Who?

What we need is a conference in Washington to discuss whether Iran exists.

At long last!

Someone in the media is looking at the Sunni-Shia divide in Islam seriously. Ralph Peters, specifically.

He's calling on us to pick sides, preferably for the Arab Shias in Iraq. He sounds like he's been reading the same people I have. We should be doing all we can to support Grand Ayatollah Sistani, without actually endorsing him, which would render him less effective.

President Obama

George Will and John Podhoretz have now both done columns assuring us that Obama is a flash in the pan. I wish I could believe that. Everything I've heard about him tells me that he's pretty much an unknown quantity, with very little experience in Washington, foreign policy or any executive office, but none of those will disqualify him for the likes of Jon Stewart. Those crowds coming to his speeches have already concluded that he's the Second Coming of JFK, even though JFK was never really JFK.

The Wall Street Journal reports that its latest poll shows that 49% of the public wants Congress to assume control of foreign policy. They're impatient with the slow progress in Iraq. It they think it's going slow now, wait until Congress starts trying to manage it. Imagine an entire legislature of John McCain's posing as conflicted and anxious to do right even as they espouse opposing policies, and after a lot of timewasting posturing, compromise on something that has the worst aspects of all proposed solutions.

Sigh. America has become too stupid to defend itself.

Read this book!

Are Republicans to dumb to be conservative? Everything today has been so spun, twisted, flipped and distorted that it's getting hard to cut through all the sophistry and get at the simple truth and common sense of issues. This is what makes Mark Steyn's new book so welcome and useful. He proceeds from agreed upon facts and simple logic and closes off the detours and the logical meandering and goosenecks employed by the multiculturalists, Malthusians and PC believers to keep us in doubt about our nation and its ideals and our way of life. He's very witty and often overdoes the sarcasm, but he is so perceptive that most of the time he just has to simplify the po-mo narratives of the press and politicians into the basic facts for the reader to see the truth for himself.

And the facts speak for themselves. The Western World has telescoped the decline and fall of the Romans into less than a century. We are depopulating our societies and bringing in immigrants to take up the slack. Societies like those of the E.U. and Canada who can't draw on Mexican Catholics eager to find honest work have instead turned to other sources who are mainly Muslims, and are only now realizing that these immigrants are becoming radicalized and refusing to stay quiet like good minorities should. While the original ethnic groups have birth rates that halve their populations with each generation, the immigrants are growing at much higher rates and will in the foreseeable future become the majority in their host countries. The welfare state is a big Ponzi scheme that can only work as long as there are plenty of new taxpayers coming along to work and fund the system. But the early investors have all got theirs and now the latecomers are realizing that they've been conned.

It could change, but it's not likely without a sudden change of will and some bloody and painful confrontation. It might be that he's wrong, but only if the official statistics he quotes are fraudulent.

"None of us is as dumb as all of us."

David Frum reviews the ISG report and finds it to be the typical drivel produced by "bipartisan" commissions.

How bad is it?

When it takes more to have a military career than it does to be in Congress, Congressmen in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones.

How not to win the GWOT

Ralph Peters:

Those on the left demanding that we "bring the troops home" from Iraq would be delighted to send American troops to rescue Khartoum's victims. But our military is occupied with other cases of fanaticism and genocide in the Muslim world this holiday season.

Isn't it curious that, when it comes to liberation, Iraq didn't count? For the endlessly hypocritical left, there's one magic difference between the half-million dead of Darfur and the 1.5 million people killed by Saddam in his internal massacres and neighborhood wars: Bush.

We should be putting a stop to this, if only to send the message that we're serious about confronting jihad. Even if we just leveled every government building in Khartoum, the message might get through.

Good news!

We WILL have Dennis Kucinich to kick around for the next two years. We can use the comic relief.

A crack in the wall

I keep reading about how things in Iran are changing beneath the surface. This suggests that Iranians are not the ignorant mob we see at staged rallies praising Mahmoud "the Rock Star" Ahmadinejad.

This was in TIME?

Why we shouldn't be tying anything to the resolution of the Palestine issue.

Uncivil Servant

Kofi Annan, having enriched himself and ignored calls for reform ends his reign by mooning the U.S. and the Bush administration. This is not what I was promised by My Weekly Reader.

This guy has played the Western World for all it's worth, coddled human rights violators, overseen a record scam and violations of his own organization's embargo. He should be slinking out of New York. The U.N. should relocate to Geneva or anyplace else who wants it, but we should show it the door. Our thirst for peace has made us blind to the insolence of office and the abuse of our good nature. This has gone beyond just being a money drain. Half of our population seems to have more allegiance to the U.N. than to our own nation. But the U.N. has not lived up to it's purpose or the expectations of the post-war world. NATO, the U.S, and Great Britain have fought the Cold War and kept the peace. The U.N. has been a playpen for the unserious and the weak-willed, except where some vicious dictatorship or totalitarian state has used it to hamper our efforts. Its "peacekeepers" are a laughingstock, when they're not committing crimes. It has provided cover to more genocide that anybody since Mao Zedong, in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo and now in Darfur.

Oceanic Nightmare

Watching Secrets of the Deep a new, part live and part CG, documentary on the Discovery Channel, I was startled by the news of a new, bigger type of squid that lives in Antarctic waters. The program is about the life of Sperm Whales, and it makes a number of doubtful claims about melting ice caps. Near the end, it features an encounter with a "Colossal Squid," mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, which is even larger that the Giant Squid. It has swiveling hooks its tentacles up to 2 inches long. Larger than the male, the female grows to almost 50 feet long.

These things have fascinated me since I first saw Disney's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with it's bogus rubber squid. The real things are a lot scarier.