Awwwww...

For some completely idiotic reason, Debbie and actually got up this morning at 1:30 AM. Consequently, by the early afternoon we were both feeling a little fagged out. I had to work, but lucky Debbie and the dogs got to take a nap.

Aren’t they cute?

Now that you’ve absorbed the cuteness, I’ll tell you what made me get up and take this photo. It was the snoring! Two of the dogs (Mo’i and Lea) and Debbie were sawing logs like mad — loud enough for me to hear it over all the computer noise in my office across the hall!

When I walked in, only Miki was alert enough to even notice. He’s looking at me here with some very sleepy puppy eyes…

Aren’t they cute?

War with Islam

Tip of the hat to Mike D. for forwarding this interesting piece by Solly Ganor (an Israeli and Dachau survivor). In it, Solly recounts his meeting with a Christian Arab. I’ve excerpted a passage where the Arab lectures Solly about Iran:

“Now is the time to stop them, not only because they are developing nuclear bombs, but because Iran has become the base for all Islamic terrorist. They supply, money, men, and weapons to Islamic terrorist around the world, quite often through their diplomatic mail. Billions of petro-dollars that are pouring into Iran are being funneled into terrorist organizations world-wide. They believe, and perhaps rightly so, that the West will do nothing to stop them in achieving their goals. Is history repeating itself? Are the Iranians making the same mistake that Hitler made when he attacked Poland? Is the situation similar?"

“As a history teacher who studied the subject thoroughly I can tell you that Western victory in World War Two was not all certain. Hitler could have won the war if he would have gone ahead with the atomic bomb development before the Americans. The Germans began working on it in the thirties, and it was Hitler’s decision to prefer building more conventional arms, as he considered atomic weapons sheer fantasy. Hitler made the wrong decision, but had he made the right decision the world would have been a different type of world today, wouldn’t it? The West won the war against Hitler by sheer chance. Very few people seem to realize that.”

I must say that his last words shook me up quite a bit. Had Hitler made a different decision, I would have died in Dachau, there wouldn’t have been a Jewish state called Israel, and most likely there wouldn’t have been any Jews left in the world. The idea that the Western democracies in general and the fate of the Jewish people in particular could have hinged on Hitler’s one decision, is a scenario of the worst nightmare.

Read the whole thing.

Solly’s Arab is much less optimistic than I am about the certainty of our eventual conflict with Iran — but he is just as certain as I am that there will be such a conflict…

So What?

I can hardly believe my eyes — an article in Newsweek (that bastion of liberal, politically-correct thinking) that actually wonders aloud about the Goracle’s view on global warming:

Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn’t be as steep as the climb in emissions.

Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world’s average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its “forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn’t been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.

As they say, go read the whole thing.

I’m unreasonably cheered by this (and some other) recent lamestream media pieces that look like the first chinks in the Goracle’s “faith-based science” of global warming…

If This Offends

From the London Telegraph, this illuminating story about the girlie-men in the BBC:

Amid the deaths and the grim daily struggle bravely borne by Britain’s forces in southern Iraq, one tale of heroism stands out.

Private Johnson Beharry’s courage in rescuing an ambushed foot patrol then, in a second act, saving his vehicle’s crew despite his own terrible injuries earned him a Victoria Cross.

For the BBC, however, his story is “too positive” about the conflict.

The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain’s youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.

The BBC’s retreat from the project, which had the working title Victoria Cross, has sparked accusations of cowardice and will reignite the debate about the broadcaster’s alleged lack of patriotism.

"The BBC has behaved in a cowardly fashion by pulling the plug on the project altogether,” said a source close to the project. “It began to have second thoughts last year as the war in Iraq deteriorated. It felt it couldn’t show anything with a degree of positivity about the conflict.

That’s Private Johnson Beharry in the photo, holding his Victoria’s Cross.

While lamestream media stories of the heroism of America’s troops in Iraq aren’t common, they do exist — our media, lame as it is, hasn’t quite been reduced to the politically-correct pablum of the BBC. Not yet, anyway. And the independent outlets (including, most especially, the hundreds of excellent “mil blogs” out there, and the video outlets like YouTube) are very effective at getting these stories out to those who want to read or see them. Collectively, these sites have millions of visitors each day — a cheering fact to those who, like me, expect that some day in the not too distant future we’ll be needing some folks with a positive view of patriotism and heroism.

I hope the movie about Private Beharry finds another outlet; I’d like to see it. And how sad…how pathetic to see a formerly-great institution like the BBC descend to such limp-wristed depths. If you know anything at all about the history of World War II, you know that just 60 years ago the BBC could have been called “heroic” itself. Now they’d probably censor a history about themselves!

Confessions

One particular aspect of the recent incident involving the 15 British sailors captured by Iran has been nagging at me: the way that 13 of the 15 had “confessions” coerced from them very quickly, and without any apparent long-lasting consequences (within hours of returning home, all 15 appeared at a press conference, looking hale and hearty).

This was manifestly different than incidents I remember from the Vietnam war, especially the famous story of Admiral Stockman, but also including many other American heroes. These American soldiers resisted every attempt by the their captors to subvert them — and these attempts included physical torture so severe that many American prisoned died of the injuries sustained, and they went on for years. More recently, I recalled the stories of the U.S. Marines captured when Iranian “revolutionaries” captured the American embassy in Tehran almost 30 years ago. Mark Bowden, in Guests of the Ayatollah, put it like this:

For many weeks, Political Officer John W. Limbert, Jr. had no contact with anyone other than his guards. He began to worry that something had happened. Had everyone else been released? Had he been left behind? Had the others been killed?

Then one day a guard asked him to define some English words that he didn’t understand.

The words were “raghead,” “bozo,” “motherfucker,” and “cocksucker.” Limbert laughed. It warmed his heart. Someplace nearby his captors were still coping with the United States Marine Corps.

It warms my heart, too. I know it would be no different today.

This tradition of brave resistance was one that I thought the British shared. This recent incident indicates otherwise, and makes me wonder what has happened to the famous British grit in the space of one generation. These sailors behaved more like what I’d expect from mainland European soldiers, as the stories of NATO soldiers in Afghanistan reveal.

I suspect the Iranians had this softness — which they would know well from operations inside Iraq — in mind when they selected British targets instead of American targets…