Monday, June 30, 2003
Mind Food.
I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820
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Posted By: geekWithA.45  
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Another Clear, Articulate Voice
Follow the link, by all means, it's from Capitalism.orgs FAQ.
Quote:
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Guns, Self-defense, and the Second Amendment
Is the right to own a gun based on the second amendment?
No. The right to own guns is not based on the second amendment. If there were no second amendment in the U.S. Constitution, one would still possess a right to own a weapon of self-defense, which in today's context, means a firearm, i.e., a gun.
What is the basis of the right to own a gun for self-defense?
The right to own a firearm, is based on the right to self-defense, i.e., the right to those means to defend oneself against those who wish to destroy one's life. The right to self-defense is itself is a corollary of the right to life (a corollary is here defined as a self-evident implication of a general principle).
It would be absurd to say one has the right to life, but does not have the right to the means necessary to protect that life. It would be like saying one has the right to life, but not the right to purchase food. Yet, this is what opponents to the right to own a gun are really against: the right to life.
Unfortunately, it is the right to life, that is ignored in the debate over the right to bear arms, both by its opponents, and by its so-called defenders! As Alexander Maher writes in Capitalism Magazine:
"The field of battle on which gun control should be fought is exactly on this issue: man's rights. Statistical arguments on gun control are a red herring -- as the leftists' appeals to hungry children or the environmentalists' appeals to clean parks are also meant to distract their opponents from the fundamental issues at stake. While the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other defenders of the right to bear arms argue over statistics and interpreting the Constitution, the real issues remain untouched and are sacrificed to the enemies of our freedom."
How is the right to self-defense applied under capitalism?
Under capitalism, it is the government's job to use force to defend its citizen's rights; however, government is not omnipotent, and it is not omnipresent: it cannot be everywhere. In many cases the protective forces of government cannot arrive to a criminal situation in time to prevent an irreversible situation, i.e., such as a murder. As such, every peaceful citizen has the right to those means necessary to protect themselves in emergency situations, until the police can arrive to 'takeover', i.e., an intrusion by a would be rapist when a woman is alone in ones apartment.
Isn't owning a gun inherently evil?
No. Evil and good are moral terms that apply to entities that can make moral choices. A gun is a non-volitional object. Guns have no power of choice; they simply act according to their identity, their nature. Unlike a gun, the user of a firearm possesses free-will, and can be morally judged for his actions. It is only the user of a gun who is good or evil: a woman who uses a gun to shoot a man wishing to rape her is acting selfishly to save her life -- and is judged as good; a bank robber using a gun to rob a bank is acting irrationally and selflessly (by placing himself in such a predicament, and attempting to achieve values by theft) -- and is judged as evil. To say that a gun is intrinsically evil, because it can be used by criminals -- and corrupt governments -- to rob peaceful citizens, is like saying water is evil because people can drown in it.
Does the right to bear arms, include the right to privately owned nuclear weapons as the 'Libertarians' insist.
No. There is no right to bear weapons like a gun, outside of the right to life (whether for self-defense, or hunting, etc.). A corollary of a principle (such as the right to bear arms) cannot violate the principle on which it hierarchically depends upon (the right to self-defense). A nuclear weapon -- i.e., an atomic bomb -- is a weapon of mass destruction. There is no such thing as the right to mass destruction, as it lies in contradiction to the right to self-defense. One does not defend oneself against a mugger by tossing a nuclear bomb.
Nuclear weapons are not weapons of self-defense. They are weapons of total offense, that render (in the present context) all weapons of self-defense useless. Such a 'right to own a nuclear weapon' would in practice turn the right to self-defense into a chimera. After all, how does one defend oneself against a nuclear bomb? By 'ducking for cover'?
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Light Blogging Alert
In case you haven't already noticed, blogging has been sporadic lately, and this trend will continue unpredictably.
Sorry 'bout that.
Long story short:
My wife, the lovely and formidable GeeketteWithA9mm and I are doing an international adoption, and things are heating up.
We'll keep ya posted ;)
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
"As Muslims, we can't accept dogs at our homes."
And so, irrate from "rough treatment" by coalition forces as they continued their search for heavy weapons, 3 of the 6 British troops who were recently killed in Iraq appear to have been executed after surrendering, and the other 3 died fighting, in part because they weren't wearing their armor in an effort to win "hearts and minds".
Summary:
Operation "win hearts and minds" by being politically correct and culturally sensitive has been called on account of non appreciation by the people of Iraq.
Operation "kickass, who cares what their names are" will be taking its place.
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Hey, I can't blame them for getting pissy about rude treatment at the hands of troops, but I draw the line when they start executing prisoners.
Fuckem.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Admittedly, The Situation Surrounding The Event Is Dodgy...
But as a statement of principle, this quote is awful:
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Prosecuting QC John Creaney told Lord Justice McCollum that while it was accepted a threat on Mr Shoukri's life was made, he was not entitled to arm himself with a weapon.
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So, there ya have it. Someone makes a death threat, say your prayers, fill out your will, and get a head start on digging your grave. You're not "entitled to arm" yourself.
There but for the grace of God and the Founders go we.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Friday, June 20, 2003
It's time, the "debate" is over.
It's time to end this, and declare that Individual right to keep and bear arms is Axiomatic.
I've been looking into this issue for a good long time and there is one pattern that is so consistent that it's spooky, and no one really talks about it.
Research that stands in favor of individual RKBA tends to stand the tests of science, time, and peer review,
and
"research" that stands against RKBA is usually demolished in very short order, and (sometimes even repudiated by it's own author! )
Based on the evidence, I think it's time that we can collectively declare that the "debate" is over, and accept that the Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms is supported by first principles, natural rights, history, and both pragmatic and social utility.
We're on solid ground folks. It's time to stand tall, and people who pretend otherwise should be treated with the same bemused sympathy we reserve for someone who insisted that the earth is flat.
The simple matter is this:
MMM & The Brady Bunch don't have open forums because they can't tolerate, or survive in the face of informed dissent from their dogma, which doesn't hold water in the light of day.
If you shine a light on a gun banner, they will either grow and join us, or close their eyes and ears tighter shouting na na na na na while they scuttle towards the darkness.
We, on the other hand, hold each other to high standards of intellectual integrity, and are generally prepared to stand corrected.
There is a whole world full of difference between those two positions, and it's time to stop treating the gun banners arguments as if they were imbued with any sort of validity whatsoever.
Crap is Crap, and it's time to treat it for what it is: Self Evident Crap.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Wow, I Finally Did It...
(No, not that, you gutter mind!)
I've been noodling with the following chain of text in various forms for some time, trying to hit the nail on the head. This is plenty close enough:
Q) Why is the individual right to keep and bear arms critically important, and why is the honest attempt to limit the damage caused by guns via banning them misguided?
Let's start with the very first principles.
I (we) exist.
Inherent in that existence is the right to continue that existence, and that right exists everywhere we are.
There is nowhere on this earth or off it where the right to defend yourself does not exist.
Implicit in this right of self defense is the right to take positive action to actually effect that defense.
Since you have the right to take action to defend yourself, you also have the right to use tools to make that defense as effective as possible.
Since an immediate threat to your life is the most dire circumstance imaginable, and that this threat can emerge at any time, and in any place, and since failing to deal effectively with the threat means that you DIE FOREVER (as far as we can tell, anyway) any and all means are legitimate to effect your defense.
Therefore, you naturally have the right to posess and have with you, anywhere, the most effective means available to defend yourself, be it a stick, spear, sword, flintlock, modern firearm, forcefield, or phaser.
If you deny any element of the above, the whole thing will unravel all the way back to your very existence, and you are really arguing that someone else has a right to make you not exist.
(Since most gun banners feel that banning guns somehow contributes to their continued existence, they ultimately undermine themselves, and achieve the opposite effect, both in theory and in practice!)
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Oh, Yeah. Like This is a Shocking Big Surprise.
Well, it turns out that the powers granted to government by the dubious Patriot Act, thoughtlessly passed by congress without even the pretense of Constitutional scrutiny, has and will be wielded against citizens suspected of everyday, garden variety non terrorism related crimes.
As if we didn't see that coming.
Ya know, the Founders certainly did see that coming down the pike, more than 200 years ago. They knew from painful experience that any and all power granted to government not might, not can, but eventually WILL be abused. In our modern, psychotically paced world, it seems that eventually has been compressed down to immediately, without even letting the ink dry on the signature.
And everyone wonders why Americans don't trust their government.
Shame, shame, shame on all of them, for letting us down, for failing to uphold the trust we have placed in them.
And considering that they're coming back to us, asking for yet even more power they don't need in the guise of Patriot II, either they're out of their minds for asking, or we're out of our minds for not taking their toys away, paddling their little behinds, and sending them to bed without dinner.
For our own good, government must always be restrained as if it were an autistic child.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Thursday, June 12, 2003
With boring predictability
The words "Lies" and "Left" seem inextricably entwined.
Apparently, Bill Clinton was about to beat the hell out of his longtime advisor Dick Morris , when Hillary pulled him off, and they've been lying about it ever since, including in her new book.
FEH.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Well Meaning Do Gooders
WMDG, who operate from a position of fear and ignorance have the unfortunate tendency to attract followers and spread their particular disease.
It's a shame that educated folks tend to let them actually influence public policy, international relations, and foriegn aid decisions.
This results in starvation and death.
Did you hear me? I said DEATH, and I meant it. You guys are KILLING PEOPLE. Think about that the next time you have a happy Green Street Rally, and face up to the notion that maybe, just maybe, it ain't ya'll saving everyone's ass.
Goto a real school, or a library, and learn facts, and science, and history, and skip the politically correct eco-fascist dogma.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Load of Horseshit
And people take this sort of thing seriously, with much handwringing and so on.
Long story short: comic does a dumbass stunt on a bet, and jumps naked into a shark tank in Britain.
OK, granted, this is a dumbass idea, but to continue....2 days later, the shark keels over and dies of a heamorrhage, and there is much consternation....was it the comics fault? Did he frighten the shark? Should charges be brought? Let's do an autopsy!
PEOPLE! Listen to yourselves! It's a fucking shark. They're a fairly hardy animal, unlikely to be frightened by humans, who they occasionally view as food.
There are millions of them swimming around the ocean!
WE EAT THEM FER CHRISTSAKES, THEY'RE A FUCKING FOOD ANIMAL!
Please, please, please, give it the hell up. It's bullshit of the highest order, and we all have lots of better things to be doing.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Monday, June 09, 2003
More From Col. Cooper....
"Note that liberty and freedom are not the same. Liberty is a political philosophy, whereas freedom is a physical condition. Governor Henry shouted, "Give me liberty or give me death!" He said nothing about freedom. The Preamble seeks to ensure the blessings of liberty upon American posterity, but can say nothing about freedom, since Americans were already free. I suppose one should not be picky about these things, but imprecise communication has been responsible for much disaster throughout history."
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"As we face off in cultural conflict (by their choice, not ours), we may point out that we have walked on the moon, we have motored on Mars, we have landed before we took off, we have conquered small pox, and we wield the B2 . They offer only institutionalized malice. Certainly the West is imperfect, and there are many ways in which we can improve, but the Holy War they offer is a poor answer."
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Saturday, June 07, 2003
Failure to Scale.
We in the software engineering community are familiar with a concept that we shorthand as "failure to scale".
Typically, systems are constructed using comfy, somewhat bloated code that does a great deal, both in terms of what the system actually does, and also in terms of what the code does for the programmer.
An example of code that does a lot for the programmer might be, oh, a general purpose list object. This object will save a lot of development time, because it knows how to do a lot of tedious things like manage it's own memory, sort itself, find objects in itself, and so on.
Developer convenience is a good thing, a by product of the business need to develop a product that meets the requirements quickly, and therefore cheaply, but it comes at a price.
The price is paid in terms of performance, and also in terms of system resources, such as memory. Sometimes, the performance/resource tax is a lot steeper than it would appear on the surface.
This trade off is well understood by advanced developers, who also know that in a resource or performance constrained position, they can go back to more labor intensive, but computationally compact structures such as bare byte buffers and raw math if they have to wring out blistering speed.
What happens though, is that less knowledgable developers can fall into a trap, because they may not be even aware that a deeper level of code is available to them. Even worse, the people who own the business drivers have no clue what the tradeoffs are, and often aren't interested in listening even if a knowledgable developer gives them fair warning.
So what inevitably happens is that an example of a system of code is built to the specifications, and it marvelously performs its assigned task.
Great! Huzzah! Hurray! Now, let's put it online.
15 minutes later, the servers have pegged to 100% utilization, and the needles stay there. Network connections are quickly swamped, and are being refused by the thousands.
You've just encounted "failure to scale".
You unjack the whole thing from the main network, and send your test probes in to see what's going on, and what you find is that the system is behaving perfectly, as if nothing had happened.
The analogy is probably imprecise, but I think there is a similiar "failure to scale" with respect to the ability of a Free Republic to "Keep Liberty Real".
For example, did you know that the first census, performed in 1790, the total population was a mere 3,893,874 people? Yep, that's everyone, slaves included. The population eligible to vote was significantly less than that. The census doesn't answer that question directly, but it does list only 800k white males over 16, and if I recall my history correctly, you needed to be a freeman, 21, and a landowner to vote. So I suppose we could chop it down to at least half, and call it 400k voters.
In short, you could quite comfortably pack the entire 1790 population of the US into modern day Manhattan, and all of the voters into Giants stadium.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that there is only one way to correct a software system that doesn't scale:
You've got to strip it down to it's essentials. You got to chop out every unnecessary and low and medium priority thing it is doing, so that it can utilize the horsepower it has to attend to the things that it MUST do to achieve the goals set out for the system. And that only buys you the time you need to retool the high priority functionality.
And in case anyone forgot, the goals are clearly stated as follows:
..."to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"....
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Chainsaws in NJ
Firearms and Chainsaws:
*They're both absurdly dangerous if misused.
*You need common sense and a little bit of training to be safe with them.
*They should be kept away from kids without supervision.
*If they where incapable of doing damage, they wouldn't be useful.
So howcome it is that everytime I step into my back yard with my rifle, the neighbors grab their kids and flee, but don't look twice when I've got my chainsaw?
Why is it that anyone, of any age can walk into any Sears in NJ and buy the biggest, meanest assault chainsaw they sell, but you need a background check, fingerprints, and permission from the chief of police to buy the meekest bb gun?
Someone explain that to me please. I just don't freaking get it.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
I gotta repost this:
AU REVOIR, MARIANNE…AUF WIEDERSEHEN, LILI MARLENE
The End of America’s European Romance
By Ralph Peters
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 15, 2003
The societies of "Old Europe" remind Americans of the Arab Street. Preferring comforting delusions to challenging realities, Europeans talk a great deal, do very little, and blame the United States for home-grown ills.
The recent chants in the boulevards of Berlin were almost indistinguishable from those heard--until recently--in downtown Baghdad. Europe’s culture of complaint, its enthusiasm for accusing America of every wickedness while assigning every virtue to itself, and its stunning lack of self-examination leave Americans bewildered.
We thought you were adults, but, from across the Atlantic, you look like spoiled children. And your recent tantrums have convinced Big Daddy America to deposit you on the steps of the strategic orphanage.
The damage done by the recent confrontation between The United States and those nations whose vocabularies collapsed to the single words "Nein!" or "Non!" will be repaired-on the surface. We shall continue to cooperate on matters of mutual interest. But, on a deeper level, the exuberantly dishonest attacks on America heard from France and Germany (Belgium simply doesn't count), along with the shameless grandstanding of Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Chirac, appear to even the most pragmatic Americans as grounds for divorce from our long marriage of convenience.
The divorce is long overdue. Ignoring "Old Europe" on questions of grand strategy will liberate the United States, freeing us at last from the failed European model of diplomacy that has given the world so many hideous wars, dysfunctional borders and undisturbed dictators. The recent mischief wrought in Paris and Berlin has enabled Washington to escape a long thrall of enchantment, a slumber of sorts during which America allowed Europe’s ghost to haunt its decisions.
Now you have awakened us, and we see that Europe’s influence was nothing but a legacy of nightmares. We shall no longer subscribe to your blood-soaked, corrupt rules for the international system, but will forge our own.
You will not like many of our new rules. But to paraphrase Frederick the Great’s remark about Maria Theresia, you will cry, but take your share of any available spoils.
As a result of a series of remarkable strategic miscalculations, France and Germany have lost their international footing-not only with the USA, but with the world. You had your moment in the anti-American sun. High noon revealed you as powerless and inept.
For Germany, this divorce will offer some advantages. American combat forces soon will begin to leave German soil permanently, followed in good time by our logistics facilities, which are simply more difficult to shift. This will be to Germany’s benefit practically and psychologically--and very much to the benefit of America’s armed forces, which have become nothing but a cash cow for greedy organizations ranging from your railways to your labor unions.
NATO will survive, of course. Along with the European Union, it’s an indispensable employment agency for Europe’s excess bureaucrats. But other bilateral and multilateral military arrangements will take precedence in Washington’s strategic calculations.
On the negative side, Germany will lose almost all of its diplomatic influence beyond continental Europe-and Berlin never had much, at least since 1945. The world will take your Euros, but will not take you seriously.
You have asserted your independence from America. Now you have it. Good luck.
We won our war, easily, despite your protests and without your help. And do not flatter yourself with rhetoric about refusing to be America’s vassals. No one in the United States questioned Germany’s right to decide for itself whether or not to support our efforts to depose Saddam Hussein. Germany had every right to decline to participate.
But it was the way you did it that infuriated us.
Bundeskanzler Schroeder astonished us. We long had recognized him as a political charlatan, but the extent of his demagogy and his amateurish inability to foresee the consequences of his ranting still came as a surprise to us. We see Mr. Schroeder as a man utterly without convictions-a man without qualities--a political animal so debased that he resembles no one so much as he does European caricatures of small-time American politicians. His opportunistic anti-Americanism seemed all for effect, without substance or genuine belief.
Yet, in other respects, Schroeder proved quintessentially European: He criticized, but failed to offer meaningful solutions of his own. He chose slogans over ideas, convenience over ethics, and portrayed small-minded selfishness as political heroism. What qualities might better describe 21st century Europe?
Germany has come a long way downhill from Adenauer and Schmidt to Gerhard Schroeder.
Most difficult of all for us to stomach were remarks from members of the German government comparing President Bush to Hitler. Now, does anyone reading this newspaper believe that’s an honest comparison? And was it fitting coming from a German official?
One thinks not. Americans heard the echo of Joseph Goebbels.
Then there were all the demonstrators waving signs equating the United States to the Nazi regime, as tasteless a display as Germany has managed since the last crematorium went cold.
Once our tempers cooled, we realized that all these Nazi comparisons weren’t really about us. It was all about you, your guilt and your evasions.
Perhaps the most revealing incident of the war came during a television interview with a young protester in Berlin after Baghdad had fallen. The reporter asked him what he thought of the images of Iraqis cheering U.S. Marines and toppling Saddam’s statue. The young German said the scenes "annoyed" him.
Doubtless. Reality is annoying, indeed.
Oh, we know how you see us. You never cease telling us. We are uncultured, because we cannot recall the date of the first performance of Das Rheingold. We are heartless, since our society favors opportunity over security. We are naïve, since we do not share your prejudices. We are warmongers, because we still believe some things are worth defending. And now we are Nazis, because we moved to depose a dictator who had slaughtered his own people as well as his neighbors, while harboring terrorists and pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, you continue to buy our cultural products. Your brightest young people come to our shores to work. We Americans have moved beyond the racism that blights Germany and France (we look forward to meeting a German Colin Powell of Turkish ancestry in Berlin or an ethnic-Senegalese Condoleeza Rice in Paris), so we certainly do not share your prejudices. And after the events of September 11th, 2001, we will not wait to be attacked, but will strike pre-emptively wherever we believe it to be necessary-and we shall do so without ever again asking Europe’s permission. So we are, indeed, warmongers by European standards.
But what about the charge that Americans are the new Nazis?
I think I understand the sickness that afflicts you. I received my first insight as a young Army sergeant in a not-yet-reunified Germany a quarter-century ago. Although the event was ten years past, young Germans unfailingly brought up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam during our conversations. My Lai was one of two documented American atrocities in that war. Almost two hundred villagers were murdered. It was inexcusable, and we did not try to excuse it. But those young Germans grasped at the My Lai massacre with an alacrity that astonished me. To them, the two-hundred dead at My Lai canceled Auschwitz and Treblinka, six million murdered Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and dissenters. The message was, "See! You Americans are just as bad as we Germans were-maybe worse."
I did not find the comparison convincing.
Now, with Germany’s Jews long since slaughtered or driven out (to America’s great benefit, thank you), you attack Israel at every opportunity, hanging on every Palestinian claim, no matter how absurd, and inventing Israeli atrocities. Americans see Israelis as fighting for their existence against those who want to exterminate them. You view Israelis as a reproach to your past deeds, and you lash out at them. Clausewitz is no longer a guide to your national behavior. Today, we need to consult Sigmund Freud. A Jew, of course.
The Israelis, too, have been called Nazis by your elected politicians-indeed, "Nazi" seems to be your favorite insult. At times it sounds to us as though everyone who isn’t a German is now a Nazi. Unless, of course, we are talking of Arabs who murder Jews, in which case a good German speaks of freedom fighters.
Here in America, Holocaust survivors live among us, as do those aging G.I.s who opened the gates to Dachau. They have been our fathers, our teachers and our neighbors. Is it any wonder that we find your rhetoric repulsive? Hitler, at least, was honest about his bigotry.
And now we must endure the ludicrous schizophrenia of your present society, in which you alternate between insisting that German guilt must have an end and indulging in revisionist history that equates the allied bombing campaign against your cities or the sinking of ships ferrying submarine crews with Nazi evils.
Your attempts to excuse the inexcusable merely remind us that Germany deserved every bomb dropped upon its soil. Bush the equivalent of Hitler? Show us the American death camps, please.
As a lifelong admirer of German culture, you leave me in despair. Your chancellor has transformed the worthy old maxim "Be more than you appear to be" into "Appear to be more than you are." Goethe’s timeless query, "Germany…but where is it?" has been answered with "Between France and Russia, duped by Chirac and cooly manipulated by Putin." And Faust has been outed as Professor Unrat.
Auf wiedersehen, Lili Marleen. It was great while it lasted.
And Marianne? Since no one took Germany seriously to begin with, Berlin had less to lose in l’affaire Iraq than Paris. France gambled with Dostoevskian abandon in the strategic casino and ended up bankrupt in the morning light.
President Chirac and his sorcerer’s apprentice, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, emerged as one of the most incompetent combinations in diplomatic history, two drunkards behind the steering wheel of policy. It astonishes us that the French actually believed that Paris could dictate terms to Washington.
Sorry. Gaul does not give orders to Rome.
We understood that Chirac was playing to the Arab world as well as to his domestic electorate. But the succession of French refusals to negotiate seriously or even to consider compromises at the United Nations, climaxed by France’s announcement, in advance, that it would veto any further resolutions introduced by the United States or Britain, seemed suicidal to us.
And it was suicidal. The legacy of Charles de Gaulle perished in the Security Council. The tradition of permitting France a greater voice in trans-Atlantic decision-making than its place, power or contributions merited is over, as dead as Jean-Paul Sartre or his idol, Josef Stalin. The Gallic cock crowed so loudly it fell off the fence and broke its neck.
Washington will no longer entertain the views of Paris on vital international issues. Nor will we risk another French veto on a matter we view as critical to our national security. And we will feed the United Nations the crumbs of strategy.
Far from expanding its influence, France has forced its collapse. A quick round of applause in Algeria is hardly worth the loss of America’s ear. Briefly the champion of all the anti-American forces in the world, from Libya to North Korea, France is left unable to resolve the civil strife in Ivory Coast. And Paris will not be given a significant role in rebuilding Iraq.
France long has seemed to Americans to be the apotheosis of European hypocrisy. While defending Saddam Hussein from "American aggression," Mr. Chirac hosted Robert Mugabe in Paris in a pathetic attempt to expand French influence into Anglophone Africa. But I was in Zimbabwe when the visit occurred and the degree of fury the people of that country felt toward France for hosting Mugabe-whom they have nicknamed "Robodan Mugabevich"-guaranteed that the French will never be welcome between the Zambezi and the Limpopo.
France seems to us an aging whore desperate to attract even the most diseased customers.
But, above all, it is French naivete that leaves us shaking our heads. How could they so misjudge the situation? Aren’t the French supposed to be terribly clever and devious? How could they be so clumsy, and on such a grand scale?
The short answer is that, like Arabs, they believed their own fantasies. In addition to the forlorn illusion that France is still a great power, Mr. Chirac and Mr. de Villepin utterly misjudged George Bush. They had called him a cowboy for so long that they came to believe there was nothing to the man. And they were wrong.
I did not vote for President Bush. But, after 9/11/01, I was glad he was our president. Had Al Gore been in the White House, we would have done the European thing and formed a committee to ask how we had brought disaster upon ourselves. President Bush led a galvanized nation into a series of deliberate, carefully-considered actions that have broken the back of one terrorist organization after another while removing a brutal, backward theocracy from one country and a blood-encrusted dictatorship from another.
And America is not finished. We will no longer subscribe to the European system in which dictators may do as they wish with impunity within their own borders-your insistence on respect for national sovereignty simply means that Hitler would have been perfectly acceptable had he only killed German Jews. And we will not follow the traditions of kings and kaisers in which heads of state are exempt from personal punishment, no matter their crimes. We will go after the truly guilty, not the masses. And no amount of insults hurled from beneath the Brandenburg Gate or from the Place de la Concorde will deter us.
We are finished with your delight in weeping over past holocausts while you remain unwilling to act to prevent or interrupt new holocausts. Srebrenica is the European model. Baghdad is ours.
President Bush is a Texan, as Europeans never fail to remind us. But the intelligence services of France and Germany seem to have failed to understand the character of Texans. They don’t speak artfully, but they act resolutely. They aren’t relativists. Texans believe there is a difference between right and wrong. And when you insult a Texan to his face while betraying his trust, he is not going to take it kindly. Confronting a Texan in public is always ill-advised, unless you intend to fight it out to the end-and have the means to do so. Texans don’t even care where Europe is on the map.
We Americans are all Texans now. You have left us no choice.
Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author of sixteen books, including novels, collections of essays and works on strategy. His most recent book is Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Cell Phone 911 Challenge
As I stood outside this morning, I saw a nervous woman jog by, clutching her cell phone. She eyed me briefly, and angled her course away from me. Now, I'm not offended by that. I'm not a particularly scary looking person, but I'm not gonna fault anyone for taking care of themselves.
What I am sick to death of is two things:
First, the fact that the "authorities" consistently sell to citizens the idea that cellphones and 911 are a magic talisman capable of effectively warding off evil, and
second, the fact that so many people buy that line of shit.
Listen up, folks, Cellphones and 911 are completely useless for your immediate defense.
Absofuckinglutely Useless.
I urge everyone to take my cell phone 911 challenge, especially if you don't believe me.
First, and foremost, do not actually call 911 during this challenge. Those folks are overworked as it is, and they don't need this sort of nonsense.
The next time you're in a grocery store, or whatever, when you're in the middle of the store pretend (only in the privacy of your mind) that a gunman has held up the register, and is proceeding to execute patrons.
Now, draw your cellphone, power it on, and dial 411. (FOUR one one) for information, and get the number of your local pizza shop, or some similiar establishment. Keep an eye on your watch, and count seconds.
This is approximately the amount of time it will take you to identify yourself and your situation to a 911 operater under the best circumstances.
Did you even get a connection? How long did it take? In this mind experiment, how many patrons did the bad guy execute? How many more minutes till help arrives?
In all honesty, at what point in this simulation did YOU DIE?
Cell phones are a notoriously unreliable piece of communications technology, and only a fool trusts his life to one as his first line of defense.
Be smart, be safe, and stay alive till help arrives.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
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