassinations of ministers and parliamentarians," he told a news conference. "It seems the Syrian regime will continue with the assassinations. I expect more assassinations but no matter what they do, we are here and we will be victorious."

Israeli Druze contribute the most admired fighters to the IDF, hence getting their Lebanese brothers mad is foolish in the extreme. Not to mention the 39% of Lebanese who are Christian:

Schools and shops were closed in Beirut and there was little traffic on the roads as Gemayel's coffin, covered in the flag of the Phalange Party, the leading Christian party founded by his grandfather, was brought to the family's home village of Bikfaya in the Metn mountains east of the capital.

So this is shaping up to be a bloody civil war, in which the Israelis will give aid and comfort to the Druze and Christian communities while taking a whack at the Syrians to keep them out of the fight. If democracy prevails and Syria is humbled the Iraqi democrats will gain heart. And maybe the oppressed Iranians too.

In that case Blair and Baker will go down in history not as appeasers but liberators.

But if Mideast democracy is destroyed, millions of Middle Easterners will curse the names of Blair and Baker - and maybe the lecture circuit won't be quite so safe after all.

On Being Feared Rather Than Loved

2006-11-22T16:09:00.000Z

Two reports today confirm the truth of Machiavelli's maxim.

Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.

First the US INS:

The survey of visitors from 16 countries showed that the US was ranked "the worst" in terms of visas and immigration procedures by 39 per cent, twice as many as the next destination considered unfriendly, the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent.

More than half of those surveyed said US immigration officials were rude and two thirds said they feared they would be detained on arrival for benign mistakes in paperwork or for saying the wrong thing to Customs and Border Protection staff, whose motto is Vigilance, Service and Integrity. The DAP said travel to the US from countries other than Mexico and Canada was down 17 per cent from its high in 2000.

In my experience, US Immigration officials have been surly for decades, although less so than their German counterparts. And once you're through US immigration, the natives are friendly, whereas your immigration experience is often the high point of your visit to Germany.

But even if the INS is the surliest in the world, so what? It's likely that the increasing harassment at immigration has prevented more 9/11s, in which case losing 17% of (non Mexican!) visitors is cheap at the price.

Next Israel:

Israel is the worst 'brand' in the world, according to a poll that measured the international perception of 36 nations in a quarterly index.

The Index surveyed over 25,000 online consumers across 35 countries about their perceptions of those countries across six areas of national competence: Investment and Immigration, Exports, Culture and Heritage, People, Governance and Tourism.

Israel was ranked last, coming in after countries such as Indonesia (34), Egypt (29) and China (19). The United Kingdom was ranked first, followed by Germany and Italy.

Israel's lowest scores gave from Egypt, who ranked Israel at the bottom of the list in all categories, save contributions to science and technology.

Surprisingly, the Russians gave Israel its highest scores in almost all categories.

You'd have to be very ignorant to rank democratic, history-soaked, beautiful, post-industrial Israel below the brutal and corrupt third world dictatorship of Indonesia. So the respondents are just expressing dislike stemming from fear.

Machiavelli would recognize this as a perfect example of his maxim - Israel survives only by causing its overt Muslim enemies and covert European enemies to fear it.

Bring Back Rummy

2006-11-21T18:14:00.000Z

If you think DU is too hard on James Baker, here's Michael Young - a Lebanese national - in today's WSJ ($, my ellipsis).

In 1990, (Baker) was a leading light in President George H.W. Bush's administration, which ceded Lebanon to Syria in exchange for President Hafez Assad's agreement to be part of the international coalition against Iraq. An inveterate "realist," Mr. Baker is not likely to balk at negotiating with Mr. Assad if it means the U.S. can buy some peace of mind as it transforms its presence in Iraq.

His proposal is unpopular at the White House, and last week Mr. Bush made that known to Mr. Baker and his colleagues. However, because of his electoral defeat, the president, pressed by a Congress avidly searching for new ideas, might find less latitude to ignore Syria down the road.

Mr. Baker and his fellow realists, custodians of stalemate in their own way, want the U.S. to return to its previous approach to the region, where interests defined behavior more than values -- particularly democracy.

But if engagement with Syria, or even Iran, is on the cards, then the U.S. might have to surrender the one genuine triumph it can point to after Mr. Bush formulated a democratic project for the Middle East: the peaceful, popular overthrow by the Lebanese of Syria's debilitating domination.

If the president wants to avoid a legacy of the bloody collapse of Mideast democracy and a nuclear war between Iran, Israel and maybe France, he has to get a grip.

He should start by bringing back Rumsfeld to oversee Gates - perhaps via a recess appointment.

NASDAQ + SOX << LSE

2006-11-21T16:21:00.000Z

NASDAQ wants to buy the London Stock Exchange to follow the money that's fled the US Sarbanes-Oxley plague. But if their hostile bid prevails, they'll just spread the contagion, so the Brit government needs to protect the LSE.

Here's the WSJ ($):

Another place merger money is going is overseas. This may help explain Nasdaq's $5 billion hostile bid for the London Stock Exchange, which was rebuffed yesterday. As more and more international companies list their shares overseas rather than in New York, having a foothold outside the U.S. has come to be seen as a survival strategy for the formerly comfortable U.S. stock exchanges. They have to follow the money if the money won't come here.

There's nothing wrong with Nasdaq - I once participated in a listing there, and it went swimmingly. The problem is the SEC:

America's Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal regulatory agency and can be over-zealous, prescriptive and intrusive – all things that the City of London can do without.

Yet the SEC will not think twice about extending its regulatory activities to the City of London should Nasdaq take over the London Stock Exchange, arguing that the New York-based exchange is part of its bailiwick wherever it may set up shop.

I wouldn't trust assurances from the SEC - it'll be led by a Dem appointee eventually, and we all know what they think about foreign competition - here's Rep. Frank, hat tip OpinionJournal (my emphasis):

Representative Barney Frank has proposed in a series of meetings with business groups a "grand bargain" with corporate America: Democrats would agree to reduce regulations and support free-trade deals in exchange for businesses agreeing to greater wage increases and job benefits for workers...

Frank casts his proposal as a way for capitalists to quell some of the populist fervor that was expressed in last week's election, when many Democrats vowed to crack down on companies moving jobs overseas.

The Brit government must plant a poison pill in the LSE. ASAP.

Baker's First Deal

2006-11-21T15:38:00.000Z

James Baker must be proud of his quick start on his task of restoring the Mideast to the mess he left it in - shame about the Lebanese.

Sat Nov 18, NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, co-chairman of the bipartisan , co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group examining strategic options in Iraq, has met several times with Syrian officials to discuss cooperation with the United States, The New York Times reported in Saturday editions."

The Syrian ambassador told the newspaper in an interview on Friday that Baker has asked Syria's Foreign Minister Walid Muallem during a meeting in New York in September: "What would it take Syria to help on Iraq?"

Baker's deal appears to be that Syria recognizes Iraq (which, with a dollar, will buy the US a cup of coffee), and in return Syria gets the Lebanon back:

Pierre Gemayel, the Lebanese Industry Minister and a prominent anti-Syrian Christian politician, has been assassinated in a Beirut suburb, security sources confirmed this afternoon.

Baker's a fast worker - at this rate, MidEast democracy will be gone in a year.

Russian Advertisement For Brit Nuclear Power

2006-11-20T16:30:00.000Z

Brits concerned that Putin is poisoning enemies in London should worry more about their future energy supplies - in 20 years they'll be dependent on his gas. Fortunately there's a way out.

The alleged poisoning:

Britain will be plunged into its worst crisis with Russia since President Putin came to power if a Scotland Yard investigation into the poisoning of a former Russian security agent leads back to the Kremlin, diplomats said last night.

People who oppose Putin have been meeting a variety of violent ends as Russia slides into dictatorship. One of the triggers of this slide is Russia's collapsing population:

Russia has a population of about 142 million, eight million fewer than in the mid-1990s. The United Nations has forecast that there will be fewer than 100 million Russians by 2050.

Dictatorships like to dictate - Europe tasted that earlier this year when Russia shut down its gas supplies during a spat with the Ukraine:

* France– supplies down by 25–30%
* Germany – supplies down by an unspecified amount
* Italy – Russian imports down 24% (6% of total imports)
* United Kingdom...expressed concern that there would be a drop in their supplies in the near future...

Next time the Brits won't be so lucky - their North Sea gas is running out, and their coal fueled power stations are obsolete (my ellipsis):

In 10 years, a third of (Brit) power stations will be worn out or against EU pollution laws.

But the solution is easy - build nuclear power plants:

The UK needs to start building (not designing, or arguing about in ten-year planning inquiries) 12 nuclear power stations this year.

This is the single most important challenge facing the Brits. If they dodge it, their kids will depend on Muslim nutters for their oil and Russian nutters for their gas.

No More Wake-Up Calls For Hamas

2006-11-20T16:01:00.000Z

Fortunately for the civilized world, Islamic terrorists are remarkably incompetent - here's the latest example.

Israel was for the first time forced to abandon an airstrike against a Palestinian militant in the Gaza Strip yesterday, after hundreds of civilians gathered to protect his home.
The human shield formed at the home of Mohammed Baroud early yesterday morning after the Israeli military telephoned to warn him that he had 10 minutes to leave before it was blown up.
Israel often uses unannounced (sic) airstrikes in Gaza to assassinate militants. Sometimes it targets their homes, weapons laboratories or arms caches and issues warnings to keep down the numbers of civilian casualties.
Until now the warnings have been quickly heeded. But this time, Mr Baroud – a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees that have been firing rockets into Israeli towns near Gaza – ran to a mosque and appealed for help over the loudspeakers used for the Muslim call to prayer.
Hundreds of people flocked to his house, with some taking up positions on his rooftop. As dawn broke a spokesman for the Israeli military confirmed that the airstrike had been cancelled.
"We don't want to hurt uninvolved civilians," the source said. "The terrorists are using uninvolved civilians as human shields."
The human shield was the first to halt an airstrike in Gaza, but appears destined to become a new tactic. "This is a victory for the Palestinian people. It is a defeat for the Israeli F-16s," said one Palestinian militant at the house. "Every time the Israeli military call from now on, no one will leave their homes."

Actually, all the Palestinian "militants" have defeated is Israel's practice of warning them before whacking them.

So now there'll be no more wake-up calls, and the terrorists will have to move to uncomfortable and insanitary spider holes.

Duh.

The Bloody Legacy Of Bush 41, Baker And Gates

2006-11-19T18:26:00.000Z

The President should not rely on his father's advisers - they're responsible for millions of deaths and permanent damage to the reputation of the US.

OpinionJournal lists Bush 41's achievements:

The senior Mr. Bush is justly remembered as the architect of the broad coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait--and of the Coalition of One that took down Manuel Noriega of Panama.

Bush 41 also deserves great credit for engineering the North American Free Trade Agreement and supporting German reunification when it was opposed by the likes of Margaret Thatcher.

But without Mrs. T, Bush 41 would likely have "gone wobbly" and left Saddam to grow fat on Kuwaiti oil and build his nukes. And most everyone in the old West Germany now agrees with Mrs T that reunification is a disaster. And NAFTA was supposed to make Mexico's economy grow, which it has manifestly failed to do - hence the increased flow of illegals.

After this faint praise, OpinionJournal lists the bad things Bush 41 and his advisers did.

They undermined Israel (my ellipsis):

..."1-202-456-1414," (is) the number for the White House switchboard. As secretary of state, Mr. Baker read it aloud in congressional testimony in 1990, ostensibly for the benefit of Israelis once they got "serious about peace."

A year later, and for much the same reason, the Bush administration threatened to withhold $10 billion in commercial loan guarantees, which Israel needed to cope with the influx of some one million Russian Jews--fully a fifth of its population.

Mr. Baker fostered the fatal perception that the failure of Arabs and Jews to make peace was the root of the region's problems, not a symptom of them, and that the obstacle to peace was intransigent Israel, not militant Islam. Bob Gates (the new SecDev) later gave voice to that perception when he wrote, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, that the road to Mideast peace must "not kowtow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's obstructionism."

Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have died as as result of the actions of these ignorant, foolish and arrogant men, and the mess they left is now unresolvable.

They supported the Serbian genocide:

...take "Lawrence of Serbia," the moniker Mr. Eagleburger earned for his initial indulgence, as the State Department's point man on Yugoslav affairs during the early 1990s while the country was coming apart, of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic.

Mr. Eagleburger, who had longstanding business ties in Belgrade, spent the early period of the war largely ignoring Mr. Milosevic's depredations on his neighbors, including paramilitary slaughters in Vukovar and concentration camps in Omarska.

"There was a kind of preference for stability and an attachment to the old Yugoslavia over our interests in human rights," Patrick Glynn of the American Enterprise Institute told Newsday in 1992, adding the administration had "been standing by, waiting while the final solution is played out."

It was indeed a "final solution" - Serbs killed hundreds of thousands or Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars. The slaughter of the Bosnians fueled Islamic hatred of the US.

They tried To sustain Soviet tyranny:

The U.S. was the 39th country to re-establish diplomatic ties with Lithuania, after Iceland and Mongolia had already paved the way.

Once Mr. Gorbachev was gone, Mr. Bush was equally reluctant to help the new Russia get on its feet, prompting Richard Nixon to complain about the administration's "pathetically inadequate response in light of the opportunities we face in the crisis in the former Soviet Union."

Ex-Soviet subject nations must view with horror the return of Baker and Gates to power.

They betrayed the Iraqi Kurds and Shias:

(In an) apparently flip suggestion, following "victory" in the Gulf War, (Bush 41 said) that the "Iraqi people . . . (should) take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step down."

Tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds took him seriously, and tens of thousands paid with their lives as Saddam quelled the revolt while the Bush administration stood by, lest it exceed its U.N. mandate.

This is what happened:

...Saddam Hussein responded to the uprisings with crushing force. According to Human Rights Watch:

In their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing indiscriminately into residential areas; executing young people on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack unarmed civilians as they fled the cities.

Some civilians were tied to tanks and used as human shields. In Karbala, some of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines were destroyed. Others were used as centers for murder, torture and rape. In Najaf, residential areas were bombed, and hospital staff and patients were murdered. The homes of suspected rebels were destroyed while the suspects were executed in the streets.

More than 2 million Kurds fled into the snowy peaks between Iran and Turkey. Children died from typhoid, dehydration and dysentery...At one point in 1991, an estimated 2,000 Kurds were dying every day.

Iraqis remember this betrayal and its horrible consequences, and that memory fuels the insurgency that followed the coalition victory in Iraq. The Sunnis expect that the US will again leave the Kurds and Shias to their fate, and all parties act accordingly. As a result tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Coalition soldiers have died.

So the legacy of Bush 41 is malign, and importing his worthless advisers into our world guarantees more slaughter, destruction, and American shame

The Self-Loathing French

2006-11-19T17:17:00.000Z

The current French mood is much as it was in 1938 - they're demoralized and trying to compensate by bullying Jews. That was lousy strategy then, and an even worse one now the Jews have nukes.

The mood (my ellipsis);

Whoever wins (the coming Presidential election) will face a particularly daunting dilemma: how to revive the world’s sixth largest economy and restore optimism to a country going through a crippling bout of self-loathing.
Signs of the malaise are everywhere, from the welter of doom-laden titles in bookshops to the political protests and riots that set ablaze the immigrant suburbs last year in the worst street violence for four decades.
The all-powerful state that once seemed to serve France well under the so-called dirigiste model has become bloated and inefficient.
Unemployment is stubbornly high and growth is sluggish — French GDP has been surpassed by Britain’s. France has lost its footing in so many domains that it once dominated, from diplomacy to cooking, that people are growing dispirited and restless.
Many French people fear that despite its nuclear weapons, seat on the United Nations security council and privileged place at the bosom of Europe, the country risks becoming irrelevant, a depressing prospect for a proud people with a deep- rooted attachment to the concept of national glory.

In an attempt to revive that glory, the French Army is threatening Israel (hat tip LGF):

TYRE, Lebanon (AFP) - French UN anti-aircraft batteries have taken "preparatory steps" to respond to Israeli jets violating Lebanese airspace, despite global criticism of such incursions.
"The anti-aircraft unit of the (French) battalion took initial preparatory steps to respond to these actions," Milos Strugar, spokesman for the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) told AFP on Friday
He said "UNIFIL observed and reported 14 Israeli air violations this morning, on November 17, 2006, and 11 of these violations occurred in the area of operation of the French battalion with UNIFIL."

UNIFIL Force Commander General Alain Pellegrini "strongly protested to the Israeli authorities and asked them to cease these actions which are unacceptable and in violation of Resolution 1701," the spokesman said.

Strugar said the French battalion took action to respond "in accordance with UNIFIL rules of engagements and UN Security Council Resolution 1701."

Of course resolution 1701 requires the French-led UNIFIL to disarm Hizbollah, which France has declined to do, and the Israelis are monitoring their complicity. Still, the French army has fairly good anti-air missiles, so what if they shoot down an F-15I or F-16I?

The IAF will just take out all the French radars, missiles, and supporting troops with anti-radiation and GPS-guided missiles - just as the USAF and RAF did to Saddam's anti-air in the old No-Fly zones. That will embolden the rearmed Hizbollah to fire more Katyushas at Israeli civilians, and the IDF will respond with the nasties it's been cooking up since the ceasefire.

Then you have a full-scale Mideast war in which UNIFIL has declared itself an enemy of Israel, thus allowing the IDF to continue, unhindered by the UN, until it has achieved its objectives.

And that will really depress the French.

Accommodating Muslim Cab Drivers

2006-11-19T16:00:00.000Z

Muslim cab drivers in Vancouver won't carry dogs - that's OK, Minneapolis shows how to accommodate their beliefs.

Vancouver:

Bruce Gilmour filed the complaint after a cab driver from North Shore Taxi refused to let his guide dog into the cab in January of this year. Gilmour, who says it's not the first time he's been refused service by a taxicab, is complaining that North Shore taxi discriminated against him on the basis of physical disability.
But the taxi driver...is arguing his Muslim religious beliefs will not allow him to take dogs in his taxi, because Muslims can't associate with dogs.
According to documents filed with the Human Rights Tribunal, North Shore Taxi said about half of their drivers are "unable to take animals in their taxis due to medical or religious reasons."

Minneapolis:

For some time, hundreds of Muslim cabdrivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport have been refusing fares that they know are carrying alcohol.

These fare refusals happen frequently enough that the airport and drivers have "worked out a proposal that calls for cabdrivers who won't carry alcohol to have a cab light that's a different color. That way, the airport workers who hook up travelers with taxis can steer alcohol-carrying fares to cabs that will take them."

But Minnesotans objected:

Commission spokesman Patrick Hogan reported that the Commission received 400 e-mails and phone calls, almost all of which opposed the proposal. Thus, the Commission rejected it, leaving the current policy in place. As USA Today reports, the current policy "says drivers who will not transport alcohol must go to the back of the taxi line."

Both solutions work for Vancouver - Muslim cab drivers just need to show a special light to warn fares hailing them on the street that they won't carry dogs, alcohol, inappropriately dressed women, etc. And if they refuse a fare at the airport, they get sent to the back of the line.

This way Muslim passengers get to choose Muslim cabbies, and the rest of us can avoid them.

What's not to like?

Quality Control On Immigration

2006-11-18T15:47:00.000Z

The US debate on immigration addresses the wrong question. The issue is not whether or not millions of illegal Mexican immigrants add value but whether they best benefit the US. This post summarizes an excellent analysis in City Journal by Steven Malanga. I don't usually include lengthy quotes, but this is worth it.

First, here's Art Laffer - rather surprisingly - stating the establishment view(WSJ, $):

"illegal immigrants are the lifeblood of our society."

If so, the blood is anemic (my ellipsis):

A study by Harvard economists...noted that 63 percent of Mexican immigrants are high school dropouts who on average earn 53 percent less than native workers when they enter the United States.

High school graduation rates among the American-born children of Hispanic immigrants are much lower than the average in the rest of the native-born population, while census surveys have begun to record growing numbers of native-born Hispanics who don’t have English-language proficiency—nearly 3 million in the 2005 American Community Survey.

...a 1997 study by economists for the National Academy of Sciences estimated the net benefits of immigration at only $10 billion in our $8 trillion economy, while the next year an NAS study of the social costs of immigration reported that in California each native-born family paid nearly $1,200 more in taxes to support government services that went to immigrants.

Enacting amnesty for illegals already here, as well as creating a new guest-worker program (could) eventually add some $46 billion a year in social costs—including welfare—to the federal government.

These poorly educated, unskilled immigrants are a new phenomenon:

The popular image of the 24 million who came during the first great migration, from the 1880s to the 1920s, is that they were Europe’s “tired” and “poor” masses, desperately escaping political or religious persecution and stagnant economies, making their way here with a few threadbare possessions.

But...many were also skilled workers. A 1998 National Academy of Sciences study noted that the immigrant workers of that era generally met or exceeded the skill levels of the native-born population, providing America’s workforce with a powerful boost just when the country was metamorphosing from an agrarian into an industrial economy.

The author draws on recent Australian and Canadian experience to make the following proposals.

1. Limit Family Unification Visas

Current law allows not only the spouses and minor children of permanent residents and American citizens—both native-born and naturalized—to come here, but also their adult sons and daughters, as well as the parents and adult siblings of citizens. This chain of relations accounts for some 600,000 legal visas a year and has prompted a backlog of some 4 million visa applicants. By restricting the family unification category to the spouses and minor children of citizens, the United States could cut family unification visas in half.

(In Canada) residents who want to sponsor a relative under the country’s family reunification program must also prove that they have the resources to support the immigrant. (America makes a similar demand that those who sponsor immigrants pledge to support them in case of need, but it doesn’t require sponsors to honor the promise.)

2. Limit Immigration To Skilled Workers

That's not just PhDs:

Reducing family visas would allow for a shift toward skills-based immigration without increasing the number of newcomers. To determine what kinds of workers would receive skills-based visas, the United States would shift away from its current system in which those visas—totaling only 77,000 last year—now almost entirely go to highly educated workers, such as technology specialists, whom companies request, but not to skilled tradesmen who might also be in short supply.

...today 70 percent of Australia’s permanent visas go to skilled workers. As a result, Australian immigrants do far better than American immigrants. A 2006 study by the Australian Productivity Commission...shows that on average Australian immigrants earn about 6 percent more than the median income of the native-born population, because immigrants typically have higher levels of education and skills.

3. Remove The Magnet Effect Of Modern Welfare

Today’s immigrants are more than twice as likely to use government programs as native-born Americans...Milton Friedman has said: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

(So) developed countries uniformly prohibit illegal aliens from receiving social benefits, and many restrict those benefits for legals, too. Australia, for instance, prohibits legal immigrants from participating in social programs for two years.

Though the federal government bans illegal aliens from receiving many benefits, several states and cities have made themselves immigrant havens by providing government services through a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy.

New York City, for instance, offers immigrants, regardless of their status, such benefits as government-sponsored health insurance, preventive medical care, and counseling programs. Some states have moved to ensure that illegals receive in-state tuition discounts to state colleges, even though out-of-state American citizens don’t qualify for those discounts.

4. Stop Giving US Citizenship To Children Born Of Foreign Parents

Currently, the children of our 11 million illegal aliens automatically become citizens with the right to apply for visas for their parents and siblings to immigrate here legally. And they have the right to government benefits, including “child-only” welfare payments, which vary greatly by state but can amount to up to $500 a month for two children in California.

5. Get Tough On Illegal Immigration

Though hardening the border is important, the real key is to lessen the economic incentives to sneak into the U.S. by ensuring that businesses don’t hire workers they know to be illegal and that government doesn’t provide them with services and benefits. The 1990s commission on immigration reform recommended establishing a national database for employers to verify the Social Security numbers of their workers. Now is the time to do it.

Though eliminating economic incentives will stem the flow of illegals and send many home, stricter enforcement also means more deportations. Canada has followed this policy, beefing up its Border Services Agency and increasing deportations, estimated to rise to about 10,000 this year in an illegal population of about 200,000. By comparison, the U.S. deports some 50,000 annually out of its 11 million-strong illegal population.

Of course an amnesty-obsessed Republican leadership allied with an illegal-friendly Dem Congress won't do any of this. But the next administration might.

Last Chances Before The Dems Rule

2006-11-17T16:41:00.000Z

The lame duck Congress offers a small window for Republicans to strengthen the US economy to face the Socialist onslaught - here's an example.

WSJ ($):

Congress will return for one more lame-duck go-round after Thanksgiving, and if it wants an easy victory for the U.S. economy it'll whip through the offshore drilling bill that has passed the Senate and awaits action in conference.
The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, crafted by New Mexico's Pete Domenici, would open 8.3 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf to oil and natural gas drilling.

As recently as 1995, the average cost for natural gas in the U.S. was about $1.70 per million British Thermal Units; by 2002 it was $3.54. It had climbed by 400% by last year, when it ranged from $11 to $14.50 per million BTUs. Japan, China, India and most of the rest of the world pay far less, putting U.S.-based companies at a huge global disadvantage...

The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that 3.1 million high-wage manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000 largely due to inadequate supplies of natural gas...

All of this is reason for Congress to act now. Gulf Coast Democrats are supporting this Senate bill, largely because it offers their states a cut of the royalties. The House has passed a much stronger bill, and in a better world would prevail.

But with coastal, anti-drilling Democrats set to run Congress next year, now is the time for the House to swallow its pride, pass the Senate version without amendment to avoid a conference, and send it to President Bush.

This is just a start - there's plenty of gas on the outer shelf:

...the outer shelf is estimated to hold an extraordinary 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to keep the U.S. in affordable energy for decades.

But that'll have to wait until the next Republican Congress - or for Saudi oil to dry up...

The Saudi Biter Worries About Being Bit

2006-11-17T16:10:00.000Z

Saudi Arabia is building a fence to keep out the terrorists it exports - we must hope it doesn't work.

GlobalSecurity reports (my emphasis):

Saudi Arabia says it will begin construction next year of a hi-tech security fence to seal off its border with Iraq against extremists.
The fence – which will cost billions of dollars -- will take six years to complete.

Saudi Arabia's interior minister, Prince Nayaf bin Abdulaziz, says the project is part of a larger plan to also secure all the kingdom's other borders...
Neil Partrick, a regional expert with the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, says Saudi Arabia is particularly concerned that Saudi and other Arab militants now fighting in Iraq may ultimately endanger the kingdom.

The analyst notes that officials fear Iraq has become the same kind of training opportunity for jihadists as Afghanistan was previously. He says the Saudis worry that -- whether Iraq remains chaotic or ultimately stabilizes -- these fighters will eventually return home.
Partrick says Saudi officials also view Iran as a regional danger. They hope the fence will help limit Tehran's contract -- via Iraq -- with the kingdom's own Shi'ite minority.

Saudi Shi'a, who feel disadvantaged in the officially Sunni kingdom, live mostly in an eastern province that is also home to the biggest-producing oil fields.

The Saudis have spent the last 40 years financing the militant Wahhabi strain of Islam, and have exported terrorists world wide, including 15 of the 19 9/11 murderers. They now seek to protect themselves from the monsters they've created.

If Saudi were to fall to its terrorists, the world's supply of oil would tank and its price would rocket. Then the west would have no alternative but to drill for its own oil and build lots nuclear power plants - so eliminating the billions that fund the Islamic threat.

Game over.

Something Odd In Israel

2006-11-16T17:05:00.000Z

Israelis are still being killed and mutilated by Palestinian rockets. That's odd, because there's a good defense available - I suspect Israel is concentrating its defenses on Hizbollah's rockets, in preparation for the next war.

Here's the Israeli Prime Minister:

Olmert told reporters on his way back from Washington, adding that in the war against Kassam rocket attacks there would be no "quick fix."

That's not true - Phalanx guns would stop most of the Kassams:

The American Phalanx anti missile system sent to Iraq, were modified to destroy rockets and mortar shells fired into the Green Zone (the large area in Baghdad turned into an American base).

The Phalanx is a 20mm cannon designed to defend American warships, by destroying anti-ship missiles. Phalanx does this by using a radar that immediately starts firing at any incoming missile it detects.

The modified versions sent to Iraq, called the C-RAM (Counter-Rocket Artillery Mortar) system has had it's software modified to detect smaller objects (like 82mm mortar shells). The original Phalanx, it was found, could take out incoming 155mm artillery shells. This capability is what led to C-RAM. The other modifications include linking Phalanx to the Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar and Q-36 Target Acquisition Radar.

When these radars detect incoming fire, C-RAM points toward the incoming objects and prepares to fire at anything that comes within range (about 2,000 meters) of its cannon. C-RAM also uses high explosive 20mm shells, that detonate near the target, spraying it with fragments...

Tests showed that C-RAM could knock down 70-80 percent of the rockets and mortar shells fired at it.

That's against a mix of weapons - if you just have to hit Kassams, you can tweak the software to improve the kill rate.

The Green Zone is about 4 square miles (10 sq Km), whereas the primary Israeli Kassam target is the small town of Sderot, which covers just 5 sq Km.

So why aren't the Israelis deploying this? They have Phalanx systems, and have developed a very nifty miniature version for their tanks. They can't be letting Kassams through to attract international sympathy, since the world's "leaders" don't care about Israeli deaths.

My guess is they're concentrating their Phalanxes in the North to neutralize Hizbollah's more lethal Katyushas - if they're planning on taking down Iran's nukes soon, they'll need to suppress Hizbollah's counter-attack.

The German Death Spiral

2006-11-16T16:26:00.000Z

Jihad Watch just published a piece on the German demographic collapse referenced in the previous post - here are the numbers from their source (my ellipsis).

BERLIN, Germany, November 9, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Germany’s downward spiral in population is no longer reversible, the country’s federal statistics office said Tuesday. The birthrate has dropped so low that immigration numbers cannot compensate.

“The fall in the population can no longer be stopped,” vice-president Walter Rademacher with the Federal Statistics Office said, reported Agence France-Presse.

Germany has the lowest birthrate in Europe, with an average of 1.36 children per woman. (Not quite true - Spain is 1.28).

Despite government incentives to encourage larger families, the population is dropping rapidly and that trend will continue, with an expected loss of as much as 12 million by 2050. That would mean about a 15 percent drop from the country’s current population of 82.4 million, the German news source Deutsche Welle reported today....
Germany has one of the largest populations of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, with a Muslim community of over 3 million. That trend is expected to continue, leading some demographic trend-watchers to warn that the country is well on the way to becoming a Muslim state by 2050, Deutsche Welle reported.

The Brussels Journal reported last month that one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families by 2025. There are an estimated 50 million Muslims living in Europe today--that number is expected to double over the next twenty years.

This last statistic is spectacular - the EU population is currently about 460 million, so 100 million Muslims - allowing for the fall in the native population - makes Europe over 25% Islamic by 2025.

The Germans have a strong sense of national identity, and I don't see them passively accepting Sharia law, the conversion of their churches into mosques, or submitting to Iranian nuclear blackmail. So things are going to get messy.

This Sceptred Isle

2006-11-15T16:52:00.000Z

Mark Steyn argues in his new book that Europe as it currently exists will be gone in a generation. I agree, but believe Brit society will survive on its island fortress.

Steyn predicts the declining, welfare-enfeebled native European populations will succumb to fast-breeding Muslim immigrant communities, producing a string of impoverished nations governed by Sharia law.

With the right leadership, the Brits can avoid this fate. Their population is growing, mostly due to immigration from non-Muslim countries (all those Polish plumbers), and the English Channel will separate them from the messy and violent continental collapse.

This measure will help:

(July 24, 2006) A large number of British troops could be pulled out of bases in Germany under plans put forward by the government.
Armed forces minister Adam Ingram announced he was considering moving the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (Arrc) headquarters to the UK.
Two of the Arrc's support brigades could also be moved out, he said.

That's now accelerated (my ellipsis):

(15 Nov 2006) The MoD (Ministry of Defense) said earlier this year that about 4,000 troops would return from Germany but following another manpower review it appears likely that a further 3,500-4,500 will be brought back over the next four years.

That still leaves half the garrison in Germany, and the sooner it's back, the better - it'll be needed at home.

Blair's Exit Plan (2)

2006-11-15T15:50:00.000Z

As predicted, Blair is going after the Israelis.

Tony Blair sought yesterday to increase the pressure on the US Government to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a way of preventing moderate Muslims from being exploited by extremists.

Appearing by video link before the Iraq Study Group, set up by President Bush to chart a new course for the country, the Prime Minister said repeatedly that the biggest factor in getting moderate Muslim countries to support the new Iraq would be progress on the Palestinian issue.

Let's analyze this.

Blair must want the US to pressure either Israel, or the Muslim states involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or both.

The Muslim states involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are:

- Palestine, which is committed to destroying Israel.

- Egypt, which arms the Palestinians (via the Philadelphi route).

- Iran, which is committed to destroying Israel with nukes.

- Syria, a client of Iran and a sworn enemy of Israel, which has repeatedly attempted ro conquer it.

- Lebanon, which hosts Hizbollah, which is sworn to destroy Israel.

- France (now effectively Muslim), which provides air cover for Hizbollah's re-armament.

Pressuring these states to change course would indeed lead to peace in the Mideast, since Israel's actions are purely defensive .

But Blair can't be suggesting the US pressure these states. The biggest - Iran - has successively resisted US and EU pressure to stop the nuke program it plans on using to destroy Israel.

So what Blair really wants is the US to pressure Israel to make concessions. Such pressure is possible since the US provides financial and military aid to Israel. The only concession available to Israel (short of mass suicide) is ceding territory to the above Muslim states. But 5 months ago, these states exploited two Israeli territorial concessions to attack it.

From which it follows that Blair seeks American help in facilitating the destruction of the Jewish state.

Blair should be careful what he wishes for - Israel will not go quietly.

The Exit Plan, Final Cut

2006-11-14T16:34:00.000Z

Tony Blair yesterday proposed the solution to all the world's problems - here's the unexpurgated version.

Here's what got published:

In his speech at the Guildhall last night, Tony Blair presented the outline of his plan for a new settlement in Iraq. His proposal is largely consistent with what are expected to be the recommendations of Washington's Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James Baker.

Both the American and the Downing Street versions of this formula are being billed as fresh, realistic responses to the dilemma of post-war Iraqi chaos.

Iran and Syria would be offered privileged status in resolving the future of Iraq...

The rest of the speech went as follows:

Blair explained that this advanced form of diplomacy had been perfected by himself, ensuring the orderly transfer of power over the people of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom to a consortium of the IRA and their backers, the Irish Republic.

Blair then moved on to Afghanistan. He argued that it made no sense to exclude the major players from ongoing dialog. In consequence, it was imperative that the leaders of the world's opium trade, the Taliban, and the Government of Pakistan be given special responsibility for establishing a stable regime in Afghanistan.

Blair next proposed that France, Hizbollah, Hamas, Russia, Syria and Iran be given privileged status in determining the Final Solution to the Israeli Question.

Turning to the problems facing North Korea, Blair proposed EU technical support for its self defense program in return for its active so-operation in addressing the threat presented by the South Korean electronics industry to the livelihood of countless EU workers.

Finally, Blair proposed that China be given UN authority to resolve the threat to world peace presented by the breakaway Taiwanese.

Blair concluded by regretting any inconvenience caused to British and US soldiers killed in the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and apologized in advance for future deaths from the necessary crack-downs on Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan. And of course Northern Ireland.

First ThinkPad Post

2006-11-14T12:44:00.000Z

After spurning the Mac, I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 - here's a comparison of the two.

Price: A Wash

The ThinkPad configuration is 15" regular screen of 1400 x 1050 pixels, 1.83 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB memory, 100 GB 5400 RPM hard drive, Radeon X1400 with 128 MB.

This worked out £40 less than the new, cheaper, MacBook Pro (which wasn't available when I bought the ThinkPad). The new MBP has a 15.4" wide screen of 1440 x 900 pixels, 2.16 MHz Core 2 Duo and X1600 graphics. On the other hand the ThinkPad has a 3 year warranty (Apple is 1 year), weighs a bit less, and has a fingerprint reader and built in modem.

Uncrating: Apple Wins

My Mac Mini packaging was tear-apart so was quicker to unpack than the old-style sealed packaging of the ThinkPad. It's a small thing, but good packaging doesn't cost more than bad packaging.

Documentation: Apple Wins

The Apple documentation was all in English and covered everything I needed to know to get up and running. The ThinkPad documentation was bulked up by large multi-language boilerplate and bizarre freebies - including Lotus Notes. It took me a few hours to determine that the only useful stuff was the troubleshooting guide and a single page ReadMe. Lenovo needs to localize and shrink its boilerplate and spend the money it saves on including a decent user manual.

Mechanical Engineering: No Result

The ThinkPad has a splendid keyboard, brilliant display, effective keyboard light, and good ergonomics. Its only weakness is poorly designed palm rest locking tabs that allowed the guy who upgraded my memory to wrongly re-assemble it. Lenovo should fix this - it's not hard to design components so they can't be installed incorrectly

I can't comment on the MBP, but the Mac Mini is just a box, and had no assembly problems.

Set Up: Apple Wins

I took several hours to get the ThinkPad configured on our wireless network. That's partly my failure to RTFM, but also because Lenovo hadn't pre-configured XP for wireless networks. The Mac Mini recognized the network when it first booted up and was sharing files within an hour.

Use: ThinkPad Wins

After all the reports of red hot MBPs; I feared the problem was the hot Core Duo rather than Apple. It isn't - the ThinkPad gets only slightly warm underneath, and is much cooler than the 5 year old Tecra it's replaced. That's not at the cost of noisy fans - the ThinkPad is very quiet, sounding like a distant breeze.

The ThinkPad also has a TrackPoint with nifty scroll button, which I find much easier to use than a track pad (although it has one of those too). Plus it has keys that let you navigate between Firefox tabs.

To get the same text quality as the Mac I had to install ClearType (every XP user should do this).

Customizability: No result

I prefer to do an OS reinstall on a new machine to get rid of all the junk manufacturers foist on their customers. However Lenovo doesn't ship the XP disks and all you can do is image the complete initial install, junk included - it took up 7 CDs! Then I had to hunt through the system individually killing Norton etc, and I've a nasty feeling some insurgents are still hiding.

I didn't get OS X install disks with the Mac mini, so the MBP may be as bad.

Conclusion

For me, the ThinkPad is the better laptop. It's light, cool, quiet, and has a great display, keyboard and pointing device. So it's a breeze to use on my lap and on airline tray tables. The configuration is blindingly fast for my apps (Firefox, Word, Excel, and Outlook).

It took a lot of work to get XP & Firefox 2 configured and to throw out the junk and install decent apps. But now that's done, I anticipate years of productive use.