Help, if you can… (Bumped to top)

In spite of being long gone, the damage from Hurrican Katrina continues as more of New Orlean’s levee system fails and water continues to rise in the city. Latest estimates put 80% of the city under water with recovery thought to involve literally months to get the water out of the streets. If you can, please consider donating to the American Red Cross to assist their efforts. Anything you can give will help, believe me.

In some of my e-mails, I’ve heard some occasional comments about the Red Cross and I need to remind everyone that the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross are 2 very different agencies. The IRC is based in Europe and has been a largely anti-American voice in the world. The American Red Cross is very much neither. Please, if you can…

Update: I am reminded of the fine work of the Catholic Charities as well and I’d like to put in a word for them here. Donate to this organization if you can.

Sisyphus slips on a rock?

I have been a regular reader of New Sisyphus since he was brought to wider attention during the asian tsunami crisis and I have found his insights to be quite valuable. This remains true today even after circumstances forced his withdrawl from the Foreign Service in the DoS. The move from overseas back to the Pacific Northwest here in the US caused his blog to go dark for a while but he’s started up again and I’m checking in every couple of days.

His post yesterday offers, again, valuable insight into the current war on terror. I might not agree with everything he’s said, but it’s still valuable. Right up to the part where he’s asking questions about where the President is going in his plan to win the war. I’m with him on some of those questions, but he lost me here:

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Question: Our troops are short translators? Why haven’t we drafted the thousands of recent new loyal Americans from Arabic-speaking nations who have recently legally immigrated and, in doing so, registered with the Selective Service and agreed to bear arms if called upon?

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Every single time I hear someone talk about the draft, I listen carefully to the men and women already in the service to see what these people have to say about it. What they have to say has not wavered an inch in 4 years: they don’t want the draft. I’ve heard that from the Secretary of Defense, from the Joint Chiefs, from Generals in the field, from Colonels, Sergeants, and line grunts. Absolutely no one currently in uniform – that I’ve heard from, anyway – has supported a draft for any reason. I would submit that if it’s not a good idea to force someone to take up a rifle, dive into a foxhole, and count on them to cover the behinds of their “brothers in arms” that it’s equally not a good idea to count on those same folks to properly translate for non-arabic-speaking troops. What would be the motivation of a man who spent years scraping together enough cash and official permissions to finally immigrate to the US who then gets carted off to boot camp, put in uniform, and shipped back to where he spent years trying to get away from to accurately translate the words of some sheik he couldn’t care less about? The term “fragging” didn’t get coined in a vaccuum – the practice has actually occured. While it’s happened in the MidEast here in the recent past, the practice was far more common in Vietnam. Why was that? Because the troops who engaged in this behavior were draftees who had no connection with the officers commanding them and had no motivation to be in the conflict at all.

This is the path we want to follow in Iraq and elsewhere? I don’t think it’s a good idea, not at all. Now, if the Pentagon wants to start marketing the hell out of the message that such new immigrants would discover real advantages and opportunities in performing this service for their new country, that’s a different matter. Make those new immigrants want to join up and translate and they’ll do it well. Force them into uniform and they won’t. I can’t imagine any serviceman who’d want to trust his life to such conscription.

Help, if you can Updated

In spite of being long gone, the damage from Hurrican Katrina continues as more of New Orlean’s levee system fails and water continues to rise in the city. Latest estimates put 80% of the city under water with recovery thought to involve literally months to get the water out of the streets. If you can, please consider donating to the American Red Cross to assist their efforts. Anything you can give will help, believe me.

In some of my e-mails, I’ve heard some occasional comments about the Red Cross and I need to remind everyone that the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross are 2 very different agencies. The IRC is based in Europe and has been a largely anti-American voice in the world. The American Red Cross is very much neither. Please, if you can…

Update: I am reminded of the fine work of the Catholic Charities as well and I’d like to put in a word for them here. Donate to this organization if you can.

Chrenkoff reports: Good news from Iraq

That Arthur Chrenkoff continues to post what has amounted to the defacto balancing report about the situation in Iraq isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that he can still come up with such huge volumes of information that speaks to the greater truth behind what’s going on over there that our news media simply continues to ignore. From the very first paragraph of this, his 34th post in the series:

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Maj. Joe Leahy, is a civil engineer with the 20th Engineer Brigade of the Army National Guard. He has been stationed at Camp Victory, outside of Baghdad, since November 2004 – enough time to get frustrated: “We all know it’s a dangerous place. But the thing that I want people to understand is that they only see those one or two instances in the country that are negative. You don’t really hear about the 100 things that have gone good,” says Maj Leahy. “One thing we’ve got to understand is that it’s not going to happen tomorrow, but we are doing something that’s getting better everyday.” Maj Leahy’s good-bad ratio might be debatable, but enough servicemen and women, as well as their families and friends back home, not to mention general public, were getting frustrated lately with the media coverage of Iraq to cause some limited, though still welcome, soul-searching among major media outlets. Whether the coverage will improve as a result remains to be seen, so in the meantime, here are the last two weeks’ worth of stories, at least some of them you might have missed.

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As Jack Kelly from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has said, these posts are huge and that’s the largest of the crying shames that can be mentioned about it. That what is being ignored over there can create such a large listing. In any case, if you’re interested in knowing the whole story, go give him a read.

Updated: Off the wire? Captain’s Quarters, Irish Pennants, Power Line, and Instapundit

How fascinating: when trying to get to Power Line, Captain’s Quarters, Instapundit and Irish Pennants this morning, I can’t get their URL’s to resolve at all. Those are some fairly heavy hitters in the blogosphere. Wonder what’s up?

Update: Being a professional network engineer, I can’t help but attempt to troubleshoot an issue like this when it presents itself. Here’s the symptoms:

1. DNS is resolving for other web sites and they are browsable. Conclusion: DNS service here is not off-line.
2. DNS for the sites listed will resolve addresses intermittently. The IP address seems to change. Conclusion: the DNS record for the site(s) is in flux.
3. Browsing to the IP address given will sometimes yield a page that simply says “test” but other times will result in page from “CPanel.net” saying no web page is configured at the address.
4. The whois listings for the sites in question all show the DNS is handled by the same company: hmsdns.net.

Pretty clearly, the company handling the DNS for these sites lost the records somehow and that loss is being propagated throughout the Net. Someone’s aware of the issue, hence the changing DNS records and “test” page displays. There may be other issues at the site actually housing the web pages but I can’t conclude that directly from the evidence I’m able to grab. In any case, I’m sending e-mails to the admin contacts of the 4 sites in question. If I get a reply, I’ll post it.

Mark Steyn, Capt. Ed on the Iraqi Constitution

In any democracy, unanimous votes are pretty rare. When you have a collection of people coming from different backgrounds and possessing different goals and ideals, it’s nearly inevitable that any topic will produce someone opposed to the action being considered. The larger the group, the greater the likelihood is. So it is with the Iraqi draft Constitution which was sent to the National Assembly this week sans consenus thanks in large part to the Sunni contingent of the committee. My thoughts upon hearing this were that while it would certainly have been nice to bring a compromise to the table that everyone could get behind, that’s not a requirement in a democracy. The committee did the best they could and produced a document that it – taken as a whole – thought served the Iraqi people best. Mark Steyn’s commentary in this morning’s Washington Times addresses a number of topics, including the never-say-success coverage of the process in the media. He gets to the point of the matter, as well:

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If you had been asked in 2003 to devise an ideal constitution for Iraq’s very non-ideal circumstances, it would look something like this: a highly decentralized federation that accepts the reality Iraq is a Muslim nation but reserves political power for elected legislators — and divides the oil revenue fairly. And if it doesn’t work? Well, that’s what the Sunni are twitchy about. If Ba’athist dead-enders and imported Islamonuts from Saudi and Syria want to make Iraq ungovernable, the country will dissolve into a democratic Kurdistan, a democratic Shiastan, and a moribund Sunni squat in the middle. And, in the grander scheme, that wouldn’t be so terrible either. In Iraq right now the glass is about two-thirds full. Those two thirds will not be drained down to Sunni Triangle levels of despair.

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Captain Ed over at Captain’s Quarters also brings up the fact that the Sunni group in the committee was 1) allowed on-board after boycotting the elections in January, and in greater numbers than their population would normally have in representation, and 2) that both the Shia and the Kurds allowed compromises into the Constitution in an effort to meet the Sunni halfway. The Sunni merely took that inch and demanded a yard:

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The Kurds and Shiites attempted to compromise with the Sunnis, even going as far as an offer to reinstate the Ba’ath Party, minus any support for Saddam and his propaganda. They offered to postpone any motions for federalism, keeping the concept but not exercising it until the next Assembly could get elected, save for the Kurds’ hard-fought autonomy. In return, the Sunnis submitted a new list of demands in the final hours, demonstrating their bad faith and determination to sink any agreement that did not restore them to power.

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The latest thing, however, is mentioned by Ed a few paragraphs later:

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On the other hand, the Guardian reports that the Sunnis have asked other Arab nations to step in and block the draft from going to the voters, along with the UN and other international organizations. That end-run around democracy will not please their fellow Iraqis in the Kurdish and Shi’ite territories. The Kurds especially will resent Arab League interference, especially since they’ve run their own democracy in the north for over a decade while the Arab League tried to force the Coalition to leave Iraq to Saddam during the entire time since Gulf War I.

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Considering that those “other Arab nations” have either staunchly refused to send any assistance to Iraq to date or have been involved in allowing foreign terrorists into Iraq to attack Coalition forces and Iraqi citizens alike, it would appear those nations have little if any standing to block anything. And the UN’s penchant for heading for the hills the second things get tough doesn’t give them a whole lot of leverage, either.

Frankly, this process is proceeding exactly as it should. The 3 major groups – none of which has the power alone to lord it over the others – are engaged in politics and are making their decisions by the rule of law and the practice of democracy. Beats torture chambers and rape rooms any day. Media reports to the contrary, the Iraqis are, so far, handling this well. Let’s see what happens in October when the Assembly meets.

Indiana Judge overruled on banning parents from teaching religion to their son

Back in the end of May I wrote about a judge in Marion Co., IN who ruled that the parents of a boy were no allowed to teach their son about their religion – Wicca – in their own homes. I considered the ruling to be a hugely blatant violation of the parents’ rights and a cut-and-dried violation of the Constitution. Along with many, many others, I called for the ruling to be overturned. I was going over my archives tonight looking for an article I’d written on something else, came across that article I wrote and decided to check for an update. There it is, on 18 August:

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An Indianapolis father can share his Wiccan beliefs and rituals with his 10-year-old son, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday in a unanimous decision upholding parents’ rights to share their religion with their children. The court declared that a Marion County judge erred in approving a divorce decree last year that also directed the man and his ex-wife to shelter their son from “non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.” … Judge Patricia A. Riley, writing on behalf of the three-judge appeals court panel in a decision released Wednesday, said trial courts can limit parents’ authority if it’s necessary to prevent endangerment to a child’s physical health or significant impairment of the child’s emotional health. However, there was no evidence of endangerment in this case, the judges ruled. They struck part of paragraph 10 from the decree but let the rest of the divorce stand, signaling the end of the legal battle.

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The original judge, Bradford, has now said he agrees with the ruling. He was never against anyone’s religion, he says, he was just concerned that some of the Wiccan rituals might have endangered the boy’s health. He changed his mind after a review of the court records and found that his concerns were unfounded.

(Insert wretching sounds here.) So, Judge, you fully admit that you made a ruling that was clearly prohibited in the US Constitution on the basis of information you had failed to become familiar with prior to making the ruling. Oh, very nice. Very professional. I know I’d feel all kinds of confident if I had to appear in your courtroom, sir. I note he avoids actually explaining just what in the hell his concern was. That’s likely because he was relying on horribly biased crap instead of actual information on the topic. I’m extremely glad the appeals court did what was plainly the right thing but this Judge Bradford needs to be given a pink slip and shown the way out of the Courthouse on a permanent basis.

Gun ban ends but crime drops

I guess I’m going to have to start reading the Dallas Morning News on a regular basis. This op-ed was published there way back on 10 July, 2005 and I heard not word 1 about it until I saw it in hardcopy this evening. The crux of the article? That 9 months after the so-called “assault weapon” ban was allowed to sunset, the FBI’s crime statistics failed to show the massive bloodletting the gun-control lobby was predicting would occur should the ban be lifted. It’s not even that benign for those gun-banners: crime actually dropped. The op-ed was based on reporting by CNS editor Susan Jones:

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Nine months after the Clinton-era “assault weapons ban” expired, the FBI has released crime statistics showing a drop in homicides in 2004 — the first such drop since 1999. The FBI report said all types of violent crime declined last year, and cities with more than a million people showed the largest drops in violent crime. When the Clinton ban on certain semiautomatic weapons expired last September, gun control groups warned that violent crime would escalate, including violence against children.

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Ooops, that wasn’t supposed to happen, was it? Well, did you know that there are 7 States that have their own assault weapon ban? So maybe their crime reductions made the increases in other States look better? John Lott’s op-ed in the Dallas Morning News goes into more detail:

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Last week, the FBI announced that the number of murders nationwide fell by 3.6 percent last year, the first drop since 1999. The trend was consistent; murders kept on declining after the assault weapons ban ended. Even more interesting, the seven states that have their own assault weapons bans saw a smaller drop in murders than the 43 states without such laws, suggesting that doing away with the ban actually reduced crime. (States with bans averaged a 2.4 percent decline in murders; in three states with bans, the number of murders rose. States without bans saw murders fall by more than 4 percent.) And the drop was not just limited to murder. Overall, violent crime also declined last year, according to the FBI, and the complete statistics carry another surprise for gun control advocates. Guns are used in murder and robbery more frequently than in rapes and aggravated assaults, but after the assault weapons ban ended, the number of murders and robberies fell more than the number of rapes and aggravated assaults. It’s instructive to remember just how passionately the media hyped the dangers of “sunsetting” the ban. Associated Press headlines warned, “Gun shops and police officers brace for end of assault weapons ban.” It was part of the presidential campaign: “Kerry blasts lapse of assault weapons ban.” An Internet search turned up more than 560 news stories in the first two weeks of September that expressed fear about ending the ban. Yet the news that murder and other violent crime declined last year produced just one brief paragraph in an insider political newsletter, the “Hotline.”

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You can call it a sucker bet that had the figures been reversed – had the crime figures increased – you’d have heard about this in every paper in the nation, on all the news networks, and they’d still be grousing about it up on Capitol Hill. Even had figured dropped, but by more in those 7 States with the ban than in the 43 that don’t, there would have been political hay made. But that’s not what happened. The story being pushed by the gun-control lobby of the left was that crime would absolutely, positively increase. It didn’t. That’s news. But the MSM won’t carry any such thing because it doesn’t fit into the liberal narrative they’re pushing. Unsurprising, but still disappointing.

Journalism 101: verify your facts

From LGF, this wonderful little tale of a college newspaper that published stories for a year and a half on the tribulations of a little girl whose only living parent, her father, was sent overseas to fight in Iraq leaving her in the care of family friends. Human interest stories and letters about the impact of such events on the life of an adorable little girl getting dealt a lousy hand in life. The stories are read tear-jerkers that came to a culmination 2 weeks ago when the staff of the paper was advised that her father had been killed in Iraq.

The only problem: every word of the story was a lie.

The Daily Egyptian is the paper of the Southern Illinois University and the tale has 1 inescapable conclusion. The reporters, editors, and faculty supervisors accepted the story of hardship and the woes that followed at face value and never once in over a year took the time to verify the facts. That’s not reporting, kids, that’s stenography. That’s taking notes in a class. That’s transcribing. The front page of the DE at least calls it like it is:

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We had been duped. Not only was he not in the military, we could not verify he existed at all. Suddenly, everything about this story was in question. Over the course of a year and a half, we published news stories, columns and letters to the editor about Dan Kennings and his daughter Kodee. All of them were rich in real human emotion, and all provided moving details in the life of a young girl trying to live her life without her parents. They portrayed a precocious child, fiercely proud of her father’s military service. Each one of these stories, columns and letters contained an essential inaccuracy — but when we published them we believed them to be true. How could this happen? We blew it. There is no pleasant way to put it. We didn’t check the facts carefully. We believed what we were told without verifying. We weren’t as skeptical as we are supposed to be.

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The question is not a matter of whether the facts were checked before the story was published. That question has been answered definitively. The question is why were the facts not checked? As Charles at LGF put it, they weren’t checked because the reporters, editors, and faculty supervisors wanted the story to be true, so they allowed themselves to believe it. Yes, indeed: they blew it. But can you blame them? These papers are the breeding grounds for tomorrow’s WaPo, NYT, and LAT reporters, but they are also students. They learn from the people who are working already at those institutions and, it should be pointed out, from the people who taught those reporters. CBS goes to air with a story based around forged documents because they wanted them to be real. Eason Jordan and Linda Foley both make accusations that US soldiers are deliberately targeting journalists with no facts to support them because the wanted the stories to be real.

In these cases and dozens like them the journalists compounded the error of “we blew it” by publishing those stories. That act turned unsupported allegations into the truth for millions of Americans who have no ability to check the facts of the story and are relying on the media to give them the facts – the real facts – and all of them, as well. The DE got burned and it’s going to take a while to recover from it. Their readership cycles past them in 4 years, however, so high-school seniors this year will come to SIU next year without the taint of this story in their heads. The DE will be able to come across as completely trustworthy and all will be well on campus. The reporters at the DE, however, will cycle out of school and into the media where it will be you and I, as adults, that will need to deal with them. Will they truly learn the lesson that’s been taught here or will they become the Dan Rathers and Mary Mapes’s and Eason Jordans and Linda Foleys of the next generation? Here’s hoping this one hurt enough to leave a mark.

Italian Red Cross chooses sides, hides insurgents

So, the Italian Red Cross, an agency claiming protection on the battlefield and passage in war zones past our protective perimeters due to the fact that they are a neutral force has admitted to providing assistance and cover to our enemies. I wonder how many times those 4 terrorists the Italians helped have set up Coalition forces to be attacked? How many soldiers have they been responsible for killing? How many Iraqis are dead today because these Italians used the neutrality of the Red Cross to hide our enemies and sneak them past our lines?

How many Red Cross workers in the future will be detained or fired upon because these Italians have shown us that the Red Cross cannot be trusted? Sure, the International Red Cross says the Italians are a separate Red Cross outfit and do not answer to the IRC. But how are our soldiers to know that this particular van with a Red Cross on it is the IRC and that van with a Red Cross on it is the Italians unless they stop every one?

Spare me the story about having done it to get kidnappers to release hostages. The only thing that did – aside from allowing terrorists to circumvent our security measures – was show the kidnappers that kidnapping is an effective tool.

In exchange for a rock-solid vow by the new Italian Red Cross director to never, never, never engage in such actions again, I’ll be willing to give them a second chance. They can thank this guy for my attitude and know that I’m thinking of him, not these sleazeball Red Cross jerks, when I think of Italians. His courage and fortitude has bought them a pass. Don’t screw it up.