Fake video at CNN?

Ed Morrissey has been following the case of a faked video at CNN, allegedly showing deaths resulting from an Israeli missile.

There are several points that clearly show this to be a fake. Yesterday I wrote about the doctors and the ridiculous effort at CPR, plus the inclusion of notorious pro-Hamas activist Mads Gilbert. When Duane and I looked at this again, we saw a few other points as well.

• Take a look at the blood on the operating table. For penetrating wounds, there is almost no blood, and what little there is looks washed out — almost orange. The body should have been covered in blood, and much more than that should have transferred to the sheets, especially if someone was giving CPR.
• The video alleges that the Israelis used a missile from an unmanned drone to attack the rooftop, but look carefully at that roof. A missile hitting that roof would have left much more than a six-inch-diameter impact crater, even if it didn’t explode.
• Also, the plastic chair is sitting normally in the blast zone, and the clothes remain on the clothesline in the background. A missile blast that killed two boys on that roof would have done much more extensive damage.

It’s not only a fake, it’s an absurd fake. It’s not even done well, and Gilbert’s dramatic headshake at the end of the supposed CPR — in which Doctor #2’s hands keep coming off the body — is only the cheesy coup de grace. Why did CNN republish this?

CNN's response: "Is not!!!" (paraphrase)

And here's this from Little Green Footballs

CNN now responds to the charge that Mashharawi worked for a company that operates Hamas websites:

Martin said accusations that Mashharawi owns a company that hosts Hamas Web sites were falsely based on Mashharawi having worked at a company that created the PS suffix to allow anyone of any political persuasion to create Palestinian Web sites.

According to Internet Haganah’s database of terror website hosts, in 2004 nepras.net, which lists Mashharawi as general manager, was the operator of the main Hamas website and the website of Hamas’ radio station Voice of Al Aqsa.

Sea Kittens

Michelle Malkin has linked to a PETA campaign aimed at renaming fish "sea kittens".

Well, I like most fish I've had, including catfish.  Maybe young catfish would be called "river kittens"?

Anyway, for those who might want to try frying up some sea kittens, here's a recipe I use for tilapia.  (And it would probably work on catfish, too -- or any light fish.)

 

1 1/2 lb tilapia fillets

1/2    cup flour

2       tbsp white pepper

2       tbsp garlic powder

2       tbsp garam masala

1       tbsp salt

butter for frying

olive oil for frying

 

Melt the butter in a frying pan with some olive oil (helps keep the butter from burning).

Mix the flour and spices and pour into a shallow bowl or plate.

Dredge the fillets through the flour, coating both sides.

Place the fillets in the hot oil and fry on both sides, for a total of 10 minutes per inch of thickness.

Serve

 

This is great as is, or with a sauce.  The residual oil/butter mix in the frying pan can be mixed with some of the flour mix to make a good gravy.

 

Next week, we'll try something with shrimp, hereinafter referred to as "ocean puppies".

The double standard on Israel

I've seen this double standard all over the place. Israel is condemned for doing things that every other country in the world does with impunity, and protesters scream things that would be reviled as "hate crimes" were they directed at any other group on the planet. Indeed, the "criticisms" are leveled with such venom and vitriol that I suspect the motivation is not anything Israel has done, but what Israel is

The world-wide protests against Israel's ground incursion into Gaza are so full of hatred that they leave me with the terrible feeling that these protests have little to do with the so-called disproportionality of the Israeli response to Hamas rockets, or the resulting civilian casualties.

My fear is that the rage we see in the protesters marching in the streets is far more profound and dangerous than we would like to believe. There are a great many people in the world who, even after Auschwitz, just can't bear the Jewish state having the same rights they so readily grant to other nations. These voices insist Israel must take risks they would never dare ask of any other nation-state -- risks that threaten its very survival -- because they don't believe Israel should exist in the first place.

Just look at the spate of attacks this week on Jews and Jewish institutions around the world: a car ramming into a synagogue in France; a Chabad menorah and Jewish-owned shops sprayed with swastikas in Belgium; a banner at an Australian rally demanding "clean the earth from dirty Zionists!"; demonstrators in the Netherlands chanting "Gas the Jews"; and in Florida, protestors demanding Jews "Go back to the ovens!"

How else can we explain the double-standard that is applied to the Gaza conflict, if not for a more insidious bias against the Jewish state?

At the U.N., no surprise, this double-standard is in full force. In response to Israel's attack on Hamas, the Security Council immediately pulled an all-night emergency meeting to consider yet another resolution condemning Israel. Have there been any all-night Security Council sessions held during the seven months when Hamas fired 3,000 rockets at half a million innocent civilians in southern Israel? You can be certain that during those seven months, no midnight oil was burning at the U.N. headquarters over resolutions condemning terrorist organizations like Hamas. But put condemnation of Israel on the agenda and, rain or shine, it's sure to be a full house.

Red Cross officials are all over the Gaza crisis, describing it as a full-blown humanitarian nightmare. Where were they during the seven months when tens of thousands of Israeli families could not sleep for fear of a rocket attack? Where were their trauma experts to decry that humanitarian crisis?

There have been hundreds of articles and reports written from the Erez border crossing falsely accusing Israel of blocking humanitarian supplies from reaching beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza. (In fact, over 520 truck loads of humanitarian aid have been delivered through Israeli crossings since the beginning of the Israeli counterattack.) But how many news articles, NGO reports and special U.N. commissions have investigated Hamas's policy of deliberately placing rocket launchers near schools, mosques and homes in order to use innocent Palestinians as human shields?

Many people ask why there are so few Israeli casualties in comparison with the Palestinian death toll. It's because Israel's first priority is the safety of its citizens, which is why there are shelters and warning systems in Israeli towns. If Hamas can dig tunnels, it can certainly build shelters. Instead, it prefers to use women and children as human shields while its leaders rush into hiding.

And then there are the clarion calls for a cease-fire. These words, which come so easily, have proven to be a recipe for disaster. Hamas uses the cease-fire as a time-out to rearm and smuggle even more deadly weapons so the next time, instead of hitting Sderot and Ashkelon, they can target Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The pattern is always the same. Following a cease-fire brought on by international pressure, there will be a call for a massive infusion of funds to help Palestinians recover from the devastation of the Israeli attack. The world will respond eagerly, handing over hundreds of millions of dollars. To whom does this money go? To Hamas, the same terrorist group that brought disaster to the Palestinians in the first place.

The world seems to have forgotten that at the end of World War II, President Harry Truman initiated the Marshall Plan, investing vast sums to rebuild Germany. But he did so only with the clear understanding that the money would build a new kind of Germany -- not a Fourth Reich that would continue the policies of Adolf Hitler. Yet that is precisely what the world will be doing if we once again entrust funds to Hamas terrorists and their Iranian puppet masters.

In less than two weeks, Barack Obama will be sworn in as president of the United States. But there is no "change we can believe in" in the Middle East -- not where Israel is concerned. The double-standard continuously applied to the Jewish state proves that, for much of the world, the real lessons of World War II have yet to be learned.

Mr. Hier, a rabbi, is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance.

Of course, some people will say this is just another example of "The Whiny Jews".

Stop the Bombing!

From John Ray's blog:

 

Stop This Vicious Slaughter! England Must Stop Waging War On The Nazis!

 

Dateline: January 3rd 1944

 

Fury continues to mount worldwide about the senseless loss of civilian life in Germany caused by England's callous bombing of German cities including Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden. As of today many innocent German women and children have died in these utterly brutal bombing missions. And now there are ground offensives starting on mainland Europe.

 

The English have claimed that they are merely retaliating against the V-1 flying bombs being launched indiscriminately by Nazis at their civilian population in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry and other cities. The English point out that their enemy is sworn to its utter destruction and has used the missiles and flying bombs against its civilians without any regard to English loss of life. Moreover it makes the case that their own bombing missions are specifically directed to military targets that the German army has intentionally planted in the heart of civilian populations to try and deter English counter-attacks.

 

These points may of course be true - but they are utterly besides the point. Of course England has a right to exist. Of course England has a right to defend itself. But it should ensure that its responses are PROPORTIONATE. Since many more Germans are dying than English - the English should either tone down the success and accuracy of their bombing - or allow the Germans to catch up on the death count. To be honest - if more English women and children were dying - we wouldn't feel quite so bad about the number of Germans dying. But it's just so UNFAIR that more Germans are dying...

 

Perhaps some English people could arrange to kill themselves to match the number of Germans dying as a result of the English retaliation bombing? It would be so considerate - and it might help England's critics feel less miserable about the number of Nazis dying. Something that is causing them so much concern. It would also put paid to that wretched proportionality argument.

 

Alternatively, perhaps the English could arrange to be less effective in their bombing? Or only bomb military targets that are nowhere near civilians - even though the vast majority of the V-1 rockets are intentionally being launched from the heart of civilian population centers.

 

Now the English will argue that the Germans have INTENTIONALLY positioned all their launch pads for the V-1 rockets in the middle of civilian populations to inhibit the English from bombing those launch sites. Well - tough noogies to the Brits! Sorry - but if the Germans are smarter or more skillful at cynically using their civilians as human shields than you - tough luck!

 

You can't have it both ways. If you truly wish to save your nation from being annihilated by Nazi missiles you'd better stop looking to win a popularity contest. The Nazis are waging this war to win and to utterly destroy England. If all you Brits care about is popularity - then you may as well resign yourself to speaking German...

 

It's about time that little nations who wish to defend themselves wised up to their responsibilities. Otherwise the same stupid complaints will be made at some point in the 21st Century when some little nation finds itself under constant attack from rockets fired at its civilian population by a terrorizing enemy that has sworn to destroy it....

 

Source

 

Polygamy

One recurring comment about same-sex marriage is that advocates don't have any reason why same-sex marriage is OK, but polygamy isn't. In fact, polygamy exists in more cultures than same-sex marriage does.

Solangel Maldonado at Concurring Opinions asks, what's wrong with polygamy?

Many Americans believe that polygamy is morally wrong, but this view is not universal. Polygamy is legal and widely practiced in many countries in Africa and the Middle East and Islamic law allows a man to have up to four wives so long as he treats them equally. So why are most Americans vehemently opposed to polygamy?

Silence on the West Bank

It's been pretty quiet on the Western Front – of Israel, that is. We constantly hear that the Arab Street will rise up in defense of the Palestinians. They don't seem to be rising up on the West Bank.

Now, there’s a headline. The great majority of Palestinians, it is being suggested, don’t feel that the war in Gaza is really something worth protesting. According to this theory, the Palestinians know what the alternatives are, know who’s to blame, and recognize that there might be another way to go on with their lives other than by dedicating them to suicidal support for fanatical terrorists.

Of course, maybe this is wrong. Maybe the first answer is closer: they are not protesting because they have been told not to, and they do what they’re told.

All this leaves us with a small number of possibilities regarding the Palestinians, at least one of which must be true, but none of which fit well with the anti-Israel narrative:

1. That the “Arab street” is a myth, and that violent protests are always directed top-down, even in the face of so-called Israeli atrocities;

2. That West Bank Palestinians are starting to understand that renouncing terror and violence might have serious advantages;

3. That the destruction of the Hamas regime is of importance not only to the West, and not only to the tacitly supportive Egyptians, but even to most Palestinians, even at the cost of civilian casualties in Gaza;

4. That Palestinian national identity is a lot weaker than we are usually told — that West Bankers are more willing to support their local regime and way of life than their brethren in Gaza.

Israel: The view from Ireland

From the Independent, Ian O'Doherty:

Are we watching the ethnic cleansing of an entire people? Are we witnessing the deliberate eradication of a race?

Well, no actually, we're not.

Yet the conventional dinner party wisdom which we've had to put up with in the media, both here in Ireland and generally across Britain, is that somehow Israel is the aggressor in the rapidly worsening situation in Gaza.

Footage of air strikes with the ensuing photogenic explosions and dramatic plumes of smoke, quickly followed by clips of collapsed buildings and enraged mourners, makes far better copy than actually looking at the reasons why Israel has done what it's done.

Anyone who devotes only a cursory glance at the news, both print and television, would be forgiven for thinking that, out of spite, might and malice, Israel has decided to destroy the Palestinian people.

The problem with that conclusion -- and it's not something you're going to learn from the BBC and most other outlets -- is that, contrary to the currently popular belief, Israel is actually acting with a ridiculous degree of restraint.
....
It's a common feeling amongst residents of southern Israeli towns who have been the silent victims of a long campaign of violence, intimidation and murder carried out by Hamas. And now, finally, that the Israelis have said that enough is enough, they are somehow meant to be the aggressors?

There are people of good conscience on both sides of this argument, but one of the main problems in this debate lies in the cowardly tendency of the Western media to apply equivalence to both sides.

Thus, Hamas is seen to be as legitimate a government as the Israelis, and its rocket attacks across the border from Gaza are seen as being part of a yet another, intractable, interminable Middle Eastern dispute.

There's just one problem with that approach -- it's completely wrong.

Hamas is a fundamentalist Islamic organisation intent on the eradication of the state of Israel and all its citizens; a violent fascist regime that allows honour killings and the execution of homosexuals to continue in its sphere of influence. Bankrolled by Iran, it manages to make even Hezbollah look like a moderate organisation.
....
But there's a bigger picture here, something which Israelis have been trying to broadcast to the world, but which, thanks to their spectacular inability to accurately and sympathetically portray their point of view, has not been properly transmitted. It's this -- Israel is the front line of the war between democracy and Islamic fascism.

Would you rather live in a society with a free press, equal rights for women -- and anyone who knows an Israeli woman will know that they're not easily suppressed, anyway -- equal rights for gay people and a proud and stubborn belief in the right of the individual to lead their life in the way that they see fit or would you rather exist in a society where women who dare to speak their mind are executed, where gay people are not just shunned but murdered and where having a dissenting thought marks you out for death?

The civilian deaths in Gaza are to be mourned, and anyone who says otherwise is reprehensible. But in a sick and twisted irony, they are mourned more by Israelis than by Hamas, who know that every dead Palestinian kid is worth another piece of propaganda.

Here in the West, where we share the same values as Israel, we need to start standing shoulder with this tiny oasis of democracy in a vast desert of savagery.

To do otherwise is moral cowardice of the most repugnant kind.

Dealing with the credit crunch

A village in Thailand has worked out a solution to the worldwide credit crunch. It's printing its own money.

Decorating their money with children's sketches of water buffaloes and Buddhist temples, the villagers conceived it as a do-it-yourself attempt to protect themselves from the whiplash of vast outflows of speculative money which undermined local currencies and threw Thailand -- and much of Asia -- into recession in 1997-98.
....
with Thailand's economy slowing sharply, the DIY cash is beginning to flow freely again.

"We need our own money more than ever now," says Phra Supajarawat, the wiry, orange-robed abbot of the local Buddhist monastery, who doubles as a "governor" of Santi Suk's tiny, one-room bank. "Things are turning bad in Thailand and people need something they can believe in," he says.

Homemade currencies, sometimes known as community or complementary currencies, have a habit of popping up during economic crises. Some towns in the U.S., Canada and Germany introduced their own scrip during the Great Depression. Similar schemes have emerged more recently in Japan, Argentina and Britain.

Gaza, Israel, and International Law

This links to a 40-page PDF laying out what international law says about the fighting going on in Gaza. A major conclusion is that the people who are accusing Israel of war crimes are not arguing the slam-dunk they think they are.

Goldberg on Israel

In today's Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg looks at the gulf between the protesters of Israel and reality.

 

Across the Islamic world, and in too many points West, it is still considered a penetrating and poignant insight to call Zionists the "new Nazis." For instance, in Sunday's Gulf News, Mohammad Abdullah al Mutawa, a sociology professor at United Arab Emirates University, penned an essay titled "Zionists are the new Nazis." He began: "Today, the whole world stands as a witness to the fact that the Nazi Holocaust was a mere lie, which was devised by the Zionists to blackmail humanity."

 

At a Saturday New York protest against Israel's military assault on Gaza, some carried signs that read: "Israel: The Fourth Reich"; "Holocaust by Holocaust Survivors"; "Stop Israel's Holocaust"; "Holocaust in Gaza"; and "Stop the Zionist Genocide in Gaza."

 

Type "Israel" and "Nazi" into any news search engine and you'll be rewarded, or punished, with a bounty of such statements just over the last week or so.

....

First, let us note that if supposedly all-powerful Israel is dedicated to exterminating the Palestinian people, it is doing a very bad job. The Palestinian population has only grown since 1948. There are more Arab citizens living in Israel proper today than there were in all of Palestine the year Israel was founded.

 

Perhaps one reason Israel fails at genocide is that it isn't interested in genocide? That would explain why Israel warned thousands of Gazans by cellphone to leave homes near Hamas rocket stockpiles. It would clarify why, even amid all-out war, it offers aid to enemy civilians. It would even illuminate the otherwise mysterious clamor from Israelis for a viable "peace partner."

....

I think, deep down, the desire to cast the Israelis as Nazis is fueled by the haters' need to see their own hatreds and ambitions mirrored in their enemy's actions. Hamas has an avowedly Hitlerite agenda. The only way to make such an agenda defensible is to convince yourself and others that the Israelis deserve it. Hence, Hamas and its allies insist that when they aim rockets at grade schools and playgrounds, they are resisting the "new Nazis." It brings to mind Huey Long's reported prophecy that if fascism ever came to America, it would be called anti-fascism. Well, with Hamas, Hitlerism comes to the Middle East wearing the mask of anti-Hitlerism.

 

Obama and Africa

(Hat tip: John Ray)

ToThePointNews believes Obama is going to try to fix Africa, and will find it unfixable.

Obama will try to fix Africa and will fail

 

Because he will be ineffectual and irrelevant most everywhere else, one place Zero [Obama] will focus his foreign policy on will be Africa. We could call this drama Zero in Africa. He is going to be spending a lot of our money and risking many of our soldiers' lives in Africa. After all, that's where his alleged father is from. It's what the entire liberal elite expects of him. And it won't do any good.

 

Endless wars, bottomless corruption, disease, tyranny and dictatorship seem standard operating procedure for Africa. Out of the over 50 nation-states on the continent, one can point to the mild success story here and there - but these are exceptions to Africa's being the bottom of humanity's barrel. The coup last week in Guinea is a fine example.

 

The former French colony has the world's largest bauxite reserves, lots of iron ore, gold, and diamonds, lots of rich farmland. Most of its 10 million people live on less than $1 a day, it was ruled by a thug for the last 25 years until he died, whereupon some completely unknown army captain staged a coup and took over the country. Guineans are hailing him as "Obama Junior."

 

Africans will be looking to Zero to end their paleolithic poverty and violence, and he won't be able to - because of a fundamental fact he cannot change. The American Psychiatric Association classifies people with an IQ of 70 or below as mentally retarded. The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67.

 

Of course, there are plenty of very smart individual Africans. But the majority population of the entire continent of Africa (excluding North African countries such as Morocco and Egypt, and the whites of South Africa) is suffering mental retardation - or, put another way, has the mental faculties of a pre-teenage child. The average IQ in Guinea is 63.

 

The world's foremost researcher on IQ is Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at the University of Ulster in the UK. His exhaustive research over 30 years has been compiled in monumental studies entitled IQ and the Wealth of Nations and Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis. His latest study is The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide.

 

Sifting through 168 national IQ studies covering 81 countries and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, analyzing the entire body of scientific psychometric (psychological measurement) research for the last 100 years, Lynn has determined that:

 

*East Asians (Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, but not China) have on average 5 IQ points higher than Europeans and European-Americans.

 

*East Asian mean IQ is 105, China excluding Hong Kong is 100 (Hong Kong is 107, the world's highest), European/European-American is 100, Inuit Eskimo is 91, American Indian is 87, Mexican is 87, American Black is 85, South Asian (e.g. India, Pakistan) is 84, Middle East/North Africa Arab is 83, Sub-Saharan African is 67, Australian Aborigine is 62. The world average IQ is 90.

 

The key words are "on average." For while the average East Asian is smarter than the average European or American, the latter have greater variability. Which means, especially for Americans whose culture allows for more flourishing of intelligence, there will be a lot more really smart folks, super-smart individuals with IQs above 130 among them. It is these geniuses of science and business that have enabled our culture, that of Western Civilization, to prosper far beyond any other.

And it is just these folks, the brightest and most talented, that Zero will stifle and sacrifice on his altars of Equality, Fairness, and Redistribution. So a lot of them will give up or leave the US - they will shrug, as we discussed last month in Atlas in America.

Here's the thing. We hear from any number of well-meaning people that IQ doesn't mean anything.  People can be just as successful with an IQ of 70 as with one of 170.  Well, this is either true or false.  If it's false, then trying to make it true by throwing money at the problem is going to waste the money, and the suffering caused by the problems will continue.

Do conservative bloggers do reporting?

Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard and Matthew Yglesias say they don't. 

Michelle Malkin says they do.

 

Well, if "reporting" means doing what the likes of the New York Times and L.A. Times do, then no, they don't. Maybe Bagdad Bob did....

Who?

The new Doctor has been unveiled by BBC.

 

THE NEXT DOCTOR WHO: Matt Smith will succeed David Tennant in the role as the Time Lord in the BBC's sci-fi series Doctor Who. Photo: BBC

Matt Smith has been cast as the replacement for David Tennant as the Time Lord in the BBC's sci-fi series Doctor Who. Ahead of Smith's incarnation as the 11th Doctor, we profile the young actor who has just won the biggest role in British television.

No, it's not Doctor Smith -- just "The Doctor".

Brains without design?

It appears the next battleground for creationism is the brain. The premise of creationists seems to be that the brain has some properties which can not have arisen naturally. A Designer is required.

What kind of designer? Jason Rosenhouse has some thoughts:

Is the evidence for design in biological systems so obvious? I hold that the brain, the ultimate test case, is, in many respects, a true design nightmare. Let's review a bit. When we compare the human brain to that of other vertebrates, it becomes clear that the human brain has mostly developed through agglomeration. The difference between the lizard brain and the mouse brain does not involve wholesale redesign. Rather, the mouse brain is basically the lizard brain with some extra stuff on top. Likewise, the human brian is basically the mouse brain with still more stuff piled on top. That's how we wind up with two visual systems and two auditory systems (one ancient and one modern) jammed into our heads. The brain is built like an ice cream cone with new scoops piled on at each stage of our lineage.

Accidental design is even more obvious at the cellular level in the brain. The job of neurons is to integrate and propagate electrical signals. Yet, in almost all respects, neurons do a bad job. They propagate their signals slowly (a million times more slowly than copper wires), their signaling range is tiny (0 to 1,200 spikes/second), they leak signals to their neighbors, and, on average, they successfully propagate their signals to their targets only about 30 percent of the time. As electrical devices, the neurons of the brain are extremely inefficient.

One approach Creationists and ID/IOTs will take is to try to figure out reasons why It's Better This Way. Somehow, slow and leaky propagation is better than fast and well-insulated propagation. Somehow, a 1200 baud bandwidth is better than a megabaud or gigabaud bandwidth. (If nature can come up with crystalline lenses, couldn't she have come up with fiber optics?)

So, at either the systems or cellular level, the human brain, which the intelligent design crowd would imagine to be the most highly designed bit of tissue on the planet, is essentially a Rube Goldberg contraption. Not surprisingly, some proponents of intelligent design have left themselves a way to retreat on this point. Michael Behe writes, “Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason -- for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off, for some as-yet-undetectable practical purpose or for some unguessable reason -- or they might not.” Or, stated another way, if on first glimpse biological systems look cool, that must be the result of intelligent design. If, on closer inspection, biological systems look like a cobbled-together contraption, that's still got to be from intelligent design, just intelligent design with an offbeat sense of humor. Clearly, this position is not a true, falsifiable scientific hypothesis, as is the theory of evolution. The idea of intelligent design is merely and assertion. (pp 241-242).

Here, Behe as much as admits that Intelligent Design is not science. A scientific theory, or even conjecture, is falsifiable. That is, there is some conceivable observation which someone can make that will show that theory or conjecture to be false. Behe admits that, no matter what anyone observes, intelligent design can never be proven false – at least not to him.

More proportionality

In this post, Michael J. Totten looks at what the Law of Armed Conflict has to say.

Proportion, as defined by Beehner and the Hague Conventions, is impossible between Israel and Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces are more professional, competent and technologically advanced than Hamas and will inflict greater damage as a matter of course. And Hamas’s war aim is entirely out of proportion to Israel’s. Israel wants to halt the incoming rocket fire, while Hamas seeks the destruction or evacuation of Israel.

Beehner’s proportionality doctrine is therefore unhelpful. Each side’s ends and means are disproportionate to the other. And nowhere in that doctrine are casualty figures or the intent of the warring parties factored in.
....
So aside from the obvious, we’re wading into murky territory that could be debated forever. Another doctrine of proportionality, though, clearly applies to this war, and it’s found in the Law of Armed Conflict.

The Law of Armed Conflict “arises from a desire among civilized nations to prevent unnecessary suffering and destruction while not impeding the effective waging of war. A part of public international law, LOAC regulates the conduct of armed hostilities. It also aims to protect civilians, prisoners of war, the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked.”

Proportionality, in short and according to the law, “prohibits the use of any kind or degree of force that exceeds that needed to accomplish the military objective.”

In other words, if a surgical strike is all that is needed to take out a Grad rocket launcher, carpet bombing the entire city or even the neighborhood isn’t allowed.

Hamas is still firing rockets; therefore, the IDF is not using more force than necessary to disrupt the firing of rockets. Israel, arguably, is using less force than necessary. And the IDF, unlike Hamas, does what it can to minimize injury to civilians. “Militants often operate against Israel from civilian areas,” the Associated Press reported last week. “Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.” Israeli commanders are even warning individual Hamas leaders that their homes are on the target list so they can vacate the premises in advance.

It’s also worth looking at the doctrine of distinction, which Israel follows while Hamas does not.

Distinction, according to the Law of Armed Conflict, “means discriminating between lawful combatant targets and noncombatant targets such as civilians, civilian property, POWs, and wounded personnel who are out of combat. The central idea of distinction is to only engage valid military targets. An indiscriminate attack is one that strikes military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. Distinction requires defenders to separate military objects from civilian objects to the maximum extent feasible. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to locate a hospital or POW camp next to an ammunition factory.”

Hamas violates this doctrine in two ways at once. Its fighters launch Qassam, Katyusha, and Grad rockets into Israeli civilian areas, and they fire those rockets from inside Palestinian civilian areas. Both are prohibited by the Law of Armed Conflict.

The law does not, however, prohibit Israel from striking legitimate military targets in civilian areas. “Although civilians may not be made the object of a direct attack, the LOAC recognizes that a military target need not be spared because its destruction may cause collateral damage that results in the unintended death or injury to civilians or damage to their property.”

Hamas, then, is legally to blame for all, or nearly all, injuries and deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians.

I shouldn’t even need to point out that Hamas is not allowed to target civilians with rockets, but I’ll cite the law anyway. “The LOAC protects civilian populations. Military attacks against cities, towns, or villages not justified by military necessity are forbidden. Attacking noncombatants (generally referred to as civilians) for the sole purpose of terrorizing them is also prohibited.”

Concern for the suffering innocents of Gaza – and all children of all nations are innocent – is well, good, and proper. And whether Israel’s operation in Gaza will turn out to be prudent, wise, and productive is yet to be seen. But either way, and at the end of the day, Israel’s rules of engagement comply with the laws of war forged by civilized nations, while nearly every one of Hamas’s military tactics are war crimes.

Taking Andrew Sullivan seriously

Noal Pollak at Contentions takes Andrew Sullivan's question at face value.

"How does just war theory defend the deaths of many innocent civilians as a means to increase “deterrent strength”?"

Assuming Andrew Sullivan can imagine any act by Israel being "just" or "legitimate"...

The first answer is that Andrew is being coy; the ground operation is not only intended as a deterrent measure, it is intended to push Hamas off the territory it has been using near the Israeli border to launch rockets, and it is intended to kill important members of Hamas — its vanguard of fighters and leaders — and yes, it is also intended as a deterrent measure. If Andrew does not want to see the IDF either completely re-occupy Gaza or lay waste to ever-larger parts of the territory, he must allow the IDF a third way: create a new deterrence posture against Hamas so that the terror regime will be forced to make a new calculation about the value of its rocket war on Israeli civilians versus the destruction to its own infrastructure and lives that such attacks invite.

Increasing “deterrent strength” against an enemy is simply another way of saying that you intend to fight them until they stop attacking you. As far as just war theory is concerned, I invite Andrew to cite chapter and verse, or even vague tenets, which might guide us toward his claim of the illegitimacy of the ground operation.

Nobody knows at this moment whether Hamas is deterrable. The question depends on whether Hamas actually intends to fight to the last man and on the efficacy of the IDF’s ground war. But surely it is also true — according to just war theory, no less — that the sovereign state of Israel, in an attempt to protect its citizens, is allowed to discover whether deterrence is possible. I note that since August 2006, Hezbollah has been awfully quiet on Israel’s northern border; and that since 1973, so have Syria and Egypt.

Israel's crime

Jennifer Rubin at Contentions looks at the real reason protesters are protesting at Israeli embassies around the world.

For those who fret endlessly about self-determination and civilian harm, the vitriol only flows one way. One might attribute their pleas for restraint and a return to the non-existent peace process as naiveté. But at some point the facts become too difficult to ignore. The aim of the selective critics becomes clear: Israel simply can’t, in their scheme of things, be allowed to defend itself.

For the protesters, Israel simply doesn't have the right to behave as any real country would, because they don't believe Israel has the right to exist.

Israeli war crimes?

Eric Posner, at the Volokh Conspiracy, has a post on The Gaza Conflict and the Limits of International Law.

Here are the high points:

1. Jus ad bellum. Gaza is not a state. It’s not clear what it is—occupied territory? Mandate? If it’s not a state, the UN charter does not forbid an attack. Even if it were, the UN charter would not forbid an attack as long as Israel’s attack is in self-defense—which it appears to be, so far.

2. Jus in bello. Can there be a war between a state and a non-state entity? Yes! And most people think the regular laws of war apply. The laws of war forbid the deliberate killing of civilians, but so far no one has proved that Israel has deliberately killed civilians. That leaves the proportionality rule, which bars an attack that causes civilian casualties (or property damage) that are “disproportionate” to the attack. Unfortunately, no one knows what proportionality means. Can you drop a bomb on a Hamas leader that might or will kill a nearby civilian? Two civilians? Ten? A thousand? Does it matter how important the leader is? Whether he has taken refuge in a densely packed area? There are no settled answers to these questions.

3. Human rights. Ideally, the Israelis enter Gaza and arrest the rocket shooters and their leaders, try them, and convict them if they are guilty. In practice, this is impossible. Human rights law does not prohibit the use of violence when ordinary law enforcement practices are inadequate.

Marriage and adoption in Arkansas

Dafydd at Big Lizards feels compelled to offer the side of the story the AP has declined to cover:

Since AP appears unwilling to allow the pro-marriage side of the debate to speak, I must take up the conservative man's burden (despite my not being a conservative) and explain exactly why we should not allow same-sex couples or other sundry unmarried cohabitators to adopt a brood -- unless there is simply no other option (which is quite rare). So here goes:

1. Children ideally should have both a (male) father and a (female) mother:

   (a) Every person has both "male" and "female" components to his personality that require training and nurturing by the corresponding sex parent... every child needs both sexes in his life, preferably as parents. Since the State is picking the parents, why not satisfy this need?

   (b) Girls learn best how to be women from their mothers, while boys learn best how to be men from their fathers... women best know the special problems girls have, while men best know the special problems boys have.

2. Children ideally should have parents whose commitment to the family extends at least far enough to get legally married. (The question of who is legally allowed to marry should be taken up in a separate initiative or legislative bill all its own.)
3. The State has a vested interest in promoting and encouraging family arrangements that most closely approximate the ideal, and in discouraging or even prohibiting some arrangements -- polygamy, underaged marriage, etc. -- that swing dangerously far away from that ideal.
4. The State has no authority to take children away from their birth parents, but it does have the primary responsibility to ensure that those children under its own care -- adoptive and foster children -- are placed in families that satisfy (3) above.
5. The people of Arkansas have the right, and I argue the duty, to enact such laws by initiative when the state legislature is pathetically unable or unwilling to do so.

I don't undersand why this should not be obvious to at least 90% of the adult population; but at least it was obvious to a majority, and the Arkansas initiative passed by 14 points.

Evidently, however, it is not obvious to the Associated Press... which obtusity, when generalized, may go a long way towards explaining the financial quagmire in which the elite news media in this country finds itself in recent years.

Maybe these reasons are ultimately bogus, but the news media have a duty to at least air them. I don't think they're conspiring to ignore them; I think they really, honestly, can't see them and don't understand them.  Going back to the five-component model of morality and the notion of "moral color-blindness", I think the mainstream journalists, being on the left, simply can't perceive those arguments as in any way meaningful.

Israel vs. Hamas

Jonathan Chait has an observation about the struggle:

I do think, though, that much of the dovish criticism fundamentally misreads the situation. Here's the American Prospect's Ezra Klein:

....

Look, it's obviously true that both sides see the root of the conflict differently. But these two views just are not equally valid. Hamas has a problem with Israel because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. Israel has a problem with Hamas because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. If Hamas lay down all its weapons, Israel would lift its blockade. If Israel lay down all its weapons, Hamas would kill as many Israelis as it could. That fact doesn't justify any Israeli response to Hamas, but it is a necessary starting point for any analysis. If you can't grasp the asymmetric nature of the two greivances, then any reasoning that follows is going to come out crooked.

WoW Economics

David Friedman looks at the economics of an artificial world -- the World of Warcraft multiplayer game.

Something to think about

From Jonah Goldberg at The Corner/NRO:

Just a random question: how come the people complaining about disproportionate responses never protest when Israel trades a couple hundred Palestianian prisoners for the dead bodies of one or two Israeli soldiers?

Have a cow, man!

Or in this case, "Have a cow, woman!"

(Hat tip: Prarie Pundit)

Marines buy cows for Iraqi widows

At the suggestion of an Iraqi women's group, the Marine Corps recently bought 50 cows for 50 Iraqi widows in the farm belt around Fallouja, once the insurgent capital of war-torn Anbar province.

 

The cow purchase is seen as a small step toward reestablishing Iraq's once-thriving dairy industry, as well as a way to help women and children hurt by the frequent failure of the Iraqi government to provide the pensions that Iraqi law promises to widows.

 

The early sign is that the program is working. Widows, many with no other income, have a marketable item to sell, as well as milk for their children. Although Iraqis, particularly women, are often reluctant to participate in an American effort, the cows were immediately popular.

 

 

"It was an easy sell," said Maj. Meredith Brown, assigned to the Marines' outreach program for Iraqi women.

 

The idea, proposed by members of the Women's Cultural Center in Fallouja, at first met with resistance from U.S. military officers and civilian officials involved in aid programs for Anbar. Nothing in their training provided guidance in haggling for livestock.

 

But those objections quickly evaporated when Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the top Marine in Iraq, signaled his support, Brown said. The Iraqis now refer to their animals as Kelly's Cows.

....

The Marines began buying cows in November at a livestock market at Saqlawiyah. Of the 50 cows, 35 were pregnant and 10 already had calves, which went along with their mothers. The five others were taken to a laboratory for artificial insemination. Brown put the program cost so far at $58,000.

 

To qualify for a free cow, each widow had to sign an agreement not to slaughter or sell the animal and instead to use the milk as a marketable item or for the family.

 

The project is not entirely altruistic. The Marines believe that widows with at least some economic resources are less likely to join Al Qaeda to carry out suicide attacks in exchange for a promise that their children will be cared for after the women are gone.

 And what's interesting is the corporate entity involved:

Though Kelly's support may have been based on gut instinct, the need to beef up Iraq's badly broken dairy industry was argued in a Nov. 25 report by Land O'Lakes Inc.

 

The Minnesota cheese-and-butter company was hired by the Marine Corps to examine the Iraqi dairy industry. Its 38-page report, based on field research in the fall by two Land O'Lakes dairy specialists, concluded that there was enormous growth potential for the industry in a milk-drinking, cheese-eating nation that can locally produce enough milk to satisfy only 5% of the demand.

 

The study also pointed out that, even in Iraqi farm families with able-bodied adult males, much of the work is left to women: "Women milk the cows, bring feed and fodder to the animals and are supported by their children."

 

Though Americans know Land O'Lakes best from its products in the dairy case, the company has been involved in 150 development projects in 70 countries in recent decades. Among them was a dairy project in Afghanistan after the Taliban was toppled in the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

 

Its report cited a litany of woes besetting the Iraqi dairy industry: facilities damaged by war, looting or neglect; a lack of good feed; a dearth of veterinarians and the initiative-numbing effect of three decades of centralized planning under Saddam Hussein.

 

"Every link in the value chain was broken, but we found that every link is fixable," said Zaheer Baber, regional director for Asia and the Middle East for Land O'Lakes' international development division.

We might hear more about these development projects if they fit the narrative of a big, greedy corporation.

Dershowitz on "Proportionality"

Alan Dershowitz, not known for his hard-line right wing positions, calls Israel's response to Hamas "perfectly proportionate".

The claim that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality -- by killing more Hamas terrorists than the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets -- is absurd. First, there is no legal equivalence between the deliberate killing of innocent civilians and the deliberate killings of Hamas combatants. Under the laws of war, any number of combatants can be killed to prevent the killing of even one innocent civilian.

Second, proportionality is not measured by the number of civilians actually killed, but rather by the risk posed. This is illustrated by what happened on Tuesday, when a Hamas rocket hit a kindergarten in Beer Sheva, though no students were there at the time. Under international law, Israel is not required to allow Hamas to play Russian roulette with its children's lives.

While Israel installs warning systems and builds shelters, Hamas refuses to do so, precisely because it wants to maximize the number of Palestinian civilians inadvertently killed by Israel's military actions. Hamas knows from experience that even a small number of innocent Palestinian civilians killed inadvertently will result in bitter condemnation of Israel by many in the international community.

Israel understands this as well. It goes to enormous lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties -- even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that are too close to civilians.

Until the world recognizes that Hamas is committing three war crimes -- targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member state of the United Nations -- and that Israel is acting in self-defense and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue.

 

Do we want a proportionate response?

Jonathan Mark at Jewish World Review examines what a "proportionate" response by Israel would look like.

so far, it has only lasted four days and I would like to see a proportionate response that terrifies Hamas for seven years, the years that have filled Sderot and neighboring towns with nightmares, death, amputations and trauma coming from rockets and mortars fired from Gaza.

Perhaps a proportionate response would have Gaza's leaders fearful of being killed every day for the next two years, as Gilad Shalit has been terrified of torture and death every day for the last two years in his solitary Gaza dungeon.

A proportionate response would have Hamas mothers and fathers as fearful for their children's lives as Shalit's mother and father have been fearful for Gilad's life.

A proportionate response would have Gaza's children crying for their mommies and daddies, the way at a Hamas pageant earlier in December a Palestinian actor dressed as Shalit got down on his knees, mock-begging in Hebrew for his Ima and Abba while the Gaza crowds laughed.

Maybe "proportionality" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"Proportionality"

Merv at Prarie Pundit looks at the accusation that Israel has been responding in a "disproportionate" manner.

Let's have a pointless discussion about Gaza and begin it by talking about whether Israel's bombing is “disproportionate”.

To illustrate the meaninglessness of such a debate let us attempt to agree what “proportionate” would look like.

Would it be best if Israel were to manufacture a thousand or so wildly inaccurate missiles and then fire them off in the general direction of Gaza City? There is a chance, though, that since Gaza is more densely packed than Israel, casualties might be much the same as they are now, so although the ordnance would be proportionate, the deaths would not. Of course, if one of Gaza's rockets did manage to hit an Israeli nursery school at the wrong time (or the right time, depending upon how you look at it), then the proportionality issue would be solved in one explosion. Would you be happy then?

Hamas is a product of a dysfunctional Muslim society. That is not Israel's fault. Dealing with dysfunctional people is difficult anytime. When they are profound religious bigots who want only your destruction, then negotiations are not a viable answer to dealing with them. Ultimately Hamas must be destroyed for the Palestinians to have peace.

James Robbins has more on the "excessive force" argument.

...

Regarding Israel’s excessive use of force (which Gen. Sec. Ban Ki-moon, and others, have alleged), one might ask for a definition of "excessive." If the definition is "more than necessary to be effective," then Israel has actually used insufficient force, since Hamas is still launching rockets (though nowhere near the “thousands” they threatened).

...

That is a good argument.

I've read (and heard) any number of accusations leveled against Israel. Lack of proportionality is one. Another accused Israel of engaging in "collective punishment" (in violation of the Geneva Conventions) by their act of shooting back.

To me, it's obvious that the core of the argument is not based on any kind of misbehavior on the part of Israel, but on the mere fact that Israel exists. The stated arguments are window dressing, cited to justify hatred of Israel.

According to these people, Israel can do no right. If Israel had not done whatever triggered the latest criticism, the critics would have found something else to pick on.

It's beginning to look a lot like easter

From Little Green Footballs:

In her Jerusalem Post column, Caroline Glick mentions a piece of news we haven't seen reported elsewhere:

On Tuesday, Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari'a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad.

 

LA Times' Honest Liberal strikes again

From Wizbang:

The only shocking thing about this column is that a liberal was actually willing to say this out loud:

I don't love America. That's what conservatives are always telling liberals like me. Their love, they insist, is truer, deeper and more complete. Then liberals, like all people who are accused of not loving something, stammer, get defensive and try to have sex with America even though America will then accuse us of wanting it for its body and not its soul. When America gets like that, there's no winning.

But I've come to believe conservatives are right. They do love America more. Sure, we liberals claim that our love is deeper because we seek to improve the United States by pointing out its flaws. But calling your wife fat isn't love. True love is the blind belief that your child is the smartest, cutest, most charming person in the world, one you would gladly die for. I'm more in "like" with my country.

....

What really struck me most isn't the admission that liberals don't really love the United States the way we conservatives do -- that we already knew, after all -- but the willingness to say so openly in the Los Angeles Times. (Of course, this is the columnist who wrote that he doesn't support the troops.) Liberals stammer, screech, and sputter with outrage if you ever, ever question their patriotism. But time and time again they give us reasons to, from blaming the United States for 9-11, to not supporting our troops, to sympathizing with our enemies, and idolizing men who exemplify everything that is anti-American, like Castro, Stalin, and liberals favorite hero, Che Guevara.

....

Liberals look at America, and have a hard time feeling the love and patriotism that conservatives feel because they can't get get past the flaws. They can't love America unless she is perfect. Conservatives, however, don't require perfection to know that America is, indeed, a special, blessed place. It doesn't mean that the rest of the world is a terrible, terrible place. It doesn't mean that no one can possibly have a great life anywhere else. However, despite what many Little League coaches and PC teachers may believe, not every runner can finish the race in first, and while the rest of the world may be great, it's just not the USA.

I think that last paragraph nails it.  Liberals are in love with an ideal, which can never be attained in real life. I've seen one sig file which begins, "I pledge allegiance to the Constitution..." suggested as an alternative to the salute of the American flag. The liberals who use this appear to me to be declearing allegiance to an ideal, which no country -- even the one whose Constitution it is -- has ever implemented to their liking.  Or ever will.

Deaths in Iraq

Baron Von Ottomatic at Wizbang looks at the latest report on civilian deaths in Iraq.

The UN/World Health Organization and Iraq have released the results of a new study estimating the number of excess (by violence) deaths in Iraq between March 2003 and June 2006. Folks who oppose the Iraq war, despise Bush/Cheney, and generally look for anything through which they can feel morally superior to people who supports the US mission in Iraq often bandy about the number one million Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion. That number is erroneous and vastly inflated:

 

Limiting the study to the time since the invasion in March 2003, and extrapolating results to the whole country, researchers arrived at the 151,000 estimate. The study authors say they are 95 percent certain that the true number is between 104,000 and 223,000. Iraq's population is roughly 26 million.

....

How would Iraqi mortality have differed if there had been no invasion? It is impossible to predict what Saddam may or may not have done, but it was widely reported that sanctions imposed in 1990 were killing thousands of Iraqis a month:

 

"The sanctions, the toughest in history, are killing up to 6,000 Iraqis a month", according to Denis Halliday, a former UN coordinator of humanitarian aid to Iraq.

Six-thousand deaths a month over thirty-six months equals 216,000 dead Iraqis - a number that would place any three years between 1990 and 1999 at the high end of the 2003-2006 study results. Needless to say, there was significant momentum toward ending the sanctions. The Oil for Food program proved to be a giant slush fund through which Saddam plundered billions and bribed sympathetic voices in the UN.

....

The invasion of Iraq has saved tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.

No vacation in Sderot

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein offered to pay for a trip to Sderot for Glenn Greenwald.  The offer was declined.

Glenn Greenwald, I take it, will not take me up on my offer of a free vacation to Sderot. My offer was specifically in response to his claim that Israel is engaging in a "massively disproportionate response" to the shelling of southern Israel from Gaza.

....

So, now that I don't have to worry about paying for Greenwald's vacation, I can ask, rhetorically (though Greenwald is free to answer): when a terrorist entity controls territory bordering that of a sovereign nation, and indiscriminately lobs rockets into that nation's territory, terrifying the civilian population and making normal life unlivable, what is a proportionate response?

....

Greenwald's real problem, I surmise, is that he thinks that Israel's response is "disproportionate" not because its disproportionate relative to Hamas's military actions and Israel's military objectives compared to the civilian damaged inflicted (more or less the international law definition of proportionality), but because he believes that Israel is primarily to blame for the situation in Gaza, and therefore any suffering inflicted on Gaza's civilians is primarily Israel's fault. Hence his observation about Israel's blockade of Gaza, which is not at all relevant to whether Israel's response to the rocket fire is "proportionate," but rather to whether Israel is morally at fault in general.

....

So, to sum up, let's rephrase Greenwald's position: "I think that Israel is not entitled to cause any casualties, civilian or otherwise, in Gaza, because Israel bears the primary, indeed, almost the entire, responsibility for the conflict it is facing with Hamas. Therefore, Israeli civilians living in the range of Hamas rockets must simply bear with it until their government adopts more enlightened policies that will magically lead Hamas to prefer to live in peace with Israel.

Basically, Israel can do no right, and her enemies can do no wrong.

Yup.  Check.

"Juicebox Mafia"?

I'm not sure where the term comes from, but Noah Pollak at the Contentions blog uses the term to describe the Jews who only know how to condemn Israel.

And condemn, they do -- holding Israel to standards that are insane.

No, what is interesting about the collective opinion of the Juicebox Mafia is the proposed rule of just war: Whoever kills more is the guilty party. This amounts to a total rejection of the distinction between aggression and self-defense and indeed the entire concept of deterrence. Taken to its logical conclusion, moral victory becomes impossible, because the moment one side has dispatched with a greater number of enemy than casualties have been suffered, justice has been forfeited. The only means of ethical conduct is pure immolation — which is indeed the prescription for Israel, expected to behave as the only true Christian nation on earth, responding to attacks by endlessly turning the other cheek.

There is a tendency on the left to brand critics, or even those who fail to toe the leftist party line, as "self-hating" whatever minority group the critic is a member of.  However, here is an example of what I believe deserve to be called "self-hating Jews".

There is something else about the Juicebox Mafia that is grating beyond its simple inanity: The only time its members write about Israel is when they can condemn it. The truth of the matter is that they have nothing invested in Israel other than their American liberalism and their Jewish surnames. Being a Jewish critic of Israel is ever so much more compelling and melodramatic than being just another leftist critic of Israel: Instead of trafficking in banalities, one can claim disillusionment, embarrassment, and betrayal. Pardon me if I call this out for what it is — moral preening and pure cynicism.

The year global warming went away

From the Telegraph:

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Again, if the computer models don't predict the changes we're observing, why are we about to destroy our economy in order to prevent the changes they are predicting?

Same-sex marriage and religion

Michael Medved writes:

Advocates for same sex marriage regularly insist that they would never interfere with free exercise of religion and will do nothing to force unwilling churches to perform gay weddings. This position counts as hypocritical and misleading, and the current controversy over Pastor Rick Warren's role in the Obama inauguration reveals the underlying intolerance in the gay agenda. Leading activists and politically correct commentators want Warren disqualified from giving the invocation because he opposes gay marriage, subjecting him to the sort of angry attack that will ultimately greet any clergyman who declines to sanction same-sex unions. Conservatives have never attempted to marginalize or humiliate pastors who support gay marriage, but the editorial and media attacks on Rick Warren give the lie to leftist claims that they're ready to respect differences of opinion on this issue.

Just because there's no penalty spelled out in the law doesn't mean there won't be a penalty.

What is Israel responding to?

This Twitter page is a list of Qassam rockets fired into Israel from Gaza. What would a "proportionate" response be?

Is a "neighborhood" analogy useful? What would your response be to a punk in your neighborhood who kept firing bullets into your house, even if he hardly ever actually hit anyone?

What if the police won't do anything?

Proportionality

Israel has lost patience with Hamas and is hitting back. Predictably, they're being attacked for failure to be "proportional".

There is a more fundamental problem here: the notion that Israel’s response (or, indeed, the response of any nation in a similar situation) should be “proportionate” to the provocation. And that is a horrific fallacy.

The notion that one should only respond to an attack with roughly the same force used by the aggressor is based on some fatally flawed presumptions.

The first is that the aggressor can be expected to respond in a rational manner. In this case, the presumption is that Hamas is actually interested in a peaceful solution and mutually beneficial situation. That is provably false. One need only look at Hamas’s charter and the group’s words and deeds to see that it is unabashedly dedicated to the absolute destruction of Israel.

The second fallacy is more subtle. The point of a “proportional” response is that it is intended to end the current hostilities and return to the status quo. And in this case, it implies that the status quo prior to the provocations was acceptable.

Hamas speaks of a “truce,” but their definition of a “truce” is one that no one else would recognize as valid. It consisted of a steady, constant bombardment of Israel by rocket and mortar shells. When they declared the truce to be at an end, they escalated the attacks, which in turn prompted Israel’s air strikes. Had Israel restrained itself to a “proportional” attack, then it would have been saying that the prior status quo — the rocket and mortar attacks reduced to one or two a day — was acceptable.

No, by striking as hard as they did Israel is sending a different message. And it’s, in an odd way, more respectful of Hamas than a “proportionate” response would have been. Israel is saying, in effect, “you are the legitimate government of the Gaza Strip, and we are holding you to the same standard as we would the government of any other nation. And when a nation declares war on us and commits acts of war against us, we respond by waging war on them.”

Hamas now finds itself having to argue before the world that it didn’t really mean all the things it said and did, that it doesn’t want to be treated that way, and that Israel needs to be restrained from further attacks.

And, sadly, there are enough nations in the world who will side with them.

Telling the tightwad party to give more

Liberal Nicholas D. Kristof is urging the tightwad party to give more of its own money to charity.

This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Which side is the media on?

It appears not to be on the side of Israel.

Since November, Hamas rockets have slammed into Israel. Israel countered with diplomacy and incursions into Palestinian territory, but still the rockets came. Today, Israel responded with massive airstrikes, raining tons of explosives on Hamas security facilities. This much the Mainly Marginalized Media can report pretty decently. Then the pro-Palestinian fun begins: Here’s the decidedly anti-Israel NYT, in paragraph three of its story.
....
A more straightforward report would have said that despite the air strikes, Hamas stubbornly continued firing rockets into Israel. In paragraph 15, AP gets around to telling us over 200 mortars and rockets have struck Israel from Hamas territory in the last week - part of 3,000 such attacks in the last year … “according to the military’s count.”

After dutifully reporting the outrage from Lebanon, Jordan and other locales noted for their openness and tolerance, the stories wrap up. Another military vicory for the Israelis; another media victory for Hamas.

Second Amendment interpretation

A Framing Era View of the Bill of Rights.

One comment from Dave Kopel at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Justice Stevens' dissent in Heller cited a 2006 article by historian Saul Cornell. That article stated that Tucker's 1791-92 lecture notes described the Second Amendment as relating only to the militia.

David Hardy's article reviews Tucker's lecture notes, as they involve various freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Hardy finds that Tucker's view of the Constitution was far more libertarian (regarding issues such as free speech and press, or warrantless searches) than either modern Supreme Court doctrine, or the views sometimes ascribed to the Founders.

As for the Second Amendment, Hardy finds that Cornell's article, and therefore Justice Stevens' opinion, contains a major factual error: the militia language which Cornell quoted was not from Tucker's description of the Second Amendment. The language was from Tucker's explanation of Article I's grant of militia powers to Congress. Tucker's description of the Second Amendment comes 20 pages later in the 1791-92 lecture notes, and is nearly a verbatim match with the text Tucker's 1803 book, unambiguously describing the Second Amendment as encompassing a personal right for a variety of purposes, not just for militia service.

Puppycide

Radley Balko at Reason Magazine looks at what appears to be a growing trend:

They're cases where the police walked or drove onto private property (usually at the wrong address), were confronted by the dog that lived on that property, interepreted—correctly or not—the dog's barks or gestures to be threatening, then shot the animal. Last August, video surfaced of a case in Oklahoma where an officer pulled into a woman named Tammy Christopher's driveway to ask directions. When Christopher's Wheaton Terrier ran out of the house to great the officer (the dog appears to be bounding in the video)—still on Christopher's property—the officer shoots the dog dead. Christopher released the video to a local news station when the police department wouldn't listen to her complaint.

What's troubling is how often in these stories the police officer's first reaction is to fire his weapon at the animal. I suppose that reaction might be understandable if the dog is, say, a pit bull, given that type of dog's (not entirely deserved) reputation. But black labs? Dalmatians? Springer spaniels? A Jack Russell? Something's clearly amiss when a police officer can stroll onto the private property of someone who's doing nothing illegal, be confronted by a dog who's merely doing what dogs do—defending his territory—shoot the dog dead, and get nothing but full support from his superiors. Moreover, many of these shootings have happened in neighborhoods, inside of homes, and in a few cases, directly in front of children. You'd think there would be some public safety concerns, too.

Police departments should be training officers how to deal with dogs in ways other than filling them full of bullets. Cops should be taught, for example, how to tell a charging dog from a bounding one; an angry dog from a barking but playful one; and that a curious or territorial bark is much less threatening than a snarl. Mailmen, firemen, paramedics, and the rest of us non-badge-wearing citizens manage to visit private homes and deal with the dogs that may reside in them without resorting gunfire. It's odd that not insignificant number of police officers can't.

There are plenty of ways of safely dealing with even a large, aggressive dog that fall far short of shooting it. I don't know what percentage of police departments offer this sort of training, but it seems clear that quite a few of them don't.

Bush's victory in Iraq

Nile Gardiner writes at the London Telegraph:

Some of the criticism of Bush's foreign policy is fair. The early stages of the occupation of Iraq were poorly handled and there was a distinct lack of post-war planning. America's public diplomacy efforts have been poor or even non-existent, with little serious attempt to combat the stunning rise of anti-Americanism. More recently, Washington's failure to stand up more aggressively to Moscow after its invasion of Georgia projected weakness and indecision.

Much of the condemnation of his policies though is driven by a venomous hatred of Bush's personality and leadership style, rather than an objective assessment of his achievements. Ten or twenty years from now, historians will view Bush's actions on the world stage in a more favourable light. America's 43rd president did after all directly liberate more people (over 60 million) from tyranny than any leader since Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Widely seen as his biggest foreign policy error, the decision to invade Iraq could ultimately prove to have been a masterstroke. Today the world is witnessing the birth of the first truly democratic state in the Middle East outside of Israel. Over eight million voted in Iraq's parliamentary elections in 2005, and the region's first free Muslim society may become a reality. Iraq might not be Turkey, but it is a powerful demonstration that freedom can flourish in the embers of the most brutal and barbaric of dictatorships.

The success of the surge in Iraq will go down in history as a turning point in the war against al-Qaeda. The stunning defeat of the insurgency was a major blow both militarily and psychologically for the terror network. The West's most feared enemy suffered thousands of losses in Iraq, including many of their most senior commanders, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Qaswarah. It was the most successful counter-insurgency operation anywhere in the world since the British victory in Malaya in 1960.

Tipler on Global Warming

From Urgent Agenda. Bottom line, it's a scam.

As regards global warming, my view is essentially the same as yours: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a scam, with no basis in science.

A few comments on my own particular view of global warming:

(1) I am particularly annoyed by the claims that the "the debate is over," because this was exactly the claim originally made against the Copernican theory of the Solar System. Copernicus' opponents said the idea that the Earth was the third planet from the Sun was advanced by Aristrachus in 300 B.C. (true), and had been definitely refuted by 100 A.D. The debate is over! Sorry, it wasn't: the Earth IS the third planet.

(2) It is obvious that anthropogenic global warming is not science at all, because a scientific theory makes non-obvious predictions which are then compared with observations that the average person can check for himself. As we both know from our own observations, AGW theory has spectacularly failed to do this. The theory has predicted steadily increasing global temperatures, and this has been refuted by experience. NOW the global warmers claim that the Earth will enter a cooling period. In other words, whether the ice caps melt, or expand --- whatever happens --- the AGW theorists claim it confirms their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology.

(3) In contrast, the alternative theory, that the increase and decrease of the Earth's average temperature in the near term follows the sunspot number, agrees (roughly) with observation. And the observations were predicted before they occurred. This is good science.

(4) I emphasized in point (2) that the average person has to be able to check the observations. I emphasize this because I no longer trust "scientists" to report observations correctly. I think the data is adjusted to confirm, as far as possible, AGW. We've seen many recent cases where the data was cooked in climate studies. In one case, Hanson and company claimed that October 2008 was the warmest October on record. Watts looked at the data, and discovered that Hanson and company had used September's temperatures for Russia rather than October's. I'm not surprised to learn that September is hotter than October in the Northern hemisphere.

It snowed here in New Orleans last week and it was the second heaviest snowfall I've seen in the 25 years I've lived in New Orleans. According to the local newspaper, it was the earliest snow had fallen in New Orleans since records were kept, beginning in 1850. I myself have looked at the relative predictive power of Copernicus's theory and the then rival Ptolemaic theory. Copernicus was on the average twice as accurate, and the average person of the time could tell. Similarly, anybody today can check the number of sunspots. Or rather the lack of them. When I first starting teaching astronomy at Tulane in the early 1980's, I would show sunspots to my students by pointing a small $25 reflecting telescope at the Sun, and focusing the Sun's image on the wall of the classroom. Sunspots were obviously in the image on the wall. I can't do this experiment today, because there are no sunspots.

(5) Another shocking thing about the AGW theory is that it is generating a loss of true scientific knowledge. The great astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus, observed in the early 1800's that warm weather was correlated with sunspot number. Herschel noticed that warmer weather meant better crops, and thus fewer sunspots meant higher grain prices. The AGW people are trying to do a disappearing act on these observations. Some are trying to deny the existence of the Maunder Minimum.

(6) AGW supporters are also bringing back the Inquisition, where the power of the state is used to silence one's scientific opponents. The case of Bjorn Lomborg is illustrative. Lomborg is a tenured professor of mathematics in Denmark. Shortly after his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," was published by Cambridge University Press, Lomborg was charged and convicted (later reversed) of scientific fraud for being critical of the "consensus" view on AGW and other environmental questions. Had the conviction been upheld, Lomborg would have been fired. Stillman Drake, the world's leading Galileo scholar, demonstrates in his book "Galileo: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford University Press, 2001) that it was not theologians, but rather his fellow physicists (then called "natural philosophers"), who manipulated the Inquisition into trying and convicting Galileo. The "out-of-the-mainsteam" Galileo had the gall to prove the consensus view, the Aristotlean theory, wrong by devising simple experiments that anyone could do. Galileo's fellow scientists first tried to refute him by argument from authority. They failed. Then these "scientists" tried calling Galileo names, but this made no impression on the average person, who could see with his own eyes that Galileo was right. Finally, Galileo's fellow "scientists" called in the Inquisition to silence him.

I find it very disturbing that part of the Danish Inquisition's case against Lomborg was written by John Holdren, Obama's new science advisor. Holdren has recently written that people like Lomborg are "dangerous." I think it is people like Holdren who are dangerous, because they are willing to use state power to silence their scientific opponents.

(7) I agree with Dick Lindzen that the AGW nonsense is generated by government funding of science. If a guy agrees with AGW, then he can get a government contract. If he is a skeptic, then no contract. There is a professor at Tulane, with a Ph.D in paleoclimatology, who is as skeptical as I am about AGW, but he'd never be considered for tenure at Tulane because of his professional opinion. No government contracts, no tenure.

(8) This is why I am astounded that people who should know better, like Newt Gingrich, advocate increased government funding for scientific research. We had better science, and a more rapid advance of science, in the early part of the 20th century when there was no centralized government funding for science. Einstein discovered relativity on his own time, while he was employed as a patent clerk. Where are the Einsteins of today? They would never be able to get a university job --- Einstein's idea that time duration depended on the observer was very much opposed to the "consensus" view of the time. Einstein's idea that light was composed of particles (now called "photons") was also considered crazy by all physicists when he first published the idea. At least then he could publish the idea. Now a refereed journal would never even consider a paper written by a patent clerk, and all 1905 physics referees would agree that relativity and quantum mechanics were nonsense, definitely against the overwhelming consensus view. So journals would reject Einstein's papers if he were to write them today.

Science is an economic good like everything else, and it is very bad for production of high quality goods for the government to control the means of production. Why can't Newt Gingrich understand this? Milton Friedman understood it, and advocated cutting off government funding for science.

Some comments...

Point number 2 is important. How well do the computer models predict what's actually happening? The answer is, not very well.

How well do climate models retro-dict? That is, if you plug in the known values for the earth's climate some time in the past and run it forward, how well do these models predict the changes that are known to have happened?

Again, not very well.

(Anyone who disagrees is welcome to cite the paper in which these comparisons were done.)

And let it be noted, this is not an argument along the lines of "they can't predict the weather next week, how can they know what's going to happen decades from now?" I don't buy that argument because these are measurements of two very different things. Weather is an instantaneous state, and climate is an average. It's quite possible to predict an average value for a very changeable system. Los Vegas makes a nice living on this fact.

What this argument is, is a demand that we see hard evidence that the predictions coming out of the climate models actually correspond with reality before we start basing massive policy changes on their output.

The death of right and wrong

The title is from a book by Tammy Bruce. Peter Hitchens writes about what's going on in schools:

If you want to know how bad the future will be, take a look at our schools, and shudder. We know that they are nurseries of ignorance, which is why we have to import disciplined, hard-working, competent young Poles to do so much of the work in this country.

We should also be concerned that they are places of fear and violence, where authority is nothing but a joke.

The police have admitted (under Freedom of Information laws) that they were called to violent incidents at least 7,000 times in English schools last year. Since FoI disclosures are about the only Government statistics we can trust, I think we should take this seriously, though – since not all police forces replied – the figure is probably much higher.

There is no reason to think that things are much better in Scotland or Wales.

The Sixties revolution, which destroyed the authority of parents and teachers alike, will soon reach its long-cherished goal.

Everything stuffy, traditional, repressive, old-fashioned and boring has been swept away in the world of the young. They are all free now.

The trouble is that they do not know how to be free, because they have also been taught that morals are ‘judgmental’, religion is ‘outdated’ and that adults are just obsolete ex-teenagers groping their way to the grave, a nuisance to be ignored or violently shoved aside.

They have discovered that the law is not just feeble (though it is) but that it frequently punishes those who try to uphold what used to be the rules of civilisation. And that, while we now have armed policemen licensed to kill virtually at will, our authorities recoil in horror at the very idea of an adult smacking a child.
....
Now, listen carefully, to see if you can hear any Sixties liberals admitting that they were wrong to dismantle adult authority. And listen even more carefully to see if you can discover a ‘Conservative’ politician with the courage to say that this must be put right, that marriage is miles better than non-marriage, that a man without a conscience is wilder than any beast, that fathers should be respected, that parents must be allowed to smack, that teachers should be able to cane.

All you will hear is silence, mingled with the sound of boots kicking a human head as if it were a football, the head of another poor fool who tried to stand up for what was right, and thought he could appeal to the better natures of people who have been brought up feral, and have no better natures.

Civilization is one generation deep.

Myths and facts about the Bush years

This piece at Real Clear Politics looks at five myths about the Bush years, and addresses each one. The five "most egregious" myths are:

1. Myth 1: The last eight years were awful for most Americans economically and President Bush's deregulatory policies caused the current financial crisis.
2. Myth 2: President Bush's tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy and were paid for by sacrificing investments in health care and education.
3. Myth 3: The President's "go it alone" foreign policy ruined America's standing in the world.
4. Myth 4: The war in Iraq caused us to "take our eye off the ball" in Afghanistan and with al Qaeda.
5. Myth 5: This Administration has been bad for the environment and ignored the problem of global warming.

The other shoe drops

Attacks in Iraq are down. Down to 5% of their levels last year.

The Iraq murder rate is substantially lower than that in many US cities including Chicago. It is also a demonstration of how ill informed the emotionally immature shoe thrower was. I doubt you will see this kind of stat in stories about his misinformed infantile tantrum. You are also unlikely to see it in the left's commentary embracing his actions.

Is BDS self-limiting?

Many diseases are "self-limiting". That is, they will go away after a period of time, no matter what treatment the patient receives. There are many who think Bush Derangement Syndrome will go away after Obama's coronation inauguration day. Wesley Pruden writes:

With only 26 days left to harangue, mock and bash President Bush, some of our colleagues in the media aren't wasting a day. Bashing ex-presidents, except for the ex-presidents with shrill prominent wives, isn't nearly as much fun as bashing while he's still the real thing.
....
The rush to get in a last few licks at a sitting Republican president is a game a lot of bashers play. Some of the bloggers were bitterly disappointed - complaining is the main point of blogging - that George W. didn't call off the election, as pointy-headed bashers freely predicted through the summer months that he would, or call out the National Guard to prevent the inauguration. There's still time for that, but not only has George W. so far failed to declare himself president-for-life, he's going out of his way to make things easy for the president-elect. He even bailed out Detroit, giving Barack Obama the opportunity to decry later his delaying the inevitable, when Detroit finally craters, or he can bail out the bailout later, as he hears opportunity knocking.
But bashing George W. is the only news that's fit to print in certain places: "There are plenty of culprits [to blame for bad economic news]," reported the New York Times, "like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk. But the story of how we got here," (and here comes the curve ball), "is partly one of Mr. Bush's own making ... "
But we never get to the other "partly" bits, the parts about how "Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk," and how Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat of New York, and Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts, did more than any other 10 men to insulate Fannie Mae from nosy regulators and effective federal supervision. Fannie and her senior executives - one of whom was (and maybe still is) Barney's special friend - grew rich on taxpayer largesse while blowing on the kindling of the fire that melted the subprime housing market.
The worthies at the New York Times are worried, like George W. himself, about his legacy. They all should know better; legacies are not plucked from the pantry shelf, but develop over the years without help or hindrance from either critic or legacee. George W.'s critics are spooked by what happened to Harry S. Truman, who straggled back to Missouri with the contempt of nearly everyone ringing in his ears ("to err is Truman") and within two decades became one of our most popular ex-presidents. Now is the time to blame the president for everything bad, and give him credit for nothing good. It's mere coincidence that America has been safe from Islamist terror every day since 9/11.

Merv at Gateway Pundit doesn't think bashing will end this January, or even this year. I suspect he will be blamed for everything that goes wrong until the end of Obama's stay in office. Then, if a Republican gets elected, he'll be the next scapegoat.

Wireheads on the way?

From The Australian:

FORGET Viagra: scientists are working on an electronic "sex chip" that will be able to stimulate pleasure centres in the brain, The Australian reports.

Essentially, there'll be a chip implanted in the area of the brain that registers pleasure. It's intended to treat people suffering from anhedonia, an inability to feel pleasure.

"There is evidence that this chip will work," Dr Aziz said.

 "A few years ago, a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn't like the sudden change, so the wiring in her head was removed."

 

The wiring remains a hurdle: Dr Aziz says current technology, which requires surgery to connect a wire from a heart pacemaker into the brain, causes bleeding in some patients and is "intrusive and crude".

 

By 2015, he predicts, micro-computers in the brain with a range of applications could be self-powered and controlled by hand-held transmitters.

Larry Niven has written a number of stories featuring "wireheads" -- people addicted to devices that stimulate the pleasure centers of their brains.  He depicts it as the newest addictive drug.  He and Spider Robinson have both written stories in which people have been killed using such devices -- in order to get to a food supply, they'd have to unplug from the current, and they're not willing to end that pleasure, so they starve to death.  ("Death by Ecstasy" by Larry Niven, and I think the Spider Robinson story is "Melancholy Elephants".)

UPDATE: As soon as I posted this, I remembered the plot of "Melancholy Elephants" and decided the Spider Robinson story was probably "God is an Iron".