Medary.com

While the new-age Neros in the mainstream press and the Democratic Party fiddle with the sideshow called Mark Foley, a couple of very important things happened this weekend:

1) The Iranians have arrested the son of Ayatollah Khomeni's one-time rival and superior, charging him with the usual crimes. We probably will never hear from him again, except for the confession of course.

Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeini Boroujerdi was detained with several supporters, Iran’s student news agency ISNA quoted the deputy governor of Tehran, Abdollah Rowshan, as saying.
. . .
"We believe that our nation is tired of political religion and they want to return to traditional religion," Mr Boroujerdi told Iran’s labour news agency ILNA on Saturday.

2) The North Koreans have reportedly tested a nuclear bomb.

"It's a wicked world we live in."

We now return you to your regularly scheduled political dirty tricks, half-truths, lies, and spin.

Is a revolt starting in Tehran?

Free Republic had it first, a story on the blog antimullah.com:

LATEST UPDATE - all phones in the area of the Ayatollah's house have been disconnected and his numbers, which worked till just now have a recording saying "they never existed".


Monitored from live communication with Iran and the Ayatollah Boroujerdi himself by Voice of Iran Radio (KRSI) and local citizens calling in from Tehran to KRSI.

Shots were being fired around the Ayatollah's home at Sard (cold) Park, Avesta Avenue, Sard Street #9 close to Freedom Square. Fires are springing up in the region at major intersections. Ambulance sirens scream futiley as Tehran citizens pour toward that address blocking streets to prevent Security forces from getting close but also blocking the paramedics and ambulances.

Distress calls from wounded men and women fill the air waves as what they describe as total war is erupting. KRSI, which covers all of Iran, constantly broadcasts calls for the populace to rise up, urging them to make the most of this opportunity.

Said Ghayem-Maghami, the announcer of KRSI repeatedly urges all provinces, cities, professions to revolt against the current regime. He also broadcasts live all suggestions provided by Tehran citizens to wake everyone up and let them know something is up.

Ayatollah Boroujerdi, blockaded on the roof of his home, has used the phone contact broadcast with KRSI to declare that anyone in the Security forces who respects him as their spiritual source should lay down their arms and not harm anyone.

 

My immediately previous post pretty much dispatched the Foley thing as nothing more than a political dirty trick of legendary proportions.

But wait, it gets better! Drudge has this story up:

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX THU OCT 5 2006 2:53:48 ET XXXXX

CLAIM: FILTHY FOLEY ONLINE MESSAGES WERE PAGE PRANK GONE AWRY
**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of Edmund, adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund. Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the investigation.

The prank scenario only applies to the Edmund IM sessions and does not necessarily apply to any other exchanges between the former congressman and others.

The news come on the heels that Edmund has hired former Timothy McVeigh attorney, Stephen Jones.

Developing...

If true, what else don't we know? What else about this increasingly ridiculous farce don't we have the context to understand properly?

Courtesy Patrick Godfrey at The American Thinker:

While angry values voters fulminate over Hastert’s failure to do something before the IMs came to light, all I can remember is the Democrats’ mantra.

    That the troglodyte Republicans were obsessed by sex between consenting adults.

    That homosexuals in close working relationships with young people, especially young men, is a good and healthy thing.

    That some forms of sex, aren’t sex.

    That what two consenting adults do or say behind closed doors is their business.

    That intercepting and reading electronic communications between anyone in the US, especially those between two citizens, is never to be tolerated.

    And most of all, never be judgmental.

So in the end, what do we end up with?

    A pedophile that wasn’t.

    A child that was actually an adult.

    The disclosure of personal electronic communications of a highly personal nature between two consenting adults revealed.

    A sex scandal between a couple who never had sex.

    That Democrat Congressmen can have sex with 17 year olds and get re-elected, but Republicans that talk about sex are forced to resign.

ABC news is made to look like a fool, hyping a story beyond the facts at hand.

So, apart from ridding the House of Representatives of a single disturbed man, what's the point here?

Barely reported in most of the media, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the Terror Surveillance program to monitor international phone calls to and from suspected terrorists and suspected collaborators in the U.S. can proceed while the program continues through the judicial system.  (Meditate upon that more accurate description versus the shorthand "domestic surveillance" used by the program's opponents, if you will . . . )

The unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave little explanation for the decision. In the three-paragraph ruling, judges said that they balanced the likelihood an appeal would succeed, the potential damage to both sides and the public interest.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, speaking about the Foley affair, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt radio show:

(The Democrats) think that this is their silver bullet that will stop us from getting our message out. The fact is that they don't have any other message except scandal, they haven't done anything on border security, they haven't done anything on keeping, getting the economy better. We have. We've got the best economy we've had in years, the stock market's great, jobs lost are down, we've got an extra $180 billion dollars in revenue just this year alone, ever since January, more than we expected to reduce the deficit. And we've done a lot of things in the war against terror, plus secured the border against illegal immigrants. So we've had a lot to talk about, a lot to do. We just need to get back on track.

Emphasis added.

I'll admit when this first came out I thought the worst of Hastert and the House leadership. But, I've come around to believing that the Republican House leadership did what they could based on what they knew at the time. This includes going to Foley when the latest accusations came out, and telling him to resign from the House. A cynical person would think they did this from sheer political calculation, but it was the right thing to do no matter what the motivation.

Those Democrats who continue to try to make this an issue for the November elections are, at this point, engaged in the lowest and most contemptible form of scandal politics. They had better pray that there are no Mark Foleys among their number.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average just hit a new record high today, closing at 11,727.34.

This graph from Yahoo Finance (via FreeRepublic) shows the Dow's history since 1930.

It appears to me that the Dow's chart since The Crash of 1929 can be differentiated into five distinct periods.

The first period from the 1929 crash until about 1950, is relatively flat. There's a bit of an uptick after the end of the war. This is generally considered to be a time of great technological innovation, but it wasn't, really. The same technologies which existed at the beginning of the period--the propeller-driven airplane, the automobile, mass production, radio, etc. were also dominant at the end of the period. But change was just around the corner.

The second period, indicated by the black line, is the "postwar boom" which ended around 1966. During this period we went from prop planes to jets, from radio to television, from two-lane highways to Interstates, from computation engines to mainframe computers, from V-2's to the Saturn V.

The third period, the thick blue line, is another flat period. Again, there is really little technological change from the beginning of the period to the end. Most people lived their lives in 1980 not too differently than they did in 1966, really. But that would soon change. (My own bias is to also attribute the relatively flat performance to the impact of the Great Society/Welfare/Medicare on the economy. Socialism is rarely responsible for economic growth.)

The fourth period, the green line, looks to me to coincide with the personal computer--let's call it the first-phase information economy. Personal computers really began to impact productivity in the early 1980's. Probably not entirely coincidentally, "Reaganomics" began to kick in around 1981-1982.

The fifth phase, in red, is interesting. You can easily see the "dot-com bubble" from 1995 to its peak in 2000. But if you look at 2003 to date, it looks to me that there was an underlying expansion going on. I'd call that the second-phase information economy, powered by Internet technologies and evolving generally much faster than the first-wave information economy.

I think you can make an argument that economic growth is directly related to the rate of technological advancement. This isn't a particularly radical thought. But with the Dow curve appearing to approximate a hyperbola, maybe it's time to look into the Singularity after all.

The infamous Kansas City-area interchange known for years as "The Grandview Triangle" has been officially renamed to "The Three Trails Crossing."

Officials will hold a ceremony at 1 p.m. today to unveil the new markers bound for the busy interchange where Interstates 435 and 470 and U.S. 71 converge in south Kansas City. The ceremony will take place two blocks south of Bannister Road on Marion Park Drive near the monuments for the Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails.

Crews then will install the signs along I-435, I- 470 and U.S. 71.

Any bets on how long it will take the locals to stop referring to it as "The Triangle?"

I posted this a while back:

Problem 1: Us-vs-Them-ism. Call it tribalism, nationalism, racism, whatever. Any time you divide the world into Us and Them, you're asking for trouble. Unfortunately, that's how we evolved to view the world.

Problem 2: The Expert Syndrome. Any time you find someone who's absolutely convinced you should live your life some other way than what you're doing right now, you've got conflict. Religious zealotry, health-nuts, safety nazis, the list goes on and on. "I know better than you, and you should be forced to do things my way." Both halves of that statement are also how everyone evolved to view the world. The first half (I know better than you) isn't that harmful in and of itself, it's the second half (you should be forced to do things my way) where things fall apart rapidly.

There. I've pretty much identified the basic problems with the world today. Somebody needs to go out and fix them. Actually, everybody needs to go out and fix them.

Problem #1 is rampant in the world today. See this story about a South Dakota State basketball player who's half-white, half-"native american":

Observing the struggle was (basketball player Casey McKenzie's) father, Tom, who came to Pine Ridge as a graduate student in 1970 and married Belva Hollow Horn, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. They separated in 1993, when Mackenzie was 7 years old and his siblings, Meghan and Sean, were 10 and 13.

That left Tom to raise three children as a single parent while he works as general manager at KILI-FM, a public radio station founded by the American Indian Movement.

In 1992, a group of activists camped outside the station for seven months to protest Casey's role as a non-Native American in charge.

"White people have no monopoly on racism," says Casey, who has covered Pine Ridge-area athletics for more than 20 years. "Have I felt racism because I'm a white person living in an Indian community? Of course. But I've lived in this community for 36 years, and we're making it work."

Fear of the different.  Everyone, regardless of skin color or culture, feels it.

Or, more specifically, the lack thereof.

First, Michael Barone, writing at RealClearPolitics:

Their pit bull attacks on Bush, their constant references to the Abu Ghraib abuses as if they were typical, their opposition to letting the NSA listen to conversations from al-Qaida suspects to persons in the United States and to letting interrogators of unlawful combatants use techniques that have helped us foil those plotting violence against us -- these amount to a strategy of rule or ruin. You must let us rule this country, or we won't regard it as "our" country anymore. So much for the first person plural.

Next, writing in the Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby:

I'm not saying that Republicans are at all better, and of course elections breed some policy timidity. But the infuriating thing about the Democrats is that, just a decade ago, they knew how to empathize with voters' economic insecurities without collapsing into irresponsibility; they combined attractively progressive social policies with sensible pro-market fiscal responsibility. Now many in the party have lost interest in this necessary balance. If the Democrats win a measure of power next month, it's hard to see what they will do with it.

Hat tip:  Instapundit.

We're all quite well aware (painfully, tediously aware, reminded day after day, hour after hour) of what Democrats are against.  What are you for, other than raw political power?