02:38 PM - Mexicans Transporting Women to Florida to Rape Them into Sexual Slavery
Current mood: pessimistic
Category: News and Politics

And then they behead them if they don't agree to the rape.

Human Trafficking Horror: 'Mexicans In Florida Behead Little Girl Who Resisted Being Raped' (Where's the media on this?) (1)

I bet you are wondering why you haven't heard about this on the national news. Sounds like a huge story, one which would shock the nation and, unfortunately, give the mass media huge ratings.

Well, Ace nails the reason why you are not hearing about this: the mass media has a different agenda which takes precedence: open borders and amnesty (2).

Here's a story. Human traffickers -- in women, I guess -- made an example of one the little girls they had intended to repeatedly rape into whoredom. She resisted. So they beheaded her -- in front of their other sexual slaves. Then left the body and head in a room with the other girls, just to let them know that sometimes rape isn't the worst thing in the world.

The story is obviously cable-news nirvana. Let me be crass and note that it's a potential ratings barnburner. (I note this just to underscore the odd reluctance of cable news, or crime-magazine shows on the networks, to touch it.)

Not only is it luridly compelling, but it actually underscores a greater problem -- what used to be called white slavery; I have no idea what we're supposed to call it now -- and thus is also an "important" story.

I note the latter because media-critic liberal chin-strokers are forever castigating cable news for running sensationalistic stories about missing and abducted girls and men who kill their wives, always branding such stories -- without contemplating their import -- as "unimportant." They really do use the word "unimportant" when discussing a story about a murdered woman, as if she doesn't rate.

What they mean, and really should be less "inartful" about expressing (as Obama would have it), is that such stories have no broader implications and are, therefore, "mere" murder stories without a greater public-policy angle to them. The latter, of course, would rescue such stories from the "unimportant" category.

Liberals can't conceive of a story as being important unless, of course, it can be used to animate the public in favor of government action and new legislation.But in this case, that criterion is well-satisfied.So why is the story not being covered?

Take a wild fucking guess.

The perpetrators are Mexicans, transporting women (apparently also Mexican) to Florida to rape them into sexual slavery. And when that doesn't work -- cut off a head or two.

Sometimes crusading journalists, who are all about informing the public and righting evils, have to consider more important crusades they're on, such as pushing for amnesty and open borders.

Open borders, as a cause, trumps any niggling concerns over entrepreneurial rape.

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02:16 PM - Own a Flat-Screen TV? Well, You’re Destroying the Planet!
Current mood: pessimistic
Category: News and Politics

Just another in a long line of man-made things that are destroying the planet much more than that insignificant little ball of flame in the sky we like to call the Sun. Amazing how man can create so many small things which are so much more powerful than the sun, huh?

Plasma, LCDs blamed for accelerating global warming (1)

Oh yeah, someone should also tell these geniuses that 'global warming' is no longer happening. And, in fact, the globe is *cooling*. So, by advanced logic, that would mean that it is completely impossible for flat screen TVs to be "accelerating global warming". Idiots.

A gas used in the making of flat screen televisions, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), is being blamed for damaging the atmosphere and accelerating global warming.

Almost half of the televisions sold around the globe so far this year have been plasma or LCD TVs.

But this boom could be coming at a huge environmental cost.

The gas, widely used in the manufacture of flat screen TVs, is estimated to be 17,000 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.

Ironically, NF3 is not covered by the Kyoto protocol as it was only produced in tiny amounts when the treaty was signed in 1997.

Levels of this gas in the atmosphere have not been measured, but scientists say it is a concern and are calling for it to be included in any future emissions cutting agreement.

Professor Michael Prather from the University of California has highlighted the issue in an article for the magazine New Scientist.

He has told ABC's The World Today program that output of the gas needs to be measured.

"One of my titles for this paper was Going Below Kyoto's Radar. It's the kind of gas that's made in huge amounts," he said.

"Not only is it not in the Kyoto Treaty but you don't even have to report it. That's the part that worries me."

He estimates 4,000 tons of NF3 will be produced in 2008 and that number is likely to double next year.

"We don't know what's emitted, but what they're producing every year dwarfs these giant coal-fired power plants that are like the biggest in the world," he said.

"And it dwarfs two of the Kyoto gases. So the real question we don't know is how much is escaping and getting out."

Dr Paul Fraser is the chief research scientist at the CSIRO's marine and atmospheric research centre, and an IPCC author.

He says without measuring the quantity of NF3 in the atmosphere it is unclear what impact it will have on the climate.

"We haven't observed it in the atmosphere. It's probably there in very low concentrations," he said.

"The key to whether it's a problem or not is how much is released to the atmosphere."

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11:04 AM - NO, Progressives are NOT Patriotic (UPDATED)
Current mood: pessimistic
Category: News and Politics

UPDATE at 20:31 EDT on 03 JUL 2008:  Heh.  Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive righteously takes down this schmuck:  The Progressive's Editor's Non-Patriotism  [http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/07/the-progressive.html]

Here is a prime example of why I don't read Leftist/Liberal/"Progressive" blogs and don't associate with them. At a site called "The Progressive", Matthew Rothschild explains "Why I am Not Patriotic" (1).

And if you think this is just the opinion of one person at the site, take a stroll through all the comments cheering him on with his attitude about America and patriotism. Simply pathetic.

This is the Number 1 reason why I don't go to these sites (I found the link through NRO The Corner (2), which linked to it as proof that we can rightly say that the Left is not Patriotic). They are nothing but doom and gloomers, pessimistic, negative and see nothing, but all the bad things about the nation and the world. Why people would want to go through life each and every day with such negativity and pessimism is beyond me.

Unfortunately, this is the mindset of the American Left. This is the ideology being taught to our children in the "progressive"-controlled public education system. This is the ideology being propagandized to the American public by our entertainment industry. And this is the ideology being fed to our young generation in the nation's universities. And, if we don't stand up to people with these attitudes and teach our young generations about the greatness of America (despite its failures and faults), this will be the prevailing attitude of the general American public in the future...

(In memory of George Carlin.)

It's July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.

Spare me the puerile parades.

Don't play that martial music, white boy.

And don't befoul nature's sky with your F-16s.

You see, I don't believe in patriotism.

It's not that I'm anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.

Love of country isn't natural. It's not something you're born with. It's an inculcated kind of love, something that is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.

Yet most people accept it without inspection.

Why?

For when you stop to think about it, patriotism (especially in its malignant morph, nationalism) has done more to stack the corpses millions high in the last 300 years than any other factor, including the prodigious slayer, religion.

The victims of colonialism, from the Congo to the Philippines, fell at nationalism's bayonet point.

World War I filled the graves with the most foolish nationalism. And Hitler and Mussolini and Imperial Japan brought nationalism to new nadirs. The flags next to the tombstones are but signed confessions -- notes left by the killer after the fact.

The millions of victims of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot have on their death certificates a dual diagnosis: yes communism, but also that other ism, nationalism.

The whole world almost got destroyed because of nationalism during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The bloody battles in Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s fed off the injured pride of competing patriotisms and all their nourished grievances.

In the last five years in Iraq, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died because the United States, the patriarch of patriotism, saw fit to impose itself, without just cause, on another country. But the excuse was patriotism, wrapped in Bush's brand of messianic militarism: that we, the great Americans, have a duty to deliver "God's gift of freedom" to every corner of the world.

And the Congress swallowed it, and much of the American public swallowed it, because they've been fed a steady diet of this swill.

What is patriotism but "the narcissism of petty differences"? That's Freud's term, describing the disorder that compels one group to feel superior to another.

Then there's a little multiplication problem: Can every country be the greatest country in the world?

This belief system magically transforms an accident of birth into some kind of blue ribbon.

"It's a great country," said the old Quaker essayist Milton Mayer. "They're all great countries."

At times, the appeal to patriotism may be necessary, as when harnessing the group to protect against a larger threat (Hitler) or to overthrow an oppressor (as in the anti-colonial struggles in the Third World).

But it is always a dangerous toxin to play with, and it ought to be shelved with cross and bones on the label except in these most extreme circumstances.

In an article called "Patriot Games" in the current issue of Time magazine (July 7), Peter Beinart, late of The New Republic, inspects his navel for seven pages and then throws the lint all around.

"Conservatives are right," he says. "To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours."

And then he criticizes, incoherently, the conservative love-it-or-leave-it types.

The moral folly of his argument he himself exposes: "If liberals love America purely because it embodies ideals like liberty, justice, and equality, why shouldn't they love Canada -- which from a liberal perspective often goes further toward realizing those principles -- even more? And what do liberals do," he asks, "when those universal ideals collide with America's self-interest? Giving away the federal budget to Africa would probably increase the net sum of justice and equality on the planet, after all. But it would harm Americans and thus be unpatriotic."

This is a straw man if I ever I saw one, but if the United States gave a lot more of its budget to eradicating poverty and disease in Africa and other parts of the developing world, it might actually make us all safer.

At bottom, note how readily Beinart disposes of "liberty, justice, and equality."

He has stripped patriotism to its vacuous essence: Love your country because it's yours.

If we stopped that arm from reflexively saluting and concerned ourselves more with "universal ideals" than with parochial ones, we'd be a lot better off.

We wouldn't be in Iraq, we wouldn't have besmirched ourselves at Guantanamo, we wouldn't be acting like some Argentinean junta that wages illegal wars and tortures people and disappears them into secret dungeons.

Love of country is a form of idolatry.

Listen, if you would, to the wisdom of Milton Mayer, writing back in 1962 a rebuke to JFK for his much-celebrated line: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Mayer would have none of it. "When Mr. Kennedy spoke those words at his inaugural, I knew that I was at odds with a society which did not immediately rebel against them," he wrote. "They are the words of totalitarianism pure; no Jefferson could have spoken them, and no Khrushchev could have spoken them better. Could a man say what Mr. Kennedy said and also say that the difference between us and them is that they believe that man exists for the State and we believe that the State exists for man? He couldn't, but he did. And in doing so, he read me out of society."

When Americans retort that this is still the greatest country in the world, I have to ask why.

Are we the greatest country because we have 10,000 nuclear weapons?

No, that just makes us enormously powerful, with the capacity to destroy the Earth itself.

Are we the greatest country because we have soldiers stationed in more than 120 countries?

No, that just makes us an empire, like the empires of old, only more so.

Are we the greatest country because we are one-twentieth of the world's population but we consume one-quarter of its resources?

No, that just must makes us a greedy and wasteful nation.

Are we the greatest country because the top 1 percent of Americans hoards 34 percent of the nation's wealth, more than everyone in the bottom 90 percent combined?

No, that just makes us a vastly unequal nation.

Are we the greatest country because corporations are treated as real, live human beings with rights?

No, that just enshrines a plutocracy in this country.

Are we the greatest country because we take the best care of our people's basic needs?

No, actually we don't. We're far down the list on health care and infant mortality and parental leave and sick leave and quality of life.

So what exactly are we talking about here?

To the extent that we're a great (not the greatest, mind you: that's a fool's game) country, we're less of a great country today.

Because those things that truly made us great -- the system of checks and balances, the enshrinement of our individual rights and liberties -- have all been systematically assaulted by Bush and Cheney.

From the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act to the new FISA Act, and all the signing statements in between, we are less great today.

From Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force Base and Guantanamo, we are less great today.

From National Security Presidential Directive 51 (giving the Executive responsibility for ensuring constitutional government in an emergency) to National Security Presidential Directive 59 (expanding the collection of our biometric data), we are less great today.

From the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to InfraGard and the Terrorist Liaison Officers, we are less great today.

Admit it. We don't have a lot to brag about today.

It is time, it is long past time, to get over the American superiority complex.

It is time, it is long past time, to put patriotism back on the shelf -- out of the reach of children and madmen.

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01:47 PM - Colombian Army Frees Ingrid Betancourt, Three American Hostages from FARC Captivity
Current mood: pessimistic
Category: News and Politics

More good news on the issue of worldwide terrorism, which, as usual, the Democrats and the Left find themselves on the wrong side of the issue.

Stephen Spruiell at NRO The Corner (1)

An e-mail:

What a great day for Colombia! Countdown to "I question the timing..." comments on the left blogosphere, with McCain in Colombia and Obama blasting him for visiting a U.S. ally on a day that became one of historic importance. Too much!

I'd be tempted to "question the timing," too, but this triumph (2) is just the latest in a string of recent victories for President Alvaro Uribe's government against the narco-terrorists trying to undermine Colombia. It started back in March when the Colombian military took out FARC commander Raul Reyes and captured incriminating laptops that implicated Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in the guerilla group's activities. Chavez initially threw a tantrum, but more recently he renounced his longstanding recognition of the FARC as a legitimate army and called on them to release all of their hostages without any preconditions. And don't forget the surrender of Nelly Avila Moreno, a top FARC commander, last month.

This should also be seen in the broader context of the remarkable decline in violence that has taken place since Uribe assumed office, including violence against union members. Remember that violence against union members (and Uribe's alleged lack of attention to the problem) is currently the Democrats' only pretense for opposing the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which McCain supports. McCain smartly planned his trip to Colombia at a time when the FARC is unraveling, violence in Colombia is dropping off sharply and the Democrats are denying this key ally the security of an important trade pact. That's no conspiracy, it's just good politics.

The dramatic news that Colombia had successfully rescued Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans held hostage for years by FARC terrorists represents a further break-through by the Uribe government in what has been an extraordinary year of successes against FARC.

We still don't have the details, but what is by now clear is that Colombia's decision to raid FARC camps across the border in Ecuador on March 1, which had the result of killing one of its senior leaders, Raul Reyes, and of obtaining critical intelligence held in FARC computers, provided information that in turn helped enable Colombia to secure a series of further objectives against FARC.

So far, all that is known is that the rescue took place in Eastern Colombia following months of surveillance by the Colombian government. Earlier this week, a French-Swiss mission had managed to resume contact with FARC hostage-takers. The former French consul in Bogota, Noel Saez, and the French-Swiss academic Jean-Pierre Gontard had met with a close associate of Alfonso Cano, the new FARC leader at an undisclosed location in the jungle in an effort to secure Betancourt's release. They had been authorized by the Colombian government to engage in dialogue in order to conclude a humanitarian agreement for a prisoner exchange. They were trying to restore a communication channel with the kidnappers. Clearly other things were going on at the same time. A prisoner for more than six years, Ingrid Betancourt has been reported to be in poor health. Less is known about the condition of the three US hostages kidnapped in 2003 during an anti-drug operation, Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes, and Keith Stansell.

This is a very big win for Colombia, which has steadfastly rejected FARC's demands for recognition, release of FARC guerrillas imprisoned by the Colombian government, and the creation of a demilitarized zone that would have allowed FARC safe-haven in designated areas. Prior to Colombia's March 1 raid, they were on a path to achieving political support for these objectives, aided by officials in Ecuador and Venezuela. With this rescue, which may well involve collaboration by defectors from within the FARC, the collapse of the FARC as a political, terrorist, and criminal force in Colombia, after 44 years, may be nearing.

URLs:

(1) http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzBmMGViODI3ZmZkNmJlOTkwZTJkZmRlNWRjMmMyZTA=
(2) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23421973/
(3) http://www.freetrade.org/node/839
(4) http://counterterrorismblog.org/2008/07/colombia_rescues_ingrid_betanc.php

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01:26 PM - There are no Words to Express Everything Conveyed by This Photo
Current mood: pessimistic
Category: News and Politics

MaryAnn at Soldiers Angels-Germany (1) has the photo. As she says, "it represents the highest ideals of our country and our guys, and the hopes and aspirations of the Iraqi people. . . . This is why we fight."

Indeed. And this is what the Democrats and Republicans and mass media should be talking about and showing to the American people - and the world - every single day. Alas, all those people could give a rats rear end about all the positive things the American troops are doing in Iraq.

Thankfully, we have places such as Soldiers Angels-Germany, Michelle Malkin (2) and John at Castle Argghhh!!! (4) to relay the facts on the ground that the mass media suppresses from the American public.

URLs:

(1) http://soldiersangelsgermany.blogspot.com/2008/06/trust.html
(2) http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/01/picture-worth-a-thousand-words/
(3) http://www.thedonovan.com/

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