I have some thoughts on the “end of the War on Terror” over at PJMedia.

A case study in failure:

The absurd and inconsequential nature of the General Assembly is reflected in the bodies and commissions that depend on it. Groups like the Commission on Human Rights are international laughingstocks and rightly so. At best they are irrelevant; at worse they actively undermine the causes they were, theoretically, established to advance.

…The Security Council represents a 1945 compromise between power realities and political correctness. That is, the UK, the US and the USSR were great powers in 1945. China and France weren’t, but it was convenient to pretend otherwise. Today, a majority of permanent Security Council members aren’t great powers, and there are significant powers (like India and Japan) who aren’t permanent members.

A majority of the Security Council’s permanent members are European states and ex-great powers to boot. This is farcical, and the Security Council’s growing weakness is the natural and inevitable result.

Like the UN, the Outer Space Treaty is outdated as well. In my talk at Space Access on Saturday, I pointed out the real problem with Article VI — its assumption that space activities, and particularly human space activities, would be performed by governments, for governments. Its nanny approach and demands that a government be responsible for anything its citizens do off planet is utterly impractical in a modern era of private spaceflight.

Some thoughts.

Graves, I’ve noticed, are very peaceful places.

Release the Khalidi tape:

Interestingly, that sole Obama remark, as reported by Wallsten, contains an ellipsis in the middle. After the then-state senator says the Khalidis had given him “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases” comes a strategically placed dot-dot-dot. We don’t know what those blind spots and biases were and what he might have thought of them. Or how he might have changed. That, in Wallsten’s or some Times editors’ judgment, was best left on the tape.

So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned “Islamism” and all related words, even “Islam” and “jihad,” from our national security documents. They’re completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer.

It’s interesting to compare this to NBC’s recent journalistic malpractice, in which they elided some words in the middle of a quote to create the false narrative that George Zimmerman was motivated by race in his suspicion of Trayvon Martin. Except in this case, it’s the reverse — to remove potentially damaging comments to show that the president is an “unbiased” “moderate.”

What, indeed, is the LA Times hiding? If they are unwilling to show the tape, they could at least provide the complete quote. They haven’t claimed that a promise to a source prevents them from doing so, though now that I’ve made the request, perhaps that will be their next excuse. At which point, we can safely consign them to the same ill repute in which NBC should reside, even if it does not in the minds of its fellow “journalists.”

I have some thoughts on Toulouse and political miscategorization, over at PJMedia.