Links and Minifeatures 09 01 Friday

Carnival of the Vanities

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Businessweek: Nightmare Mortgages. Over a year after my first article on the subject, they say most of what I did.



This stuff is all math and public record. What took you clowns so long? So much for investigative journalism. Have to wait for financial bodies to hit the street so that there's human interest? How many people that you could have informed of the perils of this loan in time now have one?



And people wonder why I have contempt for journalists.



By the way, I saw no fewer than a dozen advertisments for these today while surfing blogs. Might be a good idea to look at your approved advertisers. Just sayin'.



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Mixed emotions department (with an oh-oh factor added in): I noticed a website I'd never seen before among my referrers, and went and clicked on it. Unfortunately, it was a pr0n site and I was at my office. Luckily, nobody else was around. I suppose pr0nographers are interested in real estate also, just like the rest of the world. Still, it would be nice if they'd all migrate to that .xxx top level domain they keep talking about.



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Iraq the Model on the situation in Iraq. His description doesn't sound so much like a civil war to me as that people are trying to create the conditions for a civil war, and largely succeeding. Maybe more troops are needed, maybe a more activist role by the Iraqi army. I do not know. I do know that unless someone has the political cojones to crush the ones preaching hate and separatism, it will become one.



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neo-neocon on Carter and the rise of the Mullahs. Money quote: "President Carter inherited an impossible situation -- and he and his advisers made the worst of it."



Five Minutes to Midnight

What these commentators are picking up is not an exact parallel to any one event of the 1930s hence their scattershot of historical analogies. Instead, what they are picking up is a sense of the overall direction of world events: we are clearly headed toward a much larger, bloodier conflict in the Middle East, but no one in the West wants to acknowledge it, prepare for it, or begin to fight it.

and

It is, indeed, "five minutes to midnight" not just for Israel, but for the West. The time is very short now before we will have to confront Iran. The only question is how long we let events spin out of our control, and how badly we let the enemy hit us before we begin fighting back.



We can't avoid this war, because Iran won't let us avoid it. That is the real analogy to the 1930s. Hitler came to power espousing the goal of German world domination, openly promising to conquer neighboring nations through military force and to persecute and murder Europe's Jews. He predicted that the free nations of the world would be too weak too morally weak to stand up to him, and European and American leaders spent the 1930s reinforcing that impression. So Hitler kept advancing the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the Spanish bombing campaign in 1937, the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the invasion of Poland in 1939 until the West finally, belated decided there was no alternative but war.

and

It is widely acknowledged that World War II was made far more horrible by the years in which free nations appeased Hitler, allowing him to strengthen his armies before he took over Europe. That analogy lends itself to one conclusion: the sooner we attack Iran, the better.



World War I, by contrast, is largely regarded as the result of a giant, tragic mistake, a failure of diplomacy in which the great powers of Europe, seeking a network of alliances that would guarantee a "balance of power," instead trapped themselves into a senseless war.

Please, read the whole thing. The conclusion is painful, but ignoring such conclusions is, historically speaking, the best way to guarantee the escalation of that pain.



HT Cox and Forkum





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via Indepundit,

I really hope it turns out the man assaulted in this report was making it up. All of the other alternatives are worse. I'd rather have the political damage it would do to the military by association than any of the other possibilities. If there is a benign controlling intelligence to this universe, please let him have made it up?



Because if he didn't, these people are trying to drive a wedge between the military and the civilian population. I'd rather deal with another 9/11 than the possibility of that happening. I'd rather deal with a nuked city than have that happen. If you don't understand why, you need to read more history.



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Melanie Phillips on the media war against Israel. Read it and weep.



On much the same subject, I find myself in agreement with Dean's World



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Looks like Argghhh! agrees with me on profiling as basically useless, and the remedy.



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Some actual thinking on What If The Left Killed Bush?



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Please don't be too surprised if activity for the next week or is much less. I feel a case of burn-out coming on.