Reporting All But The Key Facts

They've arrested a guy at Orlando Airport before he could get on a plane with bomb-making materials, and that's great. It's just the reporting that's lacking. Here's the account from a local TV station:

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A Jamaican man behavior specialists spotted acting suspiciously was detained and arrested after components used to make pipe bombs, unknown liquids and bomb-making literature were found in his luggage at Orlando International Airport. ...

The passenger, who the FBI identified as Kevin Brown, 32, was immediately taken into custody and a portion of the Terminal A in front of Virgin Atlantic was closed to passengers.

During a search of Brown's luggage, airport authorities found two galvanized pipes, end caps, two small containers containing BBs, batteries, two containers with an unknown liquid and bombing making literature, FBI officials said.

It goes on, but that's the gist of it. What's missing? Two things.

First, a description of the literature would be more than nice. Was it "Blowing Up Airplanes for Dummies" -- as implied but not clarified by the reference to "bomb-making literature" in the lead, or was it more sinister -- a some psycho rant he was working on ... or jihadist literature? Inquiring minds want to know.

One might -- might, mind you, given the quality of reporting nowadays -- assume the reporter would ask. If he or she did, then either the cops weren't talking or the editor cut it. Either is all right if the motivation is to protect the integrity of an ongoing investigation, but if the motivation is to protect Muslim sensitivities, then heads should roll.

Figuratively, of course. This is America, not Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Second, where exactly was that luggage when it was searched? If it was in checked-in baggage, it's much less significant than if it was in his carry-on baggage. The latter means his intent might have been to blow up that plane, and that TSA security was severely lacking.

The account tells us nothing, evidence of a level of reporting one could expect from an 8th grader. The accompanying flash slide show, however, shows a photo of the man seated on a curb outside the airport with a bomb squad person next to him apparently checking the contents of a bag. The caption reads:

When the person's bag was checked, it was found to have prohibitive [sic] materials inside, officials said. There was no word what was inside the bag.

Yet the lead says "components used to make pipe bombs, unknown liquids and bomb-making literature" were found in the bag. So was it in the carry-on? This story is so confusing!

I would be remiss if I didn't pass on the humor of the story. Remember, this guy was captured after "behavior specialists" spotted him "acting suspiciously." Way to go, TSA, having behavior specialists at the ready to defend the homeland. Except, a few paragraphs down the story says:

Passengers waiting to board flights at Orlando International Airport Tuesday said they noticed Brown acting suspiciously before agents moved in.

"He looked rather crazy," a passenger said. "He was rocking left and right and up and down. He looked a little wacko."

That could be a nervous man, a Muslim in prayer, or a person with a mental illness -- but it's hardly behavior that requires a behavior specialist to observe and act on.

Sunday Scan

Survival

I didn't know there was a publication called Survival until my friend Jim forward a link to it. No, it's not about eating grubs and avoiding grizzlies -- it's about geopolitical survival, the tectonic plates of foreign policy, and what we must do, as humans, to avoid the alternative to the publication's name.

In the winter 2007–08 issue, which I haven't seen, Philip Gordon, a Clintonista from the Brookings Institution, published an article that argued that America’s strategy against terror is failing ‘because the Bush administration chose to wage the wrong war.'

The current issue gives former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner an opportunity to rebut, and he does it quite well, without the arrogant rhetoric Gordon accuses the Bush administration of suffering from. Gordon presented six reasons why Bush has failed, and Wehner rebuts each quite neatly, while admitting our shortcomings along the way.

Each of the six rebuttals is a gem to file away for safekeeping until the next time you have to debate a rhetoric-spewing anti-Bushite, but I particularly liked this little bit in response to Gordon's claim that Bush has squandered the goodwill of the world:

For Gordon’s thesis to have merit, then, he would have to rewrite most of the history of the past six years. He would have to erase virtually all of the day-to-day activity of the war on terror, which as a practical matter consists of unprecedented levels of cooperation and integrated planning across scores of countries, both long-time allies and new partners.

All of this calls to mind the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which the Judean ‘guerrillas’ debate whether the Roman Empire has brought any good to the Holy Land. John Cleese’s character asks rhetorically what good the Romans have done. After his men point out one benefit after another, the Cleese character is obliged to say: ‘All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’

Apart from the vast number of multilateral anti-terrorism initiatives from 2001 to the present, when has the Bush administration ever worked in partnership with other countries?

The magazine offers the opportunity for counterpoint to Kishore Mahbubani, Dean and Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, and the tired, recycled rhetoric of his piece underscores the effectiveness of Wehrner's piece. Here's an example, part of his argument that America's support for Israel makes friendship with the Islamic world difficult:

The threat Israel faces was illustrated very well by Deng Xiaoping, who once used a simple comparison to describe the folly of Vietnam taking on China after defeating America in 1975. When he was asked how long China could fight Vietnam, Deng replied that when a large rock and a small stone are continuously rubbed together, over time the small stone disappears. Vietnam soon realised the wisdom of Deng’s comments. Despite the confidence the nation felt after America’s retreat, it sued for peace with China. Vietnam’s population is 84 million, while China’s is 1.3 billion, meaning there are 15 Chinese for every Vietnamese. The ratio of Israel’s population (7m) to that of the Islamic world (1.5bn) is even worse – 1:200. Wisdom dictates that Israel should work for peace.

What a concept! Israel should work for peace! Why hasn't this occurred to us before? Mahbubani, in one paragraph, has succeeded in exquisitely illustrating for us the blind, hate-filled, anti-Semitic mind of Islam -- even the highly educated, moderate Islamic mind he says is different from our perception of Islam.

Unlucky Seven

Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride, look out. You've got company.

After 1,500 years of committee meetings and prayer, the Catholic church has added to the list of mortal sins for the first time since Pope Gregory. And I have to say, the new Bad Biggies lack the simple message impact of the first Big Seven.

Lust? Got it. Gluttony, yup. Sloth ... I could go on through the seven but I'm sooo tired, and you get the point: They're all one-worders that get their point across well and easily. But some of the new ones? "'Manipulative' genetic scientists?" What does mean? That they play nasty little tricks to get more than their fair share of Petri dishes?

Fortunately, we have Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, to explain it to us. Manipulative genetic scientists are those who "carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos.”

I see. But I bet these scientists are already loaded up with avarice and pride and therefore are in for a Dante-esque afterlife.

Abortion is also new to the list, and let's give it a warm welcome -- as long as we're talking about abortionists, not women who have abortions. It's the abortionists, who live high on the hog by murdering the unborn with full recognition of what they're doing, who deserve to move up to Majors in the Sin League.

Unfortunately, it appears the Catholic Church is including those that have abortions on the list as well, just as it is including those who take drugs with the deserving new mortal sin bunch, drug dealers. People who have abortions and people who do drugs have much wrong with them and are guilty of many sins, but I don't understand how the Vatican can group them with the profiteers who exploit their weakness. Given that the Catholic Church had 1,500 years to make the list, couldn't it have done a better job?

Rounding out the seven are environmental polluters (which includes all of us, of course, so I hope some quantification is provided), pedophiles (including those in priest's robes), the "obscenely wealthy" (how does that differ from gluttony?), and social injustice that causes poverty (which is sometimes the scapegoat for sloth and avarice).

All in all, we've been presented with a complicated and confusing bunch of new sins, lacking the simplicity and clarity of the first seven. Come the year 3,508 -- 1,500 years hence -- the Church may stretch the list to 21. Let's hope they do a better job than they did with this bunch.

Wombs For Rent

Best be careful here ... this seems to be a dangerously narrow loophole between the genetic manipulation and social injustice mortal sins we just talked about. Let's let the NYT (which is surely some sort of mortal sin all by itself) explain:

An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).

Because few if any well-healed women will offer to be a surrogate womb for a stranger, surrogacy is a business of giving poor women enough money ($7,500, according to the NYT) to make an all-business pregnancy worthwhile, for the benefit of a wealthier couple.

While I like the free trade aspects of it -- that these desperately poor Indian women are quite literally lifted out of grinding poverty for the price of one or two pregnancies -- it's hard not to be struck by this paragraph from the NYT story:

In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.

Is the fact that the surrogate's own children will never have to sign a contract with a thumbprint, thanks to the education they received because their mother rented out her womb, enough to make this entire enterprise cheery and bright? Not quite.

Shocking Headline of the Day

And the winner is ... BBC!

Conservatives win Iran election

Meanwhile ...

Those Iranian conservatives have been busy protecting their slaves citizens from things the poor oppressed masses happy participants in the Islamic Revolution don't know to protect themselves from:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's Culture Ministry on Sunday announced the closure of nine cinema and lifestyle magazines for publishing pictures and stories about the life of "corrupt" foreign film stars and promoting "superstitions."

The Press Supervisory Board, a body controlled by hard-liners, also sent warning notes to 13 other publications and magazines on "observing the provisions of the press law," the ministry said on its website.

It was not clear why the nine magazines were targeted for closure. They do not deal with politics, focusing on light lifestyle features, family advice, and news of celebrities.

They regularly publish photos of Iranian actresses in loose headscarves and stylish clothes, as well as foreign female film stars without head coverings — but nothing more revealing than what is tolerated on some state media.

The ministry said it shut them down for "using photos of artists, especially foreign corrupt film stars, as instruments (to arouse desire), publishing details about their decadent private lives, propagating medicines without authorization, promoting superstitions."

You know, sick as I am of 24/7 Brittany and Paris news, I sometimes wish we could have a little media repression here ... but then the thought passes.

Had the Iranian election been fair (a BIG "had"), chances are the government would have paid the price for this sort of unwelcomed, heavy-handed control over peoples' lives. But it wasn't fair, so the conservatives won big.

The reference to "propagating medications without authorization" is apparently a reference to ads the shuttered publications ran for male enhancement formulas. Apparently the Islamic state has no room for enhanced males.

Going Green, China Style

Perhaps, being better read than I, you've read kudo-laden accounts of an emerging solar panel industry in China, and perhaps you've thought, "Ah, the corner is begining to be turned. China may be changing from its polluted ways."

Well, that just proves that being better-read doesn't mean having better sense. ENN explains why:

As people worldwide increasingly feel the heat of climate change, many are applauding the skyrocketing growth China’s fledging solar-cell industry. ...

A recent Washington Post article, however, has revealed that China’s booming solar industry is not as green as one might expect. [Really?!] Many of the solar panels that now adorn European and American rooftops have left behind a legacy of toxic pollution in Chinese villages and farmlands.

The Post article describes how Luoyang Zhonggui, a major Chinese polysilicon manufacturer, is dumping toxic factory waste directly on to the lands of neighboring villages, killing crops and poisoning residents. Other polysilicon factories in the country have similar problems, either because they have not installed effective pollution control equipment or they are not operating these systems to full capacity. Polysilicon is a key component of the sunlight-capturing wafers used in solar photovoltaic (PV) cells.

Uh-oh. That's a mortal sin, fer sure.

So now when you put those PV units on your rooftop, you can rest easy knowing that not only are you greener than the Jones, you're significantly less poisoned by Chinese industrial pollution than the Pengs, whose picture (above) ran with the WaPo story.

Feeling A Little Cocky

Let's see if the Euros, the ex-Soviets, the Chinese or the Caliphate can do this:

NASA's Cassini spacecraft performed a daring flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wed., March 12, flying about 15 kilometers per second (32,000 mph) through icy water geyser-like jets. The spacecraft snatched up precious samples that might point to a water ocean or organics inside the little moon.

A Euro-Terrorist

On the heals of a study proving that al-Qaeda cynically recruits social outcasts for suicide bombings, we read this, from Spiegel:

His last mission began at exactly 4.04 p.m. on March 3. The driver pulled up his blue Toyota Dyna truck in front of the Sabari district center in the eastern Afghan province of Khost. The motor was still running when he hit the detonator. The force of the blast shook the earth and caused the guard post to collapse, trapping dozens of US soldiers under the rumble. The explosion was so forceful that eye witnesses assumed there had been a rocket attack on the building that the US army had built just two months previously.

Of course, as a suicide bomber, his "last mission" was also his first mission. This punk who killed two of our men has been identified by the Islamic Jihad Union as 28-year-old "Cüneyt C." from Bavaria, a scrawny, pimply-faced loser of a German-born Turk. Spiegel provides more detail:

Cüneyt C., a 28-year-old German-born Turk, is known to be an Islamist and to have had links with the so-called "Sauerland Cell" led by Fritz Gelowicz and Adem Yilmaz. He had been regarded as dangerous since their arrest last year on suspicion of planning a terror attack (more...) in Germany. "Ismail from Ansbach," as C. was called by his friends had already left Germany by then. He left Ansbach with his wife and two children on April 2, giving up his apartment, quitting his job and even going to the local registration office to inform them he was leaving the area.

The investigators have since regarded C. as belonging to a group who have traveled from Germany to Pakistan in order to receive training as Jihadists. In the eyes of the German authorities this makes them extremely dangerous.

This is why we can't treat terrorism as a problem to be handled by the legal system, as the Libs and Dems would have it. German intelligence was well aware of the risk posed by C. and his scummy friends, but because no crime had been committed by them, Germany couldn't stop them. By exploiting the system, the Islamic Jihad carried out a successful operation ... leaving behind at least two orphans and sending a sick young man to Hell.

Think Again, Code Pink

Before Code Pink half-wits picket Berkeley's USMC recruiting station, maybe they should read about the recruiters our recruiters are up against:

In an interview, two senior analysts who helped question the 48 captured fighters said the picture that emerges is of a cold and calculating process that recruits young alienated men who are social outcasts. Neither of the interrogators could be named for security reasons.

"Al-Qaida recruits these people from the Middle East and North Africa, hitting them at the most vulnerable time of the life," said one of the analysts with the U.S.-led Multinational Force.

The demand for many foreign fighters begins in places such as the dingy back streets of teeming Iraqi cities such as Mosul, where al-Qaida still holds sway.

An al-Qaida cell decides it needs two suicide bombers. It puts in an order which is funded by money made through racketeering, extortion and kidnapping. That request goes to Damascus, Syria, and to the facilitators and recruiters training young men in North Africa and Saudi Arabia. Three months later, the bomber is delivered, military investigators and officials say.

According to the U.S. military, records seized from al-Qaida show that 40 percent come from North African countries such as Libya and Algeria, and 41 percent from Saudi Arabia.

Al-Qaida in Iraq recruiters troll mosques for potential fighters — impoverished young men who are believed at odds with their family or angry at the West, the military summary says.

"They are experts at identifying these men" who are often sitting alone in mosques, one of the analysts said. "They befriend them, usually by saying that they are praying wrong and offering to correct it."

They then offer to help them with Quran studies, and that is the start of their indoctrination into the jihadi philosophy. (AP)

There is, I hope, a particularly hot and uncomfortable circle in Hell for jihad recruiters. If the meek -- the targets of these appallingly evil people-- are blessed, then damned, double-damned, are those who deliberately hunt them out and turn them into vessels of evil.

Of course, Code Pink will blame all this on America, instead of jihadist Islamism. When the intelligence recruiter was handing out brains, they must have been demonstrating at the "Breasts not Bombs" rally.

Guess The Insurgent

It's that age-old question: What are these folks are insurging about, what they're militanting over?

BANGKOK, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Two students and an official were wounded when suspected insurgents detonated a bomb at Yala Rajabhat University in Thailand's southern province of Yala on Friday morning.

A five-kilogram bomb was placed inside its Science and Technology Faculty and was detonated by remote control at around 10 a.m. (0300 GMT), according local newspaper the Nation's website.

The victims, all female, were rushed to Yala Center Hospital.

Kraisorn Sritrairat, dean of the university, was quoted as saying that police are still not sure who planted the bomb. However, he said he believes the attack must be staged by suspected militants.

Thailand's three southernmost provinces -- Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala have been troubled with insurgency-related violence which has claimed more than 2,800 people's lives since 2004.

Note that this report is from Xinhua, China's news agency. If we're to believe what officially atheistic China reports regarding its Muslim population, there are 26.4 million Muslims in the People's Republic, so we can see why Beijing doesn't want to rile the jihad set.

But anyone who's been tracing jihad over the last few years has had to track Indonesia, especially its southern provinces. As Global Security reports:

The 4-province area in the southern-most part of Thailand, which is populated mainly by Muslim Thais, has not been completely pacified. There are still some small groups of Islamic radical[s], which sometime resort to violent tactics in order to make their presence felt, are still posing problems to public safety in the south. The crack down on terrorist organizations, with connections to international terrorist groups like Al-Queda, may spill over into this sensitive area. The possibility of local Islamic radical groups in the south giving sanctuary or staging location for future attack to fellow neighboring or international factions cannot be totally discounted. It has been a concern among Thai and friendly countries. Authorities have known for quite some time that many Muslim Thai activists went overseas to Islamic schools, where they came under influence of hard-line teachers. Some were reported to have joined the jihad war against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and returned to Thailand as extremists.

So I guess what they're insurging and militanting about, eh?

Air Terror

Frequent hat-tip recipient Jim turned me on to this Times of London story posted at Jules Crittenden. It's a heck of a story in itself, but it's copied here so that you will read all the way down to the last paragraph, where the money is:

A co-pilot at the controls of a passenger jet bound for Heathrow was forcibly removed from the cockpit and bound hand and foot after he began “asking for God” 30,000 feet over the Atlantic.

Passengers aboard Air Canada’s Flight AC848 from Toronto to London on Monday said the flight officer started shouting and crying at the controls when they were less than an hour from Heathrow.

His colleagues, helped by an off-duty member of the Canadian Armed Forces, took the man out of the cockpit, apparently in the middle of a mental breakdown, tied his wrists and ankles in front of astonished passengers. He was then handcuffed to a seat while the flight diverted to Shannon airport, in the West of Ireland.

After the jet landed at Shannon with only the captain at the controls, the co-pilot was taken off the plane and put in a waiting ambulance, which took him to an acute psychiatric unit. ...

Sean Finucane, a passenger, told the Canadian broadcaster CBC that the co-pilot “was swearing and asking for God. He specifically said he wants to talk to God. He was yelling loudly but didn’t sound intoxicated When they tried to put his shoes on later, he swore and threatened people. He was very, very distressed.”

Another passenger, writing on the website flyertalk.com, said that the co-pilot was pinned down in seat 12A, a window seat in the first row of the economy class section. “It was quite an experience,” the passenger wrote. “The entire mini-cabin could hear the whole thing. Not for delicate ears. The soldier and the doctors [who were passengers] were great.”

The writer said that the flight crew were “calm and professional throughout”. …

In 1999 a suicidal co-pilot was blamed for the crash of an EgyptAir flight from New York that came down in the Atlantic with the loss of 217 lives after he was heard on the cockpit voice recorder saying: “I put my faith in God.”

Suicidal?! An easy word to type, perhaps, but a challenging word to nonchalantly pass off as justified, given the facts.

Like the fact that the co-pilot of EgyptAir flight 990, Gameel Al-Batouti, was putting his faith in Allah, not God?

Or the fact that 30 Egyptian military officers; including two brigadier-generals, a colonel, major, and four other air force officers, were on board at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic groups in Egypt were basically at war with the Egyptian military?

Or the fact that the Egyptian government prohibited Egyptian media from reporting the presence of the military officers in their reporting on the crash, seemingly reinforcing the notion that the crash was a jihadist act against the military?

Egypt put forth various personal and disciplinary issues Al-Batouti ws facing to justify that it was "just a suicide," and al-Batouti's family said he was not deeply religious, but passing off Flight 990's crash as an act of suicide without further illumination is akin to Britain's recent decision to refer to terrorist acts as "anti-Islamic actions."

The methodical deliberateness and Al-Batouti's trance-like chanting of "I rely on God" [an alternative translation of "I put my faith in God"] is evident in the NTSB's final report on the incident:

At 0148:30, about 11 seconds after the captain left the cockpit, the CVR recorded an unintelligible comment.10 Ten seconds later (about 0148:40), the relief first officer stated quietly, "I rely on God."11 There were no sounds or events recorded by the flight recorders that would indicate that an airplane anomaly or other unusual circumstance preceded the relief first officer's statement, "I rely on God."

At 0149:18, the CVR recorded the sound of an electric seat motor. FDR data indicated that, at 0149:45 (27 seconds later), the autopilot was disconnected.12 Aside from the very slight movement of both elevators (the left elevator moved from about a 0.7° to about a 0.5° nose-up deflection, and the right elevator moved from about a 0.35° nose-up to about a 0.3° nose-down deflection)13 and the airplane's corresponding slight nose-down pitch change, which were recorded within the first second after autopilot disconnect, and a very slow (0.5° per second) left roll rate, the airplane remained essentially in level flight about FL 330 for about 8 seconds after the autopilot was disconnected. At 0149:48, the relief first officer again stated quietly, "I rely on God." At 0149:53, the throttle levers were moved from their cruise power setting to idle, and, at 0149:54, the FDR recorded an abrupt nose-down elevator movement and a very slight movement of the inboard ailerons. Subsequently, the airplane began to rapidly pitch nose down and descend.

Between 0149:57 and 0150:05, the relief first officer quietly repeated, "I rely on God," seven additional times.14 During this time, as a result of the nose-down elevator movement, the airplane's load factor15 decreased from about 1 to about 0.2 G.16 Between 0150:04 and 0150:05 (about 10 to 11 seconds after the initial nose-down movement of the elevators), the FDR recorded additional, slightly larger inboard aileron movements, and the elevators started moving further in the nose-down direction. Immediately after the FDR recorded the increased nose-down elevator movement, the CVR recorded the sounds of the captain asking loudly (beginning at 0150:06), "What's happening? What's happening?," as he returned to the cockpit.

The airplane's load factor decreased further as a result of the increased nose-down elevator deflection, reaching negative G loads (about -0.2 G) between 0150:06 and 0150:07. During this time (and while the captain was still speaking [at 0150:07]), the relief first officer stated for the tenth time, "I rely on God." Additionally, the CVR transcript indicated that beginning at 0150:07, the CVR recorded the "sound of numerous thumps and clinks," which continued for about 15 seconds.

According to the CVR and FDR data, at 0150:08, as the airplane exceeded its maximum operating airspeed (0.86 Mach), a master warning alarm began to sound. (The warning continued until the FDR and CVR stopped recording at 0150:36.64 and 0150:38.47, respectively.)17 Also at 0150:08, the relief first officer stated quietly for the eleventh and final time, "I rely on God," and the captain repeated his question, "What's happening?" At 0150:15, the captain again asked, "What's happening, [relief first officer's first name]? What's happening?" At this time, as the airplane was descending through about 27,300 feet msl, the FDR recorded both elevator surfaces beginning to move in the nose-up direction. Shortly thereafter, the airplane's rate of descent began to decrease.18 At 0150:21, about 6 seconds after the airplane's rate of descent began to decrease, the left and right elevator surfaces began to move in opposite directions; the left surface continued to move in the nose-up direction, and the right surface reversed its motion and moved in the nose-down direction.

The FDR data indicated that the engine start lever switches for both engines moved from the run to the cutoff position between 0150:21 and 0150:23.19 Between 0150:24 and 0150:27, the throttle levers moved from their idle position to full throttle, the speedbrake handle moved to its fully deployed position, and the left elevator surface moved from a 3º nose-up to a 1º nose-up position, then back to a 3º nose-up position.20 During this time, the CVR recorded the captain asking, "What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engine(s)?" Also, at 0150:26.55, the captain stated, "Get away in the engines,"21 and, at 0150:28.85, the captain stated, "shut the engines." At 0150:29.66, the relief first officer stated, "It's shut."

Between 0150:31 and 0150:37, the captain repeatedly stated, "Pull with me." However, the FDR data indicated that the elevator surfaces remained in a split condition (with the left surface commanding nose up and the right surface commanding nose down) until the FDR and CVR stopped recording at 0150:36.64 and 0150:38.47, respectively. (The last transponder [secondary radar] return from the accident airplane was received at the radar site at Nantucket, Massachusetts, at 0150:34.)22

Creepy: multiple, methodical steps against the backdrop of ten chants of "I rely on God" as the terrifying event unfolded. This may have just been a suicide, but unless the Air Canada co-pilot was a Muslim, it is utterly inappropriate to juxtapose Al-Batouti's chanting plunge to mass murder with the mental breakdown of the Air Canada co-pilot.

Sunday Scan

A Curious Endorsement

Ed Morrisey, skipper of Captain's Quarters has decided who he's going to vote for and has published an endorsement. It's Mitt Romney, and his thinking is much like mine, as I approach finality in my decision-making. (I need to decide by California's Feb. 5 primary unless I vote absentee.)

No one's the perfect conservative, but Mitt'll do. Check. Executive leadership and experience. Check. The guy we want if the economy turns south. Check.

What is telling, very, very telling, is that the war against Islamic jihadists and Iraq is not mentioned once in Morissey's endorsement. How could such a thoroughly exceptional an observer of our times make so monumental oversight?

In part, it's because when looking at McCain, Romney and Giuliani, there's strong confidence that any of them have the ability to faithfully and forcefully guide the mission.

And in part, it's because we have a general and senior staff in the field who are getting the job done, taking the pressure off the president.

And that is also, perhaps, the reason for Morrissey's oversight. With the war going well, one of the keenest observers of the war on terror simply forgot to mention it.

A Kennedy Endorsement

There's news today that Ted Kennedy has come out of his fog long enough to endorse Obama tomorrow. Could I care any less? Checking .... No.

But who can't take note, as I wrote last night, that Caroline Kennedy is endorsing Obama? That is golden; that has value; that has magic.

I still think of Caroline Kennedy as a little girl in a pretty coat standing by her mother as little John saluted. That image in our mind gives her a very special place in the American consciousness, as does how she has lived her life since: quietly and pretty darn normally.

So when this 40-year-old mother of teens who works in New York City's' schools writes of Obama in today's NYT ...

There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility. ...

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

... it is a powerful thing for Obama, indeed.

I was Boy Scout age when Kennedy was killed, so I admit that some youthful romanticism is affecting my thinking. That said, I still think this endorsement is huge, and may have just iced Obama as the Dem nominee.

And we were so hoping to be able to take on Hillary.

Throwing Stones At Greenhouses

In case your copy of the journal from the Institut für Mathematische Physik at Germany's Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina has been sitting around unread since last summer, here's what you're missing:

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 and is still supported in global climatology essentially describes a fictitious mechanism in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 °C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

A hat-tip Bubba who led me to the post by Van Helsing at Moonbattery, who comments, "Someone get this to Al Gore quickly, before he makes a fool of himself. Whoops, too late."

Russia Pumped Oil-for-Food For Bucks

Just when you thought the Oil-for-Food scandal was past its last outrage, just when you thought Putin's Russia couldn't get any more troubling, there's always another story that shouts, "You ain't seen nuthin' yet!" And this new one, from Sky News, is a doozey:

A former Russian spymaster has said his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500m (£252m) from the UN's oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Sergei Tretyakov says he helped Saddam Hussein's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the programme.

The scheme was set up to ease the suffering of ordinary Iraqis under UN sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

It allowed Iraq to sell oil provided the bulk of the proceeds were used to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods and to pay war reparations.

However, a UN investigation has accused 2,200 companies from 40 countries of cheating the scheme out of some $1.8bn (about £908m).

The former spy, who defected to the US in 2000 as a double agent, said this allowed Russia to skim profits on the scheme.

Of the UN, Tretyakov says,

"It's an international spy nest. Inside the UN, we were fishing for knowledgeable diplomats who could give us first of all anti-American information."

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing: Why do we pay to keep the UN alive when it's used against us, when it steals from and rapes those it is supposed to help, and when it's designed primarily to benefit our enemies?

Putin's New Man At NATO

And while we're on the subject of Putinville, let's pause to consider Vlad the Tiny's new appointment to represent Russia at NATO, Dmitri Rogozin. It's an appointment, says Andreus Umland at History News Network, that should be seen as "a slap in the face of the West."

The new NATO envoy is an infamous nationalist with manifold links to racist and antisemitic circles throughout his political career. From the beginning of his rise, Rogozin’s image has been that of a “protector” of ethnic Russians in and outside the Russian Federation, as well as of a rabidly anti-Western pan-Slavist. He was founder and co-founder of various nationalist groupings one of which openly demanded, among other things, to make homosexualism a criminal offense.

At a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Rogozin made Europe responsible for the horrors of Soviet communism - in as far as Marxism was imported to Russia from the West.

Just Putin's type, eh?

Bans And Lifting Bans

Spiegel has a couple interesting stories today on bans -- one on a busybody secularist ban that forces a change in many folks' lifestyle, all to aggrandize the Nanny State, and one a ban that's being lifted in order to squelch secularism -- an action that makes me nervous.

First, from Germany, the nation that brought us stern bauhaus avant guarde denizens, always with a cigarette dangling, there's this:

Helmut Schmidt, former German chancellor, former minister of defense and co-publisher of the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit, is being accused of breaking the law -- for violating Germany's new ban on smoking in public places.

Committed smokers Helmut Schmidt and his wife Loki -- aged a lung-cancer-defying 89 and 88, respectively -- are being investigated by Hamburg public prosecutors under suspicion of breaking the smoking ban and endangering public health, the mass-circulation daily Bild reported Friday. The complaint was brought by the Wiesbaden Non-Smokers Initiative, an anti-smoking organization based in the town of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt.

If you're almost 90 and you want to light up, and you're the guest of honor at the event, shouldn't you be able to? Of course not!

The Nanny Staters saw in Schmidt a target to publicize campaign to control our lives, so he and Loki are now potentially common criminals, all in the name of people who know what's good for us (and not smoking is definitely good for us) telling us what to do.

Then, from Turkey, there's this:

Women at Turkish universities could soon show up in class wearing traditional Islamic head scarves, as the government moves towards lifting a ban on the practice.

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has its root in an Islamist religious movement, reached an agreement with an opposition nationalist party on Thursday to cooperate on legislation to lift the two decade-old ban.

"Agreement has been reached ... the issue of the head scarf was evaluated in terms of rights and freedoms," read a joint statement released by the AKP and the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The two parties control enough seats in parliament to end the ban with a vote that could be held as early as next week.

A lift on the ban would anger Turkey's secular elite, who view the wearing of head scarves as a political statement aimed at undermining the nation's secular principles.

Anyone following Turkish politics could see this coming. Fundamentally (bad choice of words?), my response should be "good," because government shouldn't be setting dress codes for schools. If a Muslim girl wants to wear a scarf, then why shouldn't she be able to?

But things are never simple in Turkey, or with Islam. The ban is more like a social dike, keeping all the harsh and restrictive tenants of Islam from overtaking the university. It's a symbol that there's a place where free thought is still allowed -- even as banning the scarves is a symbol that there's a place where free thought is not allowed.

Big picture: Turkey is on its way to losing its important symbolic role as the world's foremost secular Islamic nation. I fear that once scarves are allowed on campus, any girl trying to go to school without one will become the victim of Islamist thugs, and Islam will grab the nation's free spirit in its chilling, vice-like grip.

"Everyone Has His Flaws." Terrorism Was This Guy's

A third would-be terrorist plead guilty today in federal court in Santa Ana, admitting that he had robbed gas stations in order to fund jihad attacks he planned to carry out on military sites, synagogues and Jewish centers in Southern California.

The terror ring, created in prison via Saudi-funded programs, was on the verge of action when it was busted by a joint federal/local task force.

The jihadist who plead guilty today is Gregory Patterson, a 23-year-old college student. Patterson's attorney executed a spin session that would have dazzled a Sufi, as described in the OC Register:

[Patterson's] attorney, William McKesson, said his client was an easily impressionable youth who become involved with the terrorist group after he was "manipulated" and "abused" by [Levar Haley] Washington [who plead guilty last week].

Patterson – who lives in the South Bay, and took classes at El Camino College in Torrance and California State University, Northridge – was raised Christian but was studying Islam when he met Washington, who was a guest speaker at an Islamic center attended by Patterson, McKesson said.

"He led a typical middle-class lifestyle, he never was in trouble with the law,'' the attorney said. "But everyone has flaws, and his (flaw) was that he was a follower."

Yeah, that's all that's wrong with him; he's just a follower.

What sort of person becomes interested in Islam after 9/11, the Mohammed cartoons and teddy bears, the Daniel Pearl beheading, Ahmadinejad's declarations on the Holocaust and Israel, and the continuous news of Islam's misogyny?

Oh, just a typical, middle-class Christian kid, right?

Gregory Patterson has a flaw all right. He is violently disturbed. He hates Jews, women and his country. He loves repression, violence and the killing of innocents.

He is a soldier of jihad, no different from any of the other crazies, really, who are nothing more than followers ... of Mohammed.

"The clock was ticking. All they needed to do was to start killing"

Even the LA Times, whose editorial line espouses jihad-denial, reports straight-up how close to deadly action the most recently busted U.S. terror operation was:

It was not the most spectacular domestic terrorism plot since the Sept. 11 attacks, and certainly not the best-known.

But no other case posed such a real and immediate threat as the audacious scheme to attack more than a dozen military centers, synagogues and other sites in Southern California, experts said Thursday.

"If you look at the roster of defendants in terrorism cases, it often seems like a casting call. They all have aspirations, but most lack real talent and helpful connections," said Brian Levin, an attorney and director of Cal State San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

"But here you actually had a case where defendants had a radicalized ideology, a list of targets and they had already gone from planning to operations," Levin said. "This was beyond merely a threat. In this instance, they were operational."

As the FBI's John Miller put it:

The clock was ticking. All they needed to do was to start killing.

Because the wannabe jihadists were so close to carrying out their plots, investigators had to act with uncharacteristic speed:

In a matter of weeks, the FBI, Los Angeles and Torrance police departments and two dozen other agencies conducted 19 searches, seized two dozen computer hard drives and examined about 53,000 documents, all without the normal luxury of moving at their own pace with undercover informants, surveillance and wiretaps.

Besides stopping the JIS' planned attacks, the case has resulted in new protocols between prison officials and anti-terror investigators, designed to track Islamic prison activities more closely.

Soon to follow: The CAIR/ACLU lawsuit against the new protocols.

American Jihadists Plead Guilty

A couple home-grown jihadists -- recruited for the Holy War against the Great Satan through Saudi-funded prison programs -- have pleaded guilty today here in OC to charges of conspiring to wage war against the United States, including plotting attacks on military sites, synagogues and other targets in Southern California.

The OC Register reports:

Kevin James, 31, and Levar Haley Washington, 28, members of a radical Islamic organization known as Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS, appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney in Santa Ana at separate times today and entered guilty pleas.

James, who is said to have founded the organization while in state prison in 1997, faces up to 20 years in prison. Washington, who also pleaded guilty to using a firearm during the plot, faces a sentence of up to 20 years on the conspiracy charges and five years to life in prison for the firearm charges, according to his plea agreement.

Also charged in the case are Gregory Vernon Patterson and Hammad Riaz Samana. The latter is a Pakistani national, but the other three are American-born Muslim converts.

James founded the JIS, which counsels its member to learn Arabic, train in various weapons, visit parole officers on schedule and not to stand out because "we've got work to do."

The Patriot Act was not needed to bring in this bunch. They decided to fund their jihad by robbing gas stations. The investigations into those crimes led the police to these men who were willing to kill their own people for no "crime" other than failing to convert to Islam.

Poster: 21st Century Paladin

Sunday Scan

Bad Karma For Islam

On October 8, Muslims in Pakistan followed in the footsteps of their Taliban brothers gang members, dynamiting the face of this wonderful 23 foot tall bas relief Buddha carved into a mountainside at Jenanabad in the Swat Valley. You can see the before and after here.

The history of the Swat Valley is one of marvelous cultural cross-pollination; a history now crushed by Islamic totalitarianism and intolerance. Tufts University history prof Gary Leupp explains (Counterpunch via HNN):

Conquered by Alexander the Greek and his Macedonians in the 320s BCE, this region became part of the Mauryan Empire. Emperor Ashoka in the mid-third century BCE promoted the spread of Buddhism here, and in the second century BCE the local Greek King Menander may have been a convert. (The Questions of Menander---supposedly a conversation between the king and a Buddhist monk---is unique among ancient Buddhist texts in its dialogue form, characteristic of Greek philosophical texts, and may have actually been composed originally in Greek.) Later the Kushan Empire centering on the Gandhara region encouraged the emergence of an Indo-Greek Buddhist style of sculpture.

The Swat Valley was at the cutting edge of one of the most extraordinary syntheses in art history: Buddhist content and classical realistic western sculpture. The Buddha, earlier represented symbolically (as a footprint), came to be depicted as a Greek deity or king, standing or seated in meditation.

The act was carried out by followers of cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who heads the "Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law," which is aligned with the Taliban. Leupp says the news was not reported widely in the West because it would have shown the spread of Taliban influence outside Afghanistan.

I doubt that was what motivated it, as our press is only too happy to show any failure in the War on Terror, and Taliban influence in the Swat Valley is already well understood. Leupp's piece is remarkably poor for a historian, blaming this on Bush, because his invasion drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan.

Historians should understand the porosity of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the longstanding social and religious cross-border ties, and the fact that the Russians created a much larger exodus in the 1980s, which further cemented cross-border melding. And Leupp should ask himself if the Taliban demolition of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan wouldn't have been followed by the destruction of the Jenanabad Buddhas much more quickly if the Taliban hadn't had their hands full trying to stay alive.

The Young and the Newsless

The writer's strike may effect the presidential election?! On its face it seems that the writers of sit coms and reality shows (you have to wonder why reality shows need writers ...) would have no impact at all on who should be the leader of the most powerful nation in this corner of the galaxy, but Adam Kelly, writing in The Phoenix, has a different viewpoint:

It’s easy to be flip about the deep implications of the Writers Guild of America strike, which is now stretching into its fourth week. After all, what’s the harm in missing a few episodes of Two and a Half Men?

But this take is too facile. In today’s media landscape, more and more serious-news coverage — particularly political news — is coming from written (read: fake) TV-news programs, with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as exhibits A1 and A2. We’re also in the midst of a wide-open presidential campaign. And with those shows out of commission, stories that could change the course of the race haven’t been getting the attention they otherwise would.

Kelly quotes a couple surveys that back him up:

In 2004, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that about as many young viewers were getting their presidential-campaign news from comedy programs including The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (21 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds who were polled) as from the nightly newscasts of NBC, ABC, and CBS (23 percent of the same group). The same study found that a whopping 61 percent of that same demographic got their campaign information from comedy and/or late-night talk shows, either regularly or occasionally.

In 2006, meanwhile, an Indiana University study of coverage of the ’04 race found that The Daily Show contained just as much substantive information as its network-news counterparts. Is it really surprising, then, that Democrat John Edwards announced his 2004 presidential candidacy on The Daily Show? Or that Republican John McCain did the same on Letterman’s show earlier this year, with fellow Republican Fred Thompson following suit on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno?

Can you imagine what these outlets would have done with the recent stories on Rudy's Byzantine billings for his Hamptons get-aways? And can you imagine a combined Stewart, Colbert, Maher, Leno and Letterman joke-a-thon not having an impact on Rudy's numbers?

It is only fitting that in this era of fakey candidates, fake news can have a real influence.

Japanese Work Ethic?

Apparently the reputation of the Japanese as notorious over-workers still has merit:

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Toyota Motor Corp employee died of overwork after logging more than 106 hours of overtime in a month, a judge ruled Friday, reversing a ministry's earlier decision not to pay compensation to his widow.

The Toyota Labor Standards Inspection office, a local branch of Japan's labor ministry, refused to pay the widow the usual compensation for a spouse's work-related death, saying the man had only logged 45 hours of overtime in the month before he died, Japanese media reported.

But the court ruled that the employee had worked far more than that .... The employee, who was working at a Toyota factory in central Japan, died of irregular heartbeat in February 2002 after passing out in the factory around 4 a.m.

Perhaps this can best be viewed as seppuku (hari kari) with a timeclock.

High-Priced Liberalism

San Francisco is facing a whopper of a $229 million budget deficit and there's only one target for the blame. And it's not the housing slump.

Much of the projected $229 million budget deficit that now preoccupies San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was created with his blessing - and with his full knowledge that the city didn't have the dough to cover it.

Newsom and his aides, however, didn't let the cat out of the bag until after his re-election last month. (SF Chron)

Newsome supported a $28 million public transit program and a four-year, 24% pay hike for police, fire and nurse city employees, all the while knowing the usual padding -- a $100 million budget carry-over -- was non-existent.

Asked how Newsome felt about this economic Balaklava, an aide said hizonner "doesn't even have one tiny morsel of regret."

Liberalism is never having to say you're sorry.

Far, Far From Kyoto

Orange Punch, the OCRegister's opinion blog, passes along this tidbit:

“Strikingly, three Chinese power companies, South Africa’s giant Eskom, and India’s NTPC all generate more CO2 emissions than any single U.S. firm—underscoring the shared challenge posed by global climate change,” according to U.S. News and World Report. “The largest, Huaneng Power International of China, has emissions 68 percent higher than American Electric Power’s.”

What do you want to bet that the U.S. will remain the principle target of global warming alarmists?

Good bet.

Dr. Doom

We conclude this week's Sunday Scan on a note of terror, calling your attention to an LA Times op/ed by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, authors of The Nuclear Jihad.

How nice that this piece ran in the liberal LAT, where blinders to the threat of global jihad abound. Frantz and Collins lay out in frightening detail the story of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who sold Pakistan's nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, and Iran's subsequent efforts to mask its true nuclear ambitions from international scrutiny.

Do read the piece, even though it doesn't include anything new to people who have tracked this issue in the blogosphere. What's illuminating about the piece is that what we know -- Iran's lies and cover-ups, the true extent of their nuclear program -- is now becoming more broadly covered in MSM outlets read by Libs.

Will they take note or just hide under their "blame everything on Bush" denials?

Sunday Scan

Jihad week is coming to the University of California Irvine, according to Red County:

In what will be a counter to the non-existent Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, The Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine will be rolling out a series of racist and anti-American speakers next week. Featuring British-born journalist Yvonne Ridley, the infamous Amir Abdel Malik-Ali, and Shaykh Khalid Yasin, this school year's inaugural hate week won't disappoint the aspiring jihadist.

Here's the event program. If you want a hint of the jihadist jist of the theme, look no further than the blurb for Shaykh Khalid Yasin's little talk:

He was considered one of the most influential men to walk the Earth. Today, over a billion people adhere to what he preached. 1400 hundred years later, his message and story are still the center of an intense controversy - as evidenced by the Danish cartoons.

The Danish cartoons?! If we want to look at what's controversial about Moe-hammed's message, let's take a gander at 9/11, the infitada, Ahmadinejad's calls for the extermination of Israel and the oppression of a third of the world's women.

Oh. Scratch that last one. Feature speaker and Stockholm Syndrom poster girl Ridley is going to talk about how the Koran is "a Magna Carta for women." Uh huh. She's also called Israel a "vile little state" and praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Chechyen martyr mass-murderer Abdallah Shamil Abu Irdis.

If you're still looking for proof that the Muslim student associations in America are firmly in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Wahhabists, look no further than UCI this week.

Nothing Funny in Denmark

In the home of those notorious Mohammed cartoons, all eyes not on the big storms that are whipsawing coastal Europe are on November 17 and the upcoming election:

Since 2001, Denmark has been governed by a center-right Liberal/Conservative coalition under Prime Minister Rasmussen. This coalition has been supported in parliament by the right-wing populist Danish People's Party in exchange for implementing key demands, such as strict policies on immigration. In the most recent opinion polls, Denmark's two main parties -- the opposition Social Democrats and Rasmussen's center-right Liberals -- are running neck and neck, each with roughly 25 percent of the vote. (Spiegel)

Particularly interesting is who Spiegel is calling the "king-maker" of this election: Naser Khader, Denmark's first Muslim, first immigrant MP. Spiegel quotes polls that show Khader's party will get about six percent of the vote -- enough to play some serious politics if the Social Democrats and Liberals split the vote, as anticipated.

Insurance for Illegals

You know the GOP electeds are in real danger of losing the base when James Carville understands the immigration issue better than George Bush:

“Just as many workers with moderate incomes, uncertain employment and health insurance could not understand why they were being taxed to subsidize the long-term idleness of those on welfare,” Carville and [Stanley] Greenberg write, “many Americans are just as perplexed that this country has lost control of the borders and winks at illegal employment, taxing the resources of local schools and hospitals.” The frustration extends to health care. One voter lamented: “We can’t afford to do anything because we’re paying for health insurance,” yet illegal immigrants “just go in and get it free.”

The quote is from a Town Hall article on SCHIP by Michael Frank. The only thing that may save the GOP on immigration is that the Dems are lost even deeper in the forest of denial:

When rumors circulated that House leaders were contemplating language to require tough proof-of-citizenship requirements for SCHIP enrollees, representatives of the several race-based congressional caucuses as well as other “progressive” members jumped into action. They sent Speaker Nancy Pelosi a strongly-worded letter warning against further concessions, especially, CQ reported, “on immigration issues.”

“We are deeply concerned,” they wrote, “by the continued compromises we may be asked to make on behalf of our communities.” “Such compromises,” they warned, “cause us to question our support for the overall package.”

These members like the vetoed SCHIP bill because it would weaken the citizenship and identity verification requirements in current law to prevent illegal immigrants from enrolling in SCHIP.

It bears repeating: SCHIP is Hillarycare; Hillarycare is SCHIP.

Connectivity Drives Code

That's the mantra of Thomas P.M. Barnett of The Pentagon's New Map fame. It basically means if you want to participate and prosper in the global marketplace, there are rules to follow. If you want to live Kaczynski-like in a cabin in the woods, you can free yourself of a lot of the code, but at the cost of removing yourself from the material, intellectual and physical benefits of connectedness.

In his weekly column, Barnett tells us of the increasing difficulty with the Kaczynski lifestyle, which is also the bin Laden lifestyle: We are getting better and better at forcing people into the grid. His subject is fascinating: Nanotechnology and better fingerprinting. It's typical Barnett; taking a seemingly narrow and arcane subject and globalizing it:

In this increasingly connected world, it's our inability to finger bad actors that - in the end - allows them to create the most terror. Make better fairy dust, crack tougher codes, connect more dots, create more transparency, and you've got fewer bad actors.

Nano-fairy dust is interesting stuff; trust me.

Human Obliteration Watch

You may not need to put a fresh coat of paint on your "The End Is Near" sign, but here's a bad news from Wyoming (which, it seems, usually falls far short of its bad news quota):

The Yellowstone "supervolcano" rose at a record rate since mid-2004, likely because a Los Angeles-sized, pancake-shaped blob of molten rock was injected 6 miles beneath the slumbering giant, University of Utah scientists report in the journal Science. ...

The upward movement of the Yellowstone caldera floor -- almost 3 inches (7 centimeters) per year for the past three years -- is more than three times greater than ever observed since such measurements began in 1923, says the study in the Nov. 9 issue of Science by Smith, geophysics postdoctoral associate Wu-Lung Chang and colleagues.

The Science Daily article assures us there's no reason to worry; caldera go up and down all the time without massive explosions, horrific extinction, an ash-packed atmosphere with nuclear winter-like effects, and longer waits at Starbucks.

Hillary Waffles; Obama Taxes

Barack Obama has been politely pounding Hillary for not giving straightforward answers, but when he comes up with an answer, it leaves you wanting some waffling:

Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday he will push for higher Social Security taxes if elected, viewing it as the best option for improving the retirement program's finances. ...

[D]uring an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Obama said taxing more of a person's income was the option he would push for if elected president. He objected to benefit cuts or a higher retirement age.

"I think the best way to approach this is to adjust the cap on the payroll tax so that people like myself are paying a little bit more and people who are in need are protected," the Illinois senator said. ...

Currently, only [only?!] the first $97,500 of a person's annual income is taxed. That cap is scheduled to rise to $102,000 next year.

Obama's proposal could include a gap or "doughnut hole" to shield middle-income earners from higher payroll taxes, he said.

Doughnut holes ... waffles -- I wish the Dem prez candidates would go on a low-carb diet.

Image: Cox & Forkum

Sunday Scan

The OCRegister editorial page leads off today's scan with its editorial giving a cool reception to Al Gore's ignoble Nobel:

"Nearly every significant statement that Vice President Gore makes regarding climate science and climate policy is either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative or wrong," says CEI environmental policy expert Marlo Lewis. Otherwise, nice job Mr. Gore.

Global warming alarmism serves those opposing free-market economics and its fossil-fuel reliance and those seeking power and profit by gaming the system once they force rule changes. Neither motive is in most peoples' interests. The Kyoto Protocol, which would force nations to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, if enforced would reduce projected temperatures about one degree over 100 years while – and this is not exaggeration – dampening and devastating economies worldwide.

Gore got a much warmer reception in Palo Alto, where young and old alike believe his hype, says an also hyped up Merc News:

Mackenzie Pope, 12, ... was one of several kids who had the day off from school [what?!] and showed up with signs saying [to Gore] "Welcome to Palo Alto."

"I was walking my dog when I saw all the people here and so I went home to get them," she said, motioning to her mom, little sisters Bailey and Rylie, and a couple of friends. [Mackenzie, Bailey and Rylie -- how cloyingly No. Cal.]

The girls, like typical Palo Alto kids, were well-versed on the climate-change issue.

"They say in 20 years New York City is going to be half gone," said Mackenzie's friend, Charlotte Barry.

The alliance is a small organization Gore founded last year as a fundraising arm for his media campaign. Its office, at Hawthorne Avenue and High Street, once housed the Foundation for a Global Community, a descendant of Beyond War. And it's next door to POST, the Peninsula Open Space Trust.

"This spot has good karma," said POST Executive Director Audrey Rust. "We're sort of at ground zero, right here on High Street."

The Merc News, which is after all a news paper, somehow didn't feel compelled to correct little Charlotte's gorism.

Babs At The Money Trough

Wrapping up news from the Golden State, the LATimes reports that Bay Area Greenie Babs Boxer is swimming in dough from the very hooligans against The Sacred Earth Mother she has worked so hard to harm:

For years Barbara Boxer has campaigned, first for Congress, then for the U.S. Senate, as a progressive Democrat strong on ... the environment. ...

But now that she's chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, she's finding some new people who want to be her friend. And not in the MySpace kind of way.

Roll Call reports (sorry, it's a subscriber-access page) that Boxer, who assumed the committee chair with the 2006 Democratic takeover of the Senate, received through Aug. 30 about $41,000 from political action committees representing "energy, natural resources, construction and transportation industries."

But in the 2004 cycle, when she was last up for re-election, Boxer "reported $18,500 in total receipts from the energy and natural resources sector in all of 2003 and 2004, according to CQ MoneyLine ....

Politicians. Love 'em or hate 'em, you gotta pay 'em off.

Don't Worry About Islam

There's a complicated piece by Simon Jenkins in the Times of London spurred by the 29-page letter to the Pope from 138 imams and other Muslim high and mighty. Jenkins doesn't see Islam as the biggest threat to the West, rather:

The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation. Extremists on each side feed off the others’ frenzied scenarios so as to garner money and political support for their respective armies of the night. Each sees the other as a cosmic menace and abandons communal tolerance and peaceful diplomacy to counter it.

It's easy to discount this out of hand because Jenkins slices too thin. Our fear isn't of the tiny groups of jihadists ... it's the consequences of even five or ten percent of Islam picking up the jihadist terror tool kit. Still, the piece isn't just liberal pap and multi-culti over-optimism. There's a lot of food for thought there, like:

It is ironic that defeat in the cold war should have led Russia to the exuberant self-confidence of Vladimir Putin’s Moscow, while victory has plunged the West into a loss of nerve. In both Washington and London are leaders who have so little confidence in democracy as to regard it as vulnerable to a few madmen, and who have so little respect for democracy’s freedoms as to suspend them at the bang of a bomb.

I believe the liberties that have been suspended have been carefully defined and limited so as to protect Americans and subject suspicious foreigners and battlefield enemies to the treatment that is needed and deserved. But how about this for a Sunday pondering: What if we fought the war on terror the way the Libs would have us fight it? Would we not still win?

Of course, to answer that, you also have to answer this: Would the extra American dead that might result from the Lib approach be worth the rigorous, hard-line protection of each letter of the Constitution, as applied by Lib judges?

Watch It, Canadians!

Canadian readers, watch out! Science Daily tells us that according to the journal Environmental Research, you might be one of the 25,000 Canadians pollution will kill this year! I love these studies that pore over medical records and death certificates and attempt to lay the blame at pollution, or global warming, or fast food, or whatever else the Lib media have their eyepieces focused on.

Here's the picture that accompanies the story. I kid you not. Look at that awful, life-nipping gunk! The caption reads:

Photo taken near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Industry in the foreground, pristine mountains in the background -- Canada is not immune to environmental problems. (Credit: Michele Hogan)

Help me find the industries in the photo that are cavalierly ignoring Canada's environmental laws and spewing toxins into drinking water and mother's milk. More easily, help me find manipulated statistics that look at cancer deaths and low birth-weight babies (as this one did) and attribute them to pollution instead of, oh, the luck of the draw or genetics or moms who smoke and booze.

Corn Fission?

Earlier in the week, Syrian flacks toured media hacks around an ag field and ag lab that they say were targeted by Israeli fighters ... why the Zionists would do that, who knows? After reporting the tour with almost a completely straight face, today the NYT joins those who understand what really was going on there:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel's air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state.

Central mystery? Not to everyone.

Who Defines 'Dying Well?'

Charlotte Allen, faced with minor breast cancer surgery -- seemingly an oxymoron, but not really -- was asked on three separate occasions whether she had a living will. A complicated form was stuffed into her mitt, asking her to ponder "a range of conditions under which I might like to have a Do Not Resuscitate order hung over my hospital bed, whether I would want to be denied "artificial" food and water under some circumstances, what I thought about being taken off a ventilator, and so forth."

Her conclusion, as very well relayed in her WaPo piece today:

In fact, when I contemplate the concept of "dying well," I can't avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means "dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is appropriate for you to die." Consider what's happened in recent years: The classic Hippocratic Oath and its prohibition against physicians giving people a "deadly drug" has collapsed with the growing acceptance of such notions as physician-assisted suicide, the "right to die," and even giving some very sick, disabled or demented people a little push over the edge, as seems to be the case in the Netherlands. People facing end-of-life decisions may well feel subtle pressure from the medical and bioethical establishments to make the choice that will save the most money, as well as spare their relatives and society at large the burden of their continued existence.

As the SCHIP plan catches the news and the Dems vow to override a prez veto, do you recall ever seeing someone raise the question of whether parents would be pressured to quickly dispatch sick babies once the feds start paying for their costly health care? Neither did I.

Start thinking about it.

Road to Rangoon

No, it's not a long-lost Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie; it's the UN's continuing dismal performance in its attempts to stop the Burmese junta from killing off every monk and protester in that poor country.

In this case, the road will lead UN chief Burma dude Ibrahim Gambari to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China and Japan, before "hoping" to return to Burma. Condi's response? Knock it off! Get back to Burma pronto and do something.

Good advice.

Lodi Jihadi Gets 24 Years

Hamid Hayat, the Muslim-American living in Lodi who went to Pakistan to get training in jihad-making, will spend the next half of his life in prison.

He's 24 and he got a 24-year sentence ... which was lucky for him, as he could have/should have gotten 39 years. The timing of the sentence is nice: One day before 9/11 and on the same day the NYT broke a major story about foreign jihad trainees who, like Hayat, go to Pakistan to learn how to propagate terror in the countries that have offered them freedom.

The jury split on convicting Hayat's dad, Umer, of fore-knowledge of his son's terrorist leanings, so the old man walked.

Read more here.