Giving Thanks

Let us be thankful for all that is Good.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wages of Illegals

Interesting post at Bernoulli Effect that looks at just how much those so-called "indispensible" low-wage illegal workers are to the farming economy:

Defenders of archaic work methods are just defending their comfortable niche; they never look at the big picture. Would produce cost more if there were no illegals to harvest it? Maybe or maybe not--newer, more efficient methods of getting the crop in might well be used; and think of the offsetting savings to be gained by eliminating the drain on our public school and public health systems.
...
So as Mark points out, raising the wages of the harvesters by 40 percent would result in only an eight dollar a year increase in the grocery bill of an average family. And it could quite possibly be less than that if productivity improvements are made.

It always amazed me how the left would essentially support exploitation of the workers at sub-par wages. Artificially low wages are not cost-free, and, as the above apparently demonstrates, not all that advantageous even in the short run.

We need a fence!

We Need A Fence

This organization states the obvious.

We need a fence!

Excerpts from a recent USA Today article:

Even at the Homeland Security Department, which opposes building a border-long fence, Secretary Michael Chertoff this fall waived environmental laws so that construction can continue on a 14-mile section of fence near San Diego that has helped border agents stem the flow of illegal migrants and drug runners.

"You have to be able to enforce your borders," says California Rep. Duncan Hunter, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He's proposing a fence from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. "It's no longer just an immigration issue. It's now a national security issue."

Colin Hanna of weneedafence.com says "there is incredible momentum on this issue," fueled by the specter of another Sept. 11. His group aired TV ads in Washington, D.C., this fall and plans more next year.

Depp

I was going to post this Friday, but now it's at LGF, so many of you have probably already seen it, but it's just so delicious I'm still going to post it here anyway.

Remember how two years ago, Johnny Depp decided he couldn't bear to live in American anymore?

"America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive," he said.

"My daughter is four, my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy."

So, he moved to France.

How's that working out for you, Johnny?

D'oh!

DEPP: 'I CAN'T STAY IN RIOT-RAVAGED FRANCE'
JOHNNY DEPP is so shocked by the riots raging through France, he's considering abandoning his home in the country.
...
"I went there (to France) to live because it seemed so simple.

"Now it's anything but. I don't know how they'll recover from this."

Where ya gonna go, Johnny?

How about Sweden?

Few areas in Sweden are worse hit by the current troubles than Malmö, the nation's third largest city. According to some estimates, the rapidly growing Muslim immigrant population may turn Malmö into a Muslim majority city within about ten years. It will be the first major Scandinavian city to enjoy this honor, although perhaps not the last. Native Swedes are leaving the city in droves, as crime is rampant and the police publicly admit they don't control all parts of the city. There are now gangs in Malmö specialized in assaulting old people visiting the graves of relatives. Robberies have increased with 50 % in Malmö only during the fall of 2004. The city is descending into general chaos. Fights in the city's movie theatres have become a recurrent problem. Numbers released in January 2005 indicate a sharp rise in the number of rape charges in Malmö. Thomas Anderberg, responsible for statistics at the Malmö Police, says there was a doubling of the number of reported rapes by ambush in 2004, following what was already a decade of steadily increasing numbers of sexual crimes.

...

Starting from the fall of 2005, the district of Hyllie will begin education in Arabic only for groups of immigrant preschool children. The idea is that once the children learn the language of their parents, it will become easier for them to learn Swedish as well. So the Swedish state paying for educating Swedish citizens on Swedish ground in Arabic is somehow supposed to increase integration. On the other hand, perhaps being good dhimmis and teaching in Arabic can stop one of the latest fads in Sweden: Burning schools. At least 139 schools in Sweden suffered arson attacks during 2002 alone. Such as a recent incident in Malmö, where three schools were put on fire during one night.

Norway?

Two out of three charged with rape in Norway's capital are immigrants with a non-western background according to a police study. The number of rape cases is also rising steadily.
...
While 65 percent of those charged with rape are classed as coming from a non-western background, this segment makes up only 14.3 percent of Oslo's population. Norwegian women were the victims in 80 percent of the cases, with 20 percent being women of foreign background.

Gee, I wonder who those "immigrants" could be.

For The Record

I haven't blogged lately, not due to lack of news items, but due to being so outraged by them that I could not even type.

But just a quick note for the record, Rep. Murtha (D-PA) is a coward and a traitor and should be run out of town on a rail.

Cultural Confidence

den Beste points out the difficulties of the islamists in their reliance on the MSM to propagandize for them:

When publicity and mind-share are your only real weapons in a war, you eventually become caught between the Scylla of boredom and obscurity and the Charybdis of nearly universal aversion for you and your cause. This is often how terrorist campaigns begin to wind down.

We've begun to see that in Iraq. Revulsion for the terrorists among the Sunnis has led to more and more tips as to where the terrorists are hiding and more and more captures/killings of high level people. Between "clean out the snakes" operations like the current one in the upper Euphrates River region, and ongoing low level operations based on tips in places like Mosul, the terrorists have been suffering severe attrition.

It's true.

Ultimately, poll numbers don't matter, if you're dead.

But the ever-eloquent Aristides comments,

The danger is an admixture of Al'Qaeda's propaganda by deed with the feeling of Western guilt propagated by a cannabalistic media. Our narcissism is unusual in that, while we cannot pull ourselves away from the looking glass, it is a self-immolating fascination with abomination that keeps us rooted. Such self-disgust, reinforced by a media and academia that trade in it, are the only actors that can create the necessary environment for Western defeat. We may be periodically disturbed from our trance, through rioting or the occasional attack, and we may lash out in annoyance, but pulling ourselves away from self-obsession for any length of time is now almost impossible. How long before the roots take hold permanently? How long before our guilt, and the timid intertia it causes, transitions into decline?

Islamist terror is but one manifestation of rejectionist ideology--the most obvious and most visible (and therefore least problematic). The real danger comes from within. To withstand the inevitable viral assaults on our society indefinitely, we need to be bolstered by self-confidence and purpose--unfortunately, these are the virtues that are slowly being stripped away by our elite.

The cause in fact of a potential decline will be our academia, but the proximate cause will be an irresponsible and undiscerning media. Therefore, the media is a clear and present danger and must be engaged.

Emphasis mine.

As an example, we have the vile, disgusting, Jimmy Carter -- worst President ever!!!

Dr. Sanity analyzes,

Jimmy Carter is a very very dangerous human being. He is the very worse sort of pacifist; the kind that gives people who truly desire peace an extremely bad taste in their mouth. Because the foundation of his pacifism is a determined and incalculably cruel passivity and tolerance toward genuine evil in all its manifestations.

His is that deluded brand of pacifism that not only does not actually advance the cause of peace; but encourages, advocates, and even legitimizes the very leaders and thugs who are responsible for the oppression and enslavemust of millions of people all around the globe.

We must regain our cultural self-confidence.

Economic Powerhouse

Wow, there's an economic powerhouse out there!

What country's real GDP grew a whopping 52% last year, way ahead of any other country in the world?

China, perhaps?

No, China only grew about 9%; but they get all the press, don't they?

Who is this mystery engine of economic growth?

It was, of course, liberated Iraq.

And liberated Afghanistan put in a healty 7.5% growth.

And the media goes, ho hum.

Sistani's Good Decision

With puritanical islam on the move worldwide, it is not a surprise that it would be trying to gain a foothold in the re-alignment of Iraqi politics. Disturbing incidents by roving self-proclaimed morality police in places such as Basra have caused alarm, and some concern that we have simply swapped one tyrant for another.

Unless imposed from the top by a ruthless force, such as by the thug-backed regimes of the Taliban and the Iranian mullahs, however, the people generally don't want it.

And it looks like the Shiite establishment in Iraq isn't going to try to seize the reins of absolute power. This interesting tidbit from Iraqi blogger, Iraq the Model:

In an important step towards more credible and fair elections, senior cleric Ali al-Sistani announced through his office that he will refrain from receiving any of the political leaders running for office in the next elections and will reject the many requests made by many Iraqi politicians.

In my opinion, such steps constitute real support for the coming elections and a declaration on the part of the Ayatollah of his awareness of the previous mistake when politicians convinced the clergy into endorsing their lists which resulted in rendering the clergy liable for criticism from the public and affected its popularity rewarding the clergy with nothing but contempt from the people due to the poor performance of Jafari’s government.

...

Don’t think I’m saying that the religious factor has been totally excluded or neutralized for good but I’m trying to say that it’s being reduced in magnitude and influence and the its interference in politics will undoubtedly be less pronounced next time and this is what I believe in.

...

And I’d like to remind those who persist to say that Iraq is a failed case that next month we will have witnessed three democratic carnivals within only one year, on January, October and one yet to come on December and I believe this alone is a striking proof on the accomplishments of a nation that has just emerged from the horrors of 35 years of tyranny and suppression and what adds to the value of the proofs of this success is that more of the community factions have joined the march and I want to remind you also that we’re human and we do err, one elections is not enough to state whether we’re successful or not and it is dead wrong to judge a country this way; we’re moving forward and nothing can stop the progress, this something I’m damn sure of.

Many refuse to see, but great things are afoot.

The reality on the ground, both with the economy and with Iraq, will eventually be apparent to all, no matter how much the anklebiters try to deny it.

The ebb in Bush's polls has happened too early to help the Dems lie their way back into power in 2006.

It's a hell of a thing to have to finesse a major war on a timetable to outwit seditious Copperheads who are willing to tear this country down just to seize power.

But Bush just might be able to do it.

Worldwide Readers

Recently I've been having fun looking at the world-map of visitors to this site. I'm amazed to have readers from all over the globe!

Because the location is often given down to the city level, I can get a sense of how many unique readers from a given country are in a given batch of the last 100 that get reported.

Most, by far, are from the United States. Of course there are many throughout the South, the Heartland, and from Texas, but there are also readers in liberal bastions such as Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and even Madison, Wisconsin!

There seem to be at least half a dozen unique readers from Canada, from Alberta, Quebec, Ontario, B.C., and even the Northwest Territories.

There are also several from Australia (for example: Victoria, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territories -- which I never heard of!)

Rounding out the Anglosphere, visitors also arrive from the U.K. and New Zealand.

I have a surprising number of readers from Scandinavia; mostly from Sweden it seems, but also from Finland and Denmark.

There is a smattering of readers from South America, such as from Buenos Aires, Argentina and Santiago, Chile.

I also see small numbers of regular hits from Egypt, Singapore, Pakistan, and India!

Others have arrived from Israel, Japan, the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain (including the Canary Islands), Italy, France, Estonia, Austria, and Russia.

And those are just from the last 100 or so visitors -- there are others as well!

Thanks, everyone, for reading!

Demonic Turing Test

It passed the Turing Test.

It was some time ago, perhaps the early 1980s. Probably summertime. I forget the location, but it might have been Maryland or Virginia.

There was a story in the newspaper, and its implications disturbed me greatly.

There had been a murder.

Some burnout, outcast-type teenagers had been dabbling with their understanding of Satanism. Heavy Metal and all that. Bored or whatever, some of them decided to lure another young student out into the woods.

One thing led to another, and the victim ended up being bound, and they gouged out his eyes, to see what it was like.

Leaving him there, calling for his Mother, the perpetrators then started to walk off.

But then something strange happened.

A crow cawed.

And the ringleader took that as a sign from Satan that their act had been noticed with favor, and that he was to go back and kill the victim as a human sacrifice.

Which he went and did.

And reading that story, that's when I knew.

Satan, the devil, was literally real.

And was active in this world.

Because it passed the Turing Test, didn't it?

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence", it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC or IM.

Or, more archaically, the call of a carrion crow.

I realized that even if there had never been a Satan, then the actions of those teens had created him then and there, because the situation was indistinguishable from Satan's actual, literal existence, commanding his minions to work evil in the world.

Indeed, that evil act was the very manifestation of Satan himself. I didn't have the vocabulary at the time, but at the very least as a Meme, Satan lived. And acted.

The consequences are profound, when you think about it.

Little things matter.

There is indeed an overarching struggle of which we are all a part, like it or not.

The further consequences are even more startling.

For once the existence of Satan and literal demonic forces are accepted, then must there not, most likely, be also a God?

Or at least, might as well be?

Because (to invert a quip by Woody Allen), if there were only the Devil -- given that things here may be bad but could be much, much worse -- wouldn't Satan then have to be something of an Underachiever?

Still not sure?

Just look around at the deranged adherence to untenable assertions promulgated by the Left and MSM. Is not this the hallmark of Beelzebub, the Lord of Lies, stalking the world?

The Other Iraq

Don't miss the short video tv spots of thanks, direct to us from Kurdistan:

With a population of 5 million in an area larger than Switzerland or twice the size of New Jersey, it is surprising that this region remains largely undiscovered and commercially untapped.

The Government and the peoples of Kurdistan invite you to discover their peaceful region, a place that has practiced democracy for over a decade, a place where the universities, markets, cafes and fair grounds buzz with progress and prosperity and where the people are already sowing the seeds of a brighter future.

Will the MSM let us see these?

Deep Sleeper?

The Bad:

NEW YORK -- An Arabic translator for the Army may have secretly helped Iraqi insurgents by taking classified documents home from Iraq to Brooklyn, where he made a series of calls to numbers linked to the insurgency, a federal prosecutor said Monday.

The man was charged last month with falsifying his identity over many years, beginning when he entered the United States seeking political asylum sometime between 1978 and 1989. His alleged ties to the insurgency were revealed for the first time at a bail hearing Monday in federal court in Brooklyn.

On the other hand, the Aussies have finally arrested the odious Abu Bakr:

SYDNEY, Australia - Australian authorities arrested 17 terror suspects on Tuesday — including a prominent radical Muslim cleric sympathetic to Osama bin Laden — and said they had foiled a major terror attack on the country by men committed to "violent jihad."
...
Abu Bakr — an Algerian-Australian who has said he would be violating his faith if he warned his students not to join the jihad, or holy war, in Iraq — was among nine men who appeared Tuesday morning in Melbourne Magistrates Court charged with being members of a terror group.

Prosecutor Richard Maidment told the court the suspects had formed a terrorist group to kill "innocent men and women in Australia."

"The members of the Sydney group have been gathering chemicals of a kind that were used in the London Underground bombings," Maidment said. He said Abu Bakr was the leader of the group.

"Each of the members of the group are committed to the cause of violent jihad," he added, saying they underwent military-style training at a rural camp northeast of Melbourne.

Speaking of rural camps for muslim extremists, linked for years to organized crime, consider the string of compounds spread all over the United States to serve the shadowy group, Jamaat al-Fuqra:

The JF, in its early phase, sought to counter what is perceived as excessive Western influence on Islam. It also concluded that violence was a significant aspect in its quest to purify Islam. In its ideological moorings, the Fuqra regards as enemies of Islam all those who do not follow the tenets of Islam as laid out in the Koran, including those Muslims who they consider as heretics as well as non-Muslims. One of Gilani’s works published by the Quranic Open University in the US and seized in a 1991-investigation instructed his cadres that their foremost duty was to wage Jehad against the ‘oppressors of Muslims’. Members of the group are described as Islamist extremists with much hatred toward their ‘enemies’.

Fuqra members were actively conducting jihad operations across North America in the ’80s and ’90s:
...
After the Portland bombing, two Fuqra cadres allegedly killed Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah sect in Canton, Michigan. Both the suspects reportedly perished in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit. The JF is also reported to have been involved in the killing of three Indians on August 1, 1984 in a suburb of Tacoma, Washington. Besides, the JF is suspected to be involved in a series of fire bombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia and Kansas City.

Beltway sniper and muslim extremist John Muhammed is linked to Jamaat al-Fuqra. And from the Washington Times, Gates of Vienna has rounded up:

Militant American Muslims operating out of rural communes in California and other Western states have targeted this rural Virginia community for an influx of members who have ties to Middle Eastern terrorists.

Law-enforcement authorities said the Muslims — mostly converts — are expected to join with radical Muslims living on 45 acres in this small Charlotte County community, 25 acres near Meherrin in neighboring Prince Edward County and on other parcels of land owned by the group's members and supporters.

There could be one of their compounds in your area; they're all over and heavily into white collar crime to fund their activities:

The National White Collar Crime Center's report is itself worth reading. It persuasively argues that Jamaat ul-Fuqra provides the Jihadi movement with a powerful support capability in the United States not merely because of the compounds but because of its member's intimate knowledge of the way the dark underbelly of America works.

Be sure to see this link for the countrywide map of JF activity.

Sonic Weapons

The Seabourn Spirit cruise ship, owned by Carnival Cruise lines, was recently attacked by pirates in small speedboats off the coast of Somalia.

A rocket-propelled grenade that failed to explode remained lodged in the ship after the captain made it out into deeper waters.

I had wondered how Carnival had prepared for such an eventuality, for pirates are a bigger threat than one might imagine.

It turns out they apparently have some onboard security, and nifty pirate-repelling weapons:

Ship Blasted Pirates With Sonic Weapon

The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Africa this weekend, the cruise line said Monday.

The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, installed as a part of its defense systems, said Bruce Good, a spokesman for Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line. The Spirit was about 100 miles off Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to get onboard.

...

The LRAD is a so-called "non-lethal weapon" developed for the U.S. military after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen as a way to keep operators of small boats from approaching U.S. warships.

The military version is a 45-pound, dish-shaped device that can direct a high-pitched, piercing tone with a tight beam. Neither the LRAD's operators or others in the immediate area are affected.

American Technology, based in San Diego, compares its shrill tone to that of smoke detectors, only much louder. It can be as loud as about 150 decibels, while smoke alarms are about 80 to 90 decibels.

The devices have been deployed on commercial and naval vessels worldwide since summer 2003, the company said.

Well that's kind of neat!

But it would be nice to give them an old-fashioned broadside.

Dalai Lama

Wow, this news story sure flashed by quick, didn't it?

I wonder why.

So, now the deafeatist anti-war types not only have to answer to Orwell, who declared that pacifism in the face of tyranny is objectively pro-fascist; and to Hitchens, who outlined how Hussein did everything possibly required to void Iraq's soverignty and has declared this mission "a war to be proud of"; but now they also have to deal with the Dalai Lama!

Who'da thunk it?

Recognizing that some wars can be just, and that even Vietnam was morally defensible, the Lama refused to classify the Iraq war as unjust, saying time would tell at an appearance at Stanford University.

The allied victory in World War II "saved Western civilization," and conflicts fought in Korea and Vietnam were honorable from a moral standpoint, the 14th Dalai Lama said in answer to questions.

But he ruled out armed struggle for Tibet's grievances with the Chinese government.

...

Asked about the US-led invasion of Iraq, he said it would take a few years before it becomes clear whether the US military action was the right course of action.

One can only take the Lama's remarks as suggesting that America should stay the course, to make sure the promise of a free Iraq is realized.

The fact that he held out the possibility that it would be seen as the right course of action is very telling, rather than dismissing it as obviously an illegal failure and a quagmire, and is surely not at all what the likes of budding Buddhists like Richard Gere had wished to hear.

HA HA HA!

Yet More Iraqi Quagmire Photos

Oh no, run for the hills...

it's more Iraqi QUAGMIIIIIIIRE PHOTOS!!!!!

Found via Iraq the Model.

Of course, tonight, "60 Minutes" was talking about our "faltering" mission in Iraq, using 7-month-old footage of an attack on a private convoy on the Airport Road.

Most galling of all in their report was the admission that the terrorists know any attack will grab the headlines -- and I was thinking, well yeah, that's because you reporters let them! It was weird hearing that kind of unselfconscious meta-reporting by the media about its own behavior and complicity.

The Carterfiles

I had the misfortune of seeing Jimmy Carter on CNN, interviewed by Wolf Blitzer this weekend.

Oh what an awful person!

Carter said two despicable things before I stopped watching.

The first was his claim that the "Bush Administration" deliberately misled the American People, and the World, to go to war in Iraq.

Three times Wolf pressed him to explain if Carter meant Bush actually lied, or if the CIA generated poor intelligence.

And three times, Carter wouldn't give a straight answer, but each time suggested it was a deliberate lie by someone, somewhere, in the administration, who "twisted" the intelligence.

And the second thing Carter did was to lie himself, as he plugged his new book, to declare that the Bush doctrine is wrong, by mis-stating it as, to paraphrase Carter, "that if there's a leader somewhere we don't like, we can use force before that country is a threat to America."

The key word he used was "threat."

See the lie?

He's claiming Bush's pre-emption doctrine can come out of the blue, before an actual threat is detected. Implicitly that also means Carter thinks Iraq was not even a threat.

But that's a false statement of the Bush doctrine.

By Carter's incorrect formulation, that would mean we could attack, say, Bulgaria, just in case it might become a threat someday.

That's a lie.

The actual reasoning is that for counries that we know to already be a threat, we don't have to wait for an actual attack to be successfully completed to respond to the known threat.

See the difference in pre-empting something before it's a threat, versus before it's an attack?

What does Carter's faux moral high ground gain us, other than increasing the risk of chaos and destruction?

Jimmy Carter -- Worst President EVER!!!

Quote of the Week

Ok, I know just reposting other people's words is lame, but it's easy, so here goes.

A nice soundbite found in the comments at Belmont Club concerning the week of muslim riots on the outskirts of Paris:

politicized Muslims are not looking for their slice of the pie. They want the whole thing and the rest of us restricted to the kitchen to cook it.

Islam grew rapidly because it provided a rationalization and a group cohesiveness to take material goods from others. Mohammed was a brigand by trade and the first Muslims were nothing more than gang members. Like it or not, Islam was then and has always remained a Mafia with rituals.

There is no appeasment. Only a quiet period between battles.

Sums it up.

Jughead

So, the movie Jarhead is soon to debut.

It is based on a book by the same name, being a memoir by a Marine in the old Desert Storm of Bush the First.

I haven't seen it, but I've browsed the book in the stores and seen the trailer.

It promises to be "a war film like no other."

Judging by recent movies, what, do they mean it will be entertaining and patriotic?

Hardly!

The movie trailer shows the title character alternately freaking out by throwing his helmet around, or standing in frozen befuddled shock as explosions burst all around -- his mental detachment due to wartime stress the only sane response to a world gone mad.

The theme of alienation and futility is underscored by the movie's tagline,

Welcome to The Suck!

I can only laugh given the seriousness with which the film approaches this issue.

Because, we'll recall, "The Suck" of the ground campaign in Desert Storm lasted all of 100 hours.

If you can't stand The Suck for 100 hours, what business do you have being a Marine?

Butch up, pansy!

MINOR SPOILER AHEAD

I infer from comments about the movie at imdb that the action scenes are few and far between, and that the movie is an exercise in ennui. Maybe this movie timidly won't judge war as right or wrong, exactly, but it surely is presented as pointless.

Apparently.

And it is stated in the comments by advanced screeners that when the action occurs, it happens in a way "different than expected."

As I said, I haven't seen it, but I can hazard a guess that this means the only fighting this unit encounters in the movie would be a friendly-fire accident.

Mark my words.