July 25, 2005
Immune from Identity Theft? Think Again
Trey Jackson: 24% of Americans over 18 have been exposed to ID theft in the last 100 days.
July 24, 2005
Hayward on (Young) Churchill
A Churchillian Perspective on September 11 by Steven Hayward
Required Reading Times 10
Oriana Fallaci speaks (hat tip to Mystery Achievement for the translation, and Roger Simon for promulgating):
Mystery Achievement: "The Enemy We Treat Like A Friend" (Part I)
Mystery Achievement: "The Enemy We Treat Like A Friend" (Part II)
Talking point: what if Islamic Nazism (Fallaci's term) was of a purely secular nature? Would we be better able (and willing) to fight? Just as there were good Germans in Hitler's Germany, good Italians in Mussolini's Italy, and good Japanese in Hirohito's Japan, there are good Muslims in the Islamic body politic. Yet with the fabric of religion interwoven into this conflict, a conflict that does not recognize traditional national boundaries, we must find a way to recognize and defeat this enemy. The first is to name the enemy, and in consequence, name the war.
It is not technically incorrect to call this conflict the War on Terror; the West dearly wants to end terrorism. However, to name the war for a technique and not the ideology that embraces the technique is to not know what we are fighting. A war on terror would logically include fighting Basque separatists in Spain, the IRA in the United Kingdom, and a whole host of countries in which terror is used against its citizenry, such as North Korea, Zimbabwe, the countries of the West African Gold Coast, and many more. As much as there are horrific events in all of these countries, and as much as we may get involved in any one of them either unilaterally or multilaterally, they are not a part of this War on Terror.
Oriana Fallaci has correctly named the enemy: Islamic Nazism (the term Islamic Fascism has sometimes been used, but I think this is a misnomer: it is not traditional fascism that the Islamic radicals are embracing; it is very much an extreme brand of National Socialism, or Nazism). Whether Bush, or Blair, or Howard, or even Kofi, Kerry, or Clinton can call this war by its name, the War on Islamic Nazism, remains to be seen.
July 23, 2005
Video of Trump
Dangerous Liberty has the video of Trump's Senate testimony (thanks for the trackback!). It is substantially longer than the audio and contains this tidbit at 27:53 in the video: out of a proposed budget of 1.2 billion dollars, an additional 471 million dollars is set aside for "contingency and professional fees"!
You heard right. The UN is expecting a 40% cost overrun with no plans, specifications, or budget in place on a project that shouldn't cost more than 700 million dollars according to the Donald. Listen to the whole thing; if it wasn't so infuriating, it would be hilarious.
July 22, 2005
Trump On UN Renovations
The Donald speaks at the Senate International Security Subcommittee on (having a snowball's chance in hell of) reining in Turtle Bay's proposed renovation costs. Really, this is an amusing testament to the UN's utter hopelessness as a global problem-solving body.
Excerpt (there is much more, including an mp3 file; I'll tell you, Trump is a good public speaker):
"Now, I listened to one thing, and I've seen one thing, and one number that sticks out more than all of the rest. Because whether or not somebody doesn't know what New York Steam is, or what boilers are, and whether or not they have boiler rooms, which the people at the United Nations didn't do. But the number of $44 million dollars for an architect, is one of the great numbers in the histroy...In fact, I think this man is a genius, whoever he may be, wherever he may be in Italy. I think he's a great genius. I would like to meet him. He is, without question, the richest architect in the world. And I listened, as one person said, I think they only got $500,000. Another person said, I think they got a million, and then changed their mind, and it was $7.8 million. And then I listened to Senator Sessions, who actually did his homework, said they got paid $27 million dollars, because you were able to check the books. So they got paid $27 million dollars. They haven't done anything. They don't even have plans. Nobody even knows what they're building, and they got paid $27 million dollars.
"Now, I have respect for a lot of people. And I have great respect for architects. But I'm going to give you an example. The tallest residential building in the world, my architect got paid approximately $1.5 million dollars. This architect got $44 million dollars. A building at 40 Wall Street, my architect got paid, believe me, peanuts. I think less than $1.5 million. In Chicago, where I'm building a building of 92 stories at the old Sun Times site, 2.7 million square feet, which is more than the United Nations, if you add up all of the projects that they're talking about, it's larger. Substantially larger. I'm spending $600 million dollars, and they're saying they're going to spend $1.2 billion. So they're spending much more...and this is a 92 story building with brand new structure, brand new foundations. I'm building all the roads...Mayor Daley made me build roads around the building. I had no choice, otherwise, if you know Mayor Daley, you're not going to build the building. He's a great mayor, but he made me do that. So all of this is $600 million dollars, and they're spending $1.2.
"Now, there is no way they're spending $1.2 billion dollars, in my opinion, and based on what I've heard. When they'd spent $27 million dollars, and terminated the architect, there's big trouble. Because I don't think they have a new architect. So if they don't have a new architect, who's going to do the plans? And who's going to do the bidding? Because in order to do a job, you have to have a complete set of plans and specs. If you don't have a complete, complete, finished, over, set of plans and specs, you have nothing to bid on. There's no way you can bid. The worst thing you can do, and you said you were in the home building business for a while...the worst thing you can do, as you know, is start a job without complete plans and specs. Because the sub-contractors will eat your lunch, right? So, it's one of those things. So they don't even have an architect. They spent $27 million dollars, and they don't have an architect. Now, I have asked, on numerous occasions, to go in, and I would help them. I would love to help them. I don't want any money. I want nothing. I've made a lot of money. I don't care. I want nothing."
An Interesting Use of Google Maps
chicagocrime.org: Chicago crime database
July 21, 2005
Required Reading
In my opinion, Charles Krauthammer and Mark Steyn stand as the two greatest columnists alive today. In today's Opinion Journal, Charles Krauthammer speaks of the maturation and vindication of the neoconservative movement.
The Neoconservative Convergence:
The post-Cold War era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: Over the past 15 years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism--has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.
Read the whole thing.
Beam Me Up, God
Ole Blue The Heretic: 'Star Trek' Star James Doohan Dies - Yahoo! News
July 19, 2005
72 Raisins Await
The lipstick lesbian daring to confront radical imams - Sunday Times - Times Online
July 18, 2005
ABC News Reports on Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection -- In 1999
Roger L. Simon: Which Side Are You - Part On & On & On
July 09, 2005
GWOT Intelligence Success
Are we winning? HughHewitt gets an email from reader "MU" on largely unreported intelligence successes in the GWOT:
February 2002
Italy: Italian authorities arrested nine Moroccans were arrested with a map
of the U.S. embassy and large quantities of a cyanide compound that could
have been turned into a deadly gas. Later, the same group was suspected of plotting a chemical attack on the U.S. embassy in Rome who were arrested previous February
March 2002
Italy: Police arrested a group of six men who were plotting a bio-terrorist
attack involving cyanide.
April 2002
Germany: German authorities detained 11 members of a Palestinian group
suspected of planning attacks in Germany. The German cell members were part of the Sunni group called “Al Tawhid,” that was later discovered to be
associated with Abu Mus ‘ab al Zarqawi. According to contemporary Reuters’ reports the cell was involved in falsifying passports and travel documents, but had later begun to plan an attack inside Germany.
August 2002
Italy: Four Moroccans and an Italian were arrested after they were overheard discussing a plan to attack 14th century Basilica of San Petronio in the northern city of Bologna, which contains a fresco depicting the prophet Mohammad in hell.
September 2002
France/Morocco: French police discovered explosives found on board a
Moroccan airplane. Trained dogs found about 3.5 ounces of plastic explosive
without a detonator in the seat armrest of a Royal Air Maroc charter plane.
Germany: German police arrested a 25-year-old German-born Turk suspected of building five bombs near the tourist city of Heidelberg. They also detained his 23-year-old American fiancée who worked as a civilian at the commissary of the city's U.S. Army Europe headquarters.
October 2002
Italy: Italian police arrested three Egyptian fishermen suspected of
plotting to attack a cemetery of American war dead south of Rome. Police
found explosives and maps highlighting the Nettuno American Cemetery and Memorial in the town of Anzio. In a separate incident, police arrested
members of a suspected al Qaeda of four Tunisians who were allegedly
planning attacks in Europe.
December 2002
France: French police arrested nine suspected Islamist militants who were
preparing an attack on Russian interests in France, including Moscow's
embassy in Paris, as a reprisal for Russian actions in its rebel Chechnya
province. Police raided the suburban flat used by the men, three Algerians
and a Moroccan, and found electronic parts used in detonators and a chemical that can be used in explosives, as well as a personal protection suit from chemical agents, a large sum of cash and false identity papers.
January 2003
United Kingdom: Four North African men charged under Britain's chemical
weapons laws with manufacturing ricin, one of the world's deadliest poisons.
Another six arrested later in the month. A British policeman was killed and
four others injured in an anti-terror raid which police say was linked to
the discovery of a chemical weapons agent in London. Three were arrested.
February 2003
Germany: German police arrested three men suspected of planning attacks inGermany and of supporting the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg which launched the September 11 attacks.
March 2003
Germany: German prosecutors charged a 33-year-old Tunisian man with trying to form a cell to attack U.S. and Jewish targets in Germany. Before being arrested, he was in the process of acquiring "chemical substances" to make bombs, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
August 2003
Germany: German police arrested an Algerian man they said was planning at
least two bomb attacks in holiday resorts in Spain's Costa del Sol.
December 2003
United Kingdom: British security officials foiled planned terror attacks by
al Qaeda followers in Britain and also probably across Europe. Britain
warned an attack is almost inevitable and security services were on high
alert for the past few weeks - arresting 23 suspects - after they said they
had information an operation was planned.
Italy: Italian security forces arrested two Somalis after surveillance
uncovered a planned attack on Italian president Silvio Berlusconi.
April 2004
Spain: Spanish authorities found a bomb planted on a high-speed rail line
south of Madrid. Investigators believed that it was an attempt at a second
attack by the cell that committed the 3/11 Madrid train attack.
United Kingdom: British and Canadian authorities arrested individuals in
both countries. Dawn raids in London and other parts of the country were
later associated with a large-scale VBIED plot that was intended to include
some form of dirty bomb. The raids were Britain’s biggest anti-terror
operation since the September 11.
June 2004
France: French anti-terror police detained a dozen people early in Paris
raids, recovering a handgun and equipment for making false identity
documents. The arrests came five days after reports that the Paris metro had been singled out for attack by militants.
October 2004
Spain: Police arrested eight men suspected of plotting to blow up Madrid
landmarks. Ten others were suspected of cooperating from jail. Spanish
authorities later asked Switzerland to extradite the suspected leader of the
cell, Mohamed Achraf, who was the leader of a group named "Martyrs for
Morocco." The cell planned to detonate a truck loaded with 1,100 lb of
explosives near Spain's High Court and Supreme Court and an attack on Real Madrid's Bernabeu soccer stadium. In a separate incident four Algerians arecharged with conspiring to make chemical weapons.
Also of interest on HughHewitt.com today is the interchange between Ron Reagan and Christopher Hitchens on MSNBC's Connected: Coast to Coast. Transcript appears at Radioblogger. Excerpt:
RR: Zarqawi is not an envoy of Saddam Hussein, either.
CH: Excuse me. When I went to interview Abu Nidal, then the most wanted terrorist in the world, in Baghdad, he was operating out of an Iraqi government office. He was an arm of the Iraqi State, while being the most wanted man in the world. The same is true of the shelter and safe house offered by the Iraqi government, to the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer, and to Mr. Yassin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. How can you know so little about this, and be occupying a chair at the time that you do?
RR: I guess because I listen to the 9/11 Commission, and read their report, and they said that Saddam Hussein was not exporting terror. I suppose that's how, Christopher.
CH: Well, then they were wrong, weren't they?
RR: No, maybe they just needed to listen to you, Christopher.
July 07, 2005
July 04, 2005
Happy 4th of July, Y'All!
Prescript: I am posting this as a comment over Kim du Toit's site. Kim is having some doubts. I will sprinkle in the hyperlinks as the day wears on. Happy 4th.
End prescript.
Sure is dark ... yup ... dawn ain't comin'.
Kim,
Let me be blunt: don't be a stupid fuck. Really. If ever we lived in revolutionary times, it is now. Before 2002 (or whenever), whoever heard of Kim du Toit? 7? 10? OK, maybe 35. How about in 2005? Well, Sitemeter says 5,291,497 (brainiacs can shut up now about multiple visits; I'm making a point).
I am going to yell now: IT IS NOT THAT WE ARE ENTERING THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE UNITED STATES AS WE KNOW IT; RATHER, IT IS THAT WE ARE ENTERING THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE NANNY/VICTIM/SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST/COLLECTIVIST STATE.
All because of the New Media.
We are regaining consciousness after 70-odd years of New Deal/Great Society/Identity Politics/Victimhood/Legacy Media crap. Having been beaten up so badly, it sucks to regain consicousness. Oh, the body (politic) hurts - badly. But get up we must. And the rehab must begin.
Without the New Media, the Ted Kennedys would have already had their day of victory in Iraq as the last American transport flew out the last American troops out of newly rerenamed Saddam International Airport.
Without the New Media, Tom Daschle would still be a Senator.
Without the New Media, we would never have heard of the Swiftvets.
Without the New Media, we would never have heard of the Arizona Minuteman project.
Without the New Media, the Arizona Minuteman project would have never existed.
Without the New Media, most Americans would still respect the UN.
Without the New Media, John Kerry would be president.
Without the New Media, the vast majority of us would never know the Tet Offensive for the decisive US victory that it really was (yes, thirty+ years later).
Without the New Media, we would never have heard about Demo voter fraud in East St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Seattle (and who knows where else).
Without the New Media, I would never have heard of James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, Bill Whittle, Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker, Paul Mirengoff, Ed Morrissey, Stephen Green, Hugh Hewitt, Roger Simon, Charles Johnson, John Lott, Michael Yon, Eric Scheie, yadda yadda yadda, and of course Kim and Connie du Toit.
And, if ever there was a newly sharpened Number 2 pencil to your heart, without the New Media, Did Today would not exist.
So Kim, in these most interesting times, a glass I see as unmistakably, exuberantly half full, go ahead and take your half empty glass and leave. You will be forgotten in short order. Really.
Allah Is In The House. Who?
Or stay. And continue to be the leader you are and were born to be.
Let me state in complete, hand over the heart, Pledge of Allegience honesty: I have never been more sanguine and optimistic about the direction our beloved country is heading. I say this with the full awareness of your above-mentioned laundry list. The reason is so simple: the good Americans are talking amongst themselves, all because of the New Media. The 2/3 to 4/5 of citizens who may disagree about a lot of little things agree on the big things, which have as their umbrella, individual liberty.
The ship of state is not sinking. It is righting itself. God Bless America.
Kenneth Greenlee
PS: I bought a S&W Model 60 on (OK, a little after) BAGDay and never told you guys (Homer voice: Mmmmmmm .... my first gun). Thanks to Kim and the forum for helping me make the decision.