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Man Bites Dog

Oriana Fallaci, scourge of Islam
Jul 21st 2005
From The Economist print edition

THERE is nothing al-Qaeda would like more than for Europeans to turn on Muslims in their midst, uniting fundamentalist militants with those who are neither fundamentalist nor militant. In that sense, Osama bin Laden won yet another victory this week with the publication of another hate-filled, anti-Islamic diatribe by an Italian writer who has become noted for such diatribes: Oriana Fallaci. Over the past three years, the 76-year-old Ms Fallaci has carved out a role as the voice of what might be a new European racism—were race, not religion, her primary cause.…

The Digital Divide

For instance, when Ms Fallaci writes: Nevertheless, there is also a principle of self-defence, or rather, of justified defence, and unless I am mistaken, the Catholic Church used it several times too. Charles Martel repelled Muslim invaders raising the Cross. Isabel of Castilla chased them from Spain doing the same, she forgets in her holy fury that Isabel of Castilla also chased Jews from Spain, "raising the Cross", and that those who chose to remain and conform by getting baptized were burnt at stake if they were caught practising Judaism in private. Perhaps some Jews who might have been tempted to follow Ms Fallaci will remember it.

Ms Fallaci also calls on the judge due to try her for insult to religion in Bergamo, expressing her fear of getting killed by Muslim co-convicts. Let us hope that the judge will declare that she cannot be tried due to the mental incapacity evidenced in this article and in her other anti-Muslim ramblings. And let us hope that the Islamic Anti-Defamation League will not sue the Corriere della Sera for having hosted and given emphasis to these libelous xenophobic ramblings, but will request equal space to answer them.


The Guardian

Anti-Islamic Italian author in new legal fight
Long-running battle over post-9/11 books pits freedom of speech against respect for religious belief

John Hooper in Rome
Wednesday July 13, 2005
The Guardian

One of Italy's best-known authors faces renewed legal action in a dispute that has raised fundamental questions about respect for religion and the right to free speech.
A radical Muslim leader, Adel Smith, told the Guardian he was bringing a civil action for damages against the writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci. He has already succeeded in getting Ms Fallaci committed for trial next year in criminal proceedings for blasphemy.

Last month a judge in the northern Italian city of Bergamo agreed that the 76-year-old Ms Fallaci should answer to claims of abusing Islam in her book The Strength of Reason. Since then, her cause has become a rallying point for mainly rightwing intellectuals and politicians in Italy and the US, where Ms Fallaci lives.
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Oriana Fallaci. Author. Firebrand. Heroine. You go girl. Some of us have a hard time reconciling how the ideology of a person who was by common definitions a mass murderer, armed robber, brigand, liar, and pedophile gets elevated to the status of a religion. Life was brutal in the 7th century and stealing goods was more efficient than producing them, but that doesn't mean that anybody should apologize for or defend a belief system based in no small part on determining exactly how these ill begotten goods were to be distributed among the insiders (believers). Shouldn't you learn a little something in 1,300 years?

A Freakin' Military Genius

NYT reporters must have some biotech implant that prevents them from ever writing kindly about American soldiers. Even when they are on the ground in Fallujah using their eyeballs to see what's happening, a beam from the HQ of the Liberal Deathstar in New York reaches out and blurs their vision.

These are exerpts from a December 12 article by NYT reporter Dexter Filkins. I've never met Mr. Filkins but I'm telling you now that this guy is a flaming asshole and that if I ever have the pleasure of meeting him that I will slap his face in the most contemptible and insulting manner and then piss on him while he grovels.

The original article is here. Black Flags Are Deadly Signals as Cornered Rebels Fight Back. You can avoid the Deathstar's registration hassle by getting a working password from here. BugMeNot.

But these marines did see a black flag pop up all at once above a water tower about 100 yards away, then a second flag somewhere in the gloaming above a rooftop. And the shots began, in a wave this time, as men bobbed and weaved through alleyways and sprinted across the street. "He's in the road, he's in the road, shoot him!" Sergeant Brown shouted. "Black shirt!" someone else yelled. "Due south!"

The flags are the insurgents' answer to two-way radios, their way of massing the troops and - in a tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon - concentrating fire on an enemy. Set against radio waves, the flags have one distinct advantage: they are terrifying.

Did you get that? The US Marines who are killing jihadi girlie-men by the hundreds are going to be terrified by a couple black flags? Yep. A tradition of 229 years of uncommon valor wiped out in an instant by a few black flags.

The insurgents are coordinating their attacks at a time when they have nowhere left to run. American forces have pushed south of Highway 10, the boulevard that runs east to west and approximately bisects Falluja. American intelligence officers believe that many of the insurgents have retreated as far as the Shuhada, a relatively modern residential area that is the southernmost neighborhood in Falluja.

But beyond Shuhada is only the open desert, patrolled by the United States Army. So the insurgents are turning and fighting. And at night, they are setting up deadly ambushes in the moonless pitch blackness of Falluja's labyrinthine streets.

The jihadi girlie-men have had months to stockpile supplies and prepare defenses in an urban environment. By all conventional thinking Fallujah should have been a tough nut to crack. Asshat Filkins fails to mention that the Marines took only two days to root the girlie-men from their prepared defenses in North Fallujah and herd them into a killing zone in the Southern part of the city.

According to Asshat Filkins we should believe that the girlie-men who ran as fast as they could away from their prepared defenses when confronted by the Marines are now capable of coordinating attacks using black flags in "moonless pitch blackness." That is quite a feat. How does it work out in practice?

Meantime, the marines went to the rooftop, saw the flags and got into a firefight. It was silenced when they called in a 500-pound bomb from above onto a house where some of the insurgents had concentrated. The strike was so close that the marines had to leave the roof or risk being killed by shrapnel.

The risk to the jihadi girlie-men was more substantial. What really happened here was that the Marines using their non-terrifying radios, within minutes of receiving fire, coordinated an airstrike that accurately placed a quarter ton of explosives within shouting distance of their position. Which side would you rather be on?

The alley exploded with gunfire and RPG rounds. Somehow the company commander, Capt. Read Omohundro, got two tanks in place to fire down the alley. They let loose with a volley and a building crumbled.

Freakin' amazing those Marines. Somehow, somehow the Marine captain got a couple tanks to shoot back at the enemy. Maybe he used flags. Maybe he spent an hour or so with the tank commander using crayons to draw diagrams to explain himself.

But the insurgents had gotten off an RPG round and disabled one tank; the other tank mysteriously stopped working as well.

Asshat Filkins said "tanks" but could have meant any armored vehicle. You have a better chance of scoring a hole-in-one on a 250 yard par 3 then you do disabling a M1A1 with an RPG. There is almost no possibility of disabling an M1A1 from the front with an RPG. The armor is thick enough to stop a high velocity tank round. I don't know for sure where Filkins was trying to go with this "observation" other than attempting to portray the Marines' equipment as deficient.

If you run into Dexter Filkins he deserves a slap in the face for running down these Marines.

I'm Too Stupid to Vote

I’m too stupid to vote. I found out today by reading the Op-Eds in the L.A. Times. I’m not alone. Rampant stupidity is endemic in America, affecting about half the adult population. According to Op-ed author, Ariel Dorfman “This anti-intellectualism has, unfortunately, a long history in the United States.”

You see, I learned that I’m too stupid to vote because I believe that John Kerry is a pretentious blowhard who thinks that’s getting the name of Jacques de Villepin’s tailor is more important than protecting the Constitution of the United States.

Ariel Dorfman says: Is John Kerry too intelligent to be president of the United States? It was what I felt instinctively the first and only time I met him, at a lunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1998. He was subtle, full of cultural and historical references, elaborating each fine argument at length, with perception and nuance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not so much against people doing brainy things from time to time. Without Isaac Newton’s seminal work could we ever appreciate the effect of Derek Lowe’s sinker ball on 2-3-4 of the Yankee batting order? For me, perception and nuance may be nifty to have when attending mucky-mucky conferences in Switzerland, but when dealing life and death issues with nuclear mullahs clarity is the higher virtue.

If it were not enough to learn that I’m too stupid to vote to begin with, I then learned that even if I went ahead and voted anyway that only third rate candidates would ever get elected. Donald Saari, a professor of mathematics and economics at UC Irvine and director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences tells me that Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician with an eclectic life story, determined in 1770 that plurality voting is inherently stupid.

How perceptive and nuanced is Donald Saari? He tells us. "Using mathematical symmetries from higher dimensional spaces and chaotic dynamics, for instance, I recently proved that the Borda count method is the best expression of the will of the voters"

What’s his proof? Under the stupid election method in the 2002 French elections the conservative candidate won the nomination and the socialist candidate was rejected by the voters.

What’s my take? Ariel Dorfam, for his instincts about John Kerry, and Donald Sarri, for his symmetries from higher dimensional spaces and chaotic dynamics, get my vote as flaming assholes.

Preview of Guvvie Health Care

"The government bungles its distribution scheme for flu vaccines, causing an unanticipated supply shock, and suppliers face an upward pressure on prices. If the high price is charged, then your anal neighbor, who regularly receives flu shots even though he is in a low-risk category for catching the flu, decides to forego the shot this year, leaving a shot for someone who needs it more. The high price also signals to suppliers to get into the vaccine or vaccine substitute business, which they most certainly would in a less regulated environment.

But the government then threatens to throw suppliers in jail for responding to the upward price pressure, so they don't. People like your anal neighbor (who also showers twice a day) still get them. The government, assuming the task that otherwise would have been performed by the price system, tries to allocate flu doses to parties that value them most, on the margin, with the same success that the Soviets enjoyed. Meanwhile, it bemoans the evil of gouging, a few weeks before election day.

It's an old story, and one that is guaranteed to persist, until a free market in medicine is demanded." Ludwig von Mises Institute

"As the vaccine shortage hits home and long lines queue around the supermarket, a handful of states and the nation's capital are threatening doctors and nurses with fines or even jail if they give flu shots to healthy, low-risk people" Fines, Jail Used to Enforce Flu Shot Rules

Kick 'em out.

A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel, the troops' relatives said Thursday. Clarion Ledger

I’m assuming that the troops were not being ordered to use their fuel trucks as rolling bombs, so how would this be a “suicide mission”? Was somebody afraid they might get shot at? Was somebody afraid of a roadside bomb?

Legitimate concerns, yes, but guess what. Iraq can be a dangerous place. If your mission is to deliver fuel to point B then you deliver fuel to point B. Your truck is not the latest model? So what. Have you been performing daily maintenance and cleaning the air and fuel filters as often as needed? You don’t have all the armored vehicles you want to escort you? So what. The US carriers that sailed into Midway to face a Japanese fleet 50 times its size didn’t have any escorts. The Marines kicking down doors in Fallujah don’t have anybody else to go ahead of them. They rely on their skills and their buddies.

I don’t want to see these bozos go to jail but I hope they get kicked out of the Army tomorrow. ABC and the NYT are salivating over the prospects. We’ll see these cowards on Good Morning America. I'm angry already.

We Have a Problem, Abdul

Camp Blue Diamond, Iraq – At approximately 4:00 p.m. Oct. 11, Marines and Iraqi National Guard members began receiving small arms fire from the Sharqi Mosque in Hit.

Insurgents fired accurate and sustained small arms fire that escalated to heavy machine gun and indirect fire during the three-hour firefight at the mosque.

Marines exchanged proportionate and accurate small arms and machine gun fire until insurgents began firing mortars. At that point, Marine aviation was used to deliver precision-guided munitions to target the threat.

Mosques are granted protective status due to their religious and cultural significance. However, when insurgents violate the sanctity of the mosque by using the structure for military purposes, the site loses its protective status.

Marines are obligated and authorized to return fire with accurate and proportionate fire in order to protect themselves. All caution was exercised to limit collateral damage and prevent non-combatant casualties. The 1st Marine Division stands committed to assisting the Iraqi Security Forces in stabilizing the country. Multi-National Force Press Reslease

If appearing on Jeopardy and asked to identify the most lethal organism to ever inhabit the earth, respond "What is a US Marine Combat Team."

Derrida Bypass Procedure

From the New York Times (D-NY). Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president's office announced. He was 74.

Although Derrida is known for deconstructionism he will, in time, became better known as the first recipient of the medical procedure that bears his name, Derrida Bypass Procedure.

Following WWII, few Frenchmen (about 11 in actual number), when asked what they did in the Resistance, were able to remember anything about either the War or the Resistance. General DeGaulle (peace be upon him) found this intolerable for his plans to restore France as a world luminary, and determined that this national memory loss of how France single handedly defeated the Third Reich was caused by a lack of nutrition to the brain.

DeGaulle commissioned the finest French physicians to come up with a procedure to correct this problem. This elite group determined that they could supercharge the flow of nutrients to the brain, grow intellect and correct memory loss, by bypassing the digestive process and connecting the large intestine directly to the brain. Jaques Derrida was the first to undergo this procedure. First other Frenchmen like Focault, and then the rising class of East Coast and Left Coast intellectuals in the US, amazed and impressed at what was coming out of Derrida’s mouth, rushed to have the Derrida Bypass Procedure themselves. And the rest is history.