There is some, at least.

Militant behind January Karbala attack believed killed. The take-away here is that we pursued this guy relentlessly... and got him. It's the last part that's the tricky part.

U.S. forces on a raid in northern Baghdad killed a Shiite militant believed to have masterminded a brazen January attack in Karbala that led to the capture and killing of four U.S. soldiers, the military said Sunday.

Troops located Azhar al-Dulaimi on Friday morning and tried to capture him, but he was killed in the ensuing battle, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, said on CNN's "Late Edition."

U.S. troops had been pursuing al-Dulaimi relentlessly since the Jan. 20 attack in the southern city of Karbala, Caldwell said.

In that attack, gunmen speaking English, wearing U.S. military uniforms and carrying American weapons attacked a joint military command headquarters where U.S. military officers and their Iraqi counterparts were meeting.

The attackers killed one soldier and abducted four others, whom they later shot to death.

"You know, anybody who kidnaps an American soldier and murders them, we're going to continue to hunt down. And that's exactly what we've been doing with this guy," Caldwell said of al-Dulaimi.

Baghdad insurgents may join war on Al Qaeda. A bit optimistic, maybe, but something similar seems to have already happened in Anbar.

Mirroring a nationwide trend, tribes near Baghdad are on the verge of banding together against al-Qaida and have met with U.S. military officials seeking aid and guidance in fighting the terrorist network.

Acceptance of — if not outright support for — al-Qaida among the tribes eroded after the strict Islamic law imposed by insurgents clashed with the authority of the sheikhs, according to U.S. military officials.

On Saturday, a group of local chieftains met with military commanders and a representative of the State Department at Camp Taji, about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, and tentatively agreed to form a council that would oversee the creation of a provincial security force similar to the tribal militia created in western Iraq.

...

But even while U.S. commanders courted tribal support, they were wary of creating a new, separate fighting force and potentially further complicating the crowded battlefield around Baghdad that includes not only al-Qaida, but also Shiite militias.

“We are not here to build another militia,” Funk said. Volunteers from the tribes must cooperate with the Iraqi government’s security forces, he said.

The US military believes two of the three recently captured US soldiers may still be alive. Contradicting reports yesterday that implied at least two had already been beheaded.

Two of the three U.S. soldiers missing since a May 12 ambush south of Baghdad are believed to have been alive as recently as Friday morning, but the third may be dead, the military said Saturday.

The men have been the focus of a huge dragnet by U.S. troops, who have detained more than 700 people for questioning in and around Yousifiya, a market town 10 miles south of the capital.

Information obtained from the detainees and other sources has provided a clearer picture of the ambush, but the military still does not know the men's status, the top U.S. commander in Iraq said in an interview with Army Times published Saturday and confirmed by a spokesman, Col. Steven Boylan.

The military did not make clear what led it to believe that the two soldiers were still alive as of Friday.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told the newspaper that the military had identified the person chiefly responsible for the abduction of the three men and the killing of four other soldiers and an interpreter.

"We know who that guy is," he said. "He's sort of an affiliate of Al Qaeda. He's the big player down in that area. We've tangled with him before."

I'm wondering if it's this al-Dulaimi guy.

Violence down in Bahgdad, but moves elsewhere. Still, if we can deny Al Qaeda a haven in one very large place, we can deny them havens elsewhere.

Thanks to Mr. Civility.

More: Tips supposedly "flooding" in about the soldiers' whereabouts. I doubt you're any more optimistic than I am, though.

It would take a miracle.

Posted by: Ace at 06:49 AM | Comments (5)
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This is the vile video of the stoning of a woman of the Yazidi faith for suspicion of mixing with a Sunni. Correction: I wrongly guessed Yazidi was a Muslim sect. It's not, it's an pre-Islamic religion.

Whedon references this murder in his screed. Here's the horrifying stoning by primitives:

Truly horrifying. Not merely horrifying in that a woman was murdered -- which is always horrific, but murders are sadly common -- but positively disgusting in the apparent support for this very public murder. Murderers are common; but fans of real-time murder? That speaks not a single demented killer but an entire society infected with viral psychopathy.

On to Wheedon's moronic commentary. And yes, trust me: It is moronic. Give the idiocy a chance to breathe.

This is not my blog, but I donÂ’t have a blog, or a space, and IÂ’d like to be heard for a bit.

Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.

There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.

I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda. I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for “Captivity”.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

Standard Liberal Operatiting Practice (SLOP): take an utterly vile incident perpetrated by the barbaric medeivalists of the Religion of Peace (TM) and immediately liken it to our own cultural shortcomings, putting it on the same continuum of evil.

Dua Khalil was murdered in cold blood by a crowd who enthusiastically became the cinematographers of her real-life snuff film; Elisha Cuthbert is paid north of $1 million to appear in a movie in which she pretends to be abducted. Same thing. Same cultural malady -- "Womb Envy" -- infecting us both.

I've got my problems with Captivity, but I'm pretty sure Elisha Cuthbert is still, you know, alive. I think I'd've heard about it had they killed her.

But this is how SLOP works. True evil is constantly trivialized by the narcissistic impulse to see that same evil in people who simply don't vote the way you do -- the thirst of liberals to flatter themselves is never sated, and this all-consuming need drives them to constantly both excuse the evil of barbaric psychopathy (can't judge these People of Another Culture of Peace, after all) and slander their fellow Americans (why, Elisha Cuthbert's new exploitation movie is just like a real murder!).

Fuckin' idiot.

I got that from Pandagon, by the way. Guess which part of Wheedon's rant -- the bit about the real-life snuff film created by adherents of the Religion of Peace, or the silly nonsense about the Cuthbert abduction/revenge movie (you guys do know she gets vengeance on her tormentors, right?) -- she chooses to quote and focus on?

Because, you know, she's a serious feminist. She's very concerned about the big issues affecting women, like Elisha Cuthbert's oevure.

BTW: From what I know of Captivity-- which is not much; just the images from the campaign and the basic plot -- I consider it irresponsible film-making. I may be wrong in jumping to conclusions, but it does seem to be a snuff movie type of movie. (Except the heroine won't get snuffed, but will rather snuff the would-be snuffers.)

But I despise movies like this. I don't mind violence in movies, God knows, but I think it's irresponsible to make "horror movies" like I Spit On Your Grave where there is a high danger of encouraging psychopaths to actually emulate what they see in the film. There's no distancing element of fantasy in such films; it's horrible actions the average psycho really could do in real life, if he had a mind to do so.

I think that's why I've always been uneasy with Death Wish. James Bond and Lethal Weapon movies feature more killings, but there's that distancing element of pure fantasy in such fare. You really couldn't be James Bond or even Martin Riggs. You could, however, easily decide to be Paul from Death Wish and start plugging people in the subways who "looked suspicious."

So really, I'm no fan of Captivity, and I could slam this sort of dangerous exploitation flick with the best of them.

What I cannot abide, however, is the SLOP being fed to us by Wheedon that this crappy movie somehow puts us -- all of us; all men, the "half of" the world population he spoke of -- on the same continuum of evil, murder, and "Womb Envy" with Dua Khalil's killers.

It's just your typical liberal, elevating murderers to the status of those merely needing some PC education, and lowering those who (it is claimed) need some PC education to the status of murderers.

But Wheedon and Marcotte speak bravely for women. Just ask them.

Related: The new Terminator TV series. How is this related? Well, just keep looking at this strangely-familar female face:

Huh. A female (appearing) Terminator gets thrown through a wall by a (male) appearing Terminator. Truly this means we live in a sick society that enjoys seeing women beaten and murdered.

Via Hot Air. Since I swiped that, let me recommend watching their clips from the 1/2 Hour News Hour. The Lorenzo Lamas bit (first clip) is quite funny, and I'm not saying that merely because it was long my plan, never gotten around to, to make my own "Truther" website featuring the shocking theory that Al Qaeda Muslims destroyed the Twin Towers with planes. The Dennis Miller stuff is okay, but it's kind of standard.

Come To Think of It... Didn't Joss Whedon pay Summner Glau a lot of money to pretend to have been abducted, tortured, violated, and mind-raped by the Alliance?

What is wrong with him? Doesn't he realize that's showing off his vicious misogyny and his belief that women are "expendable" and "inferior" and ergo good subjects for filmed torments for us evil men to jack off too?

What's that? He was just telling a fairly standard story about a super-hero's origin, an origin featuring, as many do, superpowers bequeathed via nasty government experimentation?

Oh.

Gee, and I thought for a moment there he was no better than Dua Khalil's killers.

I'm not sure how I feel about Buffy so frequently being karate-punched and head-butted by warlocks, though.

Posted by: Ace at 05:47 AM | Comments (100)
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Further weight adding to my current distaste for conservativism -- liberals, whatever their faults, do not preach that blacks are basically incapable of tasks whites take for granted.

Wait-- what's that? This is indeed liberals sending high school students to a conference that teaches that blacks lack self-reliance, planning skills, and the ability to properly speak English?

Oh. That changes things. I guess it's all for the good, then. Liberals know best.

Dr Caprice Hollins, the Director of Equity, Race & Learning Support for Seattle’s public schools, has previously criticised individualism, long-term planning (or “future time orientation”) and the speaking of grammatical English as “white values.” The expectation among teachers that all students should be responsible individuals and meet certain linguistic and organisational standards is, according to Dr Hollins, a form of “cultural racism.”

David Thompson notes this in discussing a LaShawn Barber post about Seattle high schoolers being sent to a "white privilege" conference.

Parents ought to be ashamed for allowing bureaucrats to politicize black underachievement and blame whites instead of erecting a mirror in front of so-called underprivileged minorities. In an op-ed in The Seattle Times, Seattle writer and blogger Matt Rosenberg noted that the white privilege conference has little, if anything, to do with helping black students improve academically. They’ll be well-equipped, however, in useless, politically correct finger-pointing. “What we have here,” writes Rosenberg, “is an institutional evasion of personal responsibility.”

I guess the trick is that pretty much you can deride blacks as viciously as you like -- hitting all the stereotypes like "Colored People's Time" and all that -- so long as you throw in the saving asterisk at the end: *But it's all white people's fault.

Posted by: Ace at 04:21 AM | Comments (30)
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Look familiar?

No need for photoshopping here to really sell the carnage -- Lebanon shelling Palestinain refugee camps just isn't really all that bad. Kind of understandable when dealing with terrorist provocations, you know. Can't make an omlette and all that.

Just curious as to why the Lebanese are permitted to fight wars against terrorists killing their civilians whereas the Israelis aren't. Must be the scary power of that Jew Lobby Ron Paul's always on about.

Anyway.

A prominent story, to be sure, but don't expect the full-court media press we saw in the Israeli-Hamas war.

Lebanese troops today shelled a Palestinian refugee camp, a day after more than 55 people were killed in fighting between Sunni militants and government forces.

Tank shells crashed into the coastal camp of Nahr el-Bared, home to some 40,000 refugees, near the northern city of Tripoli. Plumes of smoke rose into the sky as fighters of the little-known Fatah al-Islam group fired grenades and machineguns at army posts on the camp perimeter, witnesses said.

Palestinian sources in the camp said the shelling had killed two civilians.

As Lebanese forces fired on the camp, witnesses said imams used loudspeakers to call on the army to stop the shelling.

At least 27 soldiers, 15 militants and 15 civilians died in yesterday's violence, the worst internal fighting since Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war.

Here's the background:

a Palestinian jihadist outfit called Fatah al-Islam that’s based in the Pali refugee camp in Tripoli (in northern Lebanon) attacked two Lebanese army positions at the entrance to the camp this morning, seizing two armored carriers in the process, and then ambushed another unit. The NYT profiled the group in March; you can read all about them and their leader, a former deputy of Zarqawi’s named Shaker al-Abssi, right here. They claim to be affiliated with Al Qaeda and boast that they’re planning attacks on the United States; they also operate without interference from the Lebanese authorities due to the special quasi-sovereign status Pali refugee camps enjoy. That changed today, obviously, with the attack on the army. The Lebanese responded by shelling the camp and engaging the jihadis in gun battles. 22 soldiers have been killed in the fighting as well as 17 “militants,” including possibly Abssi’s deputy, Abu Yazan. Now, hours after the fighting broke out, a bomb’s gone off outside a mall in eastern Beirut. One woman is reported dead.

Every time a step is taken towards probing the assassination of al-Hariri, terrorist groups step up attacks. From Allah's link to the JPost:

While Syrian officials have been keen from the outset to describe al-Abssi and his group as operating "in favor of al-Qaida," Lebanese authorities suspect that the group may in fact be a client of the Syrian authorities themselves, established to act as an instrument of policy in Lebanon, fomenting disorder. The Assad regime has a long history of utilizing terrorist and paramilitary groups for such a purpose. Fatah-intifada itself was used by Hafez Assad in a power struggle with Yassir Arafat in the Lebanon refugee camps between 1985-88. The regime is known also to have engaged operatives of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party to carry out assassinations in Lebanon during the civil war period.

... why might the Syrians wish to sow chaos in Lebanon, and why now?

A draft resolution for the unilateral establishment of an international tribunal on the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri was circulated in the UN Security Council by the US, France and Britain last week. It is known that the Syrian regime is determined to prevent this tribunal at all costs, since it is believed that senior Syrian officials may be found to have been involved in the Hariri killing. Could it be that the regime in Damascus might see an escalation of tension in Lebanon as currently helpful - as a tacit reminder to the international community of what Damascus is capable of when put in a corner? This is the view of senior officials in Lebanese government, and is in keeping with earlier practices of the Damascus regime.

Posted by: Ace at 03:49 AM | Comments (17)
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It's bias, it's written for maximum shock value, it's intended to rile up anti-American Europussies. And yet still I find Allah's angry tone here a bit off.

Of course we had a plan to kil Sadr. Of course we still have "plans," in the sense of "blueprints for" rather than actual present intentions, to kill him, should it become necessary.

The tone and intent of the piece can be criticized, but not really the basic accuracy of it all.

Do we have "plans" to whack Sadr should it become necessary? Well, if we don't, that's a dereliction of national security planning that rises to the firing/impeachable level.

I guess Allah's problem with the piece (as is mine) is that this common-sense news-that's-only-news-to-the-intellectually-incurious should be written with an of course, SFW? kind of tone, not this off-the-rails attempt to propagandize further on behalf of Sadr, Iran, the hard-core Sunni "insurgents," and Al Qaeda itself.

I've got news for Patrick Cockburn: Not only do we have plans to kill Sadr, we have "plans," in the sense of pure how-would-it-be-done plans, not intentions, to assassinate the PM of Britain and even the friggin' Royal Family too, should they become big problems.

You know the guys in the basement of the Pentagon in the Plans Department? See, this is what they do all day: They draw up plans. Plans for seizing Saudi Arabi's oil, plans for a full-on first-strike thermonuclear attack on Russia. Plans on how to sell out Israel to the Arabs and convince the American people they had it coming, should it be necessary to cut such an odious deal with Al Qaeda.

Plans for everything, from the unlikely to the fantastical to even the quite possible.

That's kind of what we're paying them to do.

Meanwhile, Anbar is so quiet now that even Michael Yon can't paint it as exciting.

That's boring.

Posted by: Ace at 06:50 PM | Comments (20)
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The article treats this as if it's something new. I dunno about that.

Some people love their laptops more than anything else in the world. Others are sexually aroused by musical instruments or buildings. Experts are trying to understand a bizarre sexual obsession known as objectophilia.

...

For 25-year-old Sandy, the attraction to things is so overpowering, she confesses: "When it comes to love, I am only attracted to objects. I couldn't imagine a love affair with a human being."

Her radical renunciation of love between two people didn't turn the young woman into a loner. She gained admission long ago to a circle of like-minded people, all of whom have devoted themselves to the love of things. They call themselves objectophiles or objectum-sexuals. Experts are now faced with the task of interpreting the phenomenon.

The retired professor and former director of Frankfurt University's Institute for Sexual Science, Volkmar Sigusch, is one person who believes he has unraveled the mysteries of objectophilia. He has extensively probed this attraction to objects as part of his research into various forms of modern "neo-sexuality."

Here's some oddly old-school thinking from a "sexologist:"

The sexologist views this inclination as proof of his hypothesis that society is increasingly drifting into asexuality: "More and more people either openly declare or can be seen to live without any intimate or trusting relationship with another person," Sigusch says, adding that cities are populated by an entire army of socially isolated individuals: "Singles, isolated people, cultural sodomites, many perverts and sex addicts."

Yup, that sounds just about right.

And objectophiles don't want to be confused with petty fetishists:

"We're by no means just straightforward fetishists," Joachim A. insists, and he immediately explains the difference: "For some people, their car becomes a fetish which they use to put themselves in the limelight. For the objectum-sexual, on the other hand, the car itself -- and nothing else -- is the desired sexual partner, and all sexual fantasies and emotions are focused on it."

Joachim A. has been pretty faithful to his steam locomotive recently.

The 41-year-old recognized and accepted his inclination when he was just 12 years old. It was then that he fell head over heels "into an emotionally and physically very complex and deep relationship, which lasted for years." His partner back then was a Hammond organ -- he has now been in a steady relationship with a steam locomotive for several years. Since he is particularly aroused by the inner workings of technical objects, repair jobs have often led to infidelity in the past. "A love affair could very well begin with a broken radiator," the now monogamous lover says, remembering how his earlier affairs began.

I think that's as far as I need to read.

I'm never really sure if these kinds of people need to be studied or understood, or simply slapped in the face and told, "Stop acting like an attention-seeking jackass."

Thanks to dri, who confesses sexual longings for his RSS aggregator, but swears he hasn't "gone farther than second base."

Posted by: Ace at 05:36 PM | Comments (43)
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Tammy Bruce and Charles Johnson talk up Paul's small army of furious mouse-clickers, who apparently believe the presidential nomination is based on internet polls.

Here's the poll they're talking about.

Johnson thinks most of Paul's "suport" comes from lefties and Truthers hoping to jolt the Republican Party with a dose of conspiracy-mongering from Ron Paul. given the rather leftish-sounding support Paul gets from "rock-ribbed conservatives" in blogs like Wuzzadem, that sounds likely.

Yes, I do know he has some genuine right-leaning support. Our own rho, for example. But what to make of comments like this?

Since [Bush] wasn't satisfied with spitting on the 1st Amendment but regularly spits on the 4th as well, and even has problems with rights that date back to the Magna Carta, there are no grounds for considering the Republican party the party of our enumerated and unenumerated Constitutional liberties.

I'm sorry if it's a hackneyed stereotype but when you take those things away I don't see what's left of the party except cornpone speaking in tongues about Jesus and a quite un-strategic-minded, un-realpolitik view of war that isn't much more sophisticated than "these colors don't run" or somesuch.

I suppose that could be an honest-to-God-doesn't-exist right-leaning libertarian talking -- right-leaning libertarians tend to be as contemptuous of traditional values and faith as lefties. (It's what makes the rebels, after all.)

Still, for a guy getting 1% support among Republicans in randomized, scientific real polls, he sure seems to be, ahem, overperforming in nonscientific polls and forums, doesn't he? Where are all these Paul supporters coming from? There just aren't enough of them in the Republican Party to spam the entire internet with Paulmania, even if they were doing nothing but that 70 hours a week.

Evidence that Paul's supporters are largely conspiracy-mongering anti-American lefties? Well, how about this -- LGF also follows one supporter over to a comment made on the 9/11 conspiracy site prisonplanet:

Is it because if Dr. Paul were elected president thhat the US would fightt no more proxy wars for Israel? Or that the Jewish controlled Federal Reserve might be shut down? Or is there some other issue that I missed that has the Jewmedia lashing out and gnashingg teeth?

Gotta love a guy who can unite the craziest elements of the hard left and hard right. Why, it's been sixty years since we've seen such a colossus...

The Jewmedia Is Using The Black As Muscle, And You Are Left Defenseless: Well, not totally defenseless. One can always fight back by spamming meaningless internet polls all the doo-dah day.

Ron Paul, In His Own Words: The Zionist Jew Is Using the Criminal Black As Muscle: He really does almost say that.

"Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal," Paul said.

95%? Really? We can "safely assume" that? Ninety-five per cent?

...

Stating that lobbying groups who seek special favors and handouts are evil, Paul wrote, "By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government" and that the goal of the Zionist movement is to stifle criticism.

He also mentions that it's hardly irrational to fear young black males (urban black males, I think he means, which is code for "not dressed in business suits nor sporting ascots"), given the great disproportion in street-level and violent crime committed by this cohort, which is unobjectionalbe, common-sense even, a hard truth that must occasionally be noted.

But.

I think I have to invoke the Pat Buchanan Rule here. (William Buckley Jr. examined the charges of anti-semitism against Pat Buchanan, and found, sadly, that while many of Buchanan's favorite talking points were defensible in and of themselves, his embrace and eager proclamation of just about every anti-Jewish position out there raised, inevitably, questions of deep-seeded anti-Jew animus.)

One can say all sorts of things, many of them true, many of them needing to be said more often just to keep simple reality as an acceptable touchpoint of political discussion, but then, there are cats who seem way too eager to discuss rampant young black male criminality. It's a tone thing, and eagerness thing: When such an obviously-charged topic is brought up, it ought to be brought up for a reason (such as to combat black racists constantly quoting the disproprtionate black make-up of prisons, as if we're just rounding innocents off the streets on Walking While Black charges), and should be noted in a more-sorrow-than-anger way, which really is the right way to view the sad fact that so many black males choose a life of nihilistic criminality, and the sadder fact that they're hardly the only victims of this choice. (One thing I always find galling among black leaders -- even ones making points I generally agree with -- is their laser-like focus on black on black crime, as if that's the only kind of murder, violence, and violation that matters -- whites, apparently, either deserve it, or else are so lowly that their shattered or prematurely-ended lives are beneath even mentioning.)

On the other hand, there's a tendency by some to bring this up gratuitously, just as a put-down, more or less. I have no problem with noting the fact that blacks commit a stunningly disproportionate number of murders, rapes, assaults, muggings, and burglaries in America. I sort of have a problem with white guys who seem far too eager to mention this, and seem to take far too much pleasure in reciting facts which, it seems to me, should not incite pleasure but rather horror, shame, and sadness.

I'm not familiar enough with the political oevure Ron Paul to make a definite determination as to whether or not he can be properly charged under the Pat Buchanan Rule. I will say, though, that those indulging in unhinged, Old School Jew/"Zionist" bashing tend to embrace a whole panoply of "interesting theories" about the races.

And given his statement about "safely assuming" that ninety five percent of younger male blacks in DC are either "semi-criminal" or professional criminals, well, I think I can see the general direction in which this train is headed, and it's somewhere to the east to places nice polite German citizens usually avoid discussing.

Posted by: Ace at 04:36 PM | Comments (63)
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Ken Burns-style documentary about The Office. Kinda funny if you're a fan.

Thanks to Douglas.

Posted by: Ace at 04:14 PM | Comments (11)
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Grisly image of the year: CNN claims US soldiers draining Baghdad canals due to reports of heads seen floating in them.

Obviously this is due to the fact that the US does not extend Geneva prisoner-of-war status to criminal terrorists.

Religion of Peace. Catch the fever.

Posted by: Ace at 04:10 PM | Comments (17)
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I watched VH1 for the first time in like three years. I caught this:

I dig it, even if it is on the Grey's Anatomy soundtrack. And yeah, it's old. How else could I have found out about it?

Posted by: Ace at 04:07 PM | Comments (221)
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