ampdead

The case for getting a gun

It's a given fact:  The police can't be everywhere.  More over, the police usually can't be where they're needed exactly when they're needed.  Because of that the system is focused more towards punishing offenders than preventing offenses.  That doesn't change the fact of someone having been robbed, assaulted, raped, or murdered. 

What's worse is the system willfully withholding information about obviously dangerous people - like Houssein Zorkot.  I'm in Dearborn Monday through Friday for classes.  The University of Michigan has a branch in Dearborn and there's Henry Ford Community College.  They're right next to each other - about 10 minutes from Hemlock Park. 

LGF, Ace, and Malkin commented on this - never thought I'd see a Heritage paper linked on a major blog.

I think the Dearbornistan name is a bit over-the-top.  Big Arab population, yes.  They were celebrating in the streets when we launched into Iraq though, and I've never had a problem there - and I'm there quite a bit.

By the way, Henry Ford Community College had Alms for Jihad on their "New Books" rack last week.

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A day late

I had jury duty yesterday.  Endless mind numbing waiting, and nothing else.  This would have gone up yesterday, but I couldn't think so it didn't get written until today.

---

So this was it, the moment everyone waits impatiently for from the first time they took the car out for a spin.    That singularly defining moment of one’s life – taking the great plunge, jumping beyond the reach of the safety net.  Make it or break it, you know with absolute certainty that this is your life.

It was like a movie – the ending of a movie, a gripping drama where everything turned out swell.  Clear skies and an empty road – blue over black with a single car slicing between them heading north on I-75 away from Detroit, away from everything old, towards Saginaw and everything new.  In the passenger seat laid the letter of employment that would secure my new apartment – a sort of passport between the past and the future.  A decent job making deliveries for Federal Express - great benefits, pay, the works.

The day began around 9 am with a shower, then coffee and a cigarette smoked outside of my parent’s smoke-free home.  Then a collection of things – keys, the letter, a lighter, cigarettes, cold caffeine for the two-hour drive, and music – I couldn’t drive without music.  I’d have liked to work while listening to music as well, but the boombox at the warehouse couldn’t compete with the noise of the airport.  That would change soon enough.

Halfway into the trip, somewhere around Flint, Cobain’s screeching angst had become tedious.  Cigarette in one hand, the windows open on this odd September morning, the CD case holding down the letter so it wouldn’t be blown out of the window, hit the eject button.  The eject button didn’t exactly work.  The CD would stop playing, yes, but it wouldn’t come out and the system wouldn’t switch over to the radio because of it.  Smash the eject button then.  Repeatedly.  Finally, the player grudgingly gave up the disc, and the radio switched on. 

There, somewhere around Flint, Orson Wells was reborn.

The voice was shaky, but recognizable – the disc jockey who is always on air at that time on 89X.  But it wasn’t him – couldn’t be.  He wasn’t making any sense, and he wasn’t playing music.  It was as if the Detroit-Windsor “New Rock Alternative” station had suddenly, inexplicably reverted to doing hysterical radio dramas.  Two planes had flown into the World Trade Center and one had flown into the Pentagon.  Button-mashing then – changing stations to find the punch-line, but there were no creatures from outer space.  Orson Wells was still quite dead.  The World Trade Center was gone.

Speed then, across the empty asphalt, the clear blue sky had become a menace.  Raced through Flint, enough to warrant a reckless driving citation, but there were no cops to be seen, through the quiet countryside up to Saginaw and the apartment complex – and a television.

I handed the leasing agent my letter and wrote the check for the deposit.  Filled out some paperwork, went over the lease, and received my keys.  In the background CNN was on the big screen television.  No television or picture could have done the Tower’s justice.  I had seen them twice – once from New Jersey while out with my dad in his truck and once up close when I had decided to take a Memorial Day drive out to New York City.  They were mountains of steel and glass, manmade structures that tried to mock or emulate Nature.

Now they were on a television, standing tall against the sky.  Now they were being struck by passenger planes.  Now they were shrouded in smoke.  Now they were collapsing.  Over and over again.  The commentary quickly became an annoying buzz in the background – a fly on the back of what was happening.

I had to work that night – that’s where it became clear.  It was the trucking facility, a Federal Express warehouse next to Detroit Metro Airport.  No planes were flying so all the freight had to go through us onto trucks.  Instead of one or two fifty-three foot trailers to Memphis, we did around fourteen – fit whatever we could wherever we could to get it on its way to somewhere, anywhere.  Memphis, Indianapolis, Columbus, Boston, and elsewhere.

We could have heard that once puny boombox those three days, but it was kept silent.  In place of the jets there were birds interrupted every now and then by fighter planes patrolling high overhead.

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"But I'm not the only one"

Dirty Harry at Libertas jumps into the lake I was swimming in here and here.  I have nothing to add - it's a brilliant post that focuses on the power film has, and the inability of Conservatives to wield it.

But it was a means to rip-off a John Lennon line, and I couldn't pass that up.

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Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World

Paris 1919:  Six Months that Changed the World
Margaret MacMillan
2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

The ties between World Wars I and II, between World War I and the Cold War, and between World War I and the current situation are, to say the least, interesting.  I have thought before that World War I never actually ended, that these neat categories - WWI, WWII, Cold War, War on Terror - belie the continuation of the Great War.

MacMillan doesn't write this, but she does lay the groundwork for this sort of thinking with descriptions of the people and causes represented at the Paris Peace Conference.  There are fascinating insights into the characters and movements - the major players like the Big Four (Britain, France, Italy, and United States), but also the lesser and wannabe players like Ho Chi Min, Chaim Weizmann, and the myriad others who came to Paris with hopes of making good on claims they believed were rooted in President Wilson's Fourteen Points.  And also the growing shadow of Bolshevism.

The following are excerpts from near the end of the book - chapter 30, Finishing Up.

Paris itself became a giant party, as the streets filled with people singing and dancing.  Along the Grands Boulevards the buildings blazed with lights and cars towed the captured German cannon about.  (It took the authorities days to collect them all again.)

While Paris rejoiced, Germany mourned.  In its cities and towns the flags flew at half-mast.  Even good socialists now talked of "a peace of shame."  Nationalists blamed the traitors at home who had stabbed Germany in the back, and the governing coalition which had signed the treaty.

While the Treaty of Versailles provided for sanctions - specifically, prolonging the occupation of the Rhineland - the Allies had to want to use them.  By the 1930s neither the British nor the French government was prepared to do so over reparations or anything else.

In 1924, a British member of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, which was established by the Treaty of Versailles to monitor Germany's compliance with the military terms, published an article in which he complained that the German military had systematically obstructed its work and that there were widespread violations of the disarmament clauses of the treaty.  There was a storm of protest in Germany at this calumny.  (Years later, after Hitler had come to power, German generals admitted that the article had been quite right.)

The extent of the violations was not completely known at the time, even to the French.  Flying clubs were suddenly very popular and were so effective that when Hitler became chancellor he was able to produce a German air force almost at once.  The Prussian police force, the largest in Germany, became more and more military in its organization and training.  Its officers could easily have moved into the German army, and some did.  The self-appointed Freikorps, which had sprung up in 1918, dissolved and its members reformed with dazzling ingenuity as labor gangs, bicycle agencies, traveling circuses and detective bureaus.  Some moved wholesale into the army.  The Treaty of Versailles limited the number of officers in the army itself to 4,000 but it said nothing about noncommissioned officers.  So the German army had 40,000 sergeants and corporals.

Factories that had once produced tanks now turned out inordinately heavy tractors; the research was useful for the future.  In the Berlin cabarets, they told jokes about the worker who smuggled parts out of a baby carriage factory for his new child only to find when he tried to put them all together he kept getting a machine gun.  All over Europe, in safe neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, companies whose ultimate ownership was in German hands worked on tanks or submarines.  The safest place of all, farthest from the prying eyes of the Control Commission, was the Soviet Union.  In 1921 the two pariah nations of Europe realized they had something to offer each other.  In return for space and secrecy for experiments with tanks, aircraft and poison gas, Germany provided technical assistance and training.

With different leadership in the Western democracies, with stronger democracy in Wiemar Germany, without the damage done by the Depression, the story might have turned out differently.  And without Hitler to mobilize the resentments of ordinary Germans and to play on the guilty consciences of so many in the democracies, Europe might not have had another war so soon after the first.  The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame.  It was never consistently enforced, or only enough to irritate German nationalists without limiting German power to disrupt the peace of Europe.  With the triumph of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933, Germany had a government that was bent on destroying the Treaty of Versailles.  In 1939, von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, told the victorious Germans in Danzig:  "The Fuhrer has done nothing but remedy the most serious consequences which this most unreasonable of all dictates in history imposed upon a nation and, in fact, upon the whole of Europe, in other words repair the worst mistakes committed by none other than the statesmen of the western democracies."

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It's everything you thought it could be

Moriarity at Ain't It Cool News posted a reader-submitted review of Redacted by someone who saw it in Venice.

The reviewer gave it five stars saying, "Disturbing.  This is the only word I could think of when it finished."  I sure as shit hope anyone would find this sort of thing disturbing.  No mention of whether or not the film depicts the full force of the UMCJ coming down on these bastards.  I'm guessing it doesn't since that would take away from the message.

Highlights from the review.

There is a full out rape of a young woman on camera.

The film stars are all relatively unknown which is key considering its premise - a story told from video journals of a soldier, a French documentary film maker, and an Al-Jazeera like network.

All seem like relatively normal Army guys. Mostly bored and horny. Everywhere pictures of naked women hanging on the walls. And constant talk of getting laid.

A bit further on, the film then switches back to the Americans where a car appears to be running a checkpoint. They order he car to stop but it won't. The Americans open fire and the car stops. Out comes a man trying to take his sister to the hospital as she is giving birth. The sister has been shot. The Al-Jazeera network takes over at which point we learn the woman and baby both died.

And if you were grossed out by the bathroom scene in Scarface, this one blows that way with a revenge decapitation. The sound effects used still make me flinch when thinking about them.

The movie ends with real pictures from dead civilians in Iraq including a pregnant woman who was clearly killed at a checkpoint.

Clearly.

But, really, the only two highlights needed are these - from the beginning and the end of the review:

The movie opens with a statement that the events pictured in this film are fictional.

If you think its a good idea we should be in Iraq, or that we have a clue and know what we are doing, then you need to see this movie. If you are opposed to the war, you still need to see this movie to see just how bad it really is.

The flick apparently received over five minutes of standing ovation.  The reviewer admits to his hands hurting from so much clapping.  I wonder, shouldn't they have been weeping instead?

Update:  The Hollywood Reporter also reviews (h/t Sister Toldjah).  Same sort of swooning gusto, but none of the spoilers the AICN reader had.

Noticed the character names though - hadn't bothered to look them up on IMDB.  Reno Flake is a druggie.  B.B. Rush is a fat blowhard - does he have a mic?  Gabe Blix is apparently at least literate - he reads John O'Hara.  Angel Salazar is based on the character of Scott Thomas Beauchamp; although, with film school aspirations instead of John O'Hara-like writer aspirations.  There's also Sergeant Sweet and Sergeant Vazques - a reference to the Sweet V perhaps?

The druggie and the fat blowhard come up with the idea of raping the daughter of a recently arrested Sunni man.  Understanding the leftie penchant for crude subtlety, I wonder if there was a reason for the names.

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Degrees of separation

One of the credited producers of Brian De Palma's anti-military screed, Redacted, is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks.  Coincidentally, Cuban is also "planning to use his media muscle to distribute Loose Change in theaters this year."

I'd start crying conspiracy, but I took my meds today.

h/t Pat Dollard

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"So that others may live"

DrewM posts about the De Palma tripe over at Ace of Spades.  The sentiment is fairly the same across the blogs I regularly read.  Frankly, it's a bit infuriating.  That he's harping on De Palma?  No, of course not.  That he's not harping on someone or some people who have the ability to at least balance the De Palmas of the world, yes.

Let's see.  AoS, HotAir, Michelle Malkin, etc. all had a huge hand in destroying that so-called immigration bill awhile back.  Why?  Because they have clout.  They have managed to rip the power to influence away from traditional media, and have used it to good effect - as evidenced by the destruction of the so-called immigration bill.  It's probably more of a curse than a blessing in the sense that they will now be expected to get accomplished other things.  But I have faith.

I have faith because getting people to not see movies is arguably a hell of alot easier than getting people to call their Congressman or Senator.  The Law of Inertia alone dictates this.  Hell, if you can get someone to write a letter to their Congressman or Senator, you can probably get people to write letters to various Hollywood types - especially those who espouse an affinity for the efforts of the U.S. military.  Something simple like:  If you claim to support our troops and their mission then, GODDAMNIT, scream it from the mountaintop because, if you haven't noticed, we're going to lose the whole thing if you don't raise your voice against your fellows in the media.

Sure, go back to Vietnam if you must.  We all know there's a whole slew of stories waiting to be told - nay - immortalized in film.  Like this:  So that Others May Live. 

Considering the current mood in DC, maybe a story about the aftermath of Vietnam - the aftermath of the U.S. once again forsaking it's sacred honor.  Here's an easy script - 2,000 words worth.

FADE IN:

FADE OUT


Not so hard, I think.

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What a difference a couple years make

Back in 2005:  Bruce Willis to take on career-killing endeavor.  The Times Online story Libertas linked to  has moved here.  He also attended the 'Punisher's Ball' where he, according to Michael Yon,

[...] gave the most impassioned speech I can remember, using clear terms—including some well-selected profanities to describe terrorists—to express his admiration and support for the troops. Bruce’s speech was so accurate in his description of the war, and so charged with emotion, that he seemed ready to lead the troops himself back to Iraq; and they were ready to go.

Sure, Willis is doing war movies.  According to IMDB he's doing The Last Full Measure

Thirty-three years after his death, during one of the bloodiest days of the Vietnam War, Air Force Para-rescue Jumper William H. Pitsenbarger is awarded the Medal of Honor after a young Washington bureaucrat and fellow veterans of Operation Abilene get Congress to reconsider the legacy of his sacrifice. From a true story.

and Pinkville - Oliver Stone's take on the My Lai Massacre.

So why not this 'Deuce Four' project?  Especially now with the current slate of vehemently anti-U.S., anti-military cinematic diatribes Hollywood is set to dump into theaters - like this and this.  Willis can give the "most impassioned speech" about the War to a gathering of distinguished veterans, but he can't take that passion into his own work, and present the story of those same distinguished veterans on film?  Instead he takes the lead role in an Oliver Stone flick?

Willis and others like him are in a perfect position to create an opposition to mainstream Hollywood tripe - to at least balance flicks like the ones I linked above.  They have the talent, the box office credibility, and the fan base.  More importantly, probably, they have the financial resources and the connections.  That is, the ability but, apparently, not the desire.  It makes Willis giving that speech reprehensible - these people are giving their lives while Willis and others aren't willing to take a chance on their careers.  Talk is cheap - so is praise when you have the ability to really support what the troops are doing yet do not.

Why are we losing the war in the media again?

Edit:  Here's another story ripe for dramatization:  Was a Crime Committed in Haditha?  Waiting, waiting.  (h/t Uncle Jimbo - nice letter to the NYT too)

Edit2:  Well, no, not really.  This edit was getting too long to include in this post.  That's why you read the edit to this post before this post.  It's like time traveling.  You've just messed with the laws of physics.  Feel good.

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Fall '07 Day 3

On the second day of my latest attempt to obtain a shiny piece of paper Tammy Erickson wonders about the future worth of said document (h/t Instapundit).  The old musings about the same thing pop up again in my own mind today, the third day of this current college try.  Especially this thought from Erickson:

And finally, although I hate to say it: a perception that at least parts of today’s college education are actually not particularly relevant may pervade more and more young people’s (and older employers’) consciousness.

Not particularly relevant or flat out wrong.  Something along the lines my political science professor comparing Nixon and Reagan - as opposed to contrasting - in terms of the philosophies of each regarding the size of government.  With Nixon we have wage and price controls, an indexing of Social Security for inflation, the creation of Supplemental Security Income, implementation of the Philadelphia Plan (a federal affirmative action program), and the creation both the EPA and OSHA.  Not exactly Reagan.

There was also the imposition of the national speed limit - 55 mph - in 1974.  He brought this up, but failed to mention a date or a President - merely put it into the context of the energy crisis.  I wonder what the answer would be to a question like:  Who was President during the energy crisis?  More importantly, what was the actual effect of the federal speed limit?  Somewhere around a 1% reduction in gasoline consumption.  Blessed are the regulators.

I also found out John Edwards is more of a Republican than I am because the more education you have, the more money you make, and the more Republican you are.  Also, the more in debt you are, but only if the financial aid office can motivate itself to do something.  Funny that.

Now is between class time.  Next up is an English class. 

English teacher by day, rent-a-cop by night - drive-thru operator on the weekend.  He's a busy guy - not that there's anything wrong with that.  He does give off strong Trekkie vibes though, and of the four books we're scheduled to read I've already read three.  He's also really into issues.  Great.  The Jungle, Catcher in the Rye, and Death of Sales Man are chock full of issues.  A hotdog vendor kills himself by becoming his own product. 

Would it be a terribly bad idea for an English class to read something like Moby Dick or, maybe, something by Shakespeare?  Maybe A Modest Proposal to introduce us to satire so we don't fall into this sort of stupid (the Lewis excuse, not the Captain's Wookiee-like take down of Lewis).  Or is this all about the number of books you read (or buy) in a year as opposed to the type of books you read?  Quality or quantity - aspects of this education thing being wholly irrelevant.

Nuance.

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