Transterrestrial Musings

Now we know why we haven’t found him. The ever-reliable Weekly World News tells us that the slim, svelte Osama that we know and love is no more.

Australian advice columnist Tim Blair has some self-helpful hints for terrorists, and terrorist wannabes.

I haven’t been beating on this drum much, but Instantman and others have been all over it. And fellow-blogger Dale Amon sends me the URL to the site that is fighting the incipient government takeover of our personal computers and DVDs.

Go thee out and sign the petition.

Instantman points out a particularly odious and mindless piece by Eric Alterman (but you have to forgive him–after all, as Mark Twain once said about someone else of similar cerebral propensity, “I’d brain him, if he had the material for it”) about the unfair balance between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian pundits.

He writes this as though it’s some kind of Olympic ice-skating contest. As though we all know that there are no objective measures of morality, both sides should be assumed to be of equal weight on the ethics scale (and we certainly can’t expect the judges themselves to be objective), so we have to at least make sure that we minimize the stacking of the deck so that both sides have equal punditry numbers and quality of spinning and support.

Well, Eric, I’ll surprise you here. While roughly half of my ancestors are of Jewish descent (if I’m to believe the tales told to me in my childhood), I think that Israel sucks in multiple ways. It is a socialist nation. It can sustain such socialism only through the largess of American foreign aid and implicit defense. It is a religious state, that imposes unacceptable (to me) strictures on freedom. It continues to subsidize collectives called kibbutzim (though not as much as in years past) in a vain effort to sustain the socialist vision that led to its founding. It is a fractious country, unable to maintain a coherent policy because it is ruled by a multi-party parliamentarian system, derived from failed European models.

Oh, sorry. I know that someone like you considers all of this a compliment–not criticism, so what’s a guy to do, Eric? When one can’t even criticize the state of Israel without sounding like a defender of it to socialist journalists, is it surprising that your little enemies list is so skewed?

But the reality (yes, I know, a vile and unfamiliar concept to writers for The Nation) intrudes. I have to conclude that, for all its flaws, it’s the only nation in that region of the world that has any hope of providing a glimmer of freedom and prosperity to its people, including its Arab citizens.

Israel occasionally kills some civilians accidentally in the process of hunting down cold-blooded murderers. Some Israelis even occasionally kill Palestinians deliberately, but when this occurs, they are brought to trial, and at least a semblance of justice.

Their enemies, on the other hand, vow that all Israelis must die. This is not just the rantings of a few hotheads, but the official policy of their governments (though it’s usually spoken and written only in Arabic, for local consumption). They deliberately target civilians, including women, children, and even babes, in their maniacal hatred of Jews. They suck at the teat of the long-vanquished Nazis, and mourn their passing, and lust to finish the job that they once started. They deny a voice to their own people, filling them instead with an irrational hatred of all things not them, and thus deflect their peoples’ righteous anger from their own failings and despotry.

In light of this, what’s surprising, and dismaying, is not the imbalance of pundits in favor of Israel, but the fact that there are any on the other side.

I was watching Jerry Rivers kvetch about being accused of being of Jewish extraction by a terrorist from Hamas on Fox just now.

He was whining (in apparent surprise) that “this Hamas guy was a racist SOB!”

He was shocked…shocked!

Paul Orwin has been bugging me for evidence that asteroid impacts have actually had an effect on humanity in the past (the post in which this occurred is actually the lead for my Fox News column today). I replied that it was certainly conceivable that the biblical flood and other mythical catastrophes could have been the result of such an event.

Someone via email pointed me to this article at Space.com from November that says exactly that.

After some discussion, I’ve decided to put it back up, for now, but I’ve reduced the checking frequency from twice a minute to once, and I’m only getting headers rather than the entire blogspot page. I’m going to close up the source again also, because it really could become a problem if lots of bloggers start doing the same thing.

I think that if this really shows up as significant traffic at Pyra, they’ll figure out which IP to block. But as Steven Den Beste says, they have hundreds of thousands of sites, and get millions of hits per hour. I suspect that right now it’s just spitting in a hurricane in terms of bandwidth.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

Reader Randolph Addison writes:

Peter Jennings is in the Palestine/Israel region right now [on ABC radio] interviewing people and getting their feelings on the violence. Had I not heard this from his own mouth, I would have simply not believed the depths of moral relativity that exists in this man. To quote as closely as possible, he said, “…when I interview Israelis, it’s almost exactly like interviewing the Palestinians…no, wait, not exactly but very close to. They are both mired in distrust for the other side and feel as though they are entrenched in violence and cannot think of [this is the best part] an imaginative solution…” And he said some more about their distrust and similar feelings, etc.

Yes, because Palestinians who celebrate the death of babies are exactly like Israelis who just want to exist and will retaliate against Palestinian soldiers and militia infantry. I figure if I interview a rapist and his victims, I will get exactly the same interview from both sides. The rapist will say, “Gosh darnit, them there people were asking for it by being all damned snippy and haughty towards me after I cleaned their windows, looking all fancy…they’re just trying to rub their wealth in my face by hiring me.”

And the victims will have roughly the same story of, “…I just don’t see why I had to provoke him by acting as though I was better just because I go to work every day and make a good living. I should not have hired him to clean our windows because it just highlights in the financial disparity of our backwards capitalist system.” Yep.

I never liked Peter Jennings for his haughty more-pious-than-thou attitude on everything (even when he is clearly wrong and should know it). This took me over the edge. To draw moral equality between them is just…well, amazing.

One more reason that fewer and fewer watch network news.