Recently in Society & Events Category

On the Israel-Gaza-Lebanon front, Hisbollah is owned, lock stock and barrel, by Iran. Hamas gets a lot of funding from the crazy mullahs. If anybody thinks this entire episode of kidnapping Israelis is a coincidence instead of intended to take heat off the Iranian nuclear issue (after all, they don't have bombs yet), I have some beachfront property in Wyoming.



Q and O has an open letter to Lebanon worth reading. It applies to other nations as well.



Tigerhawk notes Saudi Arabia taking Israel's side, if not quite explicitly.



LGF publishes a letter from a Lebanese group on the israeli invasion. I'm not familiar with this group; for all I know they could be puppets of Israel.



LGF also notes that Iranian Revolutionary Guards (known to be in Southern Lebanon) may have fired a ballistic missile that hit Haifa. If this is so, the gloves may come off; It would certainly be a valid causus belli for Israel. About number two million and one.



Wizbang notes that Hezbollah may be planning the transfer the two soldiers it kidnapped to Iran. Causus belli number two million and two.



Kesher Talk has a roundup from the Arab side



Hot Air has more, including a video of detailing the Israeli accusations that Iranian guards fired the missile. I suggest you watch the video.



I do not want a confrontation with Iran, but if one must come, the worst we could do is delay it until they have nuclear weapons. If we have to nuke them in order to survive, our allies in the region (including 1.2 billion Indians) will reap fallout, and I suspect China would use the fallout to manufacture an incident. The US can flatten Iran if we have to. I don't want to, but if it must be done, a thought I am becoming resigned to, best we do it now while we have the luxury of being humane and conventional.



Of course the Evil Overlord in me is wondering if this was all carefully orchestrated by the folks in the White House as world cover for giving Israel, the US, and any allies he may have lined up a shot at Iran. Unfortunately, the situational facts of the kidnappings and Palestinian situation speak against this.



The slightly less Macchiavellian side of me answers back: Bad Evil Overlord! The shalt not feed Delusional Paranoia

Michelle Malkin has an excellent round up of links to 9/11 memories.



On the evening of September 11, 2001, I posted an essay to a listserv of a science fiction club which I was attending at the time. In it, I talked about some of the warnings we had had over the years, and the changes to our mindset necesary to prevail over those who had done this. I touched only very lightly on the need for a certain degree of unity among ourselves, thinking it should be obvious to anyone with any grasp of history what happens to a people with factions willing to do anything for political gain.



I was wrong. Judging by the evidence, the average american has never heard of Bosworth Field or Manzikert or any number of other historical situations where members of a society seeking political advantage over another member provided the wedge for outsiders to bring the society low and eventually destroy it. It is all very well and good to campaign based upon who will do a better job. It is something else again to continually hound and vilify your leaders, denigrate their decision making, require that they sat a "timetable for withdrawal" (for the terminally clueless, withdrawal means retreat) thus telling out enemies that they only have to hold out until a certain date. Last I checked, we still have bases and troops in Germany and Japan and we haven't fought either of them since 1945.



I've often speculated on how the societal inability to carry extended projects to completion is rooted in the rise of the 30 or 60 minute television program, where the situation at the end of the program has all been resolved due to some artifice of the writer and everything is exactly as it was at the beginning of the program. This is the generation that crippled President Nixon's attempts to deal with the Vietnam situation because they presumed when he said he wanted to end the war he would just wave some kind of magic wand and the troops would all be out by dinner time on Inauguration day just like on their favorite TV program.



I've linked Bill Whittle's essays over at Eject! Eject Eject! before. If you haven't, I suggest you read all of them. In his most recent, Tribes, he talks accurately upon the unwillingness of the sheep to believe that there really are wolves in the world. People are both profoundly lazy, and at the same time want to believe that they are safe, regardless of whether or not they are. It is easy to pretend you don't see clear evidence that there are people in the world who will do anything to get what they want, and who do not care if they hurt others in the process. Some of these want direct personal power (Hitler and Stalin come to mind, and Mugabe and Kim today). Others want their pre-eminence and worldly dominion for their religion (Savanarola, Torquemada, and Mohammed historically, Khameni and Bin Ladin today) and personal power may only have been a byproduct of that.



The more I look around and consider the situation, the more convinced I am that the die-hard left of today is different only in degree, not in kind, from these individuals and their followers. The immediate "don't question my/his/our patriotism!" before anybody has is only the first confirmation. Many times I have seen them throw this out when nobody has questioned their patriotism, only their judgment. There is a line out of Shakespeare, "The lady doth protest too much," which deals precisely with this sort of situation.



Well for me, that all ends today, right now. Everybody has a right to wonder at others motivations, and should have the ability to speculate as to the true causes and roots of motivation for this. When every action you undertake supports a hypothesis of "You seem motivated to sabotage the current leadership of the United States no matter the cost to your fellow citizens and our military and our long term well-being as a country", that is a mindset of treason, and whether or not the actual crime of treason has been committed, should be noted and broadcast so that our fellow citizens are aware of your predilections.



Criticize the mistakes of the administration all you want. That is your right under the Constitution. I myself criticize the administration on several fronts (immigration, spending, trade policy, etcetera). I'll criticize needless mistakes in the War on Terror as they occur, but keep in mind that this is a war, and the next war where there are no major mistakes made will be the very first in the history of all the world. In the War on Terror, this administration "gets it" in a way that I can't point to in any back to at least Truman, and before him not back to Lincoln. Trying to undercut them on this one point puts yourself on the same moral level as Ducas at Manzikert. He got power out of it, but destroyed the Byzantine Empire just as certainly as if he'd overrun it with a Mongol horde. Whether you like it or not, we are committed to this war. If we stop prosecuting it to the maximum and most effective level, we will lose troops and fight (and lose) battles that we otherwise wouldn't. If we don't fight it effectively enough, the real fundamentalist hordes will take us over, compared to which Pat Robertson and his ilk are but ill-behaved children to compared to true psychopaths. If you love our artwork, look at what the Taliban did to Afghanistan's. If you love high culture and civilization, compare modern day India to Pakistan, and consider that they were one society until the British left and placed the Hindus in charge of one and the Muslims in charge of the other. Consider what Pakistan did to what is now Bangladesh until India intervened. If you love female equality, look at how it exists in Iran today. If you love the ability to dissent from official truth, look at how it existed in Iraq under the Ba'athists, and contrast with how it exists in the same place today. If you want homosexuals to be able to participate freely and openly in society, look at anywhere in the Muslim world, and compare it to here, where various cities host quite "in your face" gay pride festivals and it is those who would sequester homosexuals who are marginalized to the shadows. If you love the ability to ignore what the priest who may not even be of your religion says, look at what happens here versus what happens in Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or even Indonesia. These vermin are saying exactly what they want to do to us, and if they don't want to actually do it, then I must say their actions belie this desire.



To ignore the evidence that the War on Terror is necessary is to go beyond an inability to see, to an unwillingness to see, or hear, or even consider. Anybody who tries to sabotage the War on Terror is not my friend, nor are they my children's friend, and they are definitely not my country's friend. Our ways, the very ways they are trying to end, require us to allow them to talk. But those same ways allow me (and others) to point out these facts as well; censorship is denied not only for me but also for thee.



And your attempts to shame or guilt or intimidate us into silence tells me that you can't meet us on the ground of open debate, either. But only sheep think that way, and those of us who support the President in the War on Terror are not sheep, not matter how much it may comfort you to think it so.

This number seems consistent with personal experience. I disagree that one agency should be responsible, however - just what we need, a new federal agency. What are they going to do, hire a whole agency full of people to watch, one, two or five in every air traffic facility just sitting there observing? That's brain damaged. That's part of what Air Traffic Control does. If ATC isn't in radio contact with that aircraft, what are they going to do about it anyway? If it hasn't been done yet, I would suggest dedicated hard lines from NORAD to every air traffic facility (including flight service stations), or at least put NORAD on every Air Traffic Control Interphone line so the involved controller can communicated directly with NORAD rather than through sometimes three lairs of intermediaries, but a whole new agency? Wasted money.



We could close down all of our general aviation in the country, but that would be a major wrong for not much gain. We can do nothing, in which case numbers like these will continue, and eventually somebody will fly a Gulfstream or KingAir full of explosives into something important before NORAD can react (Montgomery Field here in San Diego is within five miles of several major military bases, so a KingAir could get there within about 75 seconds from takeoff, a Gulfstream about 45. Even in the old days where the Air Force had fighters on constant standby, they had two minutes to get airborne. In case you're not aware, the 9/11 hijackers did some of their training here in San Diego, and if that doesn't give your backside a pucker...). Or we can maybe close a few general aviation airports that are the cause of vast majority of the problems and get serious about enforcement actions (I'm only aware of two sustained enforcement actions against all of the pilots that violated FARs at my various facilities handled during my twelve years working for them, and both of those were truly egregious and in our faces about the violations. But there's a lot of true bozos out there who won't do their homework, scraping by with their heads you-know-where by grace of a lax enforcement system. We never wanted to write anyone up - preferring education instead - and when we did it was because we were convinced they were a true danger to the flying public and there wasn't anything we further we could reasonably do that would help them. However, the general aviation lobby has made it impossible to successfully take action against someone's license for anything less than, well, 9/11).



UPDATE: It appears as if the original article has been updated since I wrote this post based on it this morning. This was an article on how clueless Congress and the Federal Bureaucracy is, but now it appears as if something constructive may come of it. It's like they read what I wrote. Either that or Congress is getting tired of being interrupted all the time. You decide.



aviation security politics

First off, Glenn Reynolds has an excellent round up at the obvious place.



Project Nothing has another round up here



Arthur Chrenkoff has a series of good posts.



Powerline debunks a myth before it gets started, and later reported on the activities of Charlotte Yoest, whose site is down.



I must admit I was a little surprised at some of the quotes. On the other hand, this was a Muslim neighborhood.



Twenty-four years ago, Margaret Thatcher rallied the british people. Sixty-five years ago Winston Churchill provided a greater precedent. If necessary, Sir Winston would have provided "A majority of one", but it wasn't. As the world discovered, it was only the rulers who suffered from a crisis of will. The vast majority of the british people had no such weakness. Ms. Thatcher would have been unable to stir them if they were not fundamentally the same people.



Looking at the situation today, I am struck by odd parallels to the situation of December 1941, only this time it is we who have been fully engaged, and they who Mr. Blair has had to drag kicking and screaming into the world of reality, as Mr. Roosevelt had to contend with our isolationists prior to Pearl Harbor. Go look up US politics through the newspaper stories of late 1939 to December 1941. There was a large, vocal, powerful minority, particularly in the upper crust, who didn't want the US to go to war. Nonetheless, the US military was performing convoy operations and sub hunting out of Iceland, among other places, there were US Volunteers in the RAF, and there were many levels of cooperation with british and allied forces everywhere. Not perhaps, the level of cooperation the british have already shown us, but significant nonetheless (Had the Axis won the war, you can bet there would have been war crimes trials).



On December 7, 1941, that changed. Having read several military memoirs of the period, among both militaries there seemed to be a feeling of inevitabilty to America's entry to the war which was only given specific impetus by Pearl Harbor. But suddenly the whole weight and conviction of the United States entered the war.



The situation is no different here. The british appeasers and opponents of the war on terror (from what I can tell, much louder there than here), have just been handed their wake up call. Many - too many - thought Mr. Blair was just buying trouble. Perhaps, as a few tried briefly here in 1941, it will be portrayed as just desserts. I don't think the british public will buy it now any more than they did during the Irish troubles. I believe that the vast majority of the britons will shift solidly towards support for the war.



The English Lion no longer bestrides the world like the colossus it once was. But it is still capable not only of roaring defiance, but biting back hard. And I firmly believe that the british are still fundamentally the same great people who stood alone and toe to toe with Hitler's Wehrmacht. They're not going to run from a little thing like a few thousand islamic terrorists who are afraid to come out and fight soldier to soldier.



UPDATE: Dean Esmay has a post urging us all to not link Daily Kos due to a particularly rancid post. Yes, I agree that they are crazy barking moonbats with no clue as to reality, political, military, economic or otherwise. I've done at least one takedown of his idiocy in my short three weeks of blogging. Furthermore, I do see hatred on the site, and definite trollish behavior.



Nonetheless, I must reluctantly refuse Dean's request. It is important to know these people, to keep track of them, and to be able to illustrate with examples off of their own keyboards lest some unwitting stranger believe they are rational. Furthermore, although there is hate, the various left wing websites are for the most part, not conscious, intentional traitors. I can point to several posts I've made here and here and especially here that indicate I am not exactly of moderate mind in the War on Terror. Nonetheless, I believe we must not cut them out of the discussion in the War on Terror. First, to do so of necessity limits our comprehension of the opposition. This is one mistake the right wing in this country attempted in the 1950s and 1960s. I decline to repeat it. Second, to use an old saying, even a stopped watch is correct twice a day. There may be issues where we can learn from him, provided we do not blind ourselves by pretending he can teach us nothing. Third, I do not believe that the site is so far gone that there is nothing which can penetrate.



So the link stays up. I'm sorry, Dean, and if you choose to de-link me I will understand, but this is more important than a place in the ecosystem.