Oh, yeah. Because the morons at Microsoft decided to imbed the damned thing into the Windows operating system so that you pretty much can't get rid of it even if you want to.

'Critical' IE bug threatens PC users

A dangerous new exploit in Internet Explorer could put PCs and data at risk, Microsoft has admitted.

The flaw, for which code has already been published on the internet, could be exploited to set an email-borne virus free on the unsuspecting public.

Potential viruses could come as an attachment that conceals the code, or could possibly redirect users to a site that will unleash the code on the user's machine, leaving the computer open to remote attack. Once the PC is being controlled by a malicious user, it can then be used to launch attacks on other PCs.

It is barbarism.

From Yahoo News: Iraqi Police Find 30 Bodies, Most Beheaded

Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg with a variation upon a theme:

Growl

by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg

For Karl Rove Solomon

I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, unelectable, and not looking too sharp naked,

bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at *censored*tail hour looking for a Prozac refill,

aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of moonbats,

who warred on poverty and Halliburton's Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like "Let's all worship zero!",

who bared their withered breasts and, he or she, bleated their vaginas' mawkish monologues to John Kennedy's ghost under the capitol dome and french-kissed Mohammedan agents in the gore-drenched redrum rooms of Guantanamo,

who passed gas and on into universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating President Al Gore and Vice-President Noam Chomsky envisioning world peace among the masters of war and stayed on and stayed on and stayed on sucking off the great teat of academe in upaid student loans and over-paid professorial positions the better to molest the minds of children for decades with every third year off for bad behavior,

who were embraced by the academies and hired by the New York Times for crazy & publishing obscene odes or anything else that trashed George W. Bush without regard for truth since there were no consequences for these posturing poseurs of puke,

who cowered in their marble-countered plasma screened media rooms in underwear which was no longer Victoria's Secret, burning their money by donating it in carloads to every half-assed Democratic PAC that promised impeachment in a nano-second without the losing proposition of actually holding an election and listening to Rush Limbaugh through the wall,

who got bombed at public wine-tastings by chugging the slops bin and referencing Sideways, returning to their summer house in the Hamptons where they ate smoked salmon, smoked $200 marijuana, wore $250 denims, and *censored*ed about how the economy was a mess but did not really, as they claimed, send their $36,000 tax cut back to the government, and continued to suffer the secret shame of Affluenza,

who breathed fire and bile about "that crooked administration" among their friends and shut up around people with real jobs and drank turpentine to get through "A Night with Gloria Steinem", claimed bogus ego-death, and Ab-busted their torsos night after night,

There is much more where this came from. Click the link above to view the *uncensored* masterpiece.

As previously noted here on Medary.com, J.R. Dunn has written a three-part strategy paper entitled Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives, at The American Thinker.

Here is Part One.

Here is Part Two.

Here is Part Three.

And here are the closing two paragraphs:

We are not as they are, and we never shall be. We are the people who go out to see what’s the matter when we hear sobbing in the darkness. This leads to much in the way of pain and trouble, but also to a share of glory that is ours alone because no one else, no empire or nation down the long ages, has ever quite done things the way we do them.

A last thought to keep in mind is that the Plan was for the U.S. by this time to be cowering in helpless terror while a resurgent caliphate consolidated its gains and prepared to expand. Nothing like this has occurred. Therefore, we’re ahead. The challenge is to keep it that way.

It is well worth taking an hour or so to read the entire series.

J. R. Dunn, military expert, in The American Thinker:

The Jihadis have lost Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s true that fighting continues in both countries, but at this point it’s effectively theater. It can’t be repeated often enough that the type of war we are involved in is as much political as it is military. By any political measure, the Jihadis have been routed. Their only chance of prevailing was to appeal to the Iraqis and Afghans as a viable alternative to elected democratic governments. No such attempt was ever made. Instead, the Jihadis have relentlessly made the Iraqis and Afghans suffer. Their final chance in Iraq lay in derailing the political process last year. They failed at this, and now it is over. Not the violence – there will be car bombs going off in Iraq for years to come, unfortunately. But any opportunity of a Jihadi victory is gone.

(Skepticism on this point is understandable, considering the circumstances. Doubters are encouraged to read any of the myriad milblogs written bysoldiers on the spot, or the recent reportage from Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson and Ralph Peters. It’s a sad comment on the nature of the times that anyone relying solely on the legacy media knows next to nothing of what’s going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in truth most other areas of the world.)

This is an excerpt from part 1 of a 3-part posting by Dunn, going a long way towards answering the question that nobody seems to be focused on: What now? Where do we go from here?

Are you SURE you're on the right side of this war?

Some on the Left think Bush (aka Chimpy McBushitler) is the enemy.

Others, including British Liberal Prime Minister Tony Blair think otherwise:

This terrorism will not be defeated until its ideas, the poison that warps the minds of its adherents, are confronted, head-on, in their essence, at their core. By this I don't mean telling them terrorism is wrong. I mean telling them their attitude to America is absurd; their concept of governance pre-feudal; their positions on women and other faiths, reactionary and regressive; and then since only by Muslims can this be done: standing up for and supporting those within Islam who will tell them all of this but more, namely that the extremist view of Islam is not just theologically backward but completely contrary to the spirit and teaching of the Koran.

But in order to do this, we must reject the thought that somehow we are the authors of our own distress; that if only we altered this decision or that, the extremism would fade away. The only way to win is: to recognise this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas, in which it operates, as linked; and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists.

The roots of global terrorism and extremism are indeed deep. They reach right down through decades of alienation, victimhood and political oppression in the Arab and Muslim world. Yet this is not and never has been inevitable. The most remarkable thing about reading the Koran - in so far as it can be truly translated from the original Arabic - is to understand how progressive it is. I speak with great diffidence and humility as a member of another faith. I am not qualified to make any judgements. But as an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, rather as reformers attempted with the Christian Church centuries later. It is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and way ahead of its time in attitudes to marriage, women and governance.

Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands was breathtaking. Over centuries it founded an Empire, leading the world in discovery, art and culture. The standard bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian.

This is not the place to digress into a history of what subsequently happened. But by the early 20th century, after renaissance, reformation and enlightenment had swept over the Western world, the Muslim and Arab world was uncertain, insecure and on the defensive. Some countries like Turkey went for a muscular move to secularism. Others found themselves caught between colonisation, nascent nationalism, political oppression and religious radicalism. Muslims began to see the sorry state of Muslim countries as symptomatic of the sorry state of Islam. Political radicals became religious radicals and vice versa. Those in power tried to accommodate the resurgent Islamic radicalism by incorporating some of its leaders and some of its ideology. The result was nearly always disastrous. The religious radicalism was made respectable; the political radicalism suppressed and so in the minds of many, the cause of the two came together to symbolise the need for change. So many came to believe that the way of restoring the confidence and stability of Islam was the combination of religious extremism and populist politics.

The true enemies became "the West" and those Islamic leaders who co-operated with them.

The extremism may have started through religious doctrine and thought. But soon, in offshoots of the Muslim brotherhood, supported by Wahabi extremists and taught in some of the Madrassas of the Middle East and Asia, an ideology was born and exported around the world.

The worst terrorist act was 9/11 in New York and Washington DC in 2001, where three thousand people were murdered. But the reality is that many more had already died not just in acts of terrorism against Western interests, but in political insurrection and turmoil round the world. Over 100,000 died in Algeria. In Chechnya and Kashmir political causes that could have been resolved became brutally incapable of resolution under the pressure of terrorism. Today, in well over 30 or 40 countries terrorists are plotting action loosely linked with this ideology. Its roots are not superficial, therefore, they are deep, embedded now in the culture of many nations and capable of an eruption at any time.

The different aspects of this terrorism are linked. The struggle against terrorism in Madrid or London or Paris is the same as the struggle against the terrorist acts of Hezbollah in Lebanon or the PIJ in Palestine or rejectionist groups in Iraq. The murder of the innocent in Beslan is part of the same ideology that takes innocent lives in Saudi Arabia, the Yemen or Libya. And when Iran gives support to such terrorism, it becomes part of the same battle with the same ideology at its heart.

True the conventional view is that, for example, Iran is hostile to Al Qaida and therefore would never support its activities. But as we know from our own history of conflict, under the pressure of battle, alliances shift and change. Fundamentally, for this ideology, we are the enemy.

Which brings me to the fundamental point. "We" is not the West. "We" are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. "We" are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts.

This is where Blair, Bush, and much of the domestic political right have made their stand. To the extent that the Left (and their megaphones in the Old Media, the entertainment industry, and academia) oppose this view in their blood-lust to bring down Bush, then yes, they are the enemies, not of the Republicans, but of liberal democratic civilization itself. "You are either with us or you are against us."

I would be less concerned if more on the Left took Blair's position, rather than the shallow Iraq = Vietnam and therefore Bush = Nixon position that so many of Bush's political opponents seem to take.

But if Blair is correct, and our very way of life, liberal western democratic society, is at stake, what should a reasonable person conclude of those who oppose the foreign policies of those political leaders who are most up front about defending that very same western liberalism? You don't have to like Bush any more than Republicans in the 1940's liked Roosevelt. But with Iran:

1) the recognized world leader in exporting and promoting terrorism and
2) on the brink of obtaining nuclear weapons,

is it too much to ask that people step back and consider, very carefully, the results of their actions? Will you be able to sleep at night if historians of the future decide that your political opposition to Bush results in inaction against Iran that causes San Diego (or more likely, Tel Aviv) to cease to exist?

Are you sure you're on the right side? (No pun intended.)

Via Harry's Place and Winds of Change.

From Yahoo News:

FORT MEADE, Md. - A jury found an Army dog handler guilty Tuesday of abusing detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison by terrifying them with a military dog, allegedly for his own amusement.

Sgt. Michael J. Smith, 24, was found guilty of six of 13 counts.

The "war on terror" is a war.

The random acts of violence in Iraq is also a "war."

So, does that mean that gang violence in the U.S. also constitutes a civil war?

Update: Trent Telenko at Winds of Change wonders, too . . .

It is a wonder that the Blogosphere hasn’t picked up on the latest media “Frame” on the war in Iraq – that Iraq is in purportedly in the middle of a civil war - and taken it apart like the propaganda it is. What is going on in Iraq today is a losing terrorist campaign hyped by media spin as a civil war because the public no longer believes their prior “frame” that we were losing to the terrorists . This is easily proven with a simple comparison with Bosnia Herzegovina’s real civil war in the early-to-mid 1990s. Today there are 26 million Iraqis, according to the CIA’s Fact Book. There are four million Bosnians of whom about half (two million) are Muslim.

Bosnia Herzegovina’s Muslim population lost 200,000 dead in four years from 1992-1995’s civil war with the Serbs. That averages about 50,000 dead a year of two million Muslims, about one killed per forty people per year.

If the civil strife in post-liberation Iraq matched that of real civil war in Bosnia ten years ago, there would be 650,000 Iraqi fatalities per year – say 1800 dead Iraqis a day from “sectarian strife” to match the average death rate of Bosnia Herzegovina’s civil war.

That is not happening and neither is Iraq’s “Civil War.” It isn’t even close. There have reputedly been only about 37,000 Iraqi civilian fatalities (not including terrorists - the MSM likes to count terrorist casualties – including foreign aka non-Iraqi terrorists - as Iraqi “civilian” casualties) from violence in the three years of American occupation. That would be less than a month’s losses if Iraq were suffering from a real civil war like the one in Bosnia.

The MSM is flat out lying about a civil war in Iraq just as they have lied about everything else in Iraq. They invent new lies when their old ones are disbelieved. Yet they wonder why their audience and circulation drop.

Oh, this is so wrong, in so many ways. And yet, so funny, in a sick and heartless sort of way. 

("Let's go Clubbing" gratuituously stolen from one of the first comments in the linked article. Heh, heh, heh. Where's muh club?)

Via Instapundit.

Yes, I know Senator Debbie was trying to call President Bush incompetent, but really . . . the dress color matches the sign, does it not?