Plastination
News.com: Plastination Exhibit
I saw the movie Dodgeball again last night. When dodgeball legend Patches O'Houlihan taught his young charges the five D's of dodgeball ("Dodge, duck, dip, dive and... dodge"), it reminded me of nothing less than the Gonzales hearing. How? When the question arose of whether the use of torture would ever be justified, the Left dodged, ducked, dipped, dived... and dodged again.
| SPECTER: And now with three individuals who are more, perhaps, academicians or at least in part academicians, we could explore a subject which we have not taken up, a delicate subject, and that is the issue of the so-called ticking bomb case on torture. There are some prominent authorities -- and I do not subscribe to this view but only set it forth for purposes of discussion -- that if it was known, probable cause, that an individual had a ticking bomb and was about to blow up hundreds of thousands of people in a major American city, that consideration might be given to torture.
...Dean Koh, start with you. Are considerations for those tactics ever justifiable, even in the face of a ticking-bomb threat? KOH: Well, senator, you're a former prosecutor, and I think that my approach would be to keep the flat ban, and if someone -- the president of time of the United States -- had to make a decision like that, someone would have to decide whether to prosecute him or not. But I don't think that the answer is to create an exception in the law, because an exception becomes a loophole, and a loophole starts to water down the prohibition. I think what we saw at Abu Ghraib is the reality of torture. |
| SPECTER: Dean Hutson, what do you think? Ever an occasion to even consider that?
HUTSON: I agree with, uh, with Dean Koh that it is always illegal. Now, you may decide that you are going to take the illegal action, ummm, because you have to. |
| JOHNSON: On the specifics of the -- of the ticking time bomb, I think that it's very overblown in our imaginations, and -- and it's very ripe with what I would...could only call fantasy and mythology. |
Natan Sharansky was born in the Ukraine and became a mathematician. His early involvement with the human rights movement led to his emergence as a spokesman and dissident for freedom. In 1973, he applied for an exit visa to Israel, and was refused. He was subsequently convicted of treason and spying on behalf of the U.S., and spent 16 months on Moscow's infamous Lefortovo prison.
I heard Sharansky give a talk about his [latest] book at the American Enterprise Institute, and I was very moved... Sharansky made three points.
Having experienced life under the cruelly repressive Soviet regime, including spending 9 years in the gulag, Sharansky spoke passionately and powerfully from personal experience. He had a wonderful turn of phrase too--"free societies and fear societies" and "weapons of mass construction" stick in my mind. It was a fantastic speech, and I'm looking forward to reading the book. The Bush Doctrine sounds very much like this Sharansky Doctrine, and while I don't know if Bush was aware of Sharansky's case for democracy (which he has been making for years) when he formulated his post-9/11 foreign policy, he certainly is now--both Bush and Condi Rice met with Sharansky in the White House last month to discuss his book. Sharansky told Bush:
What a breathtaking compliment. It makes me proud to have Bush as my president. |
Hugh Hewitt reports the following welcome news, which simply could not happen fast enough. Here's a suggestion for a replacement show: simply find two talented representatives from the left and the right and let them go at it, perhaps with a centrist also represented. Oh, wait, Britt Hume already hosts that show on Fox every night at 6PM. Okay, just forget it.
| CNN has announced plans to snuff Crossfire. The Wall Street Journal reports that Crossfire "averages 447,000 viewers each weekday, down 21% from the previous season." I hadn't realized the show had fallen so far. That's the sort of number you get from patients in hospitals who can't change reach the remote and airport lounge prisoners. It wasn't the format that killed the show, it was Begala, who is unwatchable except by the Michael Moore left. |
This ain't good. Hat tip: LGF.
| A burgeoning East Boston-based street gang made up of alleged rapists and machete-wielding robbers has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, prompting Boston police to ``turn up the heat'' on its members, the Herald has learned.
MS-13, which stands for La Mara Salvatrucha, is an extremely violent organization with roots in El Salvador, and boasts more than 100 ``hardcore members'' in East Boston who are suspected of brutal machete attacks, rapes and home invasions. There are hundreds more MS-13 gangsters in towns along the North Shore... In recent months, intelligence officials in Washington have warned national law enforcement agencies that al-Qaeda terrorists have been spotted with members of MS-13 in El Salvador, prompting concerns the gang may be smuggling Islamic fundamentalist terrorists into the country. Law enforcement officials have long believed that MS-13 controls alien smuggling routes along Mexico. The warning is being taken seriously in East Boston, where Raed Hijazi, an al-Qaeda operative charged with training the suicide bombers in the attack on the USS Cole, lived and worked, prosecutors have charged. Also, the commercial jets that hurtled into the World Trade Center towers in New York City were hijacked from Logan International Airport... MS-13 members congregate near the Maverick Square train station sporting white and blue bandannas, their skin inked with spider webs and ``laugh now, cry later'' clown faces. ``MS-13 is the most dangerous gang in the area,'' Fiandaca said. ``They are big. They are mobile. Now they have a terrorist connection.'' The theory that Salvadoran criminals manage to smuggle people over the border was bolstered this month when two Boston men described as MS-13 leaders were spotted on the North Shore days before Christmas - a year after they were deported by Boston Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators for gang-related crimes... |
Tom Delay's choice of words is... inappropriate at best. Let it never be said that I condone unacceptable behavior, from the Right or the Left.
Take a gander at the pictures from last year's Harbin Ice festival, courtesy of R. Todd King.
The ATF is searching for a man of apparent Middle Eastern descent -- and false construction documents -- who attempted to purchase large amounts of ammonium nitrate. You may remember that substance from the catastrophic Oklahoma City bombing; it's what Timothy McVeigh used to destroy the Federal Building (hat tip: LGF):
| “We’re still running down leads. But we thought it would be prudent putting out an advisory to the fertilizer industry,” said Tom Mangin, an ATF agent in Phoenix, where the investigation is centered.
The suspect also made several Internet email inquiries to vendors seeking to buy between 500 to 1,000 metric tons of the explosive — a quantity larger than McVeigh used to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building in April 1995 but smaller than amounts companies typically might buy in bulk for construction, explosives or farm work. The International Society of Explosives Engineers, based in Cleveland, sent an e-mail Wednesday alerting its members and asking them to call ATF in Phoenix to report any suspicious activity. “ATF has recently been made aware of a suspicious attempt by an individual to purchase mass quantities of ammonium nitrate, specifically between 500 to 1,000 metric tons,” the alert said. “This individual, who uses a Middle Eastern name, purports to be a representative of a construction corporation. However, indications are that this is most likely false. ”The individual has previously made contact with other industry members via e-mail seeking the large amounts of ‘fertilizer grade’ ammonium nitrate," the alert said... |
The Power Line crew points us to a startlingly well-written speech given by Melanie Phillips. It's an important statement and one certain to resonate for months, if not years, to come.
| A friend went into Blackwells university bookshop in Oxford and asked the counter clerk: 'Do you have a copy of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel?' 'There is no case for Israel', the counter clerk replied...
Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices. This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them... The outcome is a society which no longer understands how to distinguish truth from lies, no longer understands or accepts the desirability of objectivity and no longer is capable of rational debate based on facts and logic. Instead, all evidence is filtered through prism of prior political prejudice and emotion to which it is wrenched to fit. It replaces evidence by propaganda, rationality by gullibility. And it is perhaps the single greatest incitement to terror. Terrorism is designed to achieve maximum publicity and to manipulate public revulsion so that pressure is put on the leaders of the democracies to surrender. It cannot be said too often that what drives al Qaeda is not the exercise of disproportionate force by the west but the perception of its weakness and incapacity or unwillingness to fight in its own defence. But even al Qaeda must surely have been taken aback by the craven willingness of the British media to fall into line by abusing and persecuting their own leaders at a time of war. These terrorists know that the more barbaric their acts, the more hysteria and pressure the British media will direct at Blair and Bush. So al Qaeda has every incentive to ratchet up the atrocities. That’s why the hostage Kenneth Bigley was videoed sobbing for his life in a cage; and the media duly do what the terrorists want and put it on their front pages and news bulletins, and the pressure on Blair to split from America becomes more and more intolerable. The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq, Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely. It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west’s response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. In the war that has been declared upon the free world, the western media’s abuse of power is perhaps the most lethal weapon of all. |
Interesting discussion from SecurityFocus on some implementation details in ASP.NET (Microsoft's strategic web application serving platform) that have dramatic ramifications for its overall security posture.
| The specific flaw Beaumont found was deceptively simple: by using a backslash instead of a forward slash you could access secure ASP.NET resources that normally required authentication.
So, if accessing www.example.net/secure/private.aspx is supposed to require authentication, anyone who wants to could still access the file by entering the URL as www.example.net/secure\private.aspx (or using %5C instead of the backslash in IE). Even if you set NTFS permissions to block anonymous users from accessing the file, ASP.NET still allowed access. As simple as it was to exploit, the existence of the bug told us a lot about ASP.NET's basic security posture -- none of it good.: * ASP.NET was not always using NTFS permissions to enforce file access. * You can fool ASP.NET by disguising the file path. * ASP.NET did not properly filter URL requests. * ASP.NET authentication fails open rather than failing closed. ...The ASP.NET authorization code determines if the resource requires authentication or not by checking the configuration file of the current application, and looking for rules that match the requested URL. If the URL does not match any of those rules, it checks the configuration of the parent application for a match. If it still finds no match, it continues up to each parent application until it reaches the machine configuration. By default, the machine configuration allows anyone to access anything without authentication. This means that if you can disguise a URL so that it doesn't match any rule, you will eventually end up at the default rule that says there is no need to authenticate you to access this file. In other words, if ASP.NET thinks everyone is authorized to access the file, it won't bother running its authentication code to see if a particular user is authorized to have access. ASP.NET opens the file with the security context of the ASP.NET machine account (ASPNET), unless you specifically configure the application to use impersonation. Therefore it completely bypasses any NTFS permissions you might have set on the file... |
I know who I would pick to win a fight between a young Mailer, pictured at left, and a young Rumsfeld, below.
The The Anagram Server is awesome (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt, whose anagram is the heading of this post).
| Days after former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy expressed fears that Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia might have acquired some kind of nuclear capability via an illicit weapons trafficking network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the chief architect of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Israeli military sources have told The Jerusalem Post that, thanks to Khan, one of those three Arab states now has the potential to achieve a "significant nuclear leap."
The sources said that Israel is aware of Khan's contacts with all three countries, but that he had provided to one of them expertise and material to manufacture nuclear bombs. They would not specify which country. The sources also spoke of an assessment in the IDF that Arab terrorist organizations are stepping up their efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. They noted that there is now evidence of increased debate as to whether Islamic law could allow for the deaths of Muslims as part of the price when tens of millions of heathens are killed – a debate whose very nature, the sources said, implies that thought is being given to the notion of using weapons of mass destruction... |
This article by Naseer Flayih Hasan has gravitas. Heft. Power. Emotion. Read the whole thing. Hat tip: Power Line.
| Before the last war, we Iraqis spent decades cut off from the outside world. Not only did the Baathist regime prevent us from traveling during the Iran-Iraq conflict and the period of the sanctions, but they punished anyone possessing satellite television. And of course, internet access was strictly limited. Because of our isolation, most of us had little idea or sense about life beyond our borders.
We did believe, however, that democracy and human rights were important factors in Western civilization. So it came as a shock to us when millions of people began demonstrating across the world against America’s build-up to the invasion of our country. We supposed the protests were by people who had no idea about the terrible atrocities that the regime had inflicted upon us for decades. We assumed that once they learned what had happened in Iraq, they would change their minds, or modify their opposition to the war... ...We came to understand how these "humanitarians" experienced a sort of pleasure when terrorists or former remnants of the regime created destruction in Iraq—just so they could feel that they were right, and the Americans wrong! Worse, we realized it was hopeless to make them grasp our feelings. We believed—and still believe--that America’s removal of the regime opened a new way for democracy. At the same time, we have no illusions that the U.S. came to Iraq on a white horse to save our people. We understand this war is all about national interests, and that America’s interests are mainly about defeating terrorism... ...I have become disillusioned, at least with the Leftists I met in Iraq. So noble in their rhetoric, they looked to the stars, yet ignored what was happening around them, caring only about what was inside their minds. So glorious in their ideals, their thoughts were inflexible and their deeds unnecessary, even harmful. In the end, they proved to me how dogma and fanaticism had transform peace activists into—lifeless peace "statues." |
Power Line:
We've said before that, with few exceptions, those who want to postpone the elections in Iraq are those who would prefer that they never take place at all. Haider Ajina adds further support for that view with this translation of poll results that appeared in the Iraqi Arabic newspaper Alsabaah this morning. The poll was of 4,974 Iraqis living in and around Baghdad:
My guess is that the turnout in Iraq at the end of the month will exceed what we normally get in a Presidential election here in the U.S. If the terrorists aren't deterring the Iraqis, why should they deter us? |
The Israeli strategy and intelligence site Debka had an interesting, second-hand interview with Saddam Hussein based upon conversations with one of his attorneys. Topics covered included the ex-dictator's health; complaints about his American guards and the Red Cross; and his impressions of the war and postwar insurgency. Granted, it's hearsay, but worth reading nonetheless.
| ...When Duleimi [ed: his attorney] informed him that five million Iranians infiltrated Iraq in advance of the January 30 elections to register as voters, Saddam retorted: "This is nothing new as far as the Persian traitors are concerned. We always knew they wanted to grab southern Iraq and that this was the objective of the Badr Brigades. Now the Americans are discovering this for themselves."
But, he added, in any case, the Americans and Allawi will not succeed in bringing the elections off. They will fail, he declared. Finally, the former Iraqi president said: “I fear for Syria. I warned Bashar Assad that the Americans had not only targeted Iraq, but Syria too.” DEBKAfile’s military sources add: Saddam Hussein touched inadvertently on the most burning issue between the Bush administration and Iraq’s interim prime minister Iyad Alawi. Ever since the December 21 suicide attack on the US forward base in Mosul, when 22 Americans were killed, Allawi has been urging Washington to launch attacks from Iraq on points in Syria – singling out military locations known to intelligence as bases used to assist and train terrorists preparatory to their infiltration of Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister believes that without military action against Syria, three key goals will remain out of reach: 1. A general election on January 30 orderly enough to be a success. 2. An effective deterrent to Tehran’s meddling in Iraq. 3. Victory in the war against the guerrillas. Sunday, January 2, US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage arrives in Damascus with a final warning from Washington. The Syrian ruler will be informed that the administration is closer than ever before to acceding to Allawi’s demand. |
In propagandizing the "Iraq = Vietnam" meme, some in the mainstream press have forgotten one teensy, tiny detail. Our side (we'll call them the good guys) are fighting for a Democratic government against extremist, suicidal Islamofascists who would like nothing better than to kill Americans (and for that matter, anyone who is not their co-religionist), either here or abroad. Nothing to do with the situation is similar to that in Vietnam, and the sooner the MSM picks up on that fact, the better for everyone. You'd think their arthritic circulation numbers would have provided the hint.
Haider Ajina sent us this translation of an article that appeared today in the Iraqi Arabic newspaper Nahrain:
Haider adds these comments:
Check your local newspaper tomorrow morning and see whether these successes by the Iraqi National Guard have been reported. Then ask yourself whether any successful terrorist attack, whether via car bomb, attack on a police station, kidnapping, or whatever, has ever gone unreported in your local paper. Then ask your local paper why half of the story is missing. |
There's something that's been eating away at me regarding the security situation in Iraq. Too many good people are being killed or maimed by car bombs in Iraq. I'm definitely no physicist, but doesn't it seem feasible to position spectrometer-based sensors on major intersections in the Sunni triangle to detect these fascists?
This is probably a bit esoteric, but one of my favorite blog moments was election day. Specifically, when the exit polls were pointing towards a stunning Kerry victory.