Conflation

Jason Steck has an interesting explanation of the use of conflation to skew arguments. He notices the suddenly escalating hysteria over claims that the Bush administration is "planning to attack" Iran despite the fact that the administration is also, quite publicly, stating rather firmly that they have no "intention" of doing so. Steck points out, quite correctly, that the two terms, which are inherently completely different, are being conflated by anti-war people and the media. There is no equivalency in the terms yet they are routinely interchanged in an attempt to demonize.

What all the breathless reports lack, however, is a sober reading of the strategic situation untainted by assumptions about shadowy “neocons” plotting in a dark situation room aboard the Death Star. The Guardian piece makes its error most glaringly:

Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: “I don’t know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran.”

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources’ assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. “Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place.”

He added: “We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous.”

Note the conflation between “planning” and “intentions”. SECDEF Gates states that the U.S. has no intention to attack and the Guardian responds by quoting an analyst who cites advanced planning.

But planning for an eventuality of military action does not telegraph an actual intention to attack. Conflation between the two is ignorant of analytical distinctions as well as historical facts. Analytically, planning merely opens up the option for an action, it does not mandate that the plans be put into action. Historically, the world is rife with examples of plans that remained on the shelf, up to an including U.S., Soviet, and British planning efforts for nuclear war. Did the existence of the U.S. SIOP indicate an actual intention to carry it out? Of course not. In fact, the existence of the plan was intended specifically to prevent having to use it.

Any government that was not "planning" for the eventuality of having to fight an opponent, even if they have no desire or intention to do so, is asking for serious trouble. I realize there are some people that think all war is wrong every time, no matter what (The Society of Friends is a good example). Some - but not by any means all - of the "anti-war" voices are of this opinion. Others who vehemently oppose the Iraq war are openly calling for armed intervention in Darfur. They are not so much anti-war as they are anti-this-war.

But there is a very, very disturbing trend at work here. The conflation of unlike terms is consistently being used to demonize people with differing opinions. There are moves afoot to equate people who disagree with the "consensus" on global warming to call them "deniers" - an attempt to conflate their opposing views with Holocaust deniers who try to argue that historical, documented events did not occur. There is a world of difference between denying history and disagreeing with a certain, unknowable, future outcome. Yet there are many doing just that. One site has a "Deniers Database" running. Nice. Pogroms at eleven, presumably.

I routinely get screeching commenters calling me a religiously motivated, rightwingnut, neocon, jack-booted Bushbot, or words to that effect. I have a number of banned commenters for just that reason. I'm sure I'll have more in the future. (And around here, banned means the spam filters kill your comments and they never get read by anyone. I love those plugins.) But the conflation of all the terms and the projection of the commenters own perceptions is discouraging. There is only the desire to demonize, denigrate and shout down.

Steck concludes his post thusly:

I would agree with critics who say that now is a bad time for the U.S. to attack Iran. U.S. forces are stretched trying to deal with the situation in Iraq and U.S. diplomatic credibility around the world is at low ebb. Other options remain viable and the Bush administration appears to be pursuing those alternatives in both word and deed. Their creation of a “credible threat” of military action should not be automatically read as a sign that Darth Cheney is off his leash. Media analysts of Bush administration foreign policy should take a deep breath and examine the role that their own assumptions might be playing in skewing the public debate.

I cannot improve on that. It's perfect as written.

Lobbying In The Age Of Democratic Control

Looks exactly like lobbying when the Republicans were in control. Which looked the same as lobbying under previous Democratic control. In other words, campers, nothing has changed. Well, the pipelines follow different routes, but its the same old loot. Except there's even more of it.

In just the last two months, lawmakers invited lobbyists to help pay for a catalog of outings: lavish birthday parties in a lawmaker’s honor ($1,000 a lobbyist), martinis and margaritas at Washington restaurants (at least $1,000), a California wine-tasting tour (all donors welcome), hunting and fishing trips (typically $5,000), weekend golf tournaments ($2,500 and up), a Presidents’ Day weekend at Disney World ($5,000), parties in South Beach in Miami ($5,000), concerts by the Who or Bob Seger ($2,500 for two seats), and even Broadway shows like “Mary Poppins” and “The Drowsy Chaperone” (also $2,500 for two).

The lobbyists and their employers typically end up paying for the events, but within the new rules.

Instead of picking up the lawmaker’s tab, lobbyists pay a political fund-raising committee set up by the lawmaker. In turn, the committee pays the legislator’s way.Lobbyists and fund-raisers say such trips are becoming increasingly popular, partly as a quirky consequence of the new ethics rules. By barring lobbyists from mingling with a lawmaker or his staff for the cost of a steak dinner, the restrictions have stirred new demand for pricier tickets to social fund-raising events. Lobbyists say that the rules might even increase the volume of contributions flowing from K Street, where many lobbying firms have their offices, to Congress.

Some lawmakers acknowledge that some fund-raising trips resemble the lobbyist-paid junkets that Congress voted overwhelmingly to prohibit. Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said its leaders had decided to stop holding fund-raising events for lobbyists with political action committees because of the seeming inconsistency.

On top of the news that the earmarks are exactly the same, where the heck are the huge changes in Washington? In other words, the voters got played just to change who got more of the loot. Stunning.

Power Plays

We reported to our faithful readers yesterday about the Animal Uprising™ attack in Escanaba, Michigan where they sent a suicide squirrel against the city's power lines. It worked, too. The squirrel detonated and the city went dark. Part of it anyway. Well, Escanaba, being relatively small, only got the second team squirrel bomber. The city of Natchez, Mississippi on the other hand got the first string. That's right, they got the fearsome exploding raccoon.  

NATCHEZ — Entergy is nervously awaiting test results on the raccoon-damaged transformer before things on the Natchez power grid go back to normal.

Last week, crews working on a breaker that exploded after a raccoon grounded 115,000 volts, opted to shut down the entire transformer.

The Johns-Manville Substation has two transformers, and crews switched all lines to the one untouched by the nocturnal critter.

Even power customers not affected by the Jan. 28 mini-blackout were switched, Customer Service representative Stephen Caruthers said……

…..The breaker that blew was relatively new and had animal guards on it to prevent events like the one that occurred.

Approximately 2,500 Entergy customers lost power for several hours after the explosion.

Well, it really doesn't matter if you put animal guards on. After all it wasn't the breaker that detonated, it was the explosive packed masked marauder. We'll have to call some of our contacts at Entergy and warn them right away.

A Rash Of Sightings

Benjamin Radford has a special report over at Live Science discussing a sudden rash of UFO sightings that have occurred all over the US in recent weeks.  

America has seen a spate of alleged UFO sightings in recent weeks and months. Eyewitnesses in Arizona, Illinois, Arkansas, North Carolina, and other states have reported seeing mysterious lights and objects in the sky.

Among the sightings:

• In November 2006, United Airlines employees reported seeing a large, dark, “saucer-shaped” craft over a terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It hovered for a while, then suddenly rose and shot up into the sky.

• In January 2007, multiple eyewitnesses reported seeing a formation of mysterious bright lights in the sky over western Arkansas, moving too slowly to be aircraft.

• Similar lights were reported this week over Phoenix.

Could such sightings be alien spacecraft? Of course it’s possible; many things are possible. The question is not what is possible but what is probable—what evidence and logic suggest. Before jumping to conclusions about ETs in spacecraft, we must look at the most likely explanations.

What's more likely?

Without some independent confirmation or other evidence, it’s hard to know what the United Airlines employees might have seen. But is it more likely that they saw an optical illusion, or that a large, unknown object hovered over one of the country’s busiest airports without being seen by anyone else or appearing on radar?

The lights over Arkansas and Arizona had something in common: they were both seen near military bases, at a time when Air Force pilots were dropping very bright flares from parachutes during training. The flares, producing in some cases nearly 2 million candlepower, would be visible for miles.

Well, if Radford had just called, we could have sent him the pictures our enterprising photographer from Magic 8-Ball Photography and Turtle Detailing, Inc. took when he was passing through O'Hare on his way to the 8th annual Full-Contact Canasta Tournament. (He suffered severe injuries during the semi-finals but is expected to be as good as new - er - as good as he was before - soon). But Radford never calls. *Sigh*

Countering A Vicious Meme

James Taranto uses a particularly vacuous column by Ellen Goodman as a starting point to eviscerate a particularly vicious meme that the left is trying to implant in the public's mind. The column repeats the sickeningly un-American meme that global warming skeptics are equivalent to holocaust deniers. (And it absolutely is un-American, I don't really care how many outraged shrieks that comment provokes.) Taranto beats that premise like a rented mule.

Wow, Ellen, thanks for sharing! But a few paragraphs later she tries to make a serious point and ends up making a serious moral and intellectual error:

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

No, Ellen. Let's not "just say" it. Before we make a truly invidious comparison, let's think a bit, shall we?

On our shelf sits a book called "The House That Hitler Built." It is a 380-page study of Nazi Germany, written by Stephen H. Roberts, a professor of modern history at the University of Sydney. Roberts spent 16 months in Germany and neighboring countries between 1935 and 1937. "My main aim," he explains in the preface, "was to sum up the New Germany without any prejudice (except that my general approach was that of a democratic individualist)."

The substance of the book is alarming, although the tone is calm and detached–so much so that it is eerie to read with the knowledge of what happened in the years after October 1937, when it was published. One 10-page chapter is devoted to "The Present Place of the Jews." At the time Roberts wrote, the persecution of Jewish Germans was well under way:

At present, the German Jew has no civil rights. He is not a citizen; he cannot vote or attend any political meeting; he has no liberty of speech and cannot defend himself in print; he cannot become a civil servant or a judge; he cannot be a writer or a publisher or a journalist; he cannot speak over the radio; he cannot become a screen actor or an actor before Aryan audiences; he cannot teach in any educational institution; he cannot enter the service of the railway, the Reichsbank, and many other banks; he cannot exhibit paintings or give concerts; he cannot work in any public hospital; he cannot enter the Labour Front or any of the professional organizations, although membership of many callings is restricted to members of these groups; he cannot even sell books or antiques. . . . In addition to these, there are many other restrictions applying in certain localities. The upshot of them all is that the Jew is deprived of all opportunity for advancement and is lucky if he contrives to scrape a bare living unmolested by Black Guards or Gestapo. It is a campaign of annihilation–a pogrom of the crudest form, supported by every State instrument.

To equate a denial of history and a disagreement over an unknowable future is morally reprehensible. The attempt to stifle, pressure or deprive employment to opponents who do not happen to toe your dictated line is un-American. It is a hideous violation of the First Amendment and the first step down a road we should all - left, center or right -rightly declare to be wrong. Reasonable people can disagree, but an attempt to silence those who oppose you is anathema to what America stands for. Read the section of Stephen H. Roberts' work that Taranto quotes. Silencing people has been done before. The results have been hideous.

The left has made a huge show about declaring how they have been "silenced". Usually live on television, mind you. But now they demand the silencing of those they disagree with. Who is really doing the silencing? Who is really suppressing speech?

I Love You, So I’ll Destroy Your Computer

Security experts are warning people that there are a rash of malicious emails with cute subject lines meant to get you to open them. Whereupon, they install a trojan on your computer. Happy Valentine's Day!

"Computer users should keep a wary eye on any romantic messages received by e-mail, as many of them could contain malicious code," said US security firm PandaLabs after detecting an increase in a worm it dubbed Nurech.A.

The worm hides in e-mails with subjects like: "Together You and I," "Til the End of Time Heart of Mine."

People who open an attached file such as postcard.exe can end up infecting their computers.

Security firm Symantec said it had detected "large-scale spamming" of e-mails including a Trojan horse, a program that contains or installs a malicious program.

Symantec said the malware was a new version of Trojan, Peacomm or the "Storm Trojan."

"With Valentine's Day approaching, this time around the authors are attempting to tug on the heartstrings of unsuspecting users with romantic subject lines such as 'My Heart belongs to you,' said Symantec's Orla Cox.

"The Trojan is much the same as we've seen before, the only difference being that the authors have used a modified packer in an (unsuccessful) effort to evade detection by antivirus vendors."

"As a general rule, don't open any suspicious e-mail, regardless of what is says it contains," said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.

I make it a rule to never - and I mean never - open any .exe file attached to an email, even if I know the person who sent it. I'll ask people to point me to where they got the file if I'm really interested. But I sure won't forward anything like that on, either. Anyway, if you get what looks like an electronic love letter, it may not be what it looks like. Consider yourself warned.

The Definition Of Steadfast

Despite the political posturing going on behind him in the US Congress, despite the critics, despite the shrill shrieks for opponents of the administration despite the wavering public opinion, General David Petraeus is moving ahead with confidence in his mission and in his soldiers.

"The stakes are high. The way ahead will be hard but it is not hopeless," he said on a platform at a former Saddam Hussein palace at Camp Victory. "We can and we must prevail. This mission is doable."

The change in command comes as President Bush overhauls his Iraqi policies and his team of top U.S. officials in the Middle East despite strong opposition by Democrats to plans to send 21,500 more troops to beef up security in Iraq.

Petraeus said the U.S. and the Iraqis needed to continue to work together in controlling the violence.

"The rucksack is too heavy for any one person to bear. We will all shoulder it here together," he said, adding that he wants to help the Iraqis "make the most of this opportunity to build a new country."

Petraeus was joined by Casey, Army Gen. John Abizaid, the outgoing Central Command chief, and a chaplain for the handover ceremony, which was held at a former Saddam Hussein palace at Camp Victory on the western edge of Baghdad. A U.S. Army band with the 1st Cavalry Division from Fort Hood, Texas, played the U.S. and Iraqi national anthems before the presentation of the flags.

Shame on the Janus-like politicians that unanimously confirm a man like this to perform a mission then busily try to undercut him from the safety of their Congressional offices. This man has a difficult job to carry out but believes he can - and must - carry that mission out. Even though all too many politicians are more interested in getting a sound bite on the evening news than they are in supporting him and his soldiers.

This is the very definition of steadfast. Godspeed, general.

Small Victories

You will never read about things like this in the US media, I'm afraid. And that really is too bad. Stories like this illustrate that Iraq, complicated as it is over there, is not a hopeless cause. Which is, unfortunately, exactly why you will not read stories like this in the major media. It doesn't fit the narrative they have imposed. But with disgusted viewers increasingly turning to the internet for news, there is at least a chance to get stories like this out to the public.

A telephone system might be unnecessary in the Iraqi tribal culture.  Local news spreads faster when it runs word of mouth, from mother to daughter, uncle to nephew, or sheik to sheik.  Because of this networking, when the Marines of 4th Platoon, Golf Company, 2/8 raided a house last night, they managed to hit a jackpot.  They arrested someone who they had been looking for.  More importantly, they also found someone who had been looking for them. 

Under the command of Captain Mark Broekhuizen, Golf 2/8 had been making slow inroads in Saqliwiah (“sack-la-wee-ah”), a village on the northwestern outskirts of Fallujah.  Finding Iraqi partners to step forward was tough, primarily because of an inability to locate and deal with the local Sheik.  Lacking active cooperation from the Sheik and his people, it was difficult to gain the Intel necessary to drive both Islamic fundamentalist and Shia-oriented terror groups from the land. 

“AQI is both feared and hated,” Capt Broekhuizen said, referring to Al Qaeda in Iraq.  “They’ve been running a brutal terror campaign.  No city leaders are left here who will take a leadership role.” Marines from Golf Company said they recently fished two bodies out of the local river: a man had been decapitated, and his 4-year old tied to his leg before both were thrown into the river and the little boy drowned.  The killings were a product of Al Qaeda terror. 

Marines say that they are making progress.  Humanitarian missions, census operations, and security patrols have, according to the grunts, reduced the level of AQI violence by over 60% since they arrived in theater a few months ago.  But absent local leadership, this progress cannot be sustained. 

Last night, 4^th Platoon won a small victory in the battle against AQI.  Under the command of Lieutenant Anthony Friel, four Marine humvees on patrol spotted a white Toyota parked close to a house along the Euphrates River.  Both the Toyota and the house looked suspicious.  Quickly, the Marines surrounded the latter, and knocked on the door.

 Inside the house were several young men (with dubious identification), women and children, as well as an older man.  The squad leader, Corporal Jon Bates, and his Marines thoroughly searched the young Iraqis.  After discovering one ID marked in English “Progressive Mosque Security,” a subsequent search of the young man's Toyota turned up sophisticated IED triggering devices, a pressure plate and an AK-47. Two were detained.

The media does not, I think, understand the enormous damage that al Qaeda took to its image in the Middle East when their media inflated invincible warriors ran (excuse me, walked briskly) like rabbits in Somalia. And they steadfastly refrain from reporting acts like the horrifying murder detailed above. They duly report body counts but never expose the hideous facts of what exactly these monsters are doing to Muslims. They also never explain how we, as a nation, can afford to walk away leaving a genocide behind us.

But you might want to bookmark sites like OnPoint and Central Command to get the news that the media squelches. (Ans do read that whole article, there really is more positive news than the media is reporting.

Props

I don't have enough words to express the utter and complete contempt I feel after seeing this picture. Bloggers tried hard to explain the manipulation that was going on in the media during the Israel-Hezbollah war- this one was one. This picture sums up everything ever written about the way the media twisted and distorted things, especially at Qana, but all over in general. The dead are nothing but props to some people. Useless except as a way to manage your emotions. The are people out there with no souls whatsoever. And they will exploit your emotions to advance their agendas.

The Hand Of Iran

The New York Times is reporting today that they have seen evidence and heard officials from various intelligence agencies confirm that Iran is the source of lethal devices known as Explosively Formed (or Forged) Projectiles (or Penetrators). The terminology differs a bit depending on who is writing the story. Apparently, the Times is convinced enough that it is willing to publish this story.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.

In interviews, civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details to support what until now has been a more generally worded claim, in a new National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran is providing “lethal support” to Shiite militants in Iraq.

The focus of American concern is known as an “explosively formed penetrator,” a particularly deadly type of roadside bomb being used by Shiite groups in attacks on American troops in Iraq. Attacks using the device have doubled in the past year, and have prompted increasing concern among military officers. In the last three months of 2006, attacks using the weapons accounted for a significant portion of Americans killed and wounded in Iraq, though less than a quarter of the total, military officials say.

Because the weapon can be fired from roadsides and is favored by Shiite militias, it has become a serious threat in Baghdad. Only a small fraction of the roadside bombs used in Iraq are explosively formed penetrators. But the device produces more casualties per attack than other types of roadside bombs.

Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile. The officials said they were willing to discuss the issue to respond to what they described as an increasingly worrisome threat to American forces in Iraq, and were not trying to lay the basis for an American attack on Iran.

The assessment was described in interviews over the past several weeks with American officials, including some whose agencies have previously been skeptical about the significance of Iran’s role in Iraq. Administration officials said they recognized that intelligence failures related to prewar American claims about Iraq’s weapons arsenal could make critics skeptical about the American claims.

Given the continued attacks on the administration, including the Washington Post's outright false report about pre-war intelligence, the administration appears to be trying very hard to make sure this information is correct. It appears to be if the Times - no friend at all to the administration - is running this report. This information is no secret to the troops, as I have mentioned before. They know exactly when a shipment of these things come in. And no US media outlet and no US politician should be advancing the notion that it is a good idea to talk to a government that providing the weapons that are killing our troops.

Iran is at war with the US and has been since the Carter Administration. The media really needs to figure out which side they are on. And they are supposed to be on a side, they are not neutrals in this. Because if the wrong side wins, they lose, just like the rest of their countrymen.

All The Socialist Saints

According to Fidel Castro's older brother, the "socialist saints" are looking out for Fidel's wellbeing. The old monster is reported to be recovering and eating solid foods.

"He is doing very well, protected by the socialist saints!" a beaming 82-year-old Ramon said after lunch with Florida cattleman John Parke Wright, a good friend and frequent visitor to the island.

"Fidel is recovering well," added Ramon, who looks remarkably like Fidel — down to the now-wispy white beard. "All of us brothers are very resilient."

Ramon spent his life in agriculture and ranching and never held any major government positions.

Ramon Castro's positive assessment came one day after his 75-year-old brother Raul, the defense minister and acting president, told reporters of 80-year-old Fidel: "He's getting better each day."

He also said Fidel was exercising in brief comments to the news media at the opening of an international book fair. "He has a telephone at his side and uses it a lot."

Reporters had less luck earlier Friday getting a statement about Fidel's health from his son, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart — known as "Fidelito" — who spoke at an international economics conference in Havana. He briefly greeted reporters and did not discuss his father before leaving.

Let's see, there's Saint Che Guevara:

How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of “over 500.” According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara’s biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about “the two thousand or so” executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. “He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure,” Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison.

Who is but a choirboy next to Saint Joseph:

At least 720,000 people were executed in the terror that followed. Millions more died from hunger and ill-treatment in concentration camps.

Only the good die young. Apparently, Castro proves that point.