Border incursions by Mexico continue

Yuma (AZ) Sun - Courts and Police:

"Last month, the Inland Valley (Calif.) Daily Bulletin reported that there had been 216 incursions into the United States by Mexican soldiers since 1996, citing a Department of Homeland Security document the newspaper obtained. The story said the Mexican military had crossed over in the Yuma area 24 times during that period."

The above nugget is part of a story about an unmarked Mexican government helicopter crossing the border and flying up the Colorado River for, according to the US and Mexican governments, about a half mile inside US airspace. Our government accepts the Mexican official position that it was a civilian craft operated by the Federal Judicial Police (analagous to our FBI) although American civilians who observed the craft thought the occupants were in army uniforms. Either army or police, they had no business crossing the border - and why unmarked?

Anyhow, the revelation that there have been 216 incidents that our government knows of and admits to of Mexican soldiers crossing our border in 10 years means we have one of these incidents every 17 days! Who's minding the store?

Iran re-writes the history of animation icons Tom and Jerry

WorldNetDaily: Tom and Jerry – a Jewish makeover?:

"'The Jewish Walt Disney Company gained international fame with this cartoon,' said Bolkhari. 'It is still shown throughout the world. This cartoon maintains its status because of the cute antics of the cat and mouse – especially the mouse.

"'Some say that the main reason for making this very appealing cartoon was to erase a certain derogatory term that was prevalent in Europe.'"

Just when you thought the Iranians couldn't top themselves after the weighty theological controversy over short- vs. long-legged dogs, along comes Prof. Hasan Bolkhari to show how the "Jewish Walt Disney Company" created Tom and Jerry to improve the post-Hitler image of Jews in Europe.

As the WND story points out, of course, Tom and Jerry were created for MGM by the team of Hanna and Barbera in 1939.

For some reason, WND omitted the relevant facts that the boss of MGM in those days was the fabled Louis B. Mayer who was Jewish, while the Disney company was controlled by Walt Disney and his brother Roy who were not Jewish but had a much more famous Mouse - Mickey.

It is amazing that such stupid propaganda claims can be seriously offered by Iran, and even more so that it comes from an advisor to the government's education ministry who actually lectures on cinema for Iran's Channel 4 TV.

There seems to be no corner of the culture that the Iranian propaganda machine will not seek to pollute for the advancement of their hatred of the West generally and the Jews in particular. This illustrates why fighting anti-semitism is the urgent business of all of us; the radical Muslim attack on the Jews is in many ways merely a proxy for its general hatred of the idea of the West, notion of progress, and therefore the modern world.

Now, there are certain elements of modernism which are reprehensible - see, for example, the works of theologians like Schaeffer and Van Til - but the kind of attitude the Iranian regime, the Taliban and al Qaeda exemplify would throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Just like "The American President"

Herald Sun: Clinton's battle of Medway [25feb06]:

"Head club pro John Dixon took the phone call from Mr Clinton's people, but thought it was a hoax."

That the pro at Medway Golf Club in Maidstone, Victoria, didn't believe the call from Clinton's advance team is nothing to fault him for. What is unfortunate is that he and the club have said they would have interrupted their scheduled ladies tournament to accommodate the former "Groper-in-Chief" if they had realized the request was genuine.

The movie reference is to the trouble Michael Douglas has making phone calls to Annette Benning and a flower shop clerk - neither believes it really is the president calling her on the phone. The film "The American President" came from Aaron Sorkin who later produced the TV show "The West Wing." The main difference between the two was that Martin Sheen got promoted from Chief of Staff to POTUS.

Odd exercise in censorship for Oscar (TM) show

Army Archerd: It's hard out here for a censor:

"The nominated tune 'It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp' from 'Hustle & Flow' with music and lyric by Jordan Houston ('Juicy Jay'), Cedric Coleman ('Freysier Boy') and Paul Beauregard ('Deejay Paul') has, by my count, 10 repeated words which would not pass network clearances. They are ..."

If you want to know what those words are, use the link - I'm not entirely comfortable with reciting them here.

The significance of this minor cultural confrontation is that the songs nominated for Oscar (TM) awards are performed as a part of the awards ceremony. The authors of this nominated song have agreed to re-write it to remove the offending words. Fortunately for them, the network has given the green light to keeping the words "bitch" and "hoes" in the song as performed for the awards show.

Personally, I find the latter OK words more offensive than some of what the censors gagged at. One wonders how a song that can't play on broadcast TV qualifies for such a high honor in the first place. And, what is the point of performing what is really a different song, not the one nominated, as part of the awards ceremony?

Remember Biafra?

International News Article | Reuters.com:

"Militants in the oil-producing Niger Delta have waged a three-month campaign of attacks and kidnappings, which has cut exports and driven up world oil prices. One of their demands is greater control over their region and its resources."

Religious and tribal animosities are fueling a crisis in Nigeria that shows no signs of improving anytime soon. The article mentions that the unrest is already suppressing oil production in the SE section of the country that was called Biafra during its abortive war for independence a generation ago. A full-scale civil war could knock out Nigerian oil production with serious effects on world prices.

Another victory for free speech?

German court convicts man for insulting Islam - Yahoo! News:

"Manfred van H. printed out sheets of toilet paper bearing the word 'Koran' shortly after a group of Muslims carried out a series of bomb attacks in London in July 2005. He sent the paper to German television stations, magazines and some 15 mosques."

Mr. van H. got off light. His crime carries a maximum of three years imprisonment and he received instead one year suspended, five years probation and 300 hours of community service.

This was a prank in extremely poor taste, but it ought not to be a crime. Of course, there are many things you can't say in Germany, Austria and many other European countries, just as there are things - different things mostly - that you cannot say in most Muslim countries.

It makes you appreciate America even more, I think, to see how tenuous individual rights are even in places where you would think they would be secure.

Vatican demands reciprosity from Muslim nations, why don't we?

My Way News:

"Bishop Rino Fisichella, head of one of the Roman universities that train young priests from around the world, told Corriere della Sera the Vatican should speak out more.

"'Let's drop this diplomatic silence,' said the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University. 'We should put pressure on international organizations to make the societies and states in majority Muslim countries face up to their responsibilities.'"

As a reformed Christian, I am no apologist for the Bishop of Rome and his followers, but when they're right, one must give credit where credit is due. Too bad we don't hear such plain talk from the leaders of real countries.

More cartoon madness

BREITBART.COM - China Bans Cartoons That Blend Animation:

"China has announced a ban on TV shows and movies that blend animated elements with live-action actors, a move aimed at nurturing local animators and apparently curbing the use of foreign cartoons."

This would seem to be a direct assault on the free trade goals of the WTO since the motive seems to be primarily to protect and encourage the domestic animation industry - content screening being already a long established part of the process of licensing foreign media productions for broadcast in the PRC.

The article notes that Chinese animation shops have had considerable success in doing animation for foreign studios but relatively little is produced specifically for the local market. Of course, it does not occur to the government that the thing they need is a way for people with interesting stories to tell to finance, produce and market their product. This is what drives the successful US and Japanese animation shops.

Direct challenge to Roe v. Wade brewing in South Dakota

Telegraph | News | South Dakota senate votes for first ban on abortion :

"South Dakota was last night on the verge of becoming the first American state to ban abortion since the Supreme Court legalised the practice in the 1970s. Its state senate voted 23 to 12 for a ban."

I fear this may be a bit premature. Tactically, I would rather see a slightly weaker law taken to the Supreme Court first and a strong one like South Dakota's taken up on appeal only if the first succeeds, but I certainly cannot fault the right-to-life leaders in South Dakota for their effort to save the lives of the weakest of our citizens.

As Capt. Reynaud said, "I am shocked ..."

TMZ.com: News - Exclusive: Underage Stars Party Illegally at Clubs:

"A Hollywood nightclub promoter, who asked to remain anonymous, was blunt: 'Authorities know that there are underage celebrities inside drinking and if they don't care, why should we?' He added the obvious: 'Celebrities help to make our clubs more exclusive.'

"California's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) is charged with enforcing the State's underage drinking laws. TMZ has obtained every citation the ABC issued in the City of Los Angeles for 2005 -- 207 in total. Mood was never cited. Indeed, TMZ's record search revealed that Mood has never been cited since opening its doors. The ABC seems far more interested in busting mom and pop liquor stores, often using underage decoys in sting operations."

This is what wealth and the social prestige and political power that flows from it means - you don't worry about the law and the law won't worry about you. On the other hand, I can't help but compare the muted reaction of the major media in these cases to the occasion when Jenna Bush made headlines getting a drink in a Georgetown bar before she was 21.

I wouldn't care much, except that I think the 21 drinking age is a serious error in public policy. First, because several states had to be blackmailed into it by the threatened withholding of their share of federal motor fuel taxes; and second, because it does not serve the reasonable goal of encouraging people to learn to drink responsibly. Finally, it seems quite unfair that the kids who go to the movies and buy the music get criminal records for underage drinking while the actors and singers just get richer and more pampered.

Note: For the cinematically illiterate, the movie reference is to Casablanca where the police chief expresses shock at the illegal gambling at Rick's Cafe Americaine just before the waiter brings him his night's winnings.

Smoke and Mirrors on Energy

My Way News:

"Saying the nation is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that would 'startle' most Americans, President Bush on Monday outlined his energy proposals to help wean the country off foreign oil.

"Less than half the crude oil used by refineries is produced in the United States, while 60 percent comes from foreign nations, Bush said during the first stop on a two-day trip to talk about energy."

Curiously, two well-proven technologies with decades of real-world experience were not even mentioned in this article. They are nuclear electric generating plants - none of which has been started since Three Mile Island almost 30 years ago. The other is the manufacture of refined petroleum products from coal which was demonstrated by Britain in WW1, used extensively by Germany in WW2 and also by South Africa during the anti-apartheid sanctions.

South Africa also extensively used a form of biomass which is, to my recollection, never mentioned by President Bush. Rather than elaborate plans to convert some plant like sawgrass to ethanol for use as a gasoline additive or in dual-fuel engines, it is much easier, cheaper and has less environmental impact to cold press sunflower seeds to produce oil that burns directly in diesel engines and the remaining sunflower material is a high protein feed for cattle.

The article speaks of "proposals to speed the development of biofuels such as 'cellulosic' ethanol made from wood chips or sawgrass" without noting, for example, that wood chips are already a significant source of energy for the wood processing industry and likely to be in greater demand for home heating fuel as electricity, oil and natural gas prices rise. Why waste all the energy it takes to turn them into ethanol instead of the little bit it takes to make chips into pellets for modern woodstoves?

It's also humorous to read gushing reports of the "new" nickel metal hydride battery and the "newer" lithium ion batteries the government is paying to develop. Rechargeable batteries of both these types are available at Radio Shack - they power my radio control model cars and boats.

Of course, the government has a great interest in longer life and greater storage density for batteries to power the increasingly electronic armed forces, including man portable drone aircraft for real time squad level surveillance of the battlefield.

In other words, just as in the Carter administration, there will be deep subsidies for those who have friends in high places and little or nothing done to benefit the taxpayer.

National Lampoon's Animal House

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review - New York Times:

"Mr. [Matthew M.] Aid [an intelligence historian] said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located."

It seems that Mr. Aid and his colleagues in that grove of academe dedicated to history involving intelligence and diplomacy are now operating under a system of "Double Secret Probation." But this time, it is on the orders of US President George W. Bush instead of Faber College Dean Vernon Wormer.

In the present instance, formerly-classified documents that have been available for reading and copying by researchers at the National Archives, even some which have been incorporated in non-classified official publications of agencies of the State Department, have been secretly re-classified. The agencies doing the work not only do not publish any lists of titles of re-classified documents, they even report that they are under orders not to say whether such a reclassification program even exists. Fortunately for us mere taxpayers, someone forgot to order the head of the Archives to disavow any knowledge of these activities and he plans to complain to the president.

The NYTimes takes the position that the re-classifications are intended to remove embarassing info about past intel failures. However, since the two examples in the article both deal with Red China (CIA assurance in 1950 that the PRC would not intervene in the Korean War that year, and a 1962 assessment of the PRC's nuke weapons program by George Kenan who was then our ambassador to Yugoslavia) one might speculate that the motive might have more to do with placating Beijing.

I believe very little ought to be secret, especially with regard to the Korean War, but you have to have a system that keeps secrets that need keeping. That includes prosecuting people who improperly acquire or keep secret documents.

We are at war and General Gonzalez must act promptly to get warrants and search the files of all historians and prosecute all those who hold copies of these re-classified documents. He should also check all the thousands of government depository libraries to see which ones hold copies of State Department and other publications containing such documents. Imagine the fun of prosecuting thousands of librarians and academic historians for a crime they were forbidden to know they had committed.

A note about National Lampoon's Animal House:
I went to see it in a theater in Rome, Georgia, with another guy who was also doing field work for US Rep. Larry McDonald's Democrat primary run-off when it came out in 1978. I had entered the University of Virginia in 1967 and he had started at Sewanee (aka The University of the South) a year or two earlier. We both were near to leterally ROFLOL at the antics of Faber College's Delta House in 1962 - it was so much like the way we remembered our own college days in the 60s in the South.

Cheney hunting accident brings out conspiracy theories

WorldNetDaily: Was vice president sending 'Godfather'-style message? :

"A North Carolina columnist claimed today Dick Cheney's shooting of friend Harry Whittington was not an accident, but was meant to be a message to his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, not to testify against the vice president in the Valerie Plame leak investigation."

Barry Saunders of the News & Obsaerver in Raleigh may be heading off the deep end, but consider the hue and cry in the MSM about a cover up based on the fact that Dick Cheney's staff and the White House press office did not announce the occurrence of the incident before the victim was packed off to the hospital.

The better question, one we are not likely to hear asked, let alone answered, is why the incident was not immediately noticed and reported on by a crowd of press with police scanners and long lens cameras hanging about the Armstrong ranch.

Another question interests me, although I'll wager hardly anyone else will care to ask it. Why is it the duty of government employees to report on the private, non-official acts of public officials? It really steams me that people who are paid by my taxes to report on the activities of the government are used to "spin" the story of what the Veep (or the Prez, for that matter) do when not acting in an official capacity.

I hope I will be forgiven for pointing out that the MSM seems to be treating the apparent accidental shooting in Texas with a great deal more healthy skepticism than they displayed with regard to the death of Vince Foster. Remember the discrepancies in the timeline then - for example, the phone calls from the White House to friends in Arkansas announcing that Foster has been found dead in his car at the White House hours before the "official" discovery of the corpse in a Virginia park? Little inconvenient facts like that were largely ignored by the US press and came to light through the investigative journalism of representatives of the foreign press.

All this is not to say that there are not some puzzling, perhaps even troubling, aspects to the reporting of this incident.

For example, there are reports that private security guards turned away from the Armstrong ranch local police responding to the ambulance call. In my time as an ambulance driver in Pennsylvania, it was routine to dispatch police as well in cases like this. And gunshot injuries, being subject to mandatory reporting by medical personnel, are routinely treated as possible crimes until investigation indicates some other explanation.

Another thing I find odd is that, although there has been mention of the the fact that Cheney lacked an upland bird endorsement on his Texas hunting license (a fact of no significance to the accident), I have seen no mention of any investigation by the game commission which would be routine in most jurisdictions, though I am not familiar with procedures in Texas.

More on this as the story develops.

Feds fear escalation of gang war on border

WorldNetDaily: Grenades, bombs found at border:

"[In a search of a residence in Laredo, Texas, t]he feds captured more than 30 homemade bombs, grenade components, assault weapons, silencers, machine gun assembly kits, bulletproof vests, police scanners and cash, Julie Myers, assistant secretary of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement.
"...
"U.S. authorities have said they increasingly fear violence in Mexico will spill over into the United States.
"About 170 deaths have been attributed to the cartel battles in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in the past year, officials said. Nuevo Laredo is across the Rio Grande from Laredo."

If your common, garden variety drug gangs are fooling aboput with grenades and IEDs in Texas, what makes anyone think the terrorists can't do the same?

But, say some, why haven't they already if it is so easy?

My suspicion is that they realize that, unlike the Euroweinies, they know that attacks here at this time might strengthen the hand of the Bush administration. Attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, even Europe, may demoralize the coalition and speed the time when they can hijack the new and unstable regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Further attacks on the US mainland can wait.

More on jihad in Europe

Van Gogh Murderer: Prophet Justifies My Deed:

"'When you compare me to Osama Bin Laden, you are seriously wronging him and giving me too much honour that I do not deserve,' [Theo Van Gogh's murderer Mohammed] Bouyeri said to the Public Prosecutor (OM). 'But the fact that you see me as the black standard-bearer of Islam in Europe fills me with honour, pride and happiness.'
"...
"[Publicist and law philosopher Afshin] Ellian said yesterday he regretted the fact that Bouyeri's plea was not broadcast on television or radio - the court did not allow this. 'Everything is about violence for him. (...) The one million Muslims (in the Netherlands) should be confronted with him. Then they can make a choice themselves.'"

Bouyeri's comment was made in conjunction with an official inquiry into whether the organization Hofstad, of which he is said to be the leader, should be officially designated as a terrorist enterprise.

The story also reminds us that Bouyeri was born in the Netherlands. If this is how assimilation works in ultra-liberal Holland, it is no wonder that riots have periodically convulsed immigrant communities in the UK, France, Belgium, Denmark, and elsewhere.

They have plans for us ... amd "us" includes Europe

Hamas demands return of Seville in internet children's magazine - The Spain Herald:

"'The lost paradise of Al Andalus,' explicitly mentioned in the text, is a common meme in the Muslim world. It has led to concrete fatwas declared in order to recover territories conquered by Christian 'infidels,' such as that of three years ago by the Islamist sheik Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, which explicitly says that 'Islam will return to Europe as the conqueror.' Al-Qaradhawi is the leader of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars, and the spiritual leader of many other Islamist organizations around the world."

Again, a reminder that if the US, and even Israel as well, ceased to exist tomorrow, the jihad would continue. Militant Islam's grievance is not so much with the modern West as with its own past ... and present - its inability to deal with its relative decline from the times when it seemed on a roll to conquer the known civilized world.