ON FRIDAY, the BBC published an apology for broadcasting the footage of Wednesday's carnage. The film showed an unarmed, furloughed IDF commando climb onto Dwayat's bulldozer just after Dwayat murdered Batsheva Ungerman by crushing her car. It showed the soldier grabbing a gun belonging to a security guard who was unsuccessfully trying to restrain Dwayat and shooting Dwayat three times in the head. The film did not show Dwayat or any of his victims dying. What it showed was the terror of the wounded, Dwayat's murderousness and the soldier's heroism.

That's how to do it.

The shooting of the Muslim murderer was a stirring sight for those who knew that someday they might be victims of attacks, in their own capitals, by Muslim terrorists. It lifted hearts. It concentrated minds. It gave people ideas, ideas about how to behave. It no doubt made many in the Western world wish that their own children had received the kind of training, and had the ability to use it, that this brave no-nonsense young Israeli exhibited. It was an example in How To Do It.

The video contained this message, that no one had to utter: "yes, this is the way to behave, this is the way to do it." And that's exactly why so many Arabs and Muslims, the ones who are on the staff of the BBC, who are all over Bush House, or who have willing collaborators, what the Chinese used to call "running-dogs" -- these are the "running-dogs of the Jihad" (world-wide, or some local component, it does not matter)-- who do not need to intimitde the BBC from outside, though they do plenty of that. No, they are right inside the BBC.

See the scandal of Orla Guerin, married to a “Palestinian” and conveniently reporting on the “Palestinian people” from Israel, and Gaza and “the West Bank”; of Barbara Plett, another BBC reporter who reported on Israel and openly wept on the radio when Arafat, one of the most repulsive figures in history, died; see hard-voiced Lyse Doucet, yet another example of the same phenomenon. Oh, they were so scandalous that even the BBC, unrepentant of course, but determined to cut off the criticism that was getting serious (certain important reports on the BBC’s coveraage have been kept from being released to the British public by the BBC itself), did move Orla Guerin to southern Africa, did move Barbara Plett to Afghanistan (or was it Pakistan?) and Lyse Doucet (for a while, anyway, to Pakistan (or was it Afghanistan?). Don’t worry. From the Middle East, the BBC coverage – despite the “loss” of Orla Guerin, and Plett, and Doucet, is still the same.

Yes, it’s the mixture as before. It’s a special Bush House concoction. A heady blend. It’s a special mixture of antisemitism, philo-Arabism, apologetics for Islam, and leftist sympathy for what is presented as a case of “third-world liberation struggle” by a (recently-invented) “Palestinian people,” which is how the BBC, never stooping to history or context or daring to recognize the elephant-in-the-room of Islam, presents the Lesser Jihad carried out by all Arabs, and supported by many non-Arab Muslims, who merely use the local Arabs – the Gazan Arabs, and the “West Bank” Arabs, and those Israeli Arabs who, as in Galilee, have been more and more showing a deep hatred, a deep ineradicable disloyalty, despite having received all the considerable benefits of Israeli citizenship -- as the front-line shock troops of that Lesser Jihad, one that has no end, against the Infidel nation-state of Israel.

So there we have it. But in this day and age of YouTube, cell phone cameras everywhere, and a blogosphere, there's only so much suppression of anti-dhimmitude that the Beeb and other networks can do.

(h/t ColtsFan) Good article on jihadists we've nabbed overseas but who've lived in the US.

Question: Does anyone know anything about doing milling operations on a lathe?

"To the army and navy and the battles they have won.
To America's colors, the colors that never run.

May the wings of liberty never lose a feather."

- From "Big Trouble in Little China"

Since the nominees this year are so strikingly similar to the Simpson's characters Kodos and Kang, who kidnapped Klinton and Dole and ran for office, I guess I should ask you all who you're going to vote for this year, Kodos or Kang?

R. Scott Clark has a good post about evangelism as carried out by Evangelicals. For my own part, I found that everything in Campus Crusade for Christ and other Evangelical movements was a big manipulative bait-and-switch. My own interaction with a certain group Evangelicals (not yours, Ryan) has left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm usually able to strike up a conversation with unbelievers very easily and make friends with them very easily just about anywhere. Most people are happy to have somebody be nice to them and take an interest in them just for the sake of it. I can't say I've had the same luck making friends with this particular group of Evangelical men. Most seemed pretty self-consciously interested in how cool and spiritual they are rather than getting to know anyone. Every friendship they cultivate seems to be oriented around some third-world mission (socialism) project rather than just having someone to hang out with. Ultimately, this is bad for evangelism itself and a very lonely road to walk in life. Another Evangelical group I interact with seems much closer to the mark to me. The guys will get together and play "Halo" every once in awhile. Hanging out is, you know, actually fun. Weird, huh?

This archive is truly a goldmine.

Good article over at GoV.

Web browsing and internet surfing affect our cognition, adversely in my opinion. The brain appears to be highly plastic, and more and more I'm convinced that your brain is what you make of it. A lot of evidence seems to point that way. This, of course, leaves even less of an excuse for underachieving minorities in our school systems.

The people in full control of the GOP these days are people like David Bahnsen: wealthy, isolated from the problems their policies create, and out of touch from and calloused towards their kin.

Just as an aside, Bahnsen works (and I think lives) in Newport Beach, and extremely wealthy city next to the one I went to high school in, though mine is now filled with the same types of people. You know, he's the type of Republican that lower-middle class white average joes vote into office to look out for their interests, even though he has interests that conflict completely with theirs.

This Bahnsen post is an example of the GOP mentality: scare us with jihad to get elected, once elected, give the jihadists citizenship through amnesty. I'm not a smart man, but won't an amnesty bring the jihad to our own neighborhoods? Oh, I forgot, there'll be background checks. How silly of me...

...from the RF Cafe of all places:

Retiring Your Retirement Plans?

How healthy is your retirement account these days? According to stories from the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the financial sections of the major news outlets, ever-increasing numbers of people are finding that the investments made in their 401k and private retirement accounts are dwindling. As if the very high levels of inflation due to energy cost increases was not doing enough on its own to devalue the worth of accounts, there is a very strange propensity for the funds associated with retirement accounts to seemingly always take a hit whenever the markets rise and fall. For a lot of people, if it were not for matching funds contributed by employers, they would be seeing net negative growth.

Over the last many years of participating in company 401k plans, I have seen even the "safe" investment part of the portfolio barely make any advance. With inflation factored in, the value is actually less than when my money from a former employer was rolled into the new one. From what I am hearing, my experience is not unique.

This is by no means a recent phenomenon. Back in the middle to late 1990s, while working for a very large aerospace/electronics defense contractor, my 401k actually lost money over a period of about three years. Remember that was an era when the dot-com companies were going platinum overnight and everybody was making money hand-over-fist. Well, except for the retirement plan participants, that is. Again, I was not alone. Only by virtue of the matching company contributions did many of us make any profit. If you did not examine your statements carefully, the fact would be easy to miss.

During that same period, were we being warned of the possible negative effects of stagflation or even negative inflation. Your money would be worth more tomorrow than it is today. Everything was smoking along so well that we were actually told that the longstanding business cycle was dead. I have to admit that I never did quite "get" that argument. It did not matter after all, because the tech stock market and a good portion of those who were invested in it came tumbling down beginning in the spring of 2000. My neighbor at the time, a real estate agent, had purchased a whole lot of AOL stock for his retirement portfolio earlier in the year, and bragged of how much money he was making on that one stock alone. About June, his demeanor changed noticeably - probably had something to do with the tanking of AOL stock.

For the rest of 2000 and into 2001, we were served story after story of people coming out of early retirement to return to work. Concurrently, the $10 per hour burger flipper jobs that employers could not fill were being taken with people glad to get $7 per hour pay. I think I have told the story of the owner of the music store where Melanie buys her violin supplies, where the proprietor claims to have lost more than $100,000 (yep, that's five zeros) on RFMD stock alone, and had been on the verge of retirement until the bubble burst. The euphoria was relatively short-lived, but at least people had learned a good lesson. Right?

Even so, the pundits kept selling the same bill of goods about how over the long term, the stock market always makes money. They brought out charts of the DOW with arrows pointing to gains made over 30-years periods and labels showing why now is the time to buy, buy, buy. What they fail to point out, of course, is that the theory holds true mainly if you were able to invest a huge lump of money at the beginning of the 30-year period. That, of course, is the period when most people are earning the least they ever will earn and subsequently have the least available for investment. In later years, when there will be less time remaining to realize any gains, the implications of short-term market fluctuations can - and have been - deadly.

Largely at the encouragement of, and through the manipulation of the government, the majority of people have been convinced (or coerced) to be spenders and/or investors in the markets rather than savers - that is if they have the ability and are inclined to make monetary investments in the future. That makes nearly everyone a "global player" because their fortunes are tied directly to the performance of stock values in the marketplace. I am old enough to remember a time when most of the people I worked with never even mentioned the stock market, and certainly did not worry about whether it was going up or down. The overall savings rate for Americans in 2006 was -1%, which means people are spending more than they make. Still, anyone caught up in the savings & loan debacle in the 1980s is aware of how even savings are not a guarantee of financial security. At least with that, depositors eventually got their money back - often on the backs of taxpayer-funded bailouts. There is nobody or no institution to bail out the people who have and/or are losing wealth in stock market based retirement programs.

It seems, however, that many of the corporations are being quietly aided in back-handed ways by the world banks. Look at the current situation with the sub-prime, and marginal qualification mortgage lenders and related activities. Shareholders are losing their shirts, while methods are being put in place to provide relief to the institutions themselves (and of course their heads). Who knows where that money is coming from? A lot is funneled via creative accounting from the Federal Reserve and many never-to-be-discovered sources. With the initial crisis last fall, we heard news of the high-risk lending policies being halted, and the companies being blamed for predatory practices (sure would not want to blame the dunderheaded borrowers), and we just assumed that would spell the end of it. Ha! Just three weeks ago we sold our house to an unmarried couple who were able to borrow not only the full purchase price of the house, but additional money to cover closing costs and even have a couple thou in their pockets after settlement. The lender's name: Bank of America - sound familiar? I guarantee there were plenty of people with retirement portfolios filled with BoA stocks.

Am I alone in suspecting that there is some intentional manipulation of retirement investment funds? How can it be that so many retirement funds are performing so dismally, while there are obviously many investors actually making good money? Do the investment companies assign retirement accounts to their lowest-performing employees as the last act before putting them out on the street? Can it really be as simple as professional incompetence, or is something more devious at work here? I suspect that somewhere along the way, retirement accounts have become the dumping ground for the poor investing of fund management businesses. They know that most participants are now watching closely, either out of ignorance or empathy. After all, by now nobody really expects much from the markets, right? Even if people do catch on, what can they really do about it? There has to be a lot of financial institution boardroom backslapping going on around the world.

How about you? Is your retirement plan suffering? Please post your comments.

Interesting. I'm wondering if plain-old CDs aren't the best way to save from now on. I've seen enough bailouts and manipulation to want my money insured, even if it makes less than inflation.

California is the ideal place to experiment with a fundamental redefinition of society's foremost building block, marriage. After all, there are only 38 million people in California, Californians are famously level-headed and rational, and Californians don't have any influence over the media. So, if it turns out a generation from now to have been a bad idea, no harm done!

My concern, since 2001, is that more gay men would be interested in getting married (i.e., in a theatrical ceremony) than in being married (i.e., sexual monogamy). We're talking about some awfully flamboyant folks: Gay Pride parades could more honestly be renamed Gay Narcissism parades.

So that the long term danger from gay marriage would likely be to make more straight guys reluctant to go through the already punitive process of getting married. Being the groom in a wedding ceremony is a pretty uncomfortable thing already, but at least it's a guy thing, not a gay thing. As John Derbyshire quoted me in 2003:
On the other hand, there's a process of gay ghettoization that goes on when straight men recognize that some institution is disproportionately attractive to male homosexuals. Broadway, for example, has gone from a popular national institution to a largely gay ghetto in recent decades. It's hard to get a serious discussion going of this since nobody wants to be accused of being homophobic, but I see it everywhere. I don't think marriages will be popular enough among gays to start this process, but I worry that weddings will be. It wouldn't take much to get the average young man to turn even more against participating in an arduous process that seems alien and hostile to him already. If some of the most enthusiastic participants become gays, then his aversion will grow even more.

The subheadline in the LA Times today reveals a campaign by gay leaders (and, no doubt, their allies in the media) to keep the ceremonies toned down until after the November California initiative vote:

"Flamboyant images from same-sex ceremonies, activists say, could be used by opponents to convince California votes that gays and lesbians shouldn't have the right to marry."

You'd think that gays would wake up and realize how good they have it in the West, and especially the US, but they seem hell-bent on pushing for more and more of their agenda: adoption, marriage, special treatment in hate-crime legislation. Some are more equal than others, I guess. Really, gays haven't succeeded even now in getting married, because there's no such thing as two men or women getting married. Marriage, in the West, is a covenant union between a man and a woman. I don't care what definitions there are in the rest of the world. We're not out to emulate them. We in the West were doing just fine with marriage the way it was, thankyouverymuch, as evidenced by the prosperity our institutions have created and the fact that third-worlders are voting with their feet to come here. We've had a definition for 2000 years and it has worked just fine.

No matter, the gays wanted to change it. Fine. There's no reason then why the Muslims shouldn't have their definition as well. There's no reason why you shouldn't now be able to marry a head of lettuce, for that matter. I think the gays are going to find that the 7th century savages immigrating here will get their way with their definition of marriage, and once they become more numerous, will start to create enormous problems for the gay agenda and for gay existence in general. There will be a certain irony to all of this. If you chip away at a dike long enough, you may drown yourself when the water rushes in. Enjoy it while it lasts, guys. Be sure to steer clear of UC Irvine on the honeymoon.

Vanishing American has an excellent post that cites a VDARE article regarding emigration from the US. Apparently, it's increasing amongst Americans, and I don't mean "Americans." This is a point I make quite a bit - younger whites who are interested in starting families may leave this country due to unrestrained third world immigration. The ones who remain behind will be the True Believers in diversity or whatever, and will probably be composed of mostly the 9/11 truth crowd. There's no talking to them.

I went to the beach this Sunday to play volleyball with my wife. It's truly amazing how racially tribalistic people are. On one court, you had a bunch of Indians playing. On another, it was all whites, on ours, it was a mix of of whites and Asians, but mostly whites. Occasionally, a group of exclusively Mexicans would walk by. Isn't diversity grand? We're all sharing the same space, yet avoiding one another as much as possible, probably because we have nothing in common.

Now if only we could break up the US into its constituent parts we might restore some sanity to our government. Alaska for example could rill for the oil it has and sell it to the rest of the independent states. Red states can band together to implement common sense economic policies and watch the blue states drown in a sea of red ink, eco-Marxism, and taxes. Big Government is a Big problem and the Irish were smart to reject the dilution of their sovereignty and the further insulation from the electorate that would be achieved by transferring power to Brussels.

Really, the US is disintegrating as it becomes an empire of conflicting and disinterested ethnicities. What's holding us together? DC ignores the contract we have with it (the Constitution) on most things, why can't we have a divorce?

No surprise, then, that Europe today increasingly finds itself troubled by a Muslim minority within its midst – now perhaps 50 million strong – that draws confidence and growing power from the sureness of its identity. Does Europe, like America, offer a higher identity to which this minority might adapt itself – even die for? It does not. Instead, it either pretends that no problem exists, or it attacks outward manifestations of identity, like Muslim headscarves, without making any real effort to integrate Muslims into a genuine European identity that means something more than the absence of identity. Meanwhile, frank discussions of the identity issue are pushed to the neo-fascistic fringe.

If you haven't yet canceled your subscription to this drivel, please do.

Arguably the best explanation around.

This is good news.

I think the Irish should keep the "No" coalition intact and expect more treachery from their 'leaders.' There are other, more pressing issues that need attention from such a coalition.

Here. Much to think about for the citizen who realizes the government has violated its charter with us.

This is pretty mind-blowing. I wonder if this decision will ever come back to haunt the SCOTUS. I've still got friends who are True Believers in the 9/11 conspiracy hype about "George Bush knew!" Jihad is nowhere on the radar for the libs, and it never will be.

Short paddle, overhead, easy take off, short swim if your board breaks

I think the open-borders people just see whatever they want to see, in spite of the data. Hispanics are the new Italians. Just keep repeating that, like a mantra.