It Takes A Baboon To Raze A Village

Insufferable Twits 3 Comments

Norm Spector has been challenging the Toronto Star to produce a list of the 45 countries military psuedo-expert Gwynne Dyer claims to be published in.
Today, they quietly changed the tagline. Countries…. papers… what’s the difference, really?


“Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 papers worldwide.”

Dyer’s Dec.30 column advises that baboons hold the secret to world peace. It’s really very simple, actually. First – kill half of the male population. Be sure it’s the more aggressive half. Since the window of opportunity has long closed for death by food borne tuberculosis, that leaves the less aggressive half to do the killing, one presumes.
Second, let foreigners make decisions for you, you arrogant self-interested Americans warmongers. The ideal foreigners would be those victorious, passive baboons at the United Nations. There will be lots of noise and bickering, but eventually, we’ll be all one happy troup, with no need for independant states at all! As we all know, World War II was started by the League of Nations, and since the UN and their Peacekeepers arrived on the scene, there really hasn’t been a war of any great importance that lasted longer than 30 days.
It really isn’t any harder than that – and to think the secret to world peace was there all the time, right under our puffy red asses.

Embrace Hollywood

Embrace Hollywood 3 Comments

“Democrats need to embrace Hollywood because this is where they need to come to learn how to tell a story.” – Michael Moore*

I don’t know where sorrow is anymore, its presence in the world has vanished, leaving behind greed and the false claims of democracy. I mourn for the victims of Tawid and Jihad, headless and hopeless and names forgotten, their lives used as bargaining chips between corrupt governments where the gangsters rule all. I must also grieve for Tawid and Jihad, that our actions led to their inestimable anger. I beat my chest and cry out hardest of all for our country, with its government so far from its people that most of us cannot see why anyone might want to harm us, take us hostage, fly planes into our towers, kill us and die trying. Most of us don’t even know why, which is the saddest fact of all.
We are like the headless corpse, confused and swiping at the air for clues, for understanding. As we bleed from our mortal wound we flail for mercy and answers with eyes and ears missing, cut off. We are removed from our sense of self, conscience, purpose, but it isn’t the fault of the body, slowly starting to slip away into death. We have lost our head, or it has been taken from us, along with our voices, our reason, our control. All that is left is dissipating strength and a heart that will soon cease to beat. – Margaret Cho, Comedian

(hat tip –Is This Blog On)

Truth And Its Consequences

What He Said No Comments

Via James Joyner this preview of Donald Sensing’s upcoming book, tentatively titled Truth and Its Consequences.

This war is in fact a religious war all around, even though we of the West generally shun the idea. Unquestionably, though, our Islamist enemies know it, as do hundreds of millions of other Muslims who have not taken up arms against us. Even Muslim voices who counsel peace to their brethren understand what the real religion of Western people is, often more than we.
In the last several hundred years the West evolved a distinctive answer of what is truth and what is its authority. In contrast, Islam’s progress in that inquiry mostly stopped just as the West was shifting out of first gear. Until the last half-century, the divergence between the West’s and Islam’s theology and philosophy of truth was not a basis for contention. After World War II the divergence took on a character that unfortunately was much more adversarial than cooperative, and finally more violent than peaceful.
This history, later coupled with cheap technology, worldwide communications and increasing globalization of economies and politics, butted headlong into Islamic societies that were ruthlessly patriarchal, theocratic, tribal and anti-democratic, all antithetical to what the West had become. After a four-hundred year hiatus, armed conflict between the West and a powerful strain of Islam broke out again.
This book is an historical, philosophical and religious exploration of how America and the West came into potentially catastrophic conflict with a prominent strain of Islam. For that topic, everyone, regardless of religion, creed or nationality is intensely interested in questions about truth and its authority. Like Pilate, both we and our present enemies realize that some answers are very threatening and that not all answers can be reconciled with one another. Unless we improve our understanding of the deep roots of the conflict and what is really at stake, we can’t effectively discern what to do next.

Donald Sensing is a retired military officer and Methodist minister. Read more…

Globetrotters

More Money Than Brains 3 Comments

Paul Martin is cutting short (by a day) his vacation in Morocco. Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew was in Paris, and International Development Minister Aileen Carroll is returning from South America. Deputy PM Anne McLellan is in contact “by phone”…
Do Canadian politicians ever vacation in Canada?
Meanwhile, others do find our country appealing in the winter – none other than the leading candidate to take over from France’s Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy. Of course, the “Sagard” estate of Paul Desmarais ain’t exactly Waskesui.
Norm Spector passes along this observation from Konrad Yakabuski;

Mr. Sarkozy’s stay at Mr. Desmarais’ massive Sagard estate � so big it’s considered a pillar of the local economy � has the power elite in Montreal and Paris alike evergreen with envy. But it only confirms a universal truth: Whether your goal is 24 Sussex Dr. or the �lys�e, you need to know Paul Desmarais.

Good News

Gopher News 8 Comments
CBC: In a release, the U.S. Department Agriculture said it will now recognize Canada as a minimal- risk region for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the scientific name for mad cow disease.
Beginning March 7, Canadian producers will be able to start shipping live cattle under the age of 30 months, as well as beef products from animals over 30 months old. Ruminants such as goats and elk will also be allowed.

Update: You just had to know this was going to happen. A new case of BSE may have been found in a Canadian dairy cow. (It has yet to be confirmed). According to USDA spokespeople this morning, it shouldn’t delay the border opening (the expectation is for about a dozen BSE positives a year) . But it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

If Required

Insufferable Twits 2 Comments

Reuters on the news conference by Bill Graham that already has our local radio news people crowing that Canada has pledged “more than the US” to tsunami relief:

Defence Minister Bill Graham, explaining why the ministers had not come home more quickly, told a news conference: “The scope of the tragedy, the scope of the damage that was done, took some time for us to absorb.”

Not to anyone who knows how to spell “Drudge Report”, Bill. Try it, sometime.

The government has faced repeated questions as to why it was not sending its Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), a 200- member military unit created precisely for this kind of emergency. Graham said it would cost C$15 million to C$20 million just to get it there and said it would not be able to arrive before next week even if required. He said the reconnaissance team leaving on Thursday for the region would determine if parts or all of the rapid response team were needed.

Graham: “This is an issue we look at in terms of whether it’s appropriate, whether countries need it and whether or not it’s worth moving it.”

The Diplomad is is at the scene. Mercifully, Canada stayed outside his line of fire today. He begins by quoting a UN statement;

As the United Nations system moves into high gear to identify the immediate needs of the countries devastated by the South Asian tsunami that has reportedly claimed nearly 70,000 lives and affected millions more, initial actions have been tailored to help each of the worst-hit nations.

He goes on to say,

The UN site then goes on to list all the “donations” that the World Food Program and other UN agencies are making to alleviate the suffering.

OK. We’ll make this short.

Let’s start with the last citation, the one from the UN. I can tell you, dear readers, that I am temporarily working in one of the countries that got slammed hard by the tsunami and while the UN effort might be in high gear, it must have its parking brake on. No sign of that effort here! Lots of bureaucrats flying in and out, but that’s about it.

And now to that Egeland character and the UN official site’s claims. Notice to the UN: The USA is BY FAR the biggest donor to the UN system. We pay for about 25% of the whole operation, BUT when you look at operations like WFP or UNHCR, we cough up about 40%. That wheat and rice that the WFP is bragging about? It is almost all from the USA. Notice to Mr. Egeland: if taxpayers want to give more they can do so without having the government reach into their wallets. Ever hear of charities? The American people are BY FAR the biggest donors to private charities — many of which are doing very fine work here in alleviating the suffering. Please note, they are actually on the ground, delivering goods and services, not flying about on first class tickets and holding press conferences in New York.

Now to that weird Post newspaper. Whom have you heard saying Bush is insensitive to the plight of the victims of this natural disaster? I haven’t heard that here in ground zero. I doubt you’ve heard it anywhere but in the MSM.

Well, whaddaya know? The German Chancellor has cut short his vacation! Now that’s gotta hurt a EUroweenie, huh? Giving up a day or two of the four or five or six months annual vacation EUrocrats get –boy that feeds and shelters a lot of people out here! They really appreciate it, Mr Chancellor! And those $4 million the ENTIRE EU has pledged, yeah, that’ll do it! I’m sure it will be a big help when some of it gets here in about six months.

One more note about the USA. The amounts listed in the newspapers as donated by the USA greatly underestimate the true size of the donation we make. We are moving huge numbers of aircraft, ships, and personnel to help out. We have carriers and even a MEU on the move. And guess what? We don’t charge the UN for that, and we don’t include those enormous costs in any “pledging conferences.” The only countries I see delivering goods and services where I am are the Aussies (who are terrific!) and us. The EU is only to be seen in press releases.

These lib-left people and their posturing make me sick . . . real folks are dying and the comfortable chattering lefties want little lip-biting gestures. I’ll take a C-130 any day.

A Snapshot Of Camp Julien

Military 1 Comment

From a recent arrival to Camp Julien, Afghanistan.

It is a well organized camp. We work, eat, sleep, shower, all in tents. The sleeping quarters area is down a flight of stairs into a lower area. The tents are all in rows…………tent city. Each large tent is set apart by a concrete bunker around it. When you go in the door it appears almost like a hall with canvass walls. There are 8 people per tent unit. Each has their own ‘cubicle’. The cubicles are made of canvass with a zippered door. Nobody uses the zipper though, because it is very iratating to hear a zipper open and close each time someone has to go to the bathroom. We have hung up blankets or rugs instead, gotten at a bargan from the market. The cubicles are large enough to comfortable contain your cot with a mattress and a couple of barrack boxes. Some of the people who have been here for the whole ROTO have given there area a personal touch. The woman I replaced has shelves. There is an availability of wood here, and no shortage of talent. The guys built here a couple of ‘book shelf’ units to hold clothes and such. Each of us has a light and power supply. There are lots of TVs and DVDs here.
A word about DVDs and CDs. That is a hot item here. There is a large business in bootleg discs. You can by up to 5 movies burnt on a disc for as little as 2.50 US. Even all the movies still in the theatres are out there. They record them from the movie theatres or find stolen copies of to bootleg.
The bathroom is another story. From the outside it almost appears like a sea cargo container with tented sides opened out. Inside on the right is 5 stainless steel toilets up on pedestals. You step up into the toilet area and close the canvas curtain behind you. There is very little room. Your knees touch the canvas. There are 5 showers on the otherside. The bathrooms are cleaned once a day by a cleaning staff. They do an excellent job of it.
One other thing I am greatly impressed by, is the laundry facilities. If you take your laundry in before 1100 to the laundry tent, it will be ready for you the next day by 1300. It is returned bagged and folded. Laundry is sent out to be done. It is so nice and clean. Gone are the days of sitting for 6 to 8 hours on the ship to do laundry and fighting for a washer or dryer. Then getting your clothes out smelling like jet fuel.
Right now I am not impressed with the weather. The other night it rained all night and turned to slush by morning. It snowed/rained all the next day. We now have rivers and lakes in the camp. This is reeking havoc with the power. Our sleeping area/bathrooms had power problems for the last few days. Power is on and off. It gets bloody cold in those tents with no heat.
There you go. A little taste of life in the fast lane.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 3 Comments

Police admit defeat in the battle to control marijuana grow operations. (Really?? I wonder… other cities seem to have the legal capacity and manpower to demand entry to homes to search for unlicensed pets. )
“China uses visiting students, scientists, business people and delegations to obtain industrial secrets and high-technology that will benefit Chinese companies and its military-industrial complex, said the source, who asked not to be identified for national security reasons.”
Well, look on the bright side – at least they’re not going to spirit away any new military technology.
Muslims are winning the war against free speech and Zionists in Britain, according to Hani Mohammad at Islam Online – a must read article.
Naivette this profound must be painful. Memo to Salim Mansur – try doing a little google searching. You’ll figure out why the Canadian government has been mute on UN corruption – they’re in it up to their Desmarais.

Breeding Their Own Slaves

Genetics No Comments

Ants’ ‘genetic engineering’ leads to species interdependency

Findings reported this week reveal how an evolutionary innovation involving the sharing of genes between two ant species has given rise to a deep-seated dependency between them for the survival of both species populations. The new work illustrates how genetic exchange through interbreeding between two species can give rise to a system of interdependence at a high level of biological organization–in this case, the production of worker ants for both species.
Millions of years before the first modern humans evolved, ants were practicing many of the social innovations we consider to be our own: division of labor, agriculture, and even slavery. Indeed, these traits have been taken to their extreme in many ant species, such as the case of slavemaker ants, which have become so specialized for raiding food from the colonies of other ants that they can no longer feed themselves or raise their younger siblings. Recent work on ants suggests that we may need to add genetic engineering to the list of innovations ants have evolved to employ. In two species of harvester ants, populations have been discovered in which queens mate with males of another species to produce genetically novel hybrid workers. In a new study, Dr. Sara Helms Cahan and colleagues demonstrate that both of the species involved have effectively given up the ability to produce pure-species workers in favor of the hybrids, thereby becoming completely dependent on one another for survival.
Female ants are generally found in two forms: reproductive queens and sterile workers. The role, or caste, of an individual is determined for life at a certain stage in her development. In virtually all ant species, it is the environment in which a female is raised, rather than a genetic predisposition, that determines which caste she will adopt. However, in two harvester ant populations in southern New Mexico, queens and workers from the same colonies are genetically very different; in both species at the site, only the queens are genetically derived from a pure species-specific lineage, whereas all the workers are hybrids that possess a combination of genes from the two species in a single individual. It is not currently known whether the ants benefit from having hybrids do the work, but, as is evident from the researchers’ own attempts at selective breeding and genetic engineering, combining genomes is an easy way to produce novel characteristics that may be highly advantageous for growth, environmental tolerance, or disease resistance. Regardless of the specific advantages, however, it is clear that these ants have committed themselves to the hybrid workforce strategy. When the researchers prevented queens from mating with males of the other species, very few succeeded in making any workers at all, a handicap that would lead to certain population failure in the field. The new findings suggest that specialization involving reliance on interspecific hybrid workers has left these species unable to survive independently of one another.

A little like Paul Martin’s minority government…

Illogistics

Military 5 Comments

Laurie Hawn reveals how the gutting of the Canadian military has resulted in an inability to move the manpower and equipment most needed during natural disasters. “We can’t get there from here”;

What the devastated area really needs is our capability to deal with such emergencies with direct medical aid and other life saving requirements, such as potable water. We have that capability standing by in the Canadian Forces Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), but we just can’t get there from here. The reason for that is that we have lost our capability to deploy such an asset by sea or air in a timely manner.
Our strategic sealift capability resides in three overtasked supply ships, in need of replacement, and smaller-sized and equally overtasked warships, not designed to haul equipment and supplies. With the Navy’s shortage of personnel and existing deployments of ships, timeliness would be a major handicap in addressing the short-term requirements.
The capability of the Air Force to reliably deploy in an emergency situation has gone the way of the serviceability of our C-130 Hercules fleet, that is straight downhill with age and overuse. We will use what Hercs and Airbuses are available to send equipment and supplies, but it will be on a catch-as-catch-can basis. To commit to sending DART would require a carefully planned operation and a large number of serviceable C- 130s to conduct it in a timely manner. The emergency operational planning is a no-brainer for the tremendously capable people we have in uniform. The expectation of a large number of C-130 missions without embarrassing breakdowns is another question. We’ve been there before and that just might be the real reason behind the slow/non-existent response with DART. We don’t want to risk looking like the international weaklings that we have become.

And we had better hope that a similar catastrophe doesn’t strike in Canada – the Armed Forces would be hard pressed to move large volumes of equipment and supplies by road, if the convoy of vintage transport vehicles I passed near Regina on Monday is any indication. They were parked on the shoulder, stalled by a breakdown of one of the trucks.

SUV’s Kill Thousands In SE Asia

Moonbats 4 Comments

It took them two days, but Greenpeace has found a way to tie the tsunami in Southeast Asia to global warming. You see, it’s all about the mangrove swamps!

A creeping rise in sea levels tied to global warming, pollution and damage to coral reefs may make coastlines even more vulnerable to disasters like tsunamis or storms in future, experts said Monday.
Few coastal ecosystems are robust enough to withstand freak waves like the ones that slammed into Asian nations from Sri Lanka to Thailand Sunday, killing more than 22,000 people, after a subsea earthquake off Indonesia.
But global warming, poorly planned coastal development and other threats over which humans have some control are weakening natural defenses ranging from mangrove swamps to coral reefs that help keep the oceans at bay.

I notice that “human overpopulation” is seldom cited as a problem in the wake of such events. Even Greenpeace knows when an argument becomes an oxymoron.
(ht – Powerline)
update – Juan Cole (one man Al-Zarqawi fan club and professional conspiracy theorist), gets in on the act.

Susan Sontag – RIP

Insufferable Twits No Comments

Laurence Simon has a devastatingly cruel – and apt – obituary for an outspoken apologist of terrorism.

The breast cancer cells that killed Susan Sontag were not cowards or an “evil” disease attacking an individual human being. No, they were the bravest of cells, attacking Susan from within at high risk to their own existence, uprising and resisting the constant bombardment from the so-called “brave” medical practicioners bathing her in radiation and chemotherapy. These so-called curatives were nothing more than genocidal technological campaigns waged against the livelihood of these innocent cancer cells, and these treatments slaughtered these cancer cells that had just as much a right to live and go about their business as any other of the cells in Susan’s body.

Ouch.
(hat tip – OTB

Aftershocks

Radioactive No Comments

Aftershocks continue near the original earthquake zone, and they’re large.
Even in the crush of need, there’s enough surviving political will remaining to reject Israeli help and “if you can’t find blame, go for shame” criticism of the US. … It’s too bad the Americans didn’t respond by announcing diversion of their UN funding to the rescue and rebuilding efforts.
In other news, The NYT is acknowledging the ability of blogs to stay ahead of the information curve.
Tsunami Help is an example of just that.
Command Post has a lengthy roundup of organizations providing information and soliciting donations.

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