The Arizona 9/11 “Memorial”

There were some meetings and some folks are very, very upset (rightfully so) about the so-called memorial Arizona set up. Curt has the details.

Strategy, Tactics And The Associated Press

It has been said that armchair generals discuss strategy while professionals discuss logistics. People in the military, have a working understanding of the military or who come from military backgrounds understand this. The clueless argue tactics as strategy. For example, one can point to the latest article from the Associated Press. The headline: "Bush admin. won't shift Iraq strategy".

Well, that's a surprise. The strategy is to turn Iraq into a stable democracy. Should that ideal be abandoned? Should we deny the Iraqis a future that is not dominated by thuggish dictatorships? Should we consign them to life under a "theocracy" that only hides behind the trappings of religion while seeking temporal power?

Is that what war critics want? Do they want the attendant bloodbaths that a precipitous withdrawal will assuredly bring about? Do they want the blood of the victims on their hands? Those who would force a withdrawal will be complicit in the deaths of thousands upon thousands. Is that what they want?

The administration says it will stick with the strategy but is saying it will adjust tactics. Is that hard to understand? I have a LOT of problems with the tactical decisions made up until this point. But I do not have a problem with the strategy.

Setting people free from a monstrous dictatorship is never, never, ever a bad thing. Walking away and leaving them to die is consummate evil.

Chavez Suffering?

Even though (T)Hugo Chavez has continued to face one setback after another, he still has his admirers. In the US. The supporters see his anti-Americanism as "political savvy". One assumes they think he is ascending, rather than as having peaked. Others are honest enough to see that Chavez has damaged himself with his antics:

"Taking these kinds of broadsides against the U.S. hasn't really worked for him politically abroad," said Daniel Erikson of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank. "A lot of governments indicated they would vote for him in the U.N., and then when it came to the secret ballot, they didn't."

With Venezuela trailing the U.S.-supported Guatemala after 35 rounds of secret votes that left both shy of the two-thirds majority needed to win a Security Council seat, the contest could eventually end up going to a compromise candidate after voting resumes Wednesday.

Chavez portrays the U.N. voting as a diplomatic victory, saying Sunday that he achieved his objective of blocking Washington's candidate.

"We've taught the empire a lesson," Chavez told supporters. Even if "Venezuela isn't able to enter the Security Council, we've done damage to the empire. That was our objective."

But Ghana's U.N. ambassador, Nana Effah-Apenteng, said many diplomats feel Chavez went too far in his speech to the General Assembly last month, when he said the podium reeked of sulfur after Bush spoke.

"Even if you want to bash another head of state, this isn't proper decorum," Effah-Apenteng said. "That's the problem."

Some analysts, however, said Chavez's influence with a solid bloc in the United Nations despite counter-lobbying by Washington shows his political savvy.

"This is like a boxing match. You have a heavyweight in the form of the U.S., you have a junior weight in the form of Venezuela, and the fact that Venezuela has lasted this long speaks tremendously to the kind of influence that they were able to generate," said Miguel Tinker Salas, a Latin American studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

Yeah, he's just taking a rest before the title bout, right professor? Since you used a boxing analogy, it is fitting to point out that there is a reason they use weight classes in that sport. (By the way, Chavez is more like a flyweight, despite his delusions of grandeur). We here at Blue Crab Boulevard like to think of Chavez's performance at the UN this way:

But then, we are optimists.

About Rights

One reason that I have been a long-term reader of the blog One Hand Clapping is that Donald Sensing is an excellent writer (I should be so good). Another reason is that when he pulls out the stops, he is devastatingly effective in a logical argument. So it is today in discussing an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about some, frankly, evangelical atheists. Sensing has just a few things to say in addressing the article:

Dawkins, Wilson et. al. are what I call evangelistic atheists, not content with enjoying their own religion as they see fit but dogmatically trying to convert others to their belief.

Well, fine. There is no stronger defendant of the free marketplace of ideas than I. But I hope they understand that they have no right to do so.

Let me say that again so you know I am intentional: atheists have no right to promulgate their belief. They have no right to challenge me about my religion. They have no right to speak up in my community, no right to live in my community, indeed, no right even to life itself. They have no rights at all, in fact.

If atheists are true to their own creed, they must admit that the entire concept of human rights crumbles to dust according to that same creed. Dawkins, Wilson et. al. have no “right” to denounce religion, they just have the ability or power to do so. If persons are not “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” (in the words of a famous Enlightenment rationalist), then “rights” is nothing but a flatus vocis. The concept of rights then really means nothing but “who wins.” Right now, atheists are able to speak out (in America, anyway, not in Saudi Arabia) and attempt to persuade others only because the rest of us let them. But why should we let them? Why don’t we religious people simply persecute atheists out of existence?

I think atheists would reply that to do so would be contrary to our own creed (well, not contrary to Islamism, but I’ll not go there today). And they would be correct. But so what? An atheist also holds that there is nothing behind religious creeds, that there is no content to them. Since religious beliefs are smply the product of evolution, they may be changed or discarded as we might wish. So could not we religious people simply say, “Sorry, persecuting atheists is no longer against our religon?” If you think not, why not?

And don’t throw the US Constitution at me: the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights is nothing more than an agreement among religious people to let atheists be. But, as I’ve just said, we can change our minds. And heck, the whole document is nothing but a product of evolution and therefore worth no more than any other political manifesto.

Can anyone refute this argument without an appeal to transcendence? I think not. The reason America’s religious people don’t denouce their creeds - and Lord knows (oops, a virus of the mind crept it), we have a hard enough time living up to them at all - is that we (Jews and Christians, anyway) really do believe there is a God who is not only a God of mercy and compassion but also of moral law and judgement.

Never argue with a minister who knows how to use artillery. You will lose.

It’s Raining Men!

It's Raining Men! Hallelujah! - It's Raining Men! Amen!
I'm gonna go out to run and let myself get
Absolutely soaking wet!
It's Raining Men! Hallelujah!
It's Raining Men! Every Specimen!
Tall, blonde, dark and lean
Rough and tough and strong and mean
(The Weather Girls, It's Raining Men)

No, really, it actually is raining men in Smithtown, New York. Men are falling from the sky. Well, okay, actually burglars are falling from the trees.  Okay, it was just the one burglar from one tree. But it sounds even better exaggerated.

Riverhead resident Joseph Barwick was admitted to Stony Brook University Medical Center to be treated for injuries to his legs and back, Suffolk County Police spokesman Jeremy Samuelson said.

Barwick led police on a high-speed chase in a stolen car after burglarizing two liquor stores in Kings Park, police said.

The chase ended when the suspect crashed the car in a wooded area of Smithtown. He fled the area on foot, but police later found him hiding in a tree. He tumbled to the ground after losing his footing as he tried to climb higher in the tree.

It could have been worse. It could have been a Saint Bernard.

False Alarm

Yep, it sure is funny when someone pulls a fire alarm for a joke, isn't it? You know, send the fire department scrambling just to get a laugh. Hah, hah. Not. What makes it worse is when the one trying to make monkeys out of the firemen is an ape.

No, really.

DES MOINES, Iowa - One of the great apes at a research center in Des Moines has learned a valuable lesson — don't pull the fire alarm. A bonobo named Panbanisha did just that last Friday, sending out the fire department to the Great Ape Trust of Iowa.

Fire department spokesman Brian O'Keefe said Monday it was the first known case of an animal setting off a fire alarm in Des Moines.

Trust spokesman Al Setka said a 25-year-old female named Panbanisha was the guilty ape.

Setka said Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a lead scientist at the trust focusing on studying the behavior and intelligence of bonobos, scolded Panbanisha.

"It's my understanding that she's been told not to do it again," Setka said.

Har dee har, like telling her not to do it again will make her stop. Panbanisha obviously has the same sense of humor as the average vandal.

Skilling Gets 24 Years

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was handed a 24 year and 4 month prison sentence today.

U.S. District Judge Sim Lake ordered Skilling, 52, to home confinement, wearing an ankle monitor, and told the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to recommend when Skilling should report to prison. Lake recommended no date, but suggested Skilling be sent to the federal facility in Butler, N.C.

Skilling, insisting he was innocent yet remorseful in a two-hour hearing, was the last top former official to be punished for the accounting tricks and shady business deals that led to the loss of thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in Enron stock and more than $2 billion in employee pension plans when Enron collapsed.

Lake denied Skilling's request for bond.

Skilling's term is the longest received by any Enron defendant; former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow was given a six-year term after cooperating with prosecutors and helping them secure Skilling's conviction.

Harsh sentence. It will not restore all that his victims lost, however. I know a number of them.

Okay, Who’s The Wiseguy….

….Who put the steroids in the Geritol? Earlier we brought you the story of a British man living in Germany. Even though the man is 70 years old, he beat the tar out of four attackers. Now another story has come across the wires. This one from Omaha, Nebraska. When Two men tried to rob a 68 year old man at gunpoint in his own car, he beat the crap out of both of them. And he took their gun away, too.

OMAHA, Neb. - Two robbers who thought they had an easy mark in a 68-year-old Omaha man were surprised on Sunday. Police said Earnest Coleman was sitting in his car outside an Omaha grocery store when a young man jumped into the passenger seat with a gun and demanded Coleman's money.

Coleman responded by grabbing the robber and his gun, and exchanging blows. A second robber came to Coleman's window and hit the elderly man, police said.

Undeterred, Coleman pulled that man into the car and began to hit him, too. The two robbers then ran away — without Coleman's money and without the gun.

There is no word on whether Coleman was in the SAS, either. Man there are some mean senior citizens out there nowadays.

War Is Interested In You

The closing sentence from Michael Barone's column over at Real Clear Politics is a quote attributed to Leon Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." His point is that too many people want to go back and live in the world of September 10th, 2001. A world before the World Trade Center towers fell, carrying several thousand of our fellow citizens to their deaths. A world before Islamist terrorists hijacked airplanes and flew them into the towers and the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

But there is something else. It's the looming threat behind the headlines: London terrorist bombers arrested. Terrorist plot to bomb trains in Germany. Iran is developing nuclear weapons, while its president denies the Holocaust and threatens to destroy Israel. Hugo Chavez at the United Nations railing at the United States. North Korea is developing nuclear weapons to go with the missiles it already has. All these remind us that there are people out there who want to destroy our bounteous and tolerant civilization.

And we know, since Sept. 11, 2001, that they will inflict any damage they can. North Korea is a proven weapons proliferator. Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. It's not hard to imagine them equipping terrorists with nuclear weapons — or with the biological weapons (anthrax, plague) North Korea is said to be developing. Remember the anthrax attacks of September 2001? It turns out we still have no idea where the anthrax came from.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," the novelist James Joyce once wrote. From the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union up until the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, we were on a holiday from history. We were happy to pay little attention to the Islamofascist terrorist threat that should have been apparent from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. We left that to government officials, who took it seriously and did some things to address it — but in hindsight not enough. Since then, we took the offensive and have had some successes in stopping terrorists. But we seem to be growing tired of the fight.

Now it appears that voters are willing to turn over Congress to a party most of whose representatives voted against allowing the National Security Agency to surveil without a court order al-Qaida suspects when they place calls to persons in the United States and against allowing terrorist interrogations under rules supported by John McCain.

There is a weirdness to this election cycle. The media is spending the bulk of its time covering sideshows being drummed endlessly by carnival barkers. Yet we are at war. Whether you believed in going to war against terrorists or not, the war was forced on us. Whether you agreed that we should invade Iraq or not, the fact is that we are there and there will be a bloodbath if we precipitously withdraw. But the focus is on a disgraced former Congressman and his text messages. Or the party n opposition touts an increase in the minimum wage as a cornerstone of what they intend to accomplish. The vast majority of voters make more than the minimum wage and enacting the cornerstone will not change their lives one iota.

We have troops on the ground in harm's way. We must not abandon them. The man who would chair the Ways and Means committee has said he wants to cut off funds for the war. Magically, he says this won't hurt the troops. We have a party in opposition that does not support a program to listen to terrorist's telephone calls unless a warrant is obtained. It seems that many of of politicians and many of the electorate are tired of war and no longer interested in it.

But it is still interested in them. And in all the rest of us as well. Still think it's a good idea to sit out the election?

Hezbollah In Venezuela?

I know Gateway Pundit had some links up a while back that pointed to the possibility that Hezbollah might be operating inside Venezuela with the tacit (or even active) help of (T)Hugo Chavez. There has just been an arrest in Venezuela that may indicate there is a growing problem. A college student was arrested after planting two home-made pipe bombs near the US embassy in Caracas. The bombs were wrapped in plastic bags. Besides the bombs themselves, the bags also contained "small fliers with publicity alluding to Hezbollah."

Police closed the street to traffic and set off the two low-intensity explosives, which they said were essentially homemade fireworks. Dozens of children were evacuated from an adjacent school. Nobody was injured.

Embassy spokesman Brian Penn said a motorcycle taxi driver "started screaming" to alert security guards after the youth made a remark to the driver. Penn said the embassy would defer to Venezuelan police to comment on specifics of the case.

Local police chief Wilfredo Borraz told reporters that one of the devices was found outside the school and the other in a planter about 50 yards from the embassy entrance.

He said both were wrapped in black plastic bags and contained "small fliers with publicity alluding to Hezbollah" — the Lebanese guerrilla group that recently fought a monthlong war with Israel. He said police glimpsed electrical wires protruding from one of the plastic pipes before setting it off.

"The idea was apparently to create alarm and publicize a message," Borraz told reporters, saying the explosives were made to scatter the pamphlets.

I don't think this is a really good development at all.

Was This Guy SAS?

A 70 year old retired British man living in Germany, who was a veteran of unspecified military background, foiled the plans of four would be muggers. When they younger men, thought to be between the ages of 18 and 25 tried to steal his money, he did not meekly hand over his wallet.

He kicked the crap out of all four of them.

"Looks like he had everything under control," a police spokesman from the German town of Bielefeld said of the incident last Friday.

The man, a native of Birmingham who now lives in Germany, was challenged by three men, demanding money, while a fourth crept up behind him. Recalling his training, the Briton grabbed the first assailant and threw him over his shoulder.

When a second man tried to kick him, the pensioner grabbed his foot and tipped him to the ground. At this point, the three men, thought to be aged between 18 and 25, fled, carrying their injured accomplice with them.

What's sad about this is that if this had occurred in Britain, it is not at all unlikely that the man would have been arrested for defending himself.

Iran’s President Bragging

Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is boasting happily away. He says Iran's nuclear capability is ten times greater than it was last year while the power of "Iran's enemies" was ten times less.

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's nuclear capability has increased tenfold despite Western pressure to roll back its atomic program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Monday.

He did not elaborate, and the remarks appeared aimed primarily at rallying public support as the U.N. Security Council prepares to consider a draft resolution imposing limited sanctions on Iran because of its refusal to halt its uranium enrichment.

"The enemies, resorting to propaganda, want to block us from achieving (nuclear technology)," Ahmadinejad told a crowd on the southern outskirts of Tehran. "But they should know that today, the capability of our nation has multiplied tenfold over the same period last year."

Ahmadinejad boasted that "the power of our enemies is less than one-tenth of their power in last year."

One hopes he fairs as well as his lapdog, (T)Hugo Chavez has been lately.

Turnabout Is Fair Play, Right?

John Hawkins at Right Wing News points out that Googlebombing works both ways. He calls for Googlebomb parity. So, in the interest of fairness and to really tick off a few people, here's Blue Crab Boulevard's contribution.

Senate

Connecticut: Ned Lamont Maryland: Ben Cardin Michigan: Debbie Stanbenow Missouri: Claire McCaskill Montana: Jon Tester New Jersey: Bob Menendez Tennessee: Harold Ford Virginia: James Webb

Democrat Held Seats (CO-03): John Salazar (GA-03): Jim Marshall (GA-12): John Barrow (IA-03): Leonard Boswell (IL-08): Melissa Bean (IL-17): Phil Hare (IN-07): Julia Carson (NC-13): Brad Miller (PA-12): John Murtha (WV-01): Alan Mollohan

Republican Held Seats (AZ-08): Gabrielle Giffords (CT-04): Diane Farrell (CT-05): Chris Murphy (CO-07): Ed Perlmutter (IA-01): Bruce Braley (IL-06): Tammy Duckworth (IN-02): Joe Donnelly (IN-08): Brad Ellsworth (IN-09): Baron Hill (FL-13): Christine Jennings (FL-16): Tim Mahoney (FL-22): Ron Klein (KY-03): John Yarmuth (NC-01): Heath Shuler (MN-06): Patty Wetterling (NM-01): Patricia Madrid (NY-20): Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-24): Michael Arcuri (NY-26): Jack Davis (OH-15): Mary Jo Kilroy (OH-18): Zack Space (PA-06): Lois Murphy (PA-08): Patrick Murphy (PA-07): Joe Sestak (PA-10): Chris Carney (VA-02): Phil Kellam (WI-08): Steve Kagen

Bring Out Your Dead. And Vote!

What does a man who died in prison in a foreign country while on trial for war crimes do on election day? Why, he votes of course. No, this wasn't in Chicago, it happened in Serbia.

BELGRADE (AFP) - Former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who died more than six month ago during his war-crimes trial, was invited to vote at this weekend's referendum on a new constitution, a news paper has reported.

The Press daily published a copy of an official vote invitation addressed to Milosevic, which details the timing and location of his nearest polling station, close to his family mansion in the posh Belgrade suburb of Dedinje.

The former Serbian president died of natural causes on March 11 in his cell at UN war crimes court in The Hague, where he was being tried for crimes committed during the wars that tore up former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

We are trying to substantiate rumors that ACORN was involved in voter registrations there.

You’ve Heard Of “Stockholm Syndrome”

That's the psychological defense mechanism where a hostage begins to sympathize with the hostage-taker after a bit of time. It seems there is an almost diametrically opposed syndrome just being identified. It is one where people recoil with revulsion when they find out that the reality of a famous tourist destination is nothing like the mental image they had. Instead of a beautiful, elegant city of dreams, they find a scruffy place filled with surly people.

Meet "Paris Syndrome".

PARIS (Reuters) - Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

Already this year, Japan's embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors — including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.

Previous cases include a man convinced he was the French "Sun King", Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being attacked with microwaves, the paper cited Japanese embassy official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.

"Fragile travellers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis," psychologist Herve Benhamou told the paper.

The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed "Paris Syndrome", was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.

Those wacky French. Now we know that exposure to French reality can cause mental problems. Which explains Jacques Chirac at last.