VPC - Officer Down
I hate it when someone uses footnotes on a "study" that doesn't actually follow logic. I would rather read straight bullshit than well-documented bullshit.This study reveals the gun industry's efforts to evade the 1994 ban and documents the significant threat assault weapons still pose to law enforcement.Whew. I'm smelling it already. "The gun industry's efforts to evade the 1994 ban..." This seem to insinuate that something illegal has been done, doesn't it? Not to VPC. To VPC, you are "evading" a ban if you comply with it. Keep up with me here: If someone passes a law that says, "You are not allowed to do A, B, and C" and you stop doing A, B, and C, and do D instead to get your job done, you are "evading" the law. "But I did what the law said" you claim? Too bad. You didn't look at whatever sort of "meta-law" VPC wanted you to.
Also, "weapons" don't threaten law enforcment. They don't even threaten law enforcement officers. Criminals threaten law enforcement officers.
In 1995, the first full year in which the ban was implemented, police continued to be victims of assault weapons. Approximately one in 10 of the 74 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in 1995 was slain with a banned assault weapon.Hmm. I guess they consulted Nostradamus on that one -- the study they cite (their own in fact) was published in September 1995. I wonder where you budget crystal balls?
I can't access the study online, but I suspect that I know what sophistry they used to make this statement -- weapons that were owned before the ban are grandfathered in. Of course, they can't be bothered to be accurate and say "legally owned weapons listed in the ban" -- they have the children to lie for.
Immediately after the 1994 law was enacted, the gun industry moved quickly to make slight, cosmetic design changes in their "post-ban" guns to evade the law, a tactic the industry dubbed "sporterization." Of the nine assault weapon brand/types listed by manufacturer in the law, six of the brand/types have been re-marketed in new, "sporterized" configurations. In fact, gunmakers openly boast of their ability to circumvent the assault weapons ban.Let's see -- you pass a law that bans guns on the way they look, and then you complain that they continue to sell after changing the way they looked? You told them, "You can't do A, B, and C." They stopped doing A, B, and C. That is called "compliance", not "evasion."
Of course, I didn't know that advertising counted as "openly boasting".
Just such a post-ban AR, the Bushmaster XM15 M4 A3 assault rifle, was used by the Washington, DC-area snipers to kill 10 and injure three in October 2002. The Bushmaster is the poster child for the industry's success at evading the ban. The snipers' Bushmaster is even marketed as a "Post-Ban Carbine."Uhh... so? They could have easily been killed by deer rifles. I could have done the job with a .22 plinking rifle at the ranges they operated at. The type of weapon had nothing to do with the crime. This isn't advocacy; this is demagoguery.
The industry's efforts have been aided by the fact that not all assault weapons are covered by the 1994 ban. For example, assault weapons with more conventional designs, such as the Ruger Mini-14, were not covered by the 1994 law—although gun experts define them as assault weapons.Really? Which experts? After riddling this "study" with footnotes, this one is conspicuously missing. Funny that.
The gun industry's evasion of the 1994 ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines continues to put law enforcement officers at extreme risk. Using data obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Violence Policy Center has determined that at least 41 of the 211 law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty between January 1, 1998, and December 31, 2001, were killed with assault weapons.8 Using these figures, one in five law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty was killed with an assault weapon.Here's the big lie. This one is the money shot. They lied by counting weapons that they say are "assault weapons" in the list, not ones that the ban says are assault weapons. 10 of the weapons they list are SKS and Mini-14 rifles -- rifles that they admit (and lament) aren't covered by the ban. That puts us at 31 of 211 -- and we have no idea how many of these rifles are legally owned from being purchased before the ban took effect.
This is the thing to keep in mind. There is no provision to confiscarte legally owned weapons. All these bans apply to future sales. There laws they are asking for in no way apply to the situations they describe.
In other words, even after lying about the evidence, they still fail to make a logical argument.
Will Arabia's Reform Start in Iraq?
According to my magic 8-ball, "Signs point to 'yes'". The inflamatory Arab media is in shambles. They have very little credibility left; that credibility fell with the Baath regime in Iraq. I wanted to go to MEMRI and find some nasty things coming out of Iraq (because that is the kind of prick that I am) and I couldn't do it. Instead, I saw things like sermon from Falouja, Iraq:"…The Prophet Muhammad signed agreements and treaties with the polytheists who worshipped idols. He signed agreements and treaties with the Christians and with the Jews. All those who honored the agreement, the Prophet Muhammad honored the agreement with them. Let the people of the New Testament and also the Torah hear: 'We are guided by the Koran and by the words of the Prophet. Anyone who harms the People of the Book harms me.' What does this mean? If you are a Muslim and in your country are Jews, Christians, and Sabians, do not harm them, because if you harm them, you are harming the Prophet Muhammad. How wonderful this tolerance is?!… When the Jews emigrated to Palestine, some families remained in one of the cities. When they witnessed the tolerance of Islam in the city… they converted to Islam, willingly and out of love for this great religion. In our city, Falouja, there are Sabians, and you all know it. When they saw that Islam is the religion of tolerance, the religion of good, the religion of love, they all converted to Islam, and became our brothers."This is the sort of tolerance that Islam will have to develop if it is not going to force the west to destroy it like fascism and communism. Tolerance is not acceptance; we don't ask that Islam accept us. Tolerance is putting up with. You don't have to agree with us to do business with us.
Of course, I knew that an Imam wouldn't let me down and give a completely positive sermon:
"We appeal to the Christians, the People of the Book, in the east and west of the land, to look at Islam and compare it with their New Testament. All are books [sent] from Allah, and all emissaries are from Allah… Oh People of the Book, come let us reach the truth. The people of the New Testament should act according to what Allah brought down to them. You [Americans] are Christians? Then, please, read the New Testament. If it is written in it that you must oppress the wretched, then let's talk about it. But if it is written that you must act justly, then we appeal to the American forces that entered [Falouja], and quote the words of Jesus to them: 'If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left cheek.' Wonder of wonders. America, the invading forces, struck us first, with uncalled-for and unacceptable force, in Baghdad and in other places. In our city, they struck us on the right cheek and on the left cheek and from above, from the front, and from behind, and their planes hover above our city, verily, above the houses. The tanks and armored personnel vehicles drive through the streets and aim their weapons at people. They say that America does not act with terror. By Allah, this is the gravest terror."You would think that they would know what real terror is after decades of Saddam. Go figure.
Also worth noting is this one from a Qutari (is that the proper nomenclature?) intelectual:
"We are forever listening apprehensively to 'the other,' to him who wishes us evil. Others have had similar problems, but they have risen up and rebuilt themselves because they were able to rid themselves of the fear of 'the other.'"Keep an eye on MEMRI."It was no wonder then when we called defeat victory in 1956 and 1967 as well as in the Mother of all Battles and Qadisiyya."
"There are still those who justify and philosophize about media partiality. They claim that it is partiality for the honor and dignity of the community. [Have] not honor and dignity been rendered miserable if the dignity of man has not been preserved? There are those who say it was to raise morale, but this is faulty reasoning: It is not necessary to raise morale by trickery and deception of the masses.""The musings of a simple Iraqi from a liberated area caught my attention. He said: 'The Arabs left us and did not liberate us. Why are they attacking the coalition which wants to liberate us?' Why is this simple fact not realized by our men of culture, our intellectuals, our men of the media and our religious leaders, the men who call for participation in 'Jihad?'"
A tale of two Americas
This is a new analogy for a phenomenon I have seen for a while:One of the peculiar features of our country is that we produce incompetent 18-year-olds and remarkably competent 30-year-olds. Americans at 18 typically score lower on standardized tests than 18-year-olds from other advanced countries. Watch them on their first few days working at McDonald's or behind the counter in chain drugstores, and it's obvious that they don't really know how to make change or keep the line moving. But by the time Americans are 30, they are the most competent people in the world. They produce a stronger and more vibrant private-sector economy; they produce scientific and technical advances that lead the world; they provide the world's best medical care; they create the strongest and most agile military the world has ever seen. And it's not just a few meritocrats at the top: American talent runs wide and deep.The article continues into the effect that government education plays in this, and this is one of the main reasons that I support the seperation of school and state. When schools aren't accountable -- and government schools are most certainly not accountable -- you turn into Soft America. When students into competative schools -- universities -- they start learning. No one in America is educated because of government schools, they are educated in spite of government schools.Why? Because from the age of 6 to 18, our kids live mostly in what I call Soft America--the part of our society where there is little competition and accountability. In contrast, most Americans in the 12 years between ages 18 and 30 live mostly in Hard America--the part of American life subject to competition and accountability; the military trains under live fire. Soft America seeks to instill self-esteem. Hard America plays for keeps.
This is an important subject in relation to individual liberty. A free America can be nothing but a Hard America. There is no way to provide for individual freedom without individual responsibility. When someone else is responsible for your needs, then that person is no longer free. The only way for everyone to be free is for everyone to responsible for themselves -- and being responsible for yourself is hard. To quote Dennis Leary: "Life sucks -- get a helmut."
Rich Lowry: The shame of our prisons
When is rape a joke? When it takes place behind bars, and it is men brutalizing other men.I've thought about this one before. I don't think there is a magic bullet on this one. There are a lot of factors, most of them about basic humor, at play here.Our tolerance for prison rape, considered a subject fit for late-night TV humor, is a great mystery. We profess to abhor rape, to adore personal dignity, to uphold the rights of the downtrodden -- yet we sentence tens of thousands of men every year to the most bestial kind of abuse, without a second thought beyond the occasional chuckle.
One of the things to remember is that we as people tend to ridicule things that truly frighten us. By turning this fear into a mockery, we build a defense mechanism about it. I joke about buggery. Men joke about buggery. We joke about it all the time, to show that this fear of homosexuality doesn't control us.
We tell jokes about consentual buggery, but we also make fun of forced sodomy. There aren't too many places that forced sodomy happens -- and prison is one of them. If you are going to take command of this fear of forced buggery, you are going to do it by joking about "prison love".
I think that there is another major factor at play, though. Part of this mockery is the dehumanization of the victim. By laughing about it, we are telling ourselves that the victims deserve it. We get to treat those that we fear -- convicts -- to the worst sort of humiliation we can come up with. No one says, "I'm afraid of going to jail and sitting in a jail cell all day." They say, "I'm afraid of going to a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison."
Don't forget that this also dehumanizes the attacker. This helps confirm in our mind that these people that we are putting in prison deserve it. "Of course he deserves it -- as soon as he gets in there, he starts buggering anyone who will stand still long enough." We get to convince ourselves that both the victim and the aggressor are subhuman, that they are animals consumed by base sexual hunger, and we feel better about putting them in prison in the first place.
I'm not saying that this is the way that it should be, only that this is the way that I see it being now. I think that we incarcerate far too many people, and we should never condone rape. Until we change this -- don't drop the soap.
Mufti warns against allowing Jews onto Temple Mount
The Palestinian Authority's mufti, Ikrimah Sabri, on Thursday issued a stern warning to Israel against allowing non-Muslims to enter the Temple Mount, saying such a move would have "grave repercussions."Let's see. We have one side who is welcoming attempts to negotiate a settlement and recognises the right of the others to exist, and we have one side who ignores virtually every agreement and refuses to accept that the other has a right to exist.The mufti was responding to statements attributed to Jerusalem Police Cmdr. Micky Levy to the effect that the time is ripe for reopening the Temple Mount to Jews and non-Muslim tourists.
Which one is the religion of peace again?
Would you like double grease with that?
"While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius."Sodolak makes his chicken-fried bacon by double-dipping uncooked bacon strips in milk and flour. Then he tosses the breaded strips in a Fryolator and nukes them in animal/vegetable oil for three or four minutes.This place is too far for me to drive, and it really isn't on the way to Houston or Austin from Dallas. If I am ever in Bryan, you can bet your ass that I am travelling to Snook to try this stuff.For that final touch, the chicken-fried bacon is served with a bowl of cream gravy.
Actually, it tastes pretty good. "It's crisp, flaky, has a distinct bacon flavor," said American-Statesman food editor Kitty Crider, who sampled part of a to-go order. The stuff travels well in the car. Hey. What's to go bad?
Until then, I think that I am going to go to the store, buy me a sack of beer batter mix, a batch of Pioneer gravy, and a pound of thick sliced bacon. I'm debating on whether or not it is time to change the grease in the fry-daddy.
Tooting My Own Horn
I think this is the first time I've blogged myself, but I was walking through my archives patting myself on the back and scowling at the stories that I linked that were premature, when I saw this one. I'm going to requote General Patton's Speech at the beginning of Operation Overlord, because our Men and Women did exactly this:When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one either. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have. We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!I don't want to get any messages saying, "I am holding my position." We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy's balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!
O'REILLY CALLS BOORTZ A "VICIOUS SON OF A BITCH!"
(and Boortz just smiles)It comes down to whether or not a school should get the authority to sign off on how students conduct private parties. Obviously, from a libertarian standpoint, they should not.
The main reason that I blogged this is to see if we can google-bomb Boortz in as the first one to come up when someone searches on "vicious son of a bitch".
TOMPAINE.com - My Country: The World
And another idiotarian is discovered. This one makes me livid, coming from the so-called "tompaine.com". Get this smidge of refuse:As a patriot, contemplating the dead GIs, should I comfort myself (as, understandably, their families do) with the thought: "They died for their country." If so, I would be lying to myself. Those who die in this war will not die for their country. They will die for their government. They will die for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. And yes, they will die for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the President. They will die to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death.This trash insists that because he suspects that George Bush might have less than pure motives, we should discount the service that our volunteers won for the Iraqi people. In his hatred for "Bush and Cheney and Rumsfield" he ignores the very things that Paine fought against: despotism, nationalism, and tyranny. He is guilty of the very arguments that caused Paine to write "The Rights of Man":The distinction between dying for our country and dying for your government is crucial in understanding what I believe to be the definition of patriotism in a democracy.
According to the Declaration of Independence -- the fundamental document of democracy -- governments are artificial creations, established by the people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Furthermore, as the Declaration says, "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."
But Mr. Burke appears to have no idea of principles when he is contemplating Governments. "Ten years ago," says he, "I could have felicitated France on her having a Government, without inquiring what the nature of that Government was, or how it was administered." Is this the language of a rational man? Is it the language of a heart feeling as it ought to feel for the rights and happiness of the human race? On this ground, Mr. Burke must compliment all the Governments in the world, while the victims who suffer under them, whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence, are wholly forgotten. It is power, and not principles, that Mr. Burke venerates; and under this abominable depravity he is disqualified to judge between them.It doesn't matter what the White House had in mind. The result is that American volunteers -- men and women who loved liberty enough to pledge their lives to the Constitution, a document where the word "democracy" never appears -- fought and died to free a people suffering under a tyranny much worse than that the tyranny Paine lauded the French for throwing off.
It really disgusts me that so called libertarians are against any sort of action by the US. There is no doubt in my mind that until about a month ago, Saddam Hussain was the greatest threat to liberty in the world. Not, perhaps, American liberty, but human liberty.
Zinn praises the foreign press for giving us "the full picture of human suffering caused by our bombing". What this press fails to show is us the full picture of human suffering under the Baath regime. You don't see the mass graves that are five years old in the press he lauds; you only see the small fresh graves. To see the full picture of suffering in Iraq, you must look to the Iraqis. I'll quote Awad Nasir, who's article appears below:
The U.S. and its allies should be prepared to take a further risk, and ignore the supposedly disinterested advice of France, Russia and the Arab regimes to salvage the political and social legacy of the dictatorship. Last February, the U.S. and Britain stood firm and insisted that Iraq must be liberated, regardless of whatever anyone might say. Today, they must remain equally firm in asserting that Iraq must be democratized. They should not leave Iraq until they are asked to do so by a freely elected Iraqi regime in Baghdad.If you truly love liberty, then there is no way that you can turn a blind eye to the tyranny that the Iraqi people lived under, and claim that it wasn't worth American lives to free those millions of people. It would be worth a million deaths to free the Iraqi people. I can only be free if you are free; Zinn seems to have forgotten this axiom.In the meantime Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Kofi Annan and others have no authority to speak on behalf of my people.
The Lemon: History Of The Internet
My favorite part is in 2001:Cats becomes sole proprietor of all your base. Every Zig moved.
An Iraqi poet celebrates the dictator's fall
I hope that this soliloquy will survive on the internet like Gordon Sinclair's speech:Let me confess something: I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw Saddam Hussein's statue toppled in Baghdad.I am a poet and know that eyes can, and do, deceive.
For three decades, part of them spent in prison, part in hiding and part in exile, I had often dreamed of an end to the nightmare of the Baathist-fascist regime. But I had never dreamed that the end, that is to say Iraq's liberation, would come the way it did.
Again and again, I watched the footage showing the fall of the statue. It was as if I was afraid it might slip from the realm of my memory. But it was not until my sister, whom I had not seen for years, phoned me from Baghdad that I was convinced that "The Vampire" had fallen and that we were free.
"Hello Awad," my sister said, her voice trembling. "The nightmare is over. We are free. Do you realize? We are free!"
It was not the mullahs of Tehran and their Islamic Revolutionary Guards who liberated the Iraqi Shiites.
Nor was it Turkey's army that came to rescue the Iraqi Turkomans from Saddam's clutches.
Amr Moussa, the Arab League's secretary-general, and the corrupt regimes he speaks for, did not liberate Iraqi Arab nationalists.
Iraq's democrats, now setting up their parties and publishing their newspapers, were not liberated by Jacques Chirac. Nor did the European left liberate Iraq's communists, now free to resume their activities inside Iraq.
No, believe it or not, Iraqis of all faiths, ethnic backgrounds and political persuasions were liberated by young men and women who came from the other side of the world--from California and Wyoming, from New York, Glasgow, London, Sydney and Gdansk to risk their lives, and for some to die, so that my people can live in dignity.
U.S. sees proof of biolab -- The Washington Times
Hawks: 4Doves: 0
First, the doves said that Saddam had no connection with terrorism. Now we have the Palestinian terror groups complaining that they aren't receiving millions of dollars from Iraq. We have documents linking Iraqi intelligence to Osama bin Laden. We have an aircraft mock-up designed to train terrorists for hijackings. We have terrorist leaders being killed in Iraq. We have piles and piles of evidence connecting Saddam to international terror.
The second thing that that doves claimed was that Saddam was complying with the UN Sanctions. He blew that assertion out of the water on the first night of the shooting war. The sanctions and the cease-fire required him to give up all missiles with a range greater than about 90 miles. Every SCUD variant he fired at Kuwait violated that requirement, and he proved it night after night.
The third thing they told us was that the war was going to be a Vietnam Quagmire and there were going to be thousands of American deaths and millions of Iraqi civilian deaths. Didn't happen. What is really irking is the people (the Libertarian Party included, which I am disgusted to be a member of) who claimed that it wasn't worth a single American life to free millions of Iraqis. I haven't seen any interviews with a soldier over there who makes that racist claim.
The final thing the doves told us is that Saddam never even had WMDs. Setting aside his own admissions and the UN assertions that this wasn't true, we now have a smoking gun:
The mobile lab was found April 19 at a checkpoint that had been manned by Kurdish forces near the town of Tall Kayf, in northern Iraq. It had been in a convoy of military vehicles and was painted in military olive colors.If I was the president, I would put this truck on a cargo plane, fly it to New York, and park it right in front of the UN building with a cordon of Ranger guards. And unlike the National Guard at half the airports, the Ranger's weapons would be locked and loaded.Inside the truck, officials found a fermenter, gas cylinders to supply clean air for production, and a system to filter exhaust gas and "eliminate any signature of production," Mr. Cambone said.
"The fermenters are used for growing cultures," he said. "And the recovery systems make air filtration unnecessary ... and prevent the release of signs indicating the fermentation process." He said that the gas recovery system is not used for any commercial biological purpose.
A detailed description of the truck was given by Mr. Powell during an intelligence briefing on Iraq's weapons programs in February before the U.N. Security Council.
Byrd criticizes Bush's carrier visit -- The Washington Times
"I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw," he said.Hmm. I don't seem to remember Byrd being quite this livid the last time this happened. (And for the exact same express reason, to boot.)Administration officials said the president went to the carrier to thank the troops for a job well done in Iraq.
Wave Sanctions at Them
There is no direct link to this one, so I am going to quote the whole thing before it disappears down the memory hole:Unarmed in Afghanistan
Tuesday, May 6, 2003 --Canadian soldiers are back in Afghanistan, but this time, they don't have any weapons to help protect them. In Ottawa's rush to put Canadian troops on the ground, 25 elite Canadian soldiers arrived in Afghanistan only to find that they are not allowed to carry guns. What makes the situation particularly embarrassing is that the troops have been assigned German bodyguards to protect them. A Global National exclusive report.
TIME.com: Food Fight
Hunger pains can apparently turn even the most upstanding diplomat into a looter.That's a strange analogy. That's like saying, "The DTs can apparently turn even the most upstanding lush into a boozehound."
The decision to make the cafeterias into "no pay zones" spread through the 40-acre complex like wildfire. Soon, the hungry patrons came running. "It was chaos, wild, something out of a war scene," said one Aramark executive who was present. "They took everything, even the silverware," she said. Another witness from U.N. security said the cafeteria was "stripped bare." And another told TIME that the cafeteria raid was "unbelievable, crowds of people just taking everything in sight; they stripped the place bare." And yet another astonished witness said that "chickens, turkeys, souffles, casseroles all went out the door (unpaid)."Am I the only one who thinks this is entirely in character for the UN?
