Cascajun

I took my dogs for a hike on Blanchard Mountain yesterday. The view from Oyster Dome rock is one the most spectacular in the area. From there, perched atop a 200 foot precipice, you have a panorama that includes the snow capped mountains on the Olympic Peninsula to the south, Samish Bay and the San Juan Islands, Vancouver Island, and the Coast Range of British Columbia to the north. Owned by the State of Washington and managed by the DNR, Blanchard Mountain is unique as it is the only place where the Cascade Mountains reach Puget Sound. It’s a popular destination for local hikers, mountain bikers, hang gliders, para gliders, and horseback riders. The weather was fabulous, though it was the warmest day of the year to date at 83 degrees F. It was easy to lay on a rock in the shade at the top and watch a juvenile bald eagle soar on the wind currents.

NPR’s top-of-the hour news @0500 PST this morning reports that “FBI agents arrested seven people Thursday in Miami on suspicion of planning attacks on federal offices in Miami, and the Sears Tower in Chicago.” No further details were given, but they explicity pointed out that the suspects have no apparent ties to al Qaeda.

But, reading this ABC News report, we get a very different picture.

…elaborating on a brief statement on the operation from Florida authorities, said the suspects had thought they were dealing with the international al Qaeda group but had been infiltrated by a U.S. government informant.

Oh that’s all, these terrorists just thought they were al Qaeda. But it wasn’t actual ties to al Qaeda. That’s an important distinction you know, especially when you’re buried under the rubble of the Sears Tower. This Miami cell appears quite similar to the recently busted Toronto cell.

Captain Ed has lots of links and updates.

Would you prefer rational self-interest or an orgy of self-sacrificing?

Robert Tracinski has a piece about morality posted at Real Clear Politics today. It includes one of my favorite quotes from Ayn Rand: “The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”

Go read it.

Thank the 4th Estate. The opposition party in our two party system is hobbled by a base that is “coming in broken and stupid.”

Their transmissions (a real debate about Iraq and the GWOT) have been garbled because the frequency (the MSM) has been compromised.

Wretchard explains the conundrum the Democrats have found themselves in.

I’m a veteran of the Louisiana Army National Guard. I drove a Bradley Fighting Vehicle for the company commander in a mechanized infantry unit and, consequently, spent a lot of time on the radio fielding calls for him. An essential part of protocol was keeping all transmissions brief, clear, and to the point. When you could not understand the other party because the transmission quality was garbled, the appropriate reply was “You’re coming in broken and distorted.”

I have taken an adaptation of that phrase into my civilian life. When I see a friend speaking or behaving in a foolish manner I warn, “You’re coming in broken and stupid.”

Someone in the Democratic Party needs to tell Congressman John Murtha that he is coming in broken and stupid.

Sonia Belle (Warning - not work safe, nudity) writes about former Secretary of the Navy James Webb’s arguments against women in the military.

Webb’s main point (rather convincingly exposed in the article) is that sexual fraternization is both inevitable and detrimental to military effectiveness. Exactly the same arguments are also used to discriminate against openly gay men and lesbian women in the military.

There is only one thing that can be said to Webb and other misogynist troglodytes like him: Fuck you! Sexual fraternization isn’t the problem. Discipline is the problem. If every superior officer who raped an underling had his balls cut off, there wouldn’t be a problem. There is too much fucking abroad navy ships? Well, why not kick out all the male sailors, and allow only women to serve aboard warships and submarines?

I would certainly agree that discipline is the problem. A military unit is designed as much as possible to be a machine. Hence the rigid chain of command, uniforms, strict codes of conduct, etc. These are all structures designed to make humans perform more like machines.

If I were designing a machine, I wouldn’t introduce unnecessary functionality that might comprise it’s performance. Let’s look at two modern war fighting machines as examples - the UAVs Predator and Global Hawk. They were not designed with emotions and sex drive. We don’t have to worry about walking in on Predator humping Global Hawk in the corner of the maintenance hanger.

Humans are what they are - we have relationships and those will inevitably create tension in the workplace. The military is a special workplace, you can’t deny it. It’s job is to destroy things and kill people. Therefore, the standard that’s become common in modern western society cannot be applied equally.

That said, it would be interesting to fork a few military units to test Sonia’s assertion that fraternization isn’t a problem with properly disciplined military units. An all female SEAL team. An all female tank or infantry battalion. An all gay or lesbian submarine crew. Plus, the competition would foster esprit de corps.

Wretchard writes today about the crisis within liberal internationalism. He postulates that the debate “falsely revolves around the issue of Iraq when in fact it should revolve around whether the liberals have a strategy for dealing with the growing chaos and dysfunction in the Third World of which radical Islamism is simply an instance. Iraq only seems central to the debate because it has precipitated a crisis within liberal internationalism that can no longer be ignored. The world that gave rise to the Cold War; that gave international institutions ‘legitimacy’; the bipolar power alignments that made these institutions effective — all of it — is fading away.”

TigerHawk notes in the comments that many on the left believe radical islamic terrorism is just blowback and suggest that if the US were to adopt a sufficiently submissive foreign policy and a suffficiently humane and “sustainable” economic system, the islamists would cease to struggle against us.

It is all blowback, and the solution to it all, according to the left, is to urinate submissively and then roll over.

If you don’t value what you have, you are unwilling to confront the people who want to take it away from you.

I can imagine all sorts of smart things that I wish the Bush administration would do, and that perhaps a Democrat might think of doing. The problem is, there is simply no stomach on the left for the fight. That is why we increasingly see lefty bloggers and blog commenters claim that the threat of al Qaeda has been massively inflated. Not that it is today massively inflated, but that it always has been. What about September 11? A lucky hit, they say. Won’t happen again.

Why do they say that not only is al Qaeda not a threat today, but that it never has been? Because if the threat of al Qaeda has diminished, somebody would have to get the credit for that…

Chaos fills the vaccum left in the third world by the end of the cold war and the demise of international bipolar power structures, which themselves were an outcome of WWII.

Denial of this threat to liberal democracies because recognizing it would require giving credence to the policies of your political enemies.

Who is being obstinate and myopic?

Keeping most of the world safe made it possible for the Left to believe in Pink Elephant repellant powder. The proof of it’s efficacy lay in that there were no Pink Elephants about, ergo it worked. The UN was a success because, see, the subway trains are running.

But the cure for fantasy comes at too high a price. Is there some way of disabusing people of their illusions without getting everyone in trouble? If words won’t do it and experience is too painful, what’s left? If there was way out of this, someone would have patented it by now.

Mark Blumenthal, Mystery Pollster, writes a three part critique of RFK Jr’s Rolling Stone article, Was the 2004 Election Stolen?.

In Part I, Is RFK Jr Right about exit polls?, Blumenthal points out some of the pitfalls of exit polling:

• a higher error rate due to the cluster sample technique; and
• a growing proportion of voters who cast absentee or mail-in ballots.

Blumenthal opens his piece:
(emphasis mine)

Late last week, Rolling Stone published an article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. that asks provocatively, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? While it covers many topics involving alleged suppression and fraud in Ohio, the article disappoints in its discussion of the exit poll controversy, because on that aspect of the controversy Kennedy manages to dredge up nearly every long-ago discredited distortion or half-truth on this subject without any acknowledgement of contrary arguments or the weaknesses in his argument. It is as if the exit poll debate of the last eighteen months never happened. With this two-part post, I want to review the article’s discussion of the exit poll controversy in-depth, for it provides a good opportunity to learn something about what exit polls can tell us — and mostly what they cannot — about whether fraud was committed in the 2004 elections.

Go figure. It’s been debated before? No worry, that’s a common theme in the age of infotainment.

Parts two and three are up, but I’ve not read them…yet.

Part II: Is RFK, Jr. Right About Exit Polls? - Part II
Part III: Gallup: A “Modest Improvement?” examines the claim that networks “scrubbed the offending results.”

Hat tip to Armed Liberal.

Nope. This isn’t a post about intelligent design. It’s about climate change, aka Global Warming. Religious people, especially those belonging to certain non-approved denominations, are held in contempt by many in the Left. They are frowned upon because of their dependency on faith.

Yet, one of the poster issues of the Left has, itself, become a quasi-religion.

It all comes down to belief — and that is the problem. Global warming has become so politicized that scientists must believe in it. If they predict dire consequences, they win praise from true believers and grants for their important research. Scientists who question the prophecies of doom can expect to be marginalized.

The earth’s climate has either been cooling or warming for billions of years, despite the recent evolution of homo sapiens. It’s never been static - that’s the inconvenient truth.

Al Gore, the inconvenient candidate.