:: Netmarcos' Notes ::

:: Thursday, May 29, 2003 ::

This is brilliant. Eject! Eject! Eject!

We find ourselves living in a time when people grow increasingly unwilling or unable to determine fact from assertion. In a society ruled by the people, this is a fatal condition. Where magical claims go unchallenged, where feeling good about something is the measure of its truth, public policy plummets into the same disconnect from reality that has doomed entire civilizations.

Go read it all...twice.

:: Mark 6:24 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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You just have to read this!Red-Flagged Frogs
The punishment begins.

You have to hand it to Big Dog. He knows how to hit 'em where it hurts. As WFB pointed out in a recent column, the French are most vulnerable in their pride. Gallic pride — based on a past growing distant, grasping for any present reality — is a rather delicate illusion. In the past few weeks, Mr. Rumsfeld made two decisions that both galled the Gauls. The important one is about Red Flag and Cope Thunder

:: Mark 3:39 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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Adam Michnik, once again, demonstrates why he stands apart from much of the rest of the world. In the excerpt that follows, you will find the key in bold face type in the last paragraph.

A German journalist published an article in the paper Die Tageszeitung in which he claimed that Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and George Konrad, Europe’s long-standing moral authorities, had suddenly become undiscriminating admirers of America.

I read that article with a twinge of nostalgia. Here we are, together again. Our three names were grouped to-gether for the first time by Timothy Garton Ash in his widely acclaimed essay nearly two decades ago. If I recall correctly, Havel and I were doing jail time then, and Konrad’s books were banned from print in Hungary. Even though we did not meet very often, we maintained a common ground in our reflections on the worlds of values and of politics. We were united by a dream of freedom, a dream of a world infused with tolerance, hope, respect for human dignity, and a refusal of conformist silence in the face of evil.

We were also united by the specific wisdom of people familiar with “history unleashed,” the experience of the acute loneliness of people subject to the pressures of totalitarian despotism and doomed to the world’s indifference. Every Hungarian citizen had retained the image of Budapest burning in November 1956, every citizen of Czechoslovakia was haunted by the sight of Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague in 1968, every Pole was to keep in the back of his mind the memory of Warsaw in the fall of 1944, murdered by Hitler and deserted by its allies.

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I do not know whether Havel and Konrad agree, but I will present my own perspective.

I aim to avoid double standards in thinking about the world. I thus aim to use the same criteria in assessing the arrogance of all great powers, not just the Bush administration.


He still knows how to think. It is refreshing to find that the entire world has not decended into intellectual bankruptcy. Go read it all.

:: Mark 5:56 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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You should take note of this guide/advice from Bert P. Krages.
Legal Handbook for Photographers

The Photographer's Right is a downloadable guide that is loosely based on the ACLU's Bust Card and the Know Your Rights flyer. It may be downloaded and printed out using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may make copies and carry them your wallet, pocket or camera bag to give you quick access to your rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography. You may distribute the guide to others provided that such distribution is not done for commercial gain and credit is given to the author.

Folow the link and download the guide. It is good stuff.

:: Mark 5:41 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 ::

Andrew Sullivan evicerates Sidney Blumenthal's version of Bill Clinton in a well written critique of Sidneys book on the Clinton presidency. The following is just a teaser.

The consummation of his love affair with Mr. Clinton came in New Hampshire, where the anointed one somehow managed to survive the first of so many sex scandals and came in second. In The New Republic, I remember reading the first draft of Sid's account--at one point, Sid described Mr. Clinton as morphing into a pale blue flame of incandescent fire--and wondering whether Sid hadn't finally lost it. But he hadn't. He'd seen finally a Democrat with the ruthlessness to win: "He was transcending the kind of media attack that had brought down Hart and the calculated, negative campaign that had paralyzed Dukakis. His performance, upon which the entire fate of the campaign depended, was the most electrifying political moment I had witnessed since I was a boy in the Chicago stadium."

Think about that last statement. Between 1960 and 1992, Sid had witnessed the entire trauma of the 1960¹s, the Kennedy assassinations, the King murder, the Vietnam war, the L.B.J. withdrawal, the McCarthy candidacy, Nixon's impeachment and resignation, the Carter calamity, the Reagan revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and on and on. But his biggest thrill in three decades came when a minor, sleazy Southern politician came in second in New Hampshire. Why? Because for the first time, Sid smelled power--and the kind of amoral tenacity he respected.

Once you realize this, everything else in the book is completely, utterly predictable.

:: Mark 11:28 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Dr. Khaled M. Batarfi, in an ArabNews article titled Drying Up The Wells of Terrorism, points out with astonishing clarity the actions necessary to defeat terrorism.

If a swamp contains the mosquitoes known to be spreading malaria and it has begun to spread it all over world, it is the right of each person harmed by the insect to demand that its life source be dried up. Terrorists are like mosquitoes and the sources of their nourishment are numerous and need to be dried up.

Go read it all.

:: Mark 9:24 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Just a reminder that the war is far from over.

Nonetheless, the terrorists who murdered 19 U.S. airmen and wounded hundreds more have yet to be brought to American justice. Whenever U.S. diplomats hold talks with representatives of Iran's Islamic government, Khobar Towers should be the top item on their agenda. The arrest and turnover to U.S. authorities of Ahmad Ibrahim Al-Mughassil and Ali Saed bin Ali Al-Houri, two of the indicted Hezbollah leaders of the Khobar attack believed to be in Iran, should be part of any "normalization" discussion. Furthermore, access and accountability by IRGC, MOIS and other senior Iranian government leaders for their complicity in the attack should be nonnegotiable.

:: Mark 9:10 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Julia Gorin has an excellent article on the Democratic Party's Diversity Dilemna in the OpinionJournal that does a great job of highlighting the sources of much of the confusion over at the DNC of late. It is an entertaining, while disturbing read, but do read it.

Democratic incoherence extends beyond policies involving protected victim groups. Consider the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which passed with little Republican support. Within days after President Bush signed it into law last year, 24 Democratic lawmakers held a closed-door luncheon to discuss strategies for evading it. The meeting culminated in the formerly supportive Sen. Hillary Clinton exploding at Sen. Russ Feingold. No doubt they all breathed a sigh of relief this month when a federal court struck down most of the law as unconstitutional.
Between the narrowly averted transit worker strike last Christmas, which would have left workers stranded in a union-happy New York striving to be a worker's paradise, and the mirror held up to the left internationally when the European Union found itself unable to meet Kyoto environmental targets while pressuring the U.S. to adhere to stricter ones, the day draws nearer when all will come running to the Republicans to undo the damage and fix the fixes.

:: Mark 8:57 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Thursday, May 15, 2003 ::

Have you been looking for a place to spend the endless hours of free time that you have each day? Well, you could try this.

My best score so far was 465 mph, but I have a slow mouse.

:: Mark 1:18 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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Jim Lacey in the National Review Online has an interesting theory concerning the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction over in Iraq. Is it possible that there never were as many weapons as the Iraqis themselves reported due to budgetary sleight of hand within Saddam's own regime? Of course there are many other possible explanations for the lack of proof other than that of there non-existence which are mentioned in the introductory paragraph.

It is likely that if Saddam no longer had a WMD program he did not know it. Why else would he endure over a decade of crippling sanctions? If Saddam had ended his quest for WMDs, it would have been in his best interest to open the doors wide and let the world see. By playing as the model citizen he would have regained control of his oil wealth and quickly been able to make Iraq a regional superpower again.

Instead, his henchmen did everything possible to obfuscate the true WMD picture and to thwart any inspection teams. If they had nothing to hide, they sure worked hard at trying to hide it. What if they were not just hiding a possible WMD program from inspectors, but also hiding from Saddam the fact that no such program existed?
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What was in it for Saddam's minions, including his sons, if they were to scrape up the billions of dollars needed to start and maintain a WMD program? All such a program did, from their perspective, is drain off funds they needed for other projects, and draw the unwanted attention of bombers and cruise missiles. In their corrupt minds, a new "love palace" would always be a priority over a WMD site that was likely to be turned into dust as soon as it was discovered. If they shortchanged Saddam on a palace or his Babylon reconstruction there was a strong chance he might notice. However, it would be easy enough to hide that he did not have a WMD program.

When you pause to consider the plausibility of such a scenario, you may find it hard not to admit that it all fits in nicely with what we all know of human nature.. Go read it all.

:: Mark 1:14 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Monday, May 12, 2003 ::

Former DCI James Woolsey defines his own version of the Axis of Evil in claiming that the U.S.is fighting World War IV against it.

This war did not begin Sept. 11, he says. That was merely the date on which the United States discovered, much to its shock, that these three powerful and dangerous elements had been at war with the United States for some time.
All three members of this axis had attacked the United States repeatedly in different ways since at least 1979. The attacks became increasingly more dramatic because the enemy concluded, based on deductive reasoning, that the U.S. was a paper tiger – unwilling to fight, or, at least, fight to win. They concluded the U.S. just didn't have the stomach for it, the former CIA director says.
"In 1979, they took out hostages and we tied yellow ribbons around trees and launched an ineffective effort, crashing helicopters in the desert, to rescue them," explains Woolsey. "In 1983, they blew up our embassy and our Marine barracks in Beirut. What did we do? We left. Throughout much of the 1980s, various terrorist acts were committed against us. We would occasionally arrest a few small fry. There was one honorable exception - President Reagan's strike against Tripoli. But, generally speaking, we prosecuted individuals when we could - essentially we litigated – in response to the terrorist acts of the '80s."

I will have more to say about this later. In the mean-time, go read it.

:: Mark 12:14 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Friday, May 09, 2003 ::

Over at the Opinion Journal, Lisa Schiffren has a new crush.

This is an excellent bit of commentary that dances the thin line between parody and sarcasm with a rare grace , all while making some revealing comparisons between the current presidents's style, and that of his immediate predecessor.

Liberals make such a fetish of intellect. But who cares how smart you are if you can't make a decision and follow through? Mr. Clinton could not seem to do that with foreign policy, or with Miss Lewinsky. Still, I concede that having a Republican president with sex appeal is kind of a new idea. We haven't actually seen one in living memory.

Go read it all.

:: Mark 11:13 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 ::

The palestinian Twighlight Zone episode continues.

WorldNetDaily: Palestinian diplomat: Israel looted Baghdad museum

As the Bush administration begins its push for the formation of a Palestinian state, a Palestinian diplomat, speaking on a popular Islamic website, claims Israel is responsible for the looting of museums and banks in Baghdad, calls for jihad against "the occupiers" of Iraq and Palestine, denies Israel's right to exist and compares President George W. Bush to Hitler.

:: Mark 11:16 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Jim Lacey comments on Civilian Casualties in Iraq over at National Review Online. His article is worth whatever time and effort it may take to read it. What I have suspected about reports of massive civial casualties as a result of American action is borne out in this piece. And, to my deep regret, it confirms the stories told by many of the actions of the Iraqi forces as well.

Besides what I saw at the hospital, I do know of at least one three-year-old girl killed during the fighting. She had been living with her family in a block of homes that received heavy Iraqi mortar fire the night before American troops moved into the area. Iraqi paramilitary forces reportedly would telephone to houses along the routes from which they were expecting the Americans to approach. If anyone answered the phone, they fired the mortars. The adults in the house knew not to answer the phone; the little girl did not

Read it all.

:: Mark 11:12 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 ::

Dr. Laura speaks out and claime that Susan Sarandon's a free-speech fraud!

Marianne M. Jennings, wrote (April 14, 2003) in the Deseret News, "Natalie Maines, one-third of the Dixie Chicks, said she was 'ashamed' of our president. Their CD sales fell nearly 60 percent in one week, airplay stopped and tractors gathered to smash the CDs outside radio stations. The left cried, 'Censorship!' This newfound First Amendment zeal could help Dr. Laura ... and a cadre of conservatives who have been banished by these same leftists."

She may be a bit smug in her rebuttal, but she has earned the right to be.

:: Mark 11:38 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Monday, May 05, 2003 ::

Instapundit alerted me to this Tim Judah article from The New York Review of Books. It is a fascinating account of the The Fall of Baghdad

The evening after Saddam's statue fell, I had tea with a group of middle-class men who were playing dominoes at a small outdoor tea shop. Ahmed, a retired air force pilot, told me that in his opinion one of Saddam's fatal mistakes had been to rely on various militias, such as the Fedayeen of Saddam, the Jerusalem Army, and the militia of the Baath Party. The problem with them, he said, was that they were not real professionally trained soldiers; it was not therefore surprising that most of the resistance had collapsed. "A civilian is not able to fight like a military man," he said.

In fact, I had met Ahmed ten days before at another tea shop and we had had a guarded conversation then about the numbers of bombs dropped on the nearby Air Force Ministry. Now some of Ahmed's friends were surrounding us and giving their opinions on what was going on, about the future, and about what they thought of various exiled politicians, including Baqir al-Hakim, who is in Tehran, and Ahmed Chalabi, who has US backing, and was about to arrive with a number of his fellow exiles in Nasiriya. There were, unsurprisingly, many conflicting opinions. Hakim was a good man, some thought; Chalabi was, or was not, a crook, others thought; the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was a traitor for making a deal with the Americans, and so on. Ahmed said he hoped the Americans would set up a transitional government without these men, and with technocrats instead. "For example the minister of health should have experience in his field." It struck me that it was a stunning event that this discussion, which already seemed quite normal, was now taking place in Baghdad. "When was the last time we could have talked openly like this?" I asked Ahmed. He took a while to reply. "When I was student in 1967," he said.

I then asked Ahmed, "Do you feel as if your country has been occupied?" His reply was, "Definitely." I said, "But you just told me you could not have talked openly like this since 1967, so don't you feel that this is also a liberation?" He replied, "Well, yes." "So perhaps there is an odd contradiction. Occupation and liberation both at the same time?" He and his friends argued about this. "Yes," he said, "that is true." "What next?" I asked, and he pointed across the street to where a house had been leveled, not by bombs but because someone had cleared away an old house. "That is where we are now. We need a shovel to build something new."

Glenn Reynold's also has links to a few more stories of looting and mayhem in such out of the way places as Canada and the U.N offices in New York. Simply shocking!

:: Mark 10:00 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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The Volokh Conspiracy asks, "Will record companies risk jail time to stop illegal downloading?"

some of the things the record companies are thinking about doing strike me as pretty clearly illegal. This is pretty odd given that the record companies are otherwise trying to defend their own legal rights.

:: Mark 9:49 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Off-Target Landing to Be Probed

MOSCOW -- As a U.S.-Russian crew returned to Moscow on Sunday after a rough and off-target Soyuz spaceship landing, officials said a special commission will probe what went wrong with the craft's descent from the orbiting international space station.
The spacecraft landed safely in Kazakhstan early Sunday using a second-choice backup procedure that involved a steeper fall to the ground and placed greater gravitational stress on the occupants. It landed north of the Aral Sea, about 290 miles short of the intended site. For part of its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, the craft was essentially in a free fall, with its descent later slowed by parachutes.
"All is fine," U.S. astronaut Kenneth Bowersox, smiling broadly, declared in good Russian to reporters at the site. "It was a real test flight!"
U.S. astronaut Donald Pettit was reported to be feeling weak and nauseated after landing -- not surprising given the effects of nearly six months of weightlessness followed by the brief experience of about nine times the Earth's gravitational force during the sharp descent. Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, the flight commander, was described by a Russian space official as being "in perfect shape."
Later in the day, Bowersox described the ride down as "fantastic."
"For me as a test pilot, it was a really great experience," he said. "It's something I've always dreamed of."

More on the recovery here:

"This was one whopper of an experience," said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, who led the delegation of space agency officials that participated in the recovery. "This demonstrates the depth of our resolve. That we are going to persevere even in the case of tragedy and adversity."

:: Mark 9:40 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Dennis Miller Fisks Norman Mailer in the OpinionJournal!

When The Wall Street Journal asked me to react to Mr. Mailer's latest daft screed, I almost took a pass. I've never written an opinion piece for a newspaper before, and furthermore I know as much about Norman Mailer as I do about Mary Quant. I think they were both kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s.
Other than a vague recollection that Mr. Mailer once played Boswell to Jack Henry Abbott's Samuel Johnson, I really only remember one other pertinent fact about him. But, what the heck, if you're going to take a stab at something new, why not take a stab at it with Norman Mailer.

OK, not a fisking in the traditional sense, but a scathing review of Mr. Mailer's recent comments. This is good stuff, as the following excerpt will show:

A guy like Mailer hates a guy like Bush because Mailer thinks of himself as infinitely smarter than Bush and yet President Bush is the most powerful man on the planet and old Normy's connecting through Atlanta and flying on prop planes to a community college that's so far out in the sticks the mail rider has yet to arrive with the message that The Great Mailer is currently more out of the loupe than a jeweler with conjunctivitis. All so he can scoop up a submicroscopic honorarium and the accolades of star-struck locals and 18-year-olds who mistakenly think Mr. Mailer wrote "Gravity's Rainbow."

:: Mark 9:36 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Anyone who continues to doubt that Saddam Hussien needed to be removed from power in Iraq has no concience.

Iraqis Dig Up Mass Graves Near Holy City

Sabah Amir Mohammed al-Tamimi was 19. So was Amna Ali.
Their remains, complete with ID cards, were dug up with the bodies of 69 others Saturday and Sunday from a shallow mass grave about 13 miles northwest of Najaf, one of Shiite Muslims' holiest cities. Bullet casings also were found in and near the graves.
Iraqis exhumed bodies with shovels and their bare hands, and they expected to find more. Others were searching the area around Najaf for additional mass grave sites they believe are in the area. At least one smaller site, guarded by U.S. Marines, turned up a few miles away.

Go read it all and weep for the lives lost while the world stood by for so many years before taking the necessary steps to remove this megalomaniacal tyrant from power.

:: Mark 9:18 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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:: Thursday, May 01, 2003 ::

Dorothy Rabinowitz has concluded that the whining and complaining from many of the outspoken celebrity oponents of US foreign policy is irrelevant to a majority of Americans.

The battle of Iraq may be over but the warriors for peace struggle on. Theirs is not an easy road, particularly, we hear, in the entertainment industry, which is packed with notables fresh from their vocal campaign against the war, the president, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney--objects of scorn in all the best circles, from Paris to California.
Now, it appears, some celebrities worry about damage to their careers. The Dixie Chicks have taken a hit. Sean Penn thinks his views have cost him jobs. Tina Brown, whose main concern about the war seems to be that it caused the postponement of her new TV show, announced last week that it would soon air and that she planned to decorate the set with an American flag bigger than anyone else's. She had to scrape up as many core American values as she could, declared Ms. Brown, "to have any hope of being allowed on TV at all in the current climate of punitive patriotism."
No fear. Americans aren't likely to concern themselves much with Ms. Brown's flag--in the event they actually encounter her program. Most of them have matters more pressing on their minds. For some, these days, those matters include funerals and mourning rites for people they have never met.

I, as one of these Americans, agree with her. The glaring hypocrisy of these self-proclaimed guardians of truth, compassion, and morality has rendered their opinions to be of so little consequence outside of Hollywood and the darkest corners of DNC headquarters that even the snail-darters and spotted owls no longer care.

Update:BushCountry has more on the subject

Boycotts don't work, America cannot beat anyone in a war, the supply lines are too thin, Iraqi resistance is stiff, the Arab street will rise up, and my favorite, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" The bottom line is that the Left wants everyone to believe them, or in the case of the former Iraqi Minister of Information Baghdad Bob, believe anything but what is actually happening.

Hollywood, and just about everyone else on the left want all of us to believe that resistance is futile. They first and foremost want to make sure that the American public understands that to criticize a celebrity that is criticizing the president or America in general, is just plain un-American. A celebrity or a politician or any of the Leftist elite are beyond reproach, and we all must appreciate the notion that when they bash America, they are being patriotic and that ordinary Americans who try and use the 1st amendment to express their disapproval of the left, are acting against the constitution.

:: Mark 2:05 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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