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76 killed in Iraq mosque attack
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-Short Attention Span Theater-
Sea of Fire - A Novel about the War on Terror
Sea of Fire - the second novel in my War on Terror series is now available online. I welcome feedback, especially about the plot. There are several aspects of the plot and the motivations of characters, I struggled over and I am not sure it is finished.

You can read it free online here.

If you want to pay for a downloaded pdf or a printed paperback book go here.

You can read the first book here, Autonomous Operation here.
Posted by: phil_b || 04/07/2006 07:58 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Thanks phil_b.
Posted by: gromgoru || 04/07/2006 9:12 Comments || Top||

#2  cool
Posted by: 2b || 04/07/2006 12:28 Comments || Top||

#3  Well, if he does quit writing and gets a real job, I'll send him a "Muglite" flashlight. Not only do I find them useful at work, they're fun recreational devices when you're off-duty.

I use the machined wolfmet HM 490 3-Z cell model, it just has that impact that's lacking in the cheap aircraft aluminum knockoffs. Of course the humans have trouble lifting it...
Posted by: Abdominal Snowman || 04/07/2006 16:41 Comments || Top||

#4  I read the first one Phil and thought it was excellent. I'll pay for the second. I don't mind rewarding good effort.
Posted by: Deacon Blues || 04/07/2006 19:57 Comments || Top||

#5  Can't say I enjoyed it. Lame X 1000. Get another line of work.
Posted by: Rope a Colt || 04/07/2006 16:23 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
Krauthammer: First A Wall - Then Amnesty
Every sensible immigration policy has two objectives: (1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters and (2) to find a way to normalize and legalize the situation of the 11 million illegals among us.

Start with the second. No one of good will wants to see these 11 million suffer. But the obvious problem is that legalization creates an enormous incentive for new illegals to come.

We say, of course, that this will be the very last, very final, never-again, we're-not-kidding-this-time amnesty. The problem is that we say exactly the same thing with every new reform. And everyone knows it's phony.

What do you think was said in 1986 when we passed the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform? It turned into the largest legalization program in American history -- nearly 3 million people got permanent residency. And we are now back at it again with 11 million more illegals in our midst.

How can it be otherwise? We already have a river of people coming every day knowing they're going to be illegal and perhaps even exploited. They come nonetheless. The newest amnesty -- the "earned legalization" being dangled in front of them by proposed Senate legislation -- can only increase the flow.

Posted by: Captain America || 04/07/2006 11:13 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  The Hammer hits it square.
Posted by: Thalet Angeng7414 || 04/07/2006 11:27 Comments || Top||

#2  amen, brauthammer.
Posted by: 2b || 04/07/2006 12:35 Comments || Top||

#3  You know, they aren't "undocumented". They didn't just leave their license at home in their other pants. They are here illegally. We should not allow immigrants to begin their relationship with this country by breaking the law.

What would be the down side to making it a felony to hire illegals? I have to fill out an I-9 form on every intern I hire.

I think that the only way to keep them out is to remove the reward for coming here. We could increase the number of people reviewing the I-9 forms, strive for a 30 day response and, when you find a suspected illegal, send an investigator who has the right to demand that the employee be produced under penalty of law to the employer.
Posted by: Formerly Dan || 04/07/2006 15:16 Comments || Top||

#4  Krauthammer hits on what I was saying here a month ago. Those who are opposed to any controls or restrictions on illegals try very hard to combine all the problems and all the solutions into a mountain that is unacceptable to anyone. An easy-to-understand, impossible to implement program.

They try to frame the argument into an "all or nothing" solution, that is practically impossible to carry out. This is a good tactic if you want nothing done.

So what is the reality? It's not hard to explain.

First of all, break the illegals down into two groups: the Mexicans, Central and South Americans who want to come to the US to work; and the others, non-hispanics and terrorists. Two different problems that need two different solutions.

The problem with the workers is sheer numbers, the problem with the others is that they have the financial resources to evade barriers. The wall is the solution to the workers, but it is not enough to keep out a dedicated person, say a terrorist, with money, who wants through.

This is why I proposed a bounty, paid to Mexicans who inform on non-hispanics that try to cross the border. Even a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars bounty, for an important terrorist, would stop any non-hispanic from crossing that border. It would seal that border from the South side. Ten thousand hungry eyes watching every non-hispanic North of Mexico City.

Second, as Krauthammer said, first a wall, and then amnesty. This recognizes a de facto situation, that Mexicans in the US are different from Mexicans in Mexico who want to be in the US.

The vast majority of Mexicans living in the US have integrated well since the 1940s. The US has proven itself capable of integrating millions of Mexicans, if given time. Were a wall to be built now, the Mexicans living in the US would be fully integrated in as little as ten or twenty years. That is, they would have no remaining ties with Mexico whatsoever.

There are two huge Mexican communities in the US, the legals and the illegals. But that is where the distiction ends. There are plenty of unsuccesful legal Mexican-Americans, who are just as poor Mexicans who have just crossed the border.

But, there are also a lot of successful, prosperous and hard working illegals who have quickly made a life for themself. They have a lot of equity in the US: a home, a car, a steady well-paying job, children in school, etc.

All-told, there are around 11 million illegals in the US, guilty of committing the misdemeanor offense of crossing the border.

Those who demand that they be forced to return to Mexico, most likely never to be able to return for a dozen years because of our limitations on legal immigration, are calling for a terribly unfair penalty.

Much like calling for someone to be deported for getting a parking citation. But more so. To be forced to give up any property and vehicle; to have their children, who may have never lived in Mexico and may not speak Spanish, taken out of school and pitched across the border with them.

Basically to destroy any life they may have made here, and for what? Some petty crime committed years before?

Yes, indeed they are different from Mexicans still in Mexico who want into the US. That is why that wall must be built ASAP.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 04/07/2006 18:45 Comments || Top||

#5  you make some good points, Moose. But you can't break the immigrants down into "two groups". Mexican immigrants here in the US don't break down into "two groups". Big Lizards tried to break them down into two groups today as well. It's bullhockey.

There are some who have lived and worked and been productive, some who have committed crimes, some who go back and forth across the border on a regular basis, some sell drugs, some are on welfare, etc. It's nothing personal and you make good points - but if I read that they can be broken down into groups terrorists v/s mom and pop, one more time today, I'm gonna barf.
Posted by: 2b || 04/07/2006 19:20 Comments || Top||

#6  2b: The groupings are to both identify the problems and come up with the solutions. What these groupings are is less important than it is to realize that it is a case of multiple problems and multiple solutions.

That is why I point out how the disingenous try to lump the problems and the solutions together, and then demand one, simple and easy-to-understand program to take care of it all, once and for all.
They know that there is no solution of this type, which means that they get to keep the status quo.

However, there actually *is* one, big solution that by itself will completely change the equation for the better. That is the border wall. If it, and only it, is done, many of the associated problems will resolve themselves.

It will not solve ALL the problems, of course, but it will go a long way in solving many of them. It is by far the most important thing we can do; and many other things we can do are predicated on it being there first.

And those who do not want to reduce illegal immigration at all, also realize that the wall would create effective change in short order. So they try to change the subject to anything other than the wall, and use ridiculous and unsubstatiated arguments against it. Then they try to keep it off the table with other distractions.

The part about "groupings" you found so distasteful was actually based on some of these efforts to distract. When pointed out that the wall would keep out the vast majority of Mexicans, their response was "The wall won't keep out terrorists, so the wall won't work and we shouldn't build the wall."

You see the distraction? The effort to change the subject from keeping out illegal Mexicans to the War on Terror? They might as well said that the wall wouldn't keep out space aliens, so it won't work, so we shouldn't build it. The point is irrelevant to the argument.

But if you look to Washington right now, you will see that they really don't want to solve the problem. Those who want to build an effective wall are by far the minority in both parties. And those who want NO immigration controls are willing to spend the big bucks to keep their ultra-cheap labor force.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 04/07/2006 21:37 Comments || Top||

#7  My biggest gripe with Congress is their failure to understand that until you control the border, the problem only grows - by about 300,000 people a year. We've GOT to reduce that number. We will NEVER be able to keep ALL the illegals out, but cutting 300,000 down to 20,000 would make the problem a lot easier to deal with. A well-patrolled fence would do that.

I just posted an article on my weblog about how to handle the ones that are already here, and how to set a pattern for any future illegals. But Krauthammer is right - we've got to stop the contining flow if we're EVER going to be able to handle the ones that are already here.
Posted by: Old Patriot || 04/07/2006 22:24 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
Western feminism is dead, and Islam played a role
In 1961, Phyllis Chesler agreed to marry her college sweetheart, a young, Westernized Muslim man who had come to study in the US. At his request, they married and lived in his home country, Afghanistan.

"When we arrived in the country they took my American passport away -- very typical with foreign wives," she says. "Then I found myself clapped up in very posh purdah. Here I was in this gorgeous country, but I wasn't supposed to go out without the chauffeur and without servants in tow and other women of the family."

"Of course, I made regular escapes and I saw how women were treated and I saw how the children of co-wives competed with each other for inheritance and attention. And I saw how women mistreated their female servants. I saw, at first hand, that polygamy was not a good thing. My father-in-law turned out to have three wives and 21 children. He was a very dapper fellow, also Westernized on the surface like my husband -- in America. But my husband became an easterner overnight in Afghanistan. I was really shocked," she says.

She returned to the US in December 1961 and, she has written, "kissed the ground at New York City's Idlewild airport."

Chesler's experiences in Afghanistan have helped shape her thoughts about the failure of feminism to engage with what she sees as the oppression of women in Islamic countries. After "40 years on the front lines" of feminism -- she is now emerita professor of psychology and women's studies at the City University of New York -- her current project means that she gets a "chilly" reception from fellow feminists. It does not help, perhaps, that her latest book is called The Death of Feminism.

Isn't the title somewhat stark? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say there are trends in feminism that she, personally, finds disturbing?

"I am still a feminist," she insists. "The reason that I have announced the death of feminism, which I agree is stark, is that from my point of view, looking at mainstream feminism in the West -- in the universities, in the media, among academics and the so-called intelligentsia -- there is a moral failure, a moral bankruptcy, a refusal to take on, in particular, Muslim gender apartheid. So you have many contemporary feminists who say, `We have to be multiculturally relativist. We cannot uphold a single, or absolute, standard of human rights. And, therefore, we can't condemn Islamic culture, because their countries have been previously colonized. By us.' I disagree."

MONOLITHIC?

But are the Islamic nations as culturally monolithic as Chesler suggests? Wasn't Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to take a particularly tendentious example, secular? And didn't it offer professional careers for women?

"I don't think that makes any big difference. Saddam's regime gassed Kurds and perpetrated genocide. His men kidnapped women and prostitutes off the streets and subjected them to private rape sessions. So merely because his Iraq was religiously secular, and women had certain rights, doesn't mean that we as intelligent Western publics should be condoning genocidal states," she says.

Western feminism's failure to confront the problems raised by Islam, Chesler believes, is a result of the creation of a hierarchy of sins, "an intellectual culture in which racism trumps gender concerns."

The example she cites as the embodiment of wrongheaded priorities is "gay and lesbian movement activists rooting for the Palestinians who, meanwhile, are very busy persecuting homosexuals, who in turn are fleeing to Israel for political asylum."

The result, she argues, is that "instead of telling the truth about Islam and demanding that the Muslim world observes certain standards, you have Westerners beating their breasts and saying: `We can't judge you, we can't expose you, we can't challenge you.' And here in the West you have a dangerous misuse of Western concepts such as religious tolerance and cultural sensitivity so that one kind of hate speech is seen as something that must be rigorously protected."

"That means, principally, lies about America and lies about Jews," she adds.

Chesler's critics say the vehemence of her language points to Islamophobia. A piece she wrote last month for the controversial Web magazine Frontpage.com suggested that "a small but organized number of Muslim-Americans and Muslim immigrants ... are currently seeking to begin the Islamization of America."

It went on to compare the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan to Hitler. The blog Islamophobia Watch suggested that this signaled "the point of total dementia."

Chesler will not accept the Islamophobe label. She says it is a blanket term that silences those who portray Islam accurately, and bemoans feminism's embrace of what she sees as misguided causes.

"Feminism began to fail when they began to say, `We can't judge barbarism. We can't even call it barbarism, because the barbarians will be offended,'" she says.

JUST ONE PART

Feminism has become just one part of a wider anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist movement, "so much so that many feminists are now much more concerned with the occupation of a country that doesn't exist -- namely Palestine -- than they are concerned with the occupation of women's bodies worldwide."

But, paradoxically, Chesler's criticisms of feminist preoccupation with a wider world do not prevent her arguing for a feminist foreign policy; it's just that she believes the foreign policy should concentrate on the issues she is passionate about.

"American feminism hasn't taken on these international issues because of its fear of being branded racist," she says. "But many Muslim feminists and dissidents are totally supportive of what I'm trying to do, because they say that here is finally a Western feminist who will not abandon us on the basis of cultural relativity."

"The attention of the American feminist movement has been forced to focus for far too long on issues like abortion or gay and lesbian rights. I totally support this. But in so doing they have neglected other real issues, such as the needs of working people," she says.

"This is simply not enough, given the moment in history in which we find ourselves. What feminism must do is spell out something that might be called a feminist foreign policy. So that, for example, if we make a trade or a peace treaty with a country, we ought to build into that treaty a commitment not -- for example -- to genitally mutilate girls who live in that country," she says. "This is not easy. But I would like feminists to think very globally and very strategically and very long-term. It's one thing to write an article now and again, but what are we, as feminists, actually going to do?"
Posted by: tipper || 04/07/2006 20:01 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Feminism is not the goal for this female. Euqality is the goal. Same chances, same need to prove worth. Women are a majority bya point or two. The only reason men haven't been taken out as a ruling class is the fact that women gave birth to these sons. And, generally we don't kill our opposers, we try to teach them.

Don't continue to try our patience.
Posted by: Thinemp Whimble2412 || 04/07/2006 21:58 Comments || Top||


Reflections on Disaster
Katrina. Such a pretty name to be forever marred by the disaster on America's Gulf Coast.

I've followed the Katrina / Rita / Wilma saga from the beginning. I've spent hundreds of hours tracking the numbers for the Americans Aiding Americans site, where I try to document the generosity of Americans, American businesses and groups with their donations for Katrina relief. I realize I slight those folks injured by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma but my simple view is that they are all victims of the Gulf Coast disaster called Katrina.

This makes the 149th entry in the Katrina Relief category on this blog. Some are short, others long. Many are just posts with news that you might not have seen. Some are my writings, trying to make some sense of the loss that our nation has suffered.

Folks complain that the war in Iraq isn't a real war because the President hasn't asked us to sacrifice. The devastation in the Gulf hasn't touched many of us in just that same manner, and it's far closer to home. Americans, your friends, families, neighbors, are homeless tonight and have been so for months. Have we sacrificed, or is this just a pretend catastrophe?

One of my Katrina posts today came closest to home for me, the wannabe photographer. HP is restoring photos that were damaged in the hurricanes. The woman whose story I featured had lost everything but a handful of old pictures. HP was able to give those memories, that reality, back to her.

About 30 students from St. John Fisher College, my alma mater and PG's as well, will be going south to help after school lets out in May. If you scan the news on Google, this is very common. Many students spent their spring break down there. Others will spend their summer. There's more than enough work for these young people, more than enough.

The billions of dollars that have gone and will go to the region have yet to make an impact. It will be years, decades, before economic and social health returns to coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Communities are gone, wiped away as if they never existed. Jobs, businesses, tax bases, infrastructure, all gone or damaged severely. The region will never be the same, and for many that is the greatest loss.

This is an event that will reshape the United States. Many of the people forced to leave their homes will not return. Thousands of businesses will never reopen. Communities will be rebuilt, with a different design, different structures, different politics.

The blame game will be played out, because that's all we seem to be able to do lately. The people who should lead will bicker and pout and obstruct and shame themselves and us by their petty and thoughtless behaviors. Chances will be squandered, money will be wasted, and life for the people of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida will never be the same. The people are the Katrina generation, forever condemned by the forces of nature and politics to a life of what might have been.

I will continue to write about this epic event in American history. Whether anyone believes me or not, this is as historically significant as few events in our history have been. Part of America in a few hours has been reduced to a poverty of place and hope and life unlike any we've seen since the Great Depression or the end of the Civil War.

These stories are about Americans. Proud, patriotic Americans just like you and me. We cannot forget them. We cannot abandon them. We must demand the best from all our leaders, the politicians, the community leaders. When people are homeless, give them homes. When people are jobless, give them jobs. Above all, give them hope.

I'm not calling for massive government. I'm calling for the vision in our leaders to lead, to open the way for those who can help, to make the paths smooth. Americans can rebuild if our leaders will let us.
Posted by: Chuck Simmins || 04/07/2006 08:50 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  awesome Chuck! It's exactly what this country needs; someone to take the media focus away from blame and put the spotlight on all of the good. Blame is the most distructive force in our country right now. The media is its champion. It's not the American way. Time to get back to basics.
Posted by: 2b || 04/07/2006 12:32 Comments || Top||



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Two weeks of WOT
Fri 2006-04-07
  76 killed in Iraq mosque attack
Thu 2006-04-06
  PM Says New Hamas Government Is Broke
Wed 2006-04-05
  Cleric links ISI and Banglaboomers
Tue 2006-04-04
  Pirates hijack UAE tanker off Somalia
Mon 2006-04-03
  Sudan Bars Egelund From Darfur
Sun 2006-04-02
  Zarqawi fired
Sat 2006-04-01
  US cuts contact with Hamas-led PA
Fri 2006-03-31
  Hizbul Mujahedeen offers ceasefire
Thu 2006-03-30
  Smoking Gun in Hariri Murder Inquest?
Wed 2006-03-29
  US Muslim Gets 30 Yrs for Bush Assasination Plot
Tue 2006-03-28
  Pak Talibs execute crook under shariah
Mon 2006-03-27
  30 beheaded bodies found in Iraq
Sun 2006-03-26
  Mortar Attack On Al-Sadr
Sat 2006-03-25
  Taliban to Brits: 600 Bombers Await You
Fri 2006-03-24
  Zarqawi aide captured in Iraq

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