Month: August 2005

Reuters: Rumsfeld causes troops to be bombed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi insurgents savaged a U.S. patrol overnight, killing four soldiers and wounding six after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged Iraq’s leaders to end arguments over a constitution to help undermine the revolt.

OK, let me get this straight: Rumsfeld urged Iraq to get their constitution done. Hearing this, Iraqi “insurgents” went out and attacked U.S. forces. That’s what the Reuters sentence says. The article directly implies a direct causal link between the two. We wonder how the Reuters reporter knows this.

We’re certain that that is the conclusion the reporter and his editor wanted the reader to make. It seems to me that this story is crying out for an “Elsewhere in Iraq” somewhere. I sincerely doubt that the attack and Rumsfeld’s statement are directly connected in the way the article plainly implies.

But since all of us in the newsroom know that Rumsfeld is an evil power-hungry Republican puppet of the ridiculous, illegitimate and stupid George W. Bush, it’s OK to casually smear him like this.

Hitchens on losing Iraq

Christopher Hitchens asks if anybody is considering the consequences of losing in Iraq[*1] ?

It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

Before you go out to your next anti-war rally, answer this question: What happens if we do what you want us to do? Where do the foreign terrorists in Iraq go next? What does Iran do? What does Syria do? What happens to the Wahabbist campaign to create a global Islamic Caliphate, and what happens to CodePink when Islamic Law becomes the law of the land?

Via Ann Althouse at Instapundit[*2] .

Neo-Nazis and Islamofascists

Chrenkoff[*1] analyzes the links between white supremicist skinheads and Islamic barbarians:

Consider:
1) fascism and Islamo-fascism have a long history of mutual admiration[*2] , reaching back at least to the days of the World War Two flirtation between the Nazis and the anti-British Arabs in Palestine and Iraq – continued, when after the war many wanted Nazi war criminals found sanctuary throughout the Arab world.

2) today, both share a long list of common enemies: the Jews and Israel, “decadent” liberal democracy, capitalism and globalisation. Skinhead thugs would also be attracted to Islam as a “manly” warrior-creed, unlike the “soft” and “Judaic” Christianity.
3) one of the most intriguing unanswered question of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing[*3] is the possible Middle East connection of its perpetrators.

4) recall that already in the aftermath of September 11, many American neo-Nazis actually came out in support[*4] of the terrorist attacks.

Both the far left and the far right have always hated the Western civilization. Now they’ve found somebody else who shares their loathing.

North Korea wants Korean War end

North Korea wants a peace treaty[*1] :

The Korea Times notes that, despite North Korea’s insistence on a peace treaty, it has tried to exclude South Korea from peace talks in the past on the grounds that South Korea did not sign the 1953 armistice treaty. That treaty was signed by North Korea, China, and the US-led United Nations Command.

U.S. not turning out enough engineers

This is not good:[*1]

Relative to the sizes of their populations, Asian nations such as Taiwan andSouth Korea are graduating five times as many undergraduate students in engineering as the United States. Engineering Trends did an exhaustive study and determined that the United States ranked 16th per capita in the number of doctoral graduates and 25th in engineering undergraduates per million citizens.

This isn’t merely an academic problem. It affects virtually every engineering specialty in society beyond the civil and structural designers who build roads and bridges, including chemical, petroleum, industrial and especially electrical and computer engineering.

Via Fark[*2] .

The decline of science

This is not good:[*1]

The President’s ignorance of science might have remained a private matter, but he chose to speak on the subject of evolution and “intelligent design.” This is a great pity.

Science — from the loftiest of theorizing (like that of Einstein or, oh, Darwin) through the conducting of painstakingly difficult experiments to the application of new knowledge to the improvement of human life — science, I say, is the chief engine of our society. The great bulk of business entrepreneurs so celebrated in certain circles as the movers and shakers have made their marks by exploiting the knowledge gained by scientists.

Even its opponents grant the prestige and accomplishments of science by pretending to do science themselves, whether in the form of “e-meters” that turn galvanic skin responses into signs of mystic energy flows in the body or in that of ID, which artfully turns “unknown” into “unknowable” in a flourish of bad math and illogic.

Our education system is systematically pushing kids away from the “harder” subjects like math and science and into areas like journalism and ethnic studies which require little or no intellectual effort whatsoever. So, while the Japanese are cranking out 3-ounce digital cameras, we’re using them to create crap like Current TV[*2] .

Uranium Rush!

Wired News[*1] reports on the boom of uranium mining claims in the western U.S.:

Wyoming, which has some of the biggest uranium deposits in the United States, hadn’t seen more than 100 new mining claims over the last 10 years combined. But now claim offices are jumping across the region. Utah and Colorado, two big players in the market, have gone from virtually no new claims for years, according to the BLM, to a combined 8,500 and rising in uranium-rich counties in 2005.

Colonizing Mars

According to the plans, the settlement will rely on a curious blend of old and new technology: it will be built with the aid of robots and run on nuclear energy, but will utilize materials and building techniques reminiscent of earlier centuries on earth.

Mars might just be far enough away from the Kansas City Royals[*1] .