Monday, July 30. 2007
Fascinating, from Totten, today. With photos.
 We posted a piece this week on the terrible recent home invasion in Connecticut, about 20 minutes from where I live. By coincidence, this was the same week I was taking my required Concealed Carry course down in Bridgeport (which was excellent, and good fun blasting away at targets with 9mm Glocks and H&Ks, plus some .22 revolvers).
One could not help but wonder what good protection might be from home invasion. In the reported story, the good doctor was downstairs, and knocked out by the invaders with a baseball bat immediately, then tied up and carried to the basement. No handgun in the bedside table would have been of any use. As home invasion becomes more common, I wonder what good protection might be, unless you carry 24 hrs/day, as many do. I had a good chat, during a break in the course, with a husky young black kid with a du-rag, silver earrings, and pants half-falling off - nicest kid in the world - who wants to be a bank guard. He told me that he was dozing in front of the TV when he was awakened by an intruder, while the rest of his family was upstairs. The intruder was a bit frightened, and this kid told him to leave in 3 seconds. The minute the guy turned, the kid slammed him in the back of the head with an aluminum baseball bat that was lying around. The kid had been at softball that afternoon, and never put his bat away. The one swing knocked the guy out. He called the cops who cuffed the skull-fractured intruder and took him away in an ambulance. He said the cops came back one more time to ask more questions, and told him "You done good, kid." He never heard any more about it. I told him to forget being a bank guard - go into the Army. He told me his Dad was a jarhead, and his granddad was in the Army. I told him he had an innate tactical sense. The way my life is, I do not have enough contact with du-rag kids. (I told my wife the story, and told her that the kid looked scary until I chatted with him. She said "It's just fashion: he wants to look scary, and you want to look dorky.") A man's home is his castle. My friend and I concluded that a short-barreled pump 12 ga., like a trench gun, might the the best tool - assuming it's handy. It is tough for an amateur to hit anything moving with a handgun, unless it's ten feet away. 
Photo on top: The Petit family of Cheshire, CT, the victims of the home invasion/rape/murder. Photo below, The entrance to The Tower, of course.
Friday, July 27. 2007
Remember the Seattle Lego story? A Seattle school banned Legos because, well, it's hard to explain rationally. Something about capitalism. However now, after a bit of Mao-style indoctrination for the little kiddie-poos, Legos are allowed back - but with strict rules about Lego construction. Ya can't make this stuff up. (Thanks for the correction, reader) Photo below: A Lego church, which I am sure would be forbidden in any Seattle schools. 
From Opinion Journal: The U.S. homeland hasn't been struck by terrorists since September 11, and one reason may be more aggressive intelligence policies. So Americans should be alarmed that one of the best intelligence tools--warrantless wiretapping of al Qaeda suspects--has recently become far less effective and is in danger of being neutered by Congressional Democrats. President Bush approved this terrorist surveillance not long after 9/11, allowing intelligence officials to track terrorist calls overseas, as well as overseas communications with al Qaeda sympathizers operating in the U.S. The New York Times exposed the program in late 2005, and Democrats and antiwar activists immediately denounced it as an "illegal" attempt to spy on Americans, à la J. Edgar Hoover. Democratic leaders were briefed on the program from the first and never once tried to shut it down. But once it was exposed, these same Democrats accused Mr. Bush of breaking the law by not getting warrants from the special court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Mr. Bush has rightly defended the program's legality, but as a gesture of compromise in January he agreed to seek warrants under the FISA process. This has turned out to be an enormous mistake that has unilaterally disarmed one of our best intelligence weapons in the war on terror. To understand why, keep in mind that we live in a world of fiber optics and packet-switching. A wiretap today doesn't mean the FBI must install a bug on Abdul Terrorist's phone in Peshawar. Information now follows the path of least resistance, wherever that may lead. And because the U.S. has among the world's most efficient networks, hundreds of millions of foreign calls are routed through the U.S. That's right: If an al Qaeda operative in Quetta calls a fellow jihadi in Peshawar, that call may well travel through a U.S. network. This ought to be a big U.S. advantage in our "asymmetrical" conflict with terrorists. But it also means that, for the purposes of FISA, a foreign call that is routed through U.S. networks becomes a domestic call. So thanks to the obligation to abide by an outdated FISA statute, U.S. intelligence is now struggling even to tap the communications of foreign-based terrorists. If this makes you furious, it gets worse.
Read the whole thing. Also, some comments from Betsy. Why do the Dems seem to want to handcuff us in a war against foreign enemies? (That's a rhetorical question.)
 The terrible story of the home invasion-murder-rape in a peaceful, leafy Connecticut suburb this week reinforces the necessity to have an armed home, as Never Yet Melted notes.
The right to self-defence is the most basic human right. It matters not to me that such crimes are rare. Lightning strikes on houses are rare, but where they are possible, we have lightning rods. We have them on the house and on the barn. It's a reasonable, cheap precaution against a low-likelihood but catastrophic event. Like fire insurance. More thoughts: I have been thinking about this doctor for days, since the Dylanologist emailed the story to me. How does he feel? I cannot imagine losing a whole family - his life - in that way, or in any other way. Does he regret that he could not protect his family - or that he could not die trying? Surviving something like this must be a world of pain. Our longer essay on the topic of the CT invasion, and home defence, here.
Baqubah: Michael Yon's latest. Fascinating, especially about the drones. Baghdad: Crittenden. About Al Quaida, and a battle. Plus he reminds you of what you can do on the home front: This Sunday, Get Naked for America. (No Grannies, please.)
 The American Left has learned from their past errors. They are now more committed to incremental Socialism instead of grand plans.
It's the old trick of boiling a frog. Someday I will wake up and realize that they will have taken my money, and left me with no choices, and my frog will be cooked. The battle over S-CHIP is an example. Klein in American Prospect, via RCP - a quote: Democrats and Republicans both view this battle as a harbinger for a coming showdown over full reform of the health care system. Rahm Emmanuel likes to call it "spring training for universal health care." Mitch McConnell and Trent Lott wrote warned that expanding S-CHIP "takes a significant step toward a government-run health care system." And indeed it does.
Thursday, July 26. 2007
From General Keane, at NRO. Those who are politically committed to defeat and failure will need to ramp up the urgency of their calls for retreat, or they may end up with more than egg all over their faces.
Another positive report, from Surber.
Wednesday, July 25. 2007
At The Dissident Frogman - click the red button. (h/t, Theo)
 The rise of a black underclass in America since the 60s has been troubling, and puzzling, to me for years. Wasted lives, wasted opportunities, wasted talents. It's been around for so long that many seem to forget that it did not exist before or during the war - or even in the 50s.
From before the Civil War, and since then, many people of all colors worked and died to bring the full freedoms of citizenship to black Americans. The emergence of a self-destructive underclass in the wake of all of that work is heartbreaking. From In the Heart of Freedom, from Myron Magnet in City Journal, a quote: Two April days threw a clarifying light on the state of race in America. On the 11th, North Carolina’s attorney general exonerated three white Duke students of the rape charges that a black stripper had lodged with much press fanfare a year earlier. The next day, CBS fired shock jock Don Imus for calling black Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos.” Between them, these events suggest an explanation for America’s most vexed social question: in a country whose chief domestic imperative for 50 years has been ending racism and righting long-standing wrongs against blacks—with such success that we now have an expanding black middle class, a black secretary of state, black CEOs of three top corporations, a black Supreme Court justice, and a serious black presidential candidate—how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families? The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued. That legacy didn’t stop blacks from raising themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowell’s data show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didn’t cause. Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure. What was going on in the mid-sixties that could explain such a startling development? Political scientist Charles Murray gave the first answer to that question: welfare benefits sharply rose just at that moment. Offering more purchasing power than a minimum-wage job, the dole, he argued, provided an economic incentive for women to have out-of-wedlock babies and for their boyfriends to live off their welfare payments, too.
Is a sub-culture of dependency the issue? I don't know. Read the whole thing. Photo: The Clifton School on Merritt Island, Florida, 1890
Photos here. h/t, Jules. Hey Granny - please put your shirt back on.
Tuesday, July 24. 2007
Totten in Baghdad. Something seems to be working. Somebody should inform the MSM.
JR Dunn at American Thinker. It begins: It's now quite clear how the results of the surge will be dealt with by domestic opponents of the Iraq war. They're going to be ignored. They're being ignored now. Virtually no media source or Democratic politician (and not a few Republicans, led by Richard "I can always backtrack" Lugar) is willing to admit that the situation on the ground has changed dramatically over the past three months. Coalition efforts have undergone a remarkable reversal of fortune, a near-textbook example as to how an effective strategy can overcome what appear to be overwhelming drawbacks.
Read the whole thing. If Petraeus can hold back the barbarians, it will change many things. (h/t, reader)
Saturday, July 21. 2007
Who knew there was a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement? As long as it's voluntary, I'm all for it. I like volunteerism. From the piece at No Left Turns: The VHEM position is “realistic: We know we’ll never see the day there are no human beings on the planet. . . . The Movement may be considered a success each time one more of us volunteers to breed no more.” The VHEM approach demographically guarantees that its hard task will only get harder. Those non-breeding volunteers will have no children to catechize, while the people who do breed will have set an anti-VHEM example for their children simply by virtue of having them.
Instead of stigmatizing people who drive SUVs and eat beef, let's just stigmatize anyone who has kids. Better yet, the members of this movement, to be morally consistent, should simply off themselves right now, in some sort of Gaia-friendly manner. After all, breathing and farting are major sources of CO2.
Friday, July 20. 2007
Regular readers know that Maggie's Farm has a strong conservationist orientation, but if anyone tries to call us Greenies we will shoot you in both kneecaps with our Colt Python. I know some readers are inclined to disagree with us about this, but we do believe in certain sorts of planning, and even certain sorts of government "taking," Kelo notwithstanding.  For two examples we like, JFK's Cape Cod National Seashore took the development rights to broad swaths of the Lower Cape (which is the upper Cape). This action not only preserved the feel and aesthetics of the Cape but preserved the unusual Cape environment - and ultimately raised land values through the roof. Without the National Seashore, there would no longer be anywhere on the Cape to hunt, the salt marshes would be filled in, and the place would look like the worst parts of the Jersey Shore. (Photo is a view of Wellfleet's Chequessett Neck).
Another example we like is Britain's Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. Without that act of Parliament, Britain would not be a tourist destination: it would look like Indianapolis. It protected the towns, and it protected their farmlands and open spaces. Yes, it essentially confiscated development rights - with the voters' approval. (Photo below: A view of English countryside, just outside of town.) 
So, while our pure Libertarian readers grouse and grumble, let's get to the point. The good Prof. Pat Deneen recently hosted Roger Scruton at Georgetown, which speech is now Scruton's most recent published essay, A Righter Shade of Green, in The American Conservative. Scruton isn't so much in favor of government taking - he is in favor of a local sense of trusteeship. That's the right idea, but I haven't seen it work in practice too often: local politics are not the highest form of human civic evolution or future-orientation. As Prof Deneen notes, and as we have frequently noted here, poor stewardship of our precious land in the US is made possible by the "externalization of costs" to other people and to future generations. Example: highways. Example: development of good farmland for 1/2 acre zoning. Read Pat Deneen's piece here. He quotes Scruton's conclusion: What then is the conservative solution, if there is one? A revival of trusteeship is the only hope for the future, and this attitude is natural to human beings. They enter the world through no choice of their own, to be greeted, as a rule, by the love of parents and the security of home. The trustee is the one who recognizes that his home, and all that it means, are inherited things, things to be safeguarded and passed on. This attitude exercises itself at the local level in the voluntary associations and small institutions of civil society. It is the core component in that associational genius that Tocqueville discerned in the American people. It is the legacy of a political order that regards people, not rulers, as the source of authority and the fount of responsible decision-making.
Environmental movements on the Left seldom pause to consider the question of human motivation. It is so clear to them that something must be done that they leap to the conclusion that it must be done by state power and imposed by law. The problem with that approach is that it makes mistakes into permanent legacies and provides no incentive to ordinary citizens to do what they are told. Conservatives, on the whole, are more respectful of human nature and will recognize in the attitude of trusteeship a feeling to which we automatically tend, when given the freedom to exercise it.
Read Scruton's whole essay at American Conservative.
 Our Aliyah Diary author Nathan forwarded this letter from Jerusalem about the NYT review of "Hot House" this week, and the pictured murderer of 15 at Sbarro.
Dear Friends, Today's New York Times carries a review of a film called "Hot House " that goes inside Israeli prisons and examines the lives of Palestinian prisoners. We're not recommending the film or the review. But we do want to share our feelings with you about the beaming female face that adorns the article.
The film is produced by HBO. So it's presumably HBO's publicity department that was responsible for creating and distributing a glamor style photograph of a smiling, contented-looking young woman in her twenties to promote the movie.
That female is our child's murderer. She was sentenced to sixteen life sentences or 320 years which she is serving in an Israeli jail. Fifteen people were killed and more than a hundred maimed and injured by the actions of this attractive person and her associates.
Neither the New York Times nor HBO are likely to give even a moment's attention to the victims of the barbarians who destroyed the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem and the lives of so many victims. So we would be grateful if you would pass along this link to some pictures of our daughter whose name was Malki. She was unable to reach her twenties - Hamas saw to that.
Though she was only fifteen years old when her life was stolen from her and from us, we think Malki was a beautiful young woman, living a beautiful life. We ask your help so that other people - far fewer than the number who will see the New York Times, of course - can know about her. Please ask your friends to look at the pictures - some of the very few we have - of our murdered daughter.
They are at
http://www.kerenmalki.org/photo.htm
And remind them of what the woman in the Israeli prison - the woman smiling so happily in the New York Times - said last year. "I'm not sorry for what I did. We'll become free from the occupation and then I will be free from prison."
With so many voices demanding that Israel release its terrorist prisoners, small wonder she's smiling.
With greetings from Jerusalem,
Frimet and Arnold Roth
On behalf of Keren Malki
Name one thing Hillary Clinton has done (besides getting rich without working).
The war in Iraq - which I still insist is a very small war, and now more of a sophisticated police action than a war - began as a bipartisan effort but has evolved into an intensely partisan one. Why? It's being used, and magnified, as a wedge issue by the Dems. Why? Because they can't say, this time, "It's the economy, stupid." What else do the Dems have? Thus this war is being magnified into something like Korea or Vietnam. Facts play no role in this - it's the narrative: Vietnam Redux. 
Thursday, July 19. 2007
Wow, can't believe how early the campaigns for 2008 start. I was at the Quickie Mart, and someone left this under the wiper. Also a handprint that all the washer fluid in the Western Hemisphere can't make a dent in. Oh well, maybe this wise Cincinattus, already plowed, can shed some light onto this Obama guy and why he wants to show Behind the Green Door instead of reading Hop on Pop in kindergarten. 
Robert Kagan says that the post-Cold War mirage of international harmony is gone, and normal world history has resumed. He begins: The world has become normal again. The years immediately following the end of the Cold War offered a tantalizing glimpse at a new kind of international order, with nations growing together or disappearing altogether, ideological conflicts melting away, cultures intermingling through increasingly free commerce and communications. But that was a mirage, the hopeful anticipation of a liberal, democratic world that wanted to believe the end of the Cold War did not end just one strategic and ideological conflict but all strategic and ideological conflict. People and their leaders longed for "a world transformed." 1 Today the nations of the West still cling to that vision. Evidence to the contrary -- the turn toward autocracy in Russia or the growing military ambitions of China -- is either dismissed as a temporary aberration or denied entirely.
Read the whole thing.
 To what extent should "public goods" be subsidized? What are the limits?
Transportation is taxpayer-subsidized or government-run in the US. Airports, roads and highways, and mass transit, for starters. All of these things were once entirely private ventures. In the Boston to DC corridor, Amtrak is a wonderful thing and it is heavily used. It's quicker and cheaper than driving and parking, and it takes you from downtown to downtown instead of to a distant airport. Whether Amtrak is overly-subsidized is another question, which I cannot answer. However, I would ask these folks who are mooning Amtrak in Calif. whether they would like their California interstates taken away. The NY Sun a while ago was not too keen on Amtrak subsidies, but when they discuss the far-cheaper cost of busses, they ignore the fact that the highways they use are government-built and maintained. Photo: A high-speed Acela engine
Wednesday, July 18. 2007
You need to know, if you do not. Alan Caruba's piece at Intell. Conservative begins thus: In a month, August 20 and 21, the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico will sit down together in Montebello, Quebec to discuss making the borders between these three nations disappear. They will discuss progress on a vast highway project passing through America to link Mexico with Canada. So far, no one has asked the citizens of these three nations whether they want to do this. It is not up for a vote in Congress and, indeed, Congress has no supervision over the gnomes in the U.S. Department of Commerce who are busily “harmonizing” the laws under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP).
Read the whole thing.
Romano at Chronicle of Higher Ed, on the Islamists. We agree. These animals are not welcome in my world. If they stay in their own world, and leave me alone, I don't really give a multicultural damn. We have been saying this for two years.
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