Taking It Home III

"Package for Mr. Rantisi". Another Hamas thug takes an Israeli missile up the poop chute. Talk about going after your root causes.

Did I say fight to the death?

It looks like coming face to face with a band of well armed and extremely grim Marines has a salutary effect on even the hairiest "insurgent". According to this dispatch from Reuterville, Shiite thug Moqtada al-Sadr has said that if other Shiite leaders ask nicely, he'll consider ending what's left of his mob uprising and agree not to be crushed like an insect by the Big Green Shithammer.

Burnt Japanese, not.

It's looking more and more like this at least started out as some kind of hoax by a trio of dim lefties. If that's the case, it would serve them right if the "captors" got carried away. Tim Blair has more, as do several others.

Barbarians III

The savages responsible for this are far beyond the pale of civilisation. This description from AP News of the "brave warriors of Islam" needs no elaboration.

"Armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the kidnappers shouted "Allahu akbar" - God is great - in the video and held knives to the throats of the Japanese, who screamed and whimpered in terror.

Associated Press Television News obtained a copy of the full video, in which four masked men point knives and swords at the blindfolded captives as they lie on the floor of a room with concrete walls.

At one point, a gunman holds a knife to the throat of one of the men, whose blindfold has been removed; his eyes widen in panic and he struggles to try to get free. The woman screams and weeps."

Let's see how brave you are when a Marine puts an RPG up your ass.

A society that encourages and celebrates this kind of barbarism deserves no better than to be on the receiving end of a war without mercy. Does this "culture" also have a place in a multi-cultural society?

Lies and Damned Lies

My dog has a better grasp of statistics than this. There is no way six months of looking at a population this size tells you anything of significance about whether a smoking ban was responsible for a reported reduction in heart attacks. If passive smoking takes decades to produce negative effects, how in hell did a ban reverse this in six months? There's no information about other changes people might have made, no information about enforcement, there's no information here period. How about some numbers on how many people froze to death while smoking outside?

Note well, I don't smoke. I don't like the smell of smoke. But health Nazis aren't allowed on Cold Mountain and this reeks of nanny-state propaganda.

Barbarians in Fallujah

Peggy Noonan in the online Wall Street Journal is her usual eloquent self on the subject of the Barbarian Wars. Here's a quote, but read the whole thing.

"The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man's inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes.

What they did in Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday was such an event. The ambush, grenading, shooting and killing of four American civilians, the setting of their SUVs on fire and the brutalization of their corpses was savage, primitive, unacceptable. The terrible glee of the young men in the crowds, and the sadism they evinced, reminds us of the special power of the ignorant to impede the good. The pictures that television appropriately mostly did not show and the Internet inevitably mostly did were horrifying in a way that was reminiscent of the first still pictures of the Trade Center victims of 9/11. It was like seeing people in business suits falling through the air again. It was as if someone pointed a camera at evil and actually caught it in the act.

The Americans who were murdered were, according to the wires, working for a security company, a North Carolina-based subcontractor hired by the U.S. government, among other things, to guard convoys.

The convoys carried food. They carried it to Fallujah."

It takes generations to civilize barbarian peoples, in the meantime they have to be restrained, by any means necessary.

Barbarians

Is this not sufficient to convince even the most ideology addled multi-culturalist that we are dealing with savages? Keep in mind that the barbarians who perpetrated this said they did it in the name of Islam. Have we not seen enough to know that this is the rule rather than the exception, that this is what lies just below the surface in Muslim society?

Taiwan

Conrad is usually pretty sane, but I think his recent posts on Taiwan and the KMT are need a little distance. I mean "the KMT is a bigger threat to Taiwan's democracy than China"? Really? Must be all those KMT missiles.

I agree that the Lien/Soong crowd are in black helicopter land with their wacko assassination conspiracy charges, but I do think they might well have won the election, albeit by an even smaller margin than Chen apparently did.

What Chen should be asking himself is how his personal credibility came to be so low that half the population believes he's capable of faking an assassination attempt and tampering with ballots. Something is deeply wrong here.

Taking It Home II

The Israelis have once again reached out and touched someone. Sheik Yassin the "spiritual leader" and capo of the terrorist organization Hamas can now get a little first hand advice from the spirits.

Taiwan President Shot

Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President, Lu Hsiu-lien have both been shot while campaigning in the DPP heartland of Tainan in southern Taiwan. Conspiracy theories immediately beagn piling up like a grassy knoll. Surprisingly, most of them did not point fingers at the opposition Pan Blue team of the KMT and the People First Party. Rather echoes rumbling up to Cold Mountain were that Chen's people pulled this themselves as a desperation attempt to win tomorrow's election. Never mind the absurdity of that, there remain the hard facts that that Chen's DPP is far too disorganised and loose-lipped to even attempt a decent conspiracy.

The danger here is that hotheads in the Chen camp could spread rumours of KMT and/or Beijing involvement, leading to some potentially very ugly confrontations, especially in the soutrhern part of the island.

I vote to blame the French.

Guangzhou

Just came back from a business trip to Guangzhou (Canton to all you dinosaur Sinologists), the Paris of the Pearl River Delta, Goat City, probably the ugliest city in China, and that's saying something. Nonetheless I did have two fond memories of the place, one being the tall double gin & tonics made by Ricky at the bar of the White Swan Hotel and the other being happy hour at the long bar of the China Hotel. Many is the time my comrades and I slurped down G&T's while watching bloated dead pigs float by on the Pearl River and trying forget the 200 odd drooling, illiterate peasants we had to talk to that day. Sadly, Ricky has gone onto better things and been replaced by, you guessed it, a drooling illiterate peasant. After expalining the difference between tonic and Sprite for 11th time, my patience, already maintained only by generous doses of Prozac and Jameson's, snapped. I stalked out to a taxi without paying the bar bill and sped away to the China Hotel. Top of the escalator, left, then right, Noooooooooooo. The bar is GONE, replaced by a lingerie shop specialising in selling sleazy polyester knickers to the hookers from the Hard Rock Cafe downstairs. The place is probably run by a descendent of whatever cynical bastard introduced bras to China in the first place. See Conrad on this issue.

Spain

ETA? al-Qaeda? It doesn't really matter does it, the bloody results are the same.

Common Sense

We live in such a airheaded PC fog that any whiff of commonsense arrives like a cool breeze. All the more so when it comes from an unexpected quarter, the US Congress. The House of Representatives has voted to bar lawsuits against restaurants
by people who are too stupid to know that deep fried megaburgers are fattening and who are too lazy move their lardasses off the sofa and exercise. The link is here.

"Honest Judge, if I'd known those Triple Cheese Bomb Burgers were going to give me a butt the size of Montana, I'd have ordered the salad."

Latest from Helengrad

All you businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors, the lot of you, can just blow off to Fiji for the rest of the year. The Prime Minister will be deciding which industries are winners
from now on, and she doesn't need any advice from the likes of you. And the new winner is....ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING. Aren't we surprised?

Read the article. Lots of talk of plans, programmes, policies, strategies, task forces, but not a word about making money. That isn't thought to be necessary and presumably will come from taxing Mr. and Mrs. Kiwi a bit more and then a bit more on top of that. I love it. Even the Chinese don't try and pick "winning industries" anymore. Helen says she's off to India as well, but she likely has more in common with Fidel Castro.

At some point, probably just about 24 hours after the US and the Eurozone start raising interest rates, money will flow out of this country like a rip tide and Labour's economic folly will stand revealed in all its Muldoonian glory. Of course by then, it will take a generation to undo the damage.

Prisoners and Prisoners of War

On Cold Mountain we support the war seeing it as we do as a battle for the survival of western civilisation, the current bulwark of which is the United States. We're also constitutionalists though and this storycertainly made us stop mid-ale and ponder. Should enemy alien prisoners, as distinct from prisoners of war, be denied habeas corpus. This is an important question because, if the answer is yea, then is there any class of non-citizens who cannot be declared enemies and treated similarly? If the answer is nay, the how does the United States, or any country, protect it's citizens from a determined, yet non-military, lethal threat?

The United States has long and rightly refused to subject its citizens to the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, fearing political prosecutions. Is what's happening at Guantanamo really any different from Belgian judges going around issuing arrest orders for whatever foreigner offends those refined Euro-sensibilities? Well, no. Not logically anyway.

We have thought from the outset that Bush should have asked Congress for a proper declaration of war, and not just some fuzzy authorisation. That would have nicely clarified the status of all concerned: prisoners of war, enemy aliens, combatants and Americans who choose to take up arms against their country.

As it is, we now think that a distinction should be made between those captured as combatants, on or off the battlefield, and those arrested as part of the terror infrastructure. The former are POW's, and international law and practice are well established on the rights of the prisoners and on the rights and obligations of the detaining power.

Captured terrorists off the battlefield should be held where they're captured until such information as they have is surrendered at which point they can either be tried by the courts where they're captured (fancy your chances before an Iraqi court these days?) or in the United States, where, like it or not, they are entitled to the protection of the Constitution.

Goodbye Pappy.

Pappy went to meet his Maker on Thursday in his sleep and with nothing to fear from that encounter. May it be so for me.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

You read it here first, see our October 28 post.

I'm a dyed in the wool free trader, and I almost never agree with Rod Donald about anything, but he's right about this. An economy as small as New Zealand's would quickly be drowned by an FTA with China. When Ricardo talked about comparative advantage, he saw large wealthy economies and small poor ones, not vice versa. China's comparative advantage is poverty, I don't think we can match that with clean and green.

Pappy

I'm in an airline lounge at LAX 18 hours into a 25 hour trip back to Arkansas to see my grandfather before he dies. His name is Rufus Elton Cassidy, but we call him Pappy. He's 96 years old. He grew up in Arkansas before the depression. He told me once that all he remembered of his mother was that she "got the cancer" when he was 6 years old, and they took her away in mule-drawn wagon and he never saw her again. In 96 years on this earth he never had a credit card, never borrowed money, only took an airplane once, never drank coffee, tea, or alcohol. It wasn't a religious thing, there was just no money for that sort of thing when Pappy was young. He became a boilermaker and a union man during The War and he travelled all around the south putting the hearts in great buildings. I remember when I was a little boy he would come home in his hard hat. He must have been tired, but loved us so, it never showed. He went to the Hazel Street Baptist Church every Sunday. He never went to school, taught himself to read and write and do arithmatic and only ever read the Bible, his Sunday School lesson and the Arkansas Gazette. He was married to the same woman for 60 years, and he was never the same after she died. He gave up driving at the age of 83. Last Christmas, he could still lift my 8 year old son over his head, just like he used to do with me. Now he can't stand up. He's tired and he wants to be with my grandmother.


I love you Pappy.

Merry Christmas

That's right, Merry Christmas. None of that denatured Season's Greetings crap. On this Christmas Day, as we survey the terrain from Cold Mountain, we are appalled at the religious bigotry that has taken over swaths of my ancestral homeland. Quite so, you say, how beastly Americans are to those poor Muslims. WRONG. Wrong and stupid.

I'm talking about the subtle bigotry and outright discrimination against Christians in the United States. From shysters imposing anti-Christian litmus tests on potential jurors, to the Ten Commandments forcibly removed from a courthouse, to store clerks required to use the grotesque "Happy Holidays" as a greeting, to the disappearance of Nativity scenes from village commons and shopping malls, Christians in America today find themselves belittled and their beliefs treated with contempt. The cheap cynicism that passes for a world view in the salons of the left requires no wisdom, no reflection, no introspection; nothing more than a bit of low cunning and a college freshman's vocabulary. It's a poor substitute for either reason or faith. Can it be that the acid contempt the left show for Christians comes from the little peeks they take into their own empty souls in the dark night? Can it be that under the slick post-modern banter, they have measured themselves against a man like Pope John Paul and found themselves badly lacking? Can it be that I give them too much credit and that all their words are really just echoes of empty minds and empty hearts?

This Christmas let us think of the Pope, whose back is now bent with the literal weight of the world and remember that he once marshaled the moral authority of the Church and the reflected power of the risen Christ to smash the locks on the gates of Hell on earth. Let us also think of Ronald Reagan, whose unshakable faith in America's destiny brought down the walls as surely as did Joshua's horn. Let us pray that we see their like among us again soon.

And Now Will They Learn....

Islamist mass murder in Turkey, Iraq, and in the heart of the beast itself. Have any of the bleeding left done their math? al-Qaeda and the Baathist rump have killed a lot more Muslims this month than the Israeli military. Meanwhile people who can't spell globalisation (or with a "z" for our American friends) or find Baghdad on a map of Baghdad are demonstrating their seriousness of purpose by wearing funny costumes and milling about in the streets of London.

No one is immune, no one. Got that? The Islamofascists cannot be reasoned with, bribed, appeased, or appealed to as brothers in the faith or fellow human beings. They can only be defeated by force of arms. It must be done and it will be done.