Head of OLCC charged with drunken driving, resigns from post
The administrator of the Ore. Liquor Control Commission resigned from her post Thursday after being arrested last weekend and charged with drunk driving, according to Portland police. Teresa Kaiser e-mailed her resignation to the board of directors.

Bin Laden Hates the UN Now, Too!

By Austin Bay : BIO 26 Apr 2006

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Last week, on a tape aired by the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera, a voice claiming to be Osama bin Laden declared war on the world.
The geographic range of the 21st century caveman's rambling verbal jihad should impress Rand McNally.
Bin Laden's latest tape promotes attacks in India, Kashmir, East Timor, East Africa and Sudan.
The Sudan rant is particularly interesting. He fingers the proposed U.N. peacekeeping force in Sudan's tragic Darfur region as an enemy -- which suggests bin Laden supports Sudan's genocide in Darfur. He encourages combat against large swaths of the human race. He condemns his Zionist-Crusader enemies (that usually means Israel and the United States, but now appears to include the United Nations). He dumps threatening bile on Hindus (India).
We know he doesn't like Buddhists -- his Taliban allies proved that when they literally defaced Afghanistan's Bamiyan buddhas with high explosives. Confucianists seem to get a pass, but after al-Qaeda defeats the West and subdues the subcontinent; no doubt Osama will crush China and the Far East.
Muslims, however, remain bin Laden's biggest enemy, perhaps not in theory and propaganda, but certainly in the flesh-and-blood world of murder and massacre. Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and its various affiliates have killed more Muslims than any other religious group, and Darfur is an example.
Since early 2003, nearly 200,000 people have died in the Sudan government's war with Darfur rebels. The Sudan government backs a variety of Islamist militias, many of them operating on horseback or in wheeled "technical vehicles" armed with light machine guns and rocket launchers. Darfur's rebels are a mixed bag of farmers, villagers and pastoralists. The rebels are also an ethnic mishmash, though most of them are black Africans. For the most part, they are Muslims, however, with a leavening of tribal animists.
Here are bin Laden's purported taped instructions vis-à-vis Darfur: "I call on mujahedeen and their supporters, especially in Sudan and the Arab peninsula, to prepare for long war again the Crusader plunderers in Western Sudan. Our goal is not defending the Khartoum government, but to defend Islam, its land and its people."
If the tape is authentic -- and that is a big if -- the call for an anti-U.N. jihad in Darfur is another self-inflicted information warfare wound by al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden is upset because the United Nations intends to take control of the Darfur peacekeeping mission. The African Union (AU) is in charge of the current peacekeeping operation, and it has failed to stop the slaughter.
That's one reason this latest tape is a major propaganda error: Most of the world's opinion leaders -- including the liberal and left-wing "internationalistas" who spend a great deal of airtime, ink and electrons excusing Arab terrorists (particularly Hamas) -- have made the Darfur horror a cause celebre (ironically excusing one band of Islamic extremists, while damning another).
Bin Laden has also made a second major political error: The peacekeeping mission is meant to protect Muslims. Once again, al-Qaeda is promoting the murder of Muslims, a point the United States has been making since Sept. 12, 2001. It's not a new insight, but it has taken four and half years to make the point. Al-Qaeda's bloody trail in Iraq is part of the proof. Al-Qaeda's car bombs and suicide bombs in Iraq were detonated in the heart of the politically dysfunctional Arab Muslim Middle East. They killed a few American "Crusaders," but most of the dead are Arab Muslims (both Shia and Sunni).
In the Darfur region, the black African Muslims savaged by the Islamist militias aren't quite "Muslim enough" for the True Believers and the Sudan government.
In the 1990s, Sudan served as a haven and a base for bin Laden and key al-Qaeda cadres. Perhaps bin Laden thinks he's paying off a political debt to Sudan's Islamists. That noted, the Sudan government has rejected bin Laden's call for a Darfur jihad.
Why? Because bin Laden's a loser -- a dangerous loser still capable of mass murder, but no longer the ideological juggernaut of global Islam.

Austin Bay is a syndicated columnist and TCS contributing writer.

Remembrance of Times Past
In 1990 the world was full of promise. How does it look today?
BY GEORGE MELLOAN Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

When I launched this column in January of 1990 I thought the new decade held great promise. The Soviet Union was tottering, America had regained its economic and political footing under Ronald Reagan, and the European Union was making steady progress in removing barriers to trade and investment. But looking back, I see that human progress doesn't roll forward steadily; it suffers fits and starts.
My optimism back then about the land east of the Oder was justified. The Soviet "evil empire," as President Reagan described it, was falling apart and would finally collapse in late 1991, freeing 14 non-Russian republics from the control of the politburo in Moscow. The empire's captive nations in Central Europe were breaking free even as I wrote my first Global View. Only a few weeks before then, the East Germans had torn down the wall that separated them from freedom.
But today, déjà vu intrudes. Russian imperialism is again on the march, under the leadership of a KGB clique in the Kremlin who never quite lost their taste for authoritarianism.
The Israel-Arab relationship is worse than in 1990, at least in political terms. Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel made a colossal mistake in 1994 of granting a lifelong terrorist, Yasser Arafat, power over Gaza and West Bank Arabs. His Oslo Treaty pledge to recognize Israel's right to exist was pure fakery, and today Palestinian terrorists are still striving to drive Israel into the sea.
Europe in 1990 was trying with mixed success to stabilize monetary exchange rates and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was about to make a costly mistake in granting newly liberated East Germans a monetary regime that would effectively price their broken-down industries out of competition with the rest of Europe. But despite the huge bills the Germans footed after putting the east on the dole, Continental Europe finally solved the exchange-rate problem in 2002 by adopting a single currency, the euro.
Europe's major achievements since 1990 have been the single currency, further progress toward a single market, and a more than doubling of European Union membership to 25 states with a combined population of 460 million and economic output roughly equivalent to the U.S. But "Old Europe" still labors with high unemployment and sluggish economic growth, in part because its elaborate welfare benefits subsidize idleness. The frictions between native peoples and immigrants have become more acute. Europe is no longer as reliable a U.S. North Atlantic partner as it was in 1990.
Asia has produced the big surprises, of course. In April of 1990 on a visit to Tokyo, I wrote about how the Japanese "miracle" had peaked out and the "great heart of Japanese capitalism has been fibrillating." The Japanese asset bubble had been pricked deliberately by the central bank to avoid a later crash, leaving overextended banks in a slump that would last 15 years.
Next door, China was stirring from its long Maoist sleep, as I learned from a visit to a modern bicycle factory launched by a Hong Kong entrepreneur in Shenzhen, a former mainland fishing village just north of Hong Kong. I never imagined that by today, this city would have skyscrapers and a huge container port that would rival Hong Kong itself.
But things change. Japan is beginning to crawl out of its slump and there are signs that the internal contradictions of authoritarian rule may finally be catching up with China. Its massive growth was financed by the foreign capital it began to welcome in the 1980s, not by home-grown capitalism. But now the Beijing regime faces social unrest as the gap between rich and poor widens and a rising middle class demands greater political freedom.
An Oxford historian once told me that empires don't just rise and fall, they often undulate between highs and lows. The same might be said of nation states, as Japan is demonstrating. But sometimes appearances are deceiving. Russia's new prosperity is wholly the result of high oil prices, not economic policies that encourage enterprise. The Kremlin cashed in on the energy boom by expropriating the assets of a Yukos, a huge Russian oil company. The state-controlled Gazprom has become the main instrument of Russian foreign policy, strong-arming neighboring states by either offering or denying them natural gas.
Many of my columns have been about the U.S., of course. I have praised the Bush administration policy of promoting political freedom throughout the world. What other country would have the power and ambition to undertake this noble task? That it has attracted the enmity of tyrants and terrorists should be no surprise. But if the American people continue to hold to the convictions handed down from the founding fathers, freedom will continue to make inroads into dark and forbidding places. It is the wave of the future.

As readers may have suspected from the above, this is my last Global View column. After 54 years of joy at being part of a great news organization, I am retiring at the end of this week. I will keep myself busy writing a book about the 36 years I have spent writing and editing a portion of the copy you have read on the Journal editorial pages.
Part of the pleasure of this column has been the exchanges I've had with readers. Let me thank again those of you who have been generous with your time in sending me your thoughts and criticisms. A tiny few readers have expressed their disagreement in barnyard terms, but, having grown up on an Indiana farm, I long ago became familiar with that kind of discourse. I can quite understand hostile reactions to the preachments of a newspaper columnist, since I occasionally have tantrums myself when I disagree with a journo who sees the world in a different light. In America, neither side, thank goodness, can use the power of the state to suppress the other.
I will leave this column in the hands of a far younger and more talented writer. It has been fun, but all good things must end. Sayonara.

Mr. Melloan is retiring as deputy editor, international, of The Wall Street Journal.

www.slate.com

Scoot over, yellowcake—a different leak scandal is flooding the blogosphere.

Mary quite contrary: On Friday, the CIA dismissed Mary McCarthy, a 61-year-old analyst who leaked information about secret CIA prisons to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who recently won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the CIA and the war on terror. McCarthy, who worked for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, has become a cause célèbre for the left and a whipping girl for the right.

Sweetness & Light, a conservative blog run by a self-described citizen-journalist, compares McCarthy's case with the Plame scandal. He notes that McCarthy's defenders include Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson, two former CIA workers who protested the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity. "You see, you can only leak to help our enemies," he mocks. Johnson himself checks in at TPM Café, where he declares that though he "could not stand working" for McCarthy, his former manager, "she is not a traitor."

Liberal bloggers believe that McCarthy's firing indicates that there is a double standard in terms of disciplining leakers. "Leaks committed by Bush allies or with the intent to promote the President's political agenda prompt nothing but silence from him, and sometimes even a defense of the leakers," writes Glen Greenwald in an extensive post on Unclaimed Territory.
On the Wayne Madsen Report, the progressive journalist posts that McCarthy was the victim of "a White House-launched political vendetta designed to ferret out pro-Democrats in the CIA." As several conservatives, including Tom Maguire of Just One Minute, have pointed out, McCarthy donated money to both the John Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party of Ohio in 2004.

But at Captain's Quarters, conservative Captain Ed isn't buying the martyr defense. "A principled dissenter would have gone through available channels, such as to the FBI, to Congress, or to the White House, to express her discontent on an issue. Failing that, she would have resigned and spoken openly about what she knew," he opines.
Read more about Mary McCarthy.

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens calls her "more than a mere partisan."

www.thesmokinggun.com

Charlie Sheen Divorce Bombshell

Wife: Drugs, hookers, threats, gambling, porn on actor's plate
APRIL 21--In a searing court attack on Charlie Sheen, actress Denise Richards has alleged that her estranged husband is unstable, irrational, addicted to gambling, patronizes prostitutes, and visits pornographic web sites featuring girls who appear underage. In a remarkable sworn declaration (a copy of which you'll find below) filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court, Richards also alleges that Sheen, 40, assaulted her and threatened her life during a December 30 incident at her Los Angeles home. Richards claims that an enraged Sheen--who was over for a visit with the couple's two children--told her she was "fucking with the wrong guy" and called her a series of vulgar names in front of the children. The actor, Richards said, then shoved her to the ground and screamed, "I hope you f--king die, bitch." As Richards, 35, tells it, Sheen was angry because she had told her divorce attorney about discovering details of Sheen's porn-surfing practices. Richards's declaration, filed in support of her request for a restraining order against Sheen, contends that Sheen "belonged" to "disturbing" sites "which promoted very young girls, who looked underage to me with pigtails, braces, and no pubic hair performing oral sex with each other." Other sites visited by Sheen, Richards alleges, involved "gay pornography also involving very young men who also did not look like adults." Richards added that she also discovered that Sheen "belonged to several sex search type sites" on which he "looked for women to have sex with." His online profile, Richards noted, included a photo of "his erect penis." The Richards evisceration also portrays Sheen as a lousy father who urged her to abort their first child. And, when she was about to give birth to their second child via a C-section, Sheen's attention was "diverted to his pager for the results of his betting."

Johnny's Friday Funny

Not so much a joke as it is a posting of envy.

Robert Spencer rips apart another deceptive article from Islamic dissembler Stephen Schwartz: Jihad Watch: Disingenuousness about apostasy law.
Islamic apologist Stephen Schwartz, who has responded with intemperate hostility in the past to my attempts to open a serious dialogue, has misrepresented Islamic apostasy law, specifically that of the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, in a new column, “Death Lists and Dissenters.”

Why does this matter? Because any number of people will read Schwartz’s column and come away with a more sanguine view of Islamic apostasy law than is justified by the facts. This is in microcosm the same kind of misapprehension that has deformed American response to the global jihad. We cannot fight an enemy that we are afraid to name, and we cannot defeat one whom we do not understand. Inaccurate statements about Sharia by Schwartz and others have led the American government to tolerate, even to sponsor, Sharia regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The disastrous consequences of this were demonstrated by the Abdul Rahman case, the implications of which no one in Washington has yet faced. In the wake of that case, the last thing we need is more inaccuracy about Sharia, especially from those who preen about their access to those in influential positions.

Read the whole thing...

"Implicit in the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis is the proposition that that United States should sacrifice Israel in order to appease radical Islam and deflect its jihad away from the United States.
Follow the bouncing ball: U.S. support for Israel is a claimed "grievance" of the Islamists. If we withdraw support for Israel, we will redress that grievance and eliminate a pretext for Islamist jihad against the United States. To "throw Israel under the bus," the United States will need some rationale for abandoning a longstanding ally. Claiming that U.S. support for Israel is based not on the merits, but rather on the domestic political power of the "vast pro-Israeli conspiracy," provides such a rationale. Ergo, delegitimize U.S. support for Israel, provoke a policy shift away from Israel and toward the Palestinians, and thereby ingratiate the United States with Islamic radicals and the "Arab street."
The folly and fallacies of this thesis are too numerous to list. At bottom, it would be a disgraceful and dishonorable act of treachery that would engender contempt, not respect or appreciation, from its intended audience. But the left and the realist camp have been searching since 9/11 for a way to address on the cheap the fundamental dynamic giving Islamism its appeal, without doing any heavy lifting or getting their hands dirty: from Richard Clarke's proposal to do a really, really good PR campaign with our "friends" in the Arab world (and who might that be?), to John Kerry's "aggressive policing" using American special ops to "go after the terrorists where they live" (now, that would reassure the Arab street!), to the realists arguing for deja vu all over again by relying on those lovable "proxies" to maintain "peace" (how'd that work out the first time through?).
The Walt-Mearsheimer thesis is merely another in this line of policy proposals that share in common the relentless search for a plausible intellectual pretext to do nothing, see nothing, know nothing--until the next smoke cloud arises from a European or American city."

all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves...

It turns out Bush was right about Iraq's quest for uranium

Apr 17, 2006
by John Leo ( bio archive contact )

In a surprising editorial, The Washington Post deviated from the conventional anti-Bush media position on two counts. It said President Bush was right to declassify parts of a National Intelligence Estimate to make clear why he thought Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. And the editorial said ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson was wrong to think he had debunked Bush on the nuclear charge because Wilson's statements after visiting Niger actually "supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium." In the orthodox narrative line, Wilson is the truth-teller and the Bush is the liar. But Wilson was not speaking truthfully when he said his wife, Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with the CIA sending him to Niger. And it obviously wasn't true, as Wilson claimed, that he had found nothing to support Bush's charge about Niger when he (Wilson) had been told that the Iraqis were poking around in that uranium-rich nation. Testifying before the Senate intelligence committee, Wilson said that the former prime minister of Niger told him he had been asked to meet with Iraqis to talk about "expanding commercial relations" between the two countries. Everybody knew what that meant; Niger has nothing much to trade other than uranium. Christopher Hitchens made the latter point last week in a muscular column subtitled "Sorry, everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger." The "Sorry, everyone" phrase indicates the strength of the reigning orthodoxy -- that Bush simply lied when he uttered the famous 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union speech: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

How do you say 'pandering' in Spanish?
By Kathleen Parker
Apr 12, 2006
WASHINGTON - Walking among thousands of friendly Latino protesters in the nation's capital Monday, I couldn't help getting caught up in the group-hugness of the occasion.
What with red tulips sprouting everywhere, temperatures hovering near a perfect 75 degrees, and spring-green sprouts coaxing creatures to do-si-do, Yo queria a todo el mundo!
"Oh golly, Mr. Noah," my inner Pollyanna exclaimed, "can't we just build a bigger ark?"
And then Rep. James P. Moran, a Virginia Democrat who apparently was channeling Che Guevara, startled me from my dream state. His voice, ragged from the strain of sustained high-volume rhetoric, thundered platitudes as a woman translated into Spanish.
"You do not become American because you're lucky enough to be born of wealthy parents," he hollered unnecessarily as his voice was amplified through several speaker towers erected along the National Mall. "You become an American by working hard and providing for your family. By that definition, you are true Americans."
"Si se puede!" roared the crowd.
Moran and others who spoke, including Sen. Ted Kennedy and a raft of religious leaders of various denominations, gave the crowd what they wanted to hear. And the people were appeased.
The unmistakable, if largely inferred, message of the day was that Americans who want a secure border and a strict immigration policy are selfish nativists. And the Latino immigrants, many of whom are here illegally, are noble souls who want only a fair break.
Moran was on a roll:
"Do they (law-and-order citizens, presumably) not understand that America didn't become great by building walls around its borders? Do they not understand that American did not become great by creating another underclass? ... You are shaping America's destiny...."
And then he launched into the someday-your-grandchildren's-grandchildren fairy tale of how the U.S. became a great nation thanks to the Latinos who demanded amnesty on April 10, 2006.
(Never mind those white guys who wrote the Constitution and created the most prosperous nation on earth.)
Despite Moran's fiery entreaties to rouse the rabble, the crowd was notably polite, while the event more closely resembled a Fourth of July picnic than a protest. I haven't seen so many American flags since Sept. 12, 2001.
And while most chanted "Si se puede" ("Yes we can") in response to trigger phrases, the spirit of the day was palpably optimistic, cooperative and at least outwardly patriotic.
Even if the protesters' allegiance to the Republic were only strategic rather than sincere, it is nonetheless difficult to think about these mostly decent, hard-working, well-intentioned people in terms of deportation or criminalization, two elements of the House bill Monday's rallies were organized to protest.
The bill (HB 4437), sponsored by Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) and passed last December, also calls for building a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
While solid arguments can be made in favor of a fence - national security being foremost - arguments against can be as easily made. As opponents keep insisting, where there's a will, there's a way around, over or under a wall.
There are, of course, ways to make a border impenetrable. Anyone who crossed into East Berlin while The Wall was in place vividly remembers how effective razor wire and rifles were. But are we really ready to start shooting neighbors at our borders? Please, consider that a rhetorical question.
Creating an immigration policy that is both humane and pragmatic is proving to be not so easy, especially as politics hinders rational discourse. Most of the rhetoric from both sides of the debate is insulting to intelligent Americans, who, though fair-minded, are realistic.
As nice and well-meaning as most illegal immigrants seem to be - and as much as most Americans want to help the less fortunate - no country can afford to allow itself to be overrun by all who want to take up residence there.
There are countless millions of poor people in the world, many living in more poverty-stricken areas than Mexico or other parts of Latin America. If we hope to help them while continuing to sustain our own nation's prosperity, we have no choice but to draw a line and enforce our policies.
Ultimately, our solution needs to be an instrument of tough love - neither Pollyannaish nor Draconian, humane but not personal. The ark, after all, is only so big, and even Noah couldn't save everybody.

Kathleen Parker is a popular syndicated columnist and director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina.

Red Scare

As anyone who's ever been in a pub fight with 15 Irish soccer players (or Package & Rock) knows, picking on redheads is a bad idea. But now, it's also a scientifically proven fact. In 2005, researchers at McGill University in Montreal discovered that the gene responsible for about 70% of all redheads is linked to higher-than-average levels of pain tolerance. Scientists found that redheads can withstand up to 25% more pain than their non-redheaded counterparts.

No study yet to explain the redhead's extremely large reproductive organs. Until that study, it is a burden we all must bear.

April 10, 2006 -- A MASSIVE spat has pitted two pint-sized performers who front rival Kiss cover bands against each other. In one corner, it's Joey Fatale, who heads up the all-dwarf cover band MiniKiss. In the other, it's Fatale's former drummer "Little" Tim Loomis and his vertically challenged Kiss ensemble, Tiny Kiss. In February, lawyers for MiniKiss sent a legal notice to Beacher's Madhouse - the Vegas variety show where Tiny Kiss regularly performs - ordering it to "cease and desist from all further attempts to present, create, market or exploit a 'MiniKiss' or MiniKiss type of act."
But Tiny Kiss continued to perform at the raucous show, staged at Peter Morton's Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. The sizable dispute almost came to a violent head recently when Fatale and a gang of little toughs showed up there.
"Beacher's Madhouse" emcee Jeff Beacher told Page Six's Fernando Gil: "[MiniKiss] sneaked past security pretending to be Tiny Kiss, but someone from my team recognized them and had them removed from the Hard Rock by bouncers. I think they wanted to physically confront [Loomis]." Loomis, who stands 4 feet tall, sounded off: "[Fatale] came out here and tried to cause trouble, so I had him 86'd from the Hard Rock. The impression I got was that he was looking for a fight. He'd been threatening me over the phone."
Loomis continued, "I met him [Fatale] at a Little People of America meeting 15 years ago. I was the new kid on the block. He'd been in [the entertainment industry] for a while, and he got in my face because he felt like I was treading on his turf. But we worked on some gigs together and he came to accept me."
Loomis said the trouble started while he was drumming for MiniKiss, and Fatale got "jealous that I was getting all the chicks. So I left to start my own band called Tiny Kiss. It's not even the same as his band, because mine is three little people and one fat chick, and he's just four little people." Fatale said: "People are always going to copy other people. I'm not going to bad-mouth anybody. This is Beacher trying to get publicity." In 2004, Loomis got into a nasty war of words with 28-inch-tall Nelson De La Rosa after replacing him as Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez's good-luck charm.

Johnny's Friday Funny

An American businessman was in Japan. He hired a local hooker and was going at it all night with her. She kept screaming "Fugifoo, Fugifoo!!!", which the guy took to be pleasurable.. The next day, he was golfing with his Japanese counterparts and he got a beautiful 340 yard shot and just 50 yards from the pin. Wanting to impress the clients, he said "Fugifoo".

The Japanese clients looked confused and said "What are you talking about, that's the right hole."

Gross!

What Drives People to Want to Be Amputees?
People With Body Integrity Identity Disorder Say They Can't Explain Strange Obsession

April 5, 2006 — - Karl is a double amputee, but not by accident, birth or disease. He is an amputee by choice.
Six years ago, Karl (who asked that his real name not be used) sat alone in a parked car with 100 pounds of dry ice and an obsession to destroy his legs.
"The first thing I did was I used a wooden flour scoop to scoop some granulated dry ice into the bucket. ... It filled the wastebasket with carbon dioxide gas, which was 79 degrees below zero," he said.
Over the next 45 minutes, Karl put his legs in the wastebasket and then kept adding dry ice until it got to the top. "I spent the next six hours well-packed in the dry ice, and then I'd add more dry ice to keep it topped off," he said. A chemistry major in college, Karl had done his research well.
"I'd done all the thermodynamic calculations, the mass of tissue, how much heat you had to subtract from that tissue to achieve freezing temperatures," he said. "And I knew that after six hours I had certainly achieved more than enough to freeze the full thickness."
After those six hours, Karl calmly drove himself to an emergency room, using the automatic hand controls he had installed in the car.
Within days, his legs began to blacken as the frozen tissue died away, and within a month surgeons had no choice but to amputate both of Karl's legs.



http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/print?id=1806125

http://www.straightblastgym.com/camps.htm

I am next to the fan on the 5th picture down! (before getting beat up by some Chinese kid)

Music for Robots

The National - Mr. November

From the opening chords we know we're dealing with a great American single. Matt Berninger and the boys from Cincinatti have created a song with almost unlimited appeal. High praise, I know, but listen to the damn thing -- it's incredible. I can listen to the chorus "I won't fuck us over/I'm Mr. November" til the cows come home -- and I have no idea what Mr. November is. I'm pretty sure he's a quarterback, but he could be a dude who posed in a Calendar for all I know. It's not important.
What is important is that Mr. November will fuck us over. He has to. There's so much desperation, so much to lose, there is no other way. He's buried in all this old pride, this leftover bravado, but it's not worth a shit. None of it matters because whatever he's attempting now is bound to fail. Even though the song is absolutely bursting with hope, I can't help but feel it's false.

The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve
A response to Messrs. Buckley, Will and Fukuyama.

BY PETER WEHNER
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 12:01 a.m.

A small group of current and former conservatives--including George Will, William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama--have become harsh critics of the Iraq war. They have declared, or clearly implied, that it is a failure and the president's effort to promote liberty in the Middle East is dead--and dead for a perfectly predictable reason: Iraq, like the Arab Middle East more broadly, lacks the democratic culture that is necessary for freedom to take root. And so for cultural reasons, this effort was flawed from the outset. Or so the argument goes.
Let me address each of these charges in turn.
The war is lost. "Our mission has failed," Mr. Buckley wrote earlier this year. "It seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly," saith the man (Mr. Fukuyama) who once declared "the end of history" and in 1998 signed a letter to congressional leaders stating, "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place."
These critics of the war are demonstrating a peculiar eagerness to declare certain matters settled. We certainly face difficulties in Iraq--but we have seen significant progress as well. In 2005, Iraq's economy continued to recover and grow. Access to clean water and sewage-treatment facilities has increased. The Sunnis are now invested in the political process, which was not previously the case. The Iraqi security forces are far stronger than they were. Our counterinsurgency strategy is more effective than in the past. Cities like Tal Afar, which insurgents once controlled, are now back in the hands of free Iraqis. Al Qaeda's grip has been broken in Mosul and disrupted in Baghdad. We now see fissures between Iraqis and foreign terrorists. And in the aftermath of the mosque bombing in Samarra, we saw the political and religious leadership in Iraq call for an end to violence instead of stoking civil war--and on the whole, the Iraqi security forces performed well. These achievements are authentic grounds for encouragement. And to ignore or dismiss all signs of progress in Iraq, to portray things in what Norman Podhoretz has called "the blackest possible light," disfigures reality.
One might hope our own democratic development--which included the Articles of Confederation and a "fiery trial" that cost more than 600,000 American lives--would remind critics that we must sometimes be patient with others. We are engaged in an enterprise of enormous importance: helping a traumatized Arab nation become stable, free and self-governing. Success isn't foreordained--and neither is failure. Justice Holmes said the mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.
The freedom agenda is dead. The president's freedom agenda is now "a casualty of the war that began three years ago," according to Mr. Will. The Bush Doctrine is in "shambles," Mr. Fukuyama insists. We cannot "impose" democracy on "a country that doesn't want it," he says.
Why is Mr. Fukuyama so sure people in Iraq and elsewhere don't long for democracy? Just last year, on three separate occasions, Iraqis braved bombs and bullets to turn out and vote in greater numbers (percentage-wise) than do American voters, who merely have to brave lines. Does Mr. Fukuyama believe Iraqis prefer subjugation to freedom? Does he think they, unlike he, relish life in a gulag, or the lash of the whip, or the midnight knock of the secret police? Who among us wants a jackboot forever stomping on his face? It is a mistake of a large order to argue that democracy is unwanted in Iraq simply because (a) violence exists three years after the country's liberation--and after more than three decades of almost unimaginable cruelty and terror; and (b) Iraq is not Switzerland.

Beyond that, the critics of the Iraq war have chosen an odd time to criticize the appeal and power of democracy. After all, we are witnessing the swiftest advance of freedom in history. According to Freedom House's director of research, Arch Puddington, "The global picture . . . suggests that 2005 was one of the most successful years for freedom since Freedom House began measuring world freedom in 1972. . . . The 'Freedom in the World 2006' ratings for the Middle East represent the region's best performance in the history of the survey."
Mr. Will says it is time to "de-emphasize talk about Iraq's becoming a democracy that ignites emulative transformation in the Middle East." Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a democracy activist from Egypt, says different. Mr. Ibrahim, who originally opposed the war to liberate Iraq, said it "has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us."
Cultural determinism. The problem with Iraq, Mr. Will said in a Manhattan Institute lecture, is that it "lacks a Washington, a Madison, a [John] Marshall--and it lacks the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people sprout." There is no "existing democratic culture" that will allow liberty to succeed, he argues. And he scoffs at the assertion by President Bush that it is "cultural condescension" to claim that some peoples, cultures or religions are destined to despotism and unsuited for self-government. The most obvious rebuttal to Mr. Will's first point is that only one nation in history had at its creation a Washington, Madison and Marshall--yet there are 122 democracies in the world right now. So clearly founders of the quality of Washington and Madison are not the necessary condition for freedom to succeed.
A mark of serious conservatism is a regard for the concreteness of human experience. If cultures are as intractable as Mr. Will asserts, and if an existing democratic culture was as indispensable as he insists, we would not have seen democracy take root in Japan after World War II, Southern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America and East Asia in the '80s, and South Africa in the '90s. It was believed by many that these nations' and regions' traditions and cultures--including by turns Confucianism, Catholicism, dictatorships, authoritarianism, apartheid, military juntas and oligarchies--made them incompatible with self-government.
This is not to say that culture is unimportant. It matters a great deal. But so do incentives and creeds and the power of ideas, which can profoundly shape culture. Culture is not mechanically deterministic--and to believe that what is will always be is a mistake of both history and philosophy.
Americans have debated matters of creed and culture before. John C. Calhoun believed slavery was a cultural given that could not be undone in the South. Lincoln knew slavery had deep roots--but he believed that could, and must, change. He set about to do just that. Lincoln believed slavery could be overcome because he believed human beings were constituted in a particular way. In the "enlightened belief" of the Founders, he said, "nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows." Lincoln believed as well that the self-evident truths in the Declaration were the Founders' "majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man."
What has plagued the Arab Middle East is not simply, or even primarily, culture; it is antidemocratic ideologies and oppressive institutions. And the way to counteract pernicious ideologies and oppressive institutions is with better ones. Liberty, and the institutions that support liberty, is a pathway to human flourishing.
Critics of the Iraq war have offered no serious strategic alternative to the president's freedom agenda, which is anchored in the belief that democracy and liberal institutions are the best antidote to the pathologies plaguing the Middle East. The region has generated deep resentments and lethal anti-Americanism. In the past, Western nations tolerated oppression for the sake of "stability." But this policy created its own unintended consequences, including attacks that hit America with deadly fury on Sept. 11. President Bush struck back, both militarily and by promoting liberty.
In Iraq, we are witnessing advancements and some heartening achievements. We are also experiencing the hardships and setbacks that accompany epic transitions. There will be others. But there is no other way to fundamentally change the Arab Middle East. Democracy and the accompanying rise of political and civic institutions are the only route to a better world--and because the work is difficult doesn't mean it can be ignored. The cycle has to be broken. The process of democratic reform has begun, and now would be precisely the wrong time to lose our nerve and turn our back on the freedom agenda. It would be a geopolitical disaster and a moral calamity--and President Bush, like President Reagan before him, will persist in his efforts to shape a more hopeful world.

Mr. Wehner is deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Nemo me impune lacessit

http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/feature1p/index.html

Forrest Mims of the Texas Academy of Science has a somewhat disturbing report on a speech one Eric Pianka, a "University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert," delivered to the academy last month. Pinaka argued that "overpopulation" was endangering the Earth, a commonplace enough notion, but one he carried to monstrous extremes:

"Without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number. . . .
His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola (Ebola Reston), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs. . . .
When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.
Then came the question and answer session, in which Professor Pianka stated that other diseases are also efficient killers.
The audience laughed when he said, "You know, the bird flu's good, too." They laughed again when he proposed, with a discernable note of glee in his voice that, "We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth." . . .
He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy. He said, "Smarter people have fewer kids." He said those who don't have a conscience about the Earth will inherit the Earth, "...because those who care make fewer babies and those that didn't care made more babies." He said we will evolve as uncaring people, and "I think IQs are falling for the same reason, too."
With this, the questioning was over. Immediately almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population."