Monday, December 06, 2004
Saturday, December 04, 2004
O'Reilly and Rumsfeld
When the history of the Republic is written, it is my opinion that Donald Rumsfeld will have his name listed with the greatest cabinet members ever involved with coordinating our national defense; in a list including Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root.
| BILL O'REILLY: ...I think the American people are very worried about Iran, don't you?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I do, I ... BILL O'REILLY: I think the American people are very worried about Iran. They're harboring Al Qaeda, as you've pointed out. They're developing nuclear as you pointed out. Now we find out they got long-range missiles, I mean, the Israelis can't like that. DONALD RUMSFELD: That's true. BILL O'REILLY: So, what are the odds of us having to confront these people militarily? DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, [SIGHS] I guess that's, those are calls for the President to, or for the, or for other leaders of other countries to make. BILL O'REILLY: But we can't let a North Korea develop in Iran, can we? DONALD RUMSFELD: Uh ... BILL O'REILLY: Where they got nuclear weapons, we can't let that happen. DONALD RUMSFELD: The um, the Iranians are making a lot of mistakes, let me just put it that way. BILL O'REILLY: All right. DONALD RUMSFELD: And they're notably unhelpful in Afghanistan and they're notably unhelpful in Iraq. BILL O'REILLY: I'm going to take that as a, we can't let another North Korea develop in Iran. DONALD RUMSFELD: I generally say roughly what I think. And I said they are being unhelpful... |
O'Reilly and Rumsfeld
Chinese repression... American Style
Chinese repression... American Style
Friday, December 03, 2004
Islamic Television USA
Islamic Television USA
The #$*%(#_@ French
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French Perfidy Watch
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Slavery in the 21st Century
| Slavery... is alive and well in the Islamic world. This report comes from Sandro Magister in Chiesa:
"Sudan’s first saint, Iosephina Bakhita, was canonized by John Paul II in the year 2000. From an early age she was made a slave, sold and resold at the El Obeid and Khartoum markets. She was fortunate to have ended up in Italy. It was in 1890 that she was finally freed and baptized. "Yet today, more than a century later, there are still slaves found between the Sahara and the Nile. What’s more, it is slavery having its basis in Islam, inheritor of the trade which for centuries has forcibly sent 11-14 million Africans from the sub-Sahara region to Arab and Muslim countries. "Little is studied or said about the trade, the opposite being true of slave trade directed toward the Americas. The last general assembly of the African Catholic bishops conferences took place in Dakar in October 2003, where a session was dedicated to the issue, being introduced by statements such as the following: "'Analyses of this issue have been prohibited at length. One cause of the paralysis of this historical conscience has been the attitude of many intellectuals and Muslim rulers regarding the trans-Saharan trade. For reasons of religious sensitivity they don’t want to properly admit to Arab and Islamic responsibility in this drama, whose evil effects still continue. Today in the Arab world the word ‘black’ simply means ‘slave.’ The tracks of the trans-Saharan trade have formed geographic roads leading to Maghreb and the Middle East.' ... |
It's an old article, but one well worth reading.
Slavery in the 21st Century
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Honor Killings
| To kill a girl because she has sex is quite sickening, especially when the guy is deemed as only giving into the girl’s "seductions."
It’s even worse when the person who chooses to kill the girl is her father, brother or uncle. I guess it reminds me of the passage in the Bible where Jesus rescues the woman who is about to be stoned and says "he who is without sin cast the first stone." When a family learns that the girl has threatened their "honor" in the community, they discuss this without the girl’s presence, even with the mother, and they just "know" that the girl has to be killed in order to regain their standing in the community—even though the community may not know about the relationship. It’s not even a choice, but a duty. The mother knows this is the fate for her daughter, and even agrees to it, sometimes choosing the manner in which she will die…perhaps being burned alive, her throat cut, stoned or clubbed to death. The family leaves the house, and the person who is chosen to kill her comes in and does it as the family is away so there are no witnesses. The whole community knows of the killing and accepts the family into the community with open arms because they have wiped their slate clean with the blood of their child. Today I was visiting the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and my roommate, we’ll call here Sally, went with me because she had to meet with the same professor as I. She started crying in the taxi on the way back home telling me about her experience the other night with her Jordanian boyfriend, we’ll call him Malik... |
Read the whole thing.
Terrorism Unveiled: Honor Killings
Alarmist Link of the Day
Yossef Bodansky told the Jerusalem Post yesterday that a massive WMD attack is 'inevitable.' (Hat tip: PDM.)
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Alarmist Link of the Day
No Need for Nukes
It is these ambitions that reveal the mullahs' intentions. Iran is not simply another democratic state like Britain, France or Israel. Iran is a sponsor of terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah, and it does not govern with the consent of the people. The Iranian mullahs' claim to legitimacy is simply raw power. A nuclear weapon would give them even greater power, but not any more moral legitimacy. It is therefore reasonable to wonder what they would do with this new power. The simple answer is that they would feel protected behind a nuclear umbrella even as they shelter and support terrorist networks. But to what end? Either from the outset or somewhere down the road, Iranian mullahs will find that their nuclear-backed state has some global influence. The authoritarian regime inside Iran will come to see itself as a power capable of checking moderate influences in the Middle East. Indeed, there is already ample evidence that Iran sees itself as a check on America. From taking Americans hostage in 1979 through trying to destabilize the interim Iraqi government today, Iran has sought to displace the U.S. from the Middle East. In the coming year, it is likely that Iran will emerge as the nation-state antagonist in the war on terror. That much more than offering shelter, Iran will provide terrorists with a symbol of a successful Islamicist check on the West. And from Osama bin Laden on down, terrorists fighters will attribute that success to nuclear weapons... |
No need for nukes
The Grassroots Can Save the Democrats
| The staggering defeat of the Democratic Party and its ever-accelerating death spiral weren't obvious from the election results. Two factors masked the extent of the party's trouble. Without the innovation of Internet-driven small-donor fund-raising and a corresponding surge in support from the youngest voters, John Kerry would have suffered a dramatically larger defeat. And the true magnitude of the Democrats' abject failure at the polls in 2004 would have been more clearly revealed.
Mr. Kerry raised nearly half of his war chest over the Internet. He was so successful at this that he actually outspent the Bush campaign. But it was the outsider campaign of Howard Dean, reviled by most of the Democratic establishment, that pioneered the use of the Internet to raise millions in small contributions; Mr. Kerry was just the beneficiary as the party nominee. And it was the risk-taking Dean campaign that forced the risk-averse Kerry campaign to opt out of the public financing system. Had that decision not been forced on Mr. Kerry, he would have been badly outspent by George Bush; he would not have been competitive at all throughout the long summer of 2004... |
The Grassroots Can Save the Democrats
Monday, November 29, 2004
Powerline on Palestine
This is the heritage of Yasser Arafat. When Europe, the United Nations and the Clinton administration legitimized Arafat, they legitimized the fantasy that the Israelis can be exterminated and their country turned over to the Palestinians. This is, and always has been, the goal of Hamas, Fatah, the PLO, and so on. Today a new generation of Palestinian "leaders" are following in the terrorist footsteps of Arafat and his henchmen, preferring the fantasy of genocide to the hard work of dealing with the Palestinians' dysfunctional society, corrupt government, and primitive economy... |
Powerline on Palestine
Oh, that Global War on Terror
Investigators have long concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were partially planned in Spain in July 2001. Hijacker Mohammed Atta, believed to have piloted one of the airliners that crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, visited Spain two months before the attacks and met two men. One was Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, who is being held by U.S. authorities, while the other was unidentified. ABC said investigators now believe that third man was the one who in December 2003 activated the Qaeda cell that carried out the March 11 attacks, which Spaniards call “our Sept. 11.” ABC said investigators had narrowed his identity down to three candidates and believed he was a lieutenant of Mustafa Setmarian, increasingly considered to have been a leader of the Madrid train bombers and who may have held a leadership role for al Qaeda in Europe. Setmarian, aged 45 and of Syrian origin, was already wanted as part of a separate investigation into Islamic militant activity in Spain and is the subject of a Spanish wanted notice issued through Interpol. The State Department said on Nov. 18 it was offering a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of Setmarian, also known as Mustafa Setmariam Nasar or Abu Musab al-Suri. It described him as an al Qaeda member and former trainer at “terrorist camps” in Afghanistan. |
Report: FBI Finds Link Between 9/11, Madrid Bombs
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Letter from Fallujah
Go read the whole thing; this is only a small part of it. |
Letter from Fallujah
The Next Language
...What Java didn’t provide was 4GL type tools, but then again nobody had 4GL type tools for web applications, so it was no big deal. It was expected that those would come. However, many years have past, and the vast majority of J2EE applications are still built by hand. A lesson that Microsoft has learned well is that for API’s to be toolable, they need to be developed concurrently with the tool and both the API and tool should depend on easily externalizable metadata. Java API’s were always written on the merits of the API’s themselves, and subsequent tools were predominantly code generators shunned by programmers. The Java API’s grew into a morass of inconsistent and incomprehensible API’s, even the most simple things proved to be very complicated. The vast majority of J2EE deployments (over 80% according to Gartner) are simply Servlet/JSP to JDBC applications. Basically HTML front-ends to relational databases. It is ironic that much of what makes Java complicated today is all of its numerous band-aid extensions, such as generics and JSP templates, which were added to make these types of simple applications easier to develop... ...So let’s look at the requirements for today’s corporate applications: # Handle XML (dynamic data with fluctuating types) well # Quickly process text into objects and out of objects # Most apps have limited logic consisting mainly of control flow # No need for portability beyond Linux/x86 and Windows/x86 # Very thin veneer over the operating system for system services # Tuned for 1-2 processor x86 machines Given these requirements, Java does not fare very well: # XML data is inherently unstructured and it has to be shoehorned into and out of Java, which is a strongly typed language that does not like new types of objects popping into its applications. # Java is horrific at processing text since it can’t manipulate strings directly. # While Java is great for complicated applications, it is not ideally suited for specifying control flow. # Java is a magically portable platform, but there is no longer a requirement for portability other than Linux and Windows. # Since there is no longer a portability requirement, developers want only a very thin veneer over operating system services like sockets, while Java provides a huge virtual machine in between the application and the operating system. # Most J2EE implementations are tuned for 4-16 processor SMP boxes So if Java does not meet these requirements, what does? Apparently what is needed is a language/environment that is loosely typed in order to encapsulate XML well and that can efficiently process text. It should be very well suited for specifying control flow. And it should be a thin veneer over the operating system. Most Linux distribution in fact bundle three such languages, PHP, Python, and Perl. PHP is by far the most popular, Python is considered the most elegant (if not odd), and Perl the tried-and-true workhorse. All three languages are open source and free. As the following graphs show, PHP use has skyrocketed over the past few years... |
The next language
Anatomy of a car wreck
Anatomy of a car wreck
Friday, November 26, 2004
Then and Now
Consider that both World War II and the Global War on Terror began with a surprise air attack. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was possible only because our immigration controls, intelligence services and FBI let us down. The same was true leading up to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Strangely enough, the American death toll is almost the same: 2,403 at Pearl Harbor and 2,966 on Sept. 11. The same kinds of events happened in 2001. Osama bin Laden had attacked the United States at the World Trade Center in 1993, in Doha, in Tanzania, in Nairobi and on the USS Cole. But we were still caught by surprise on Sept. 11. The Banzai charges starting at Guadalcanal and the Kamikaze attacks that begin at Leyte were beyond the comprehension of most Americans. The Japanese routinely booby-trapped the bodies of their dead, ambushed Americans under false flags of surrender and filmed themselves committing terrible atrocities -- including beheadings. Many even wore headscarves with symbolic messages. Today, the Jihadists believe they have a divine mission -- to drive the "infidels" out of "Islamic lands." The suicide terrorist is eulogized as a martyr; they routinely videotape and photograph the most heinous murders of their hostages and proudly display the images; if you look carefully at these horrific videos and photos, you will see many of them wearing headscarves emblazoned with verses from the Koran. Today's enemy is every bit as brutal as the enemy we faced in the Pacific during World War II, and they are every bit as determined to destroy America. The one difference between the Pacific engagement in World War II and today's War on Terror -- though the media ignore it -- is that we are making more progress in less time than during the start of World War II... |
Then and Now
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Lileks' Matchbook Museum
Middle Eastern Press Reactions to the Election
In MEMRI's recap of the Arab press' reactions to the re-election of President Bush, there were, of course, the predictable wails and gnashing of teeth among the Arab fourth estate. However, there were also some interesting liberal and moderate viewpoints. Read on.
| The Arabs Must Learn from the U.S. Electoral System
Journalist Hassan Younes wrote in the Qatari daily Al-Watan: "The American elections are an important and sad lesson that the Arab world does not study, and in which it makes do with observer status and expresses its hopes for the victory of the candidate that it thinks will realize its own interests… "The Americans are voting for everything: president, legislature, governors of states, judges, education superintendents, and many officials. This, while the money-hungry ones in the Arab world scrap amongst themselves to gain the ruler's pleasure and a job – by means of which they will be able to plunder and steal everything within reach. "The American elections are an opportunity for soul-searching in the Arab world, so that [we will be able to] establish a new regime to reflect the expectations and true will of the people. Only democracy can correct what exists, and only [through democracy] is it possible to find solutions to painful and unsolved problems – including, of course, the Arab-Israeli conflict. "Had there been such democracy in Iraq, neither the first nor the second Gulf War would have broken out. [Also,] neither the invasion and occupation of this Arab country [i.e. Iraq], nor the disintegration and the destruction which we witness today, would have taken place…" |
...and...
| Bush's Victory is a Victory for Proper U.S. Middle East Policy
Liberal columnist Shaker Al-Nabulsi wrote on the liberal website www.elaph.com: "Congratulations to President Bush on his landslide victory in the presidential election. Congratulations to the Republican Party for its landslide success in Congress. This is the first time in the history of America that the Republican Party has gained a landslide victory for the presidency and Congress alike. This landslide victory is the victory of American policy on the Middle East, particularly regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror. "The American people, [who number] over 100 million voters, elected the president of human freedom who liberated Iraq and Afghanistan and promised to establish a Palestinian state in 2005. [They also elected] the son of the one who previously liberated Kuwait. "The Arab-Americans who voted for Kerry made a mistake, as we said before. They always put their eggs in a basket full of holes, due to lack of clear and clean political vision, lack of knowledge, and failure to read history properly…" |
MEMRI: reactions to President Bush's re-election
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