On the Stem Cell Debate?!

This is one of those issues that frustrates me no end, because of the ignorance of the general public, and the manipulation of that ignorance by those with a political bone to pick.

The good Captain reprints an article from the New York Sun (Ban, what Ban?) on this issue that accurately describes what stem cells are, and what Bush's position on research is.

For me, this falls under the category of "can only be an issue with those who don't care to educate themselves". I need a better name for that category.

I don't expect to see this kind of clear information prefacing the debate from the left. Why explain an issue, when it pays to complicate it?

Do beheadings condemn an entire people?

Another terrorist saws off the head of an innocent foreign contractor. The left is predictably in high dudgeon: "we brought this on ourselves" "we made things worse" "we never should have tried bringing Democracy to the Middle East"...

Savage events like this can make one wonder... are they right?

Certainly they are wrong in their claims that U.S. policies are to blame. Middle Eastern unrest has a history of thousands of years. European and Russian machinations there were far more invasive, hostile and causative factors in current events than the generally benign actions of the U.S. these past few decades.

It can be said, with absolutely no credible denial, that no country in the history of the world has done more in favor of Muslims than America.

The Left has only one truly compelling argument against the "Domino effect" that the Bush doctrine of pre-emption and installation of democrocies aims for. Interestingly enough, it is one shared by many on the "kill 'em all" Right, and it is the one that should scare us the most.

Are they right in their oft-repeated estimation that these people cannot be brought into the fold of civilized man?

If so, doesn't an affirmative to that question lesson our choices dramatically?

Afterall, if these people are savages incapable of cohabiting peacefully with those who do not share their beliefs, can we afford to allow them to continue to live. Can we afford to allow them to multiply in a world where chemical/biological/nuclear weapons technology is available at the click of a mouse button?

The choices of action when you decide that those "savages" will never rise above repressing and mutilating their women, and cutting off the heads of the kufr can been refined to this: Live, or Die.

To Die under this scenario means to give up on all that you have striven for, all that your parents, their parents, and a thousand years of social progress has created. It means spitting on the graves of those who created the world we live in today.

To Live under this scenario means literally exterminating a group of people from the face of the Earth, because isolating them from us in the 21st century is impossible. It means nuclear bombs, concentration camps, and an absolute and heartless campaign of eradication of a people, it's culture, it's religion, and any references to it historically that might corrupt future generations.

I would submit that it is morally unacceptable for us to decide that some broad group of people are incapable of civilized behavior... because the choices then might be too terrible to deal with.

Where were you when...

JFK's ubiquitous ghost has finally been laid to rest, at least in respect to the "Where were you when..." question for those of us who have no memory of that day in Dallas.

For our generation, the end of that query is now, of course, "... the World Trade Center was attacked?"

All the national and international news was not very memorable to me as a child, having been born in 1970 after JFK's assassination, and the following decade itself being just a blur of much more personal near-tragedies including: being hit by a car; being forced out of a town because an allergy to cow's milk meant owning goats that the neighborhood Nazi's could not abide; and dealing with the ostrasism that is inevitable in going to school in rural cow-farm Virginia while living on a goat farm.

Similarly nondiscrept, the 80's were the "salad days" of my youth. Flush with a fledgling national optimism generated by Reagan's steady stewardship of this country through a frightening cold-war and into economic stability and growth, and with having broken through the hard social wall of my peers and become something approaching popular.

The 90's were more or less a wash. While certainly a great many things happened to me that were memorable, both good and bad including a motorcycle tour of the country and death threats from a mobster in South Florida, no single burning event distinguished itself enough as a date to remember.

I've always been fairly nonplussed by events many others seem to commemorate automatically. This will probably create a real problem for me if I ever get married.

September 11th, 2001 was different, because it was the day the suspension of disbelief I'd managed to craft for myself concerning the real world was shattered.

Butte, Montana is an ugly place. It was known as "the richest hill in the world" in it's heyday, a mining town on a hill full of copper being dug out of the ground just as Alexander Graham Bell's device was driving demand through the roof.

By the mid 1980's diminished demand and increased power costs closed the last of the mines, and the city began it's long decline. By the time I arrived in February 2001, a once bustling city of over 100 thousand residents had shrunk to a population of 30 thousand and a landscape scarred a perpetual brown and gray, the results of the environmental unconsciousness of the boom times.

In a town like this where a dollar went far, I was fat and happy. Making as much as 5 grand a week, while living expenses per month was 500 tops. Yeah the town was ugly, I didn't have a girl, and the weather was cold, but on any given day, you would find me flush and carefree.

I walked into the NOC that morning and had barely finished my morning rounds of getting the hand-off information from my night techs and the light bantering of shift change, when someone said the Trade Center was burning, and all TV's were changed to news broadcasts.

Now, I am a hard individual. My first response wasn't, "Oh those poor people". It was truly bemusement at the plight of us humans, to be killed by our inventions. I was even joking around with it with my best friend as he was getting ready to leave work.

And then the world changed as in the corner of my eye I saw the explosion from the second plane impact.

What gives me goosebumps as I write this is the apparent universal thought that everyone had. Up until that moment, lively chatting could be heard throughout the NOC, yet at that moment, the air literally went out of the room as all eyes focussed on the flames and everyone realized the same thing at the same instant: That this was no accident.

The mind struggled fleetingly for a rationalization against the terrible truth, but the evidence of a deliberate attack couldn't have been clearer than the blue sky from whence it fell.

For the first time in my life, I felt my legs go wobbly from something other than a Buick's bumper, and I took a seat. There, along with 40 of my stunned workmates, I stared at the tv screens as the pandemonium, the fear, the anxiety and panic unfurled in horrible color.

As frozen as that moment in time is, the rest of the day passed in a blur of rage, frustration and sorrow, on constant rotation with terrible moments like these.

Any time I am feeling at all complacent... any time I feel any doubt about the Bush Doctrine... I look at those pictures, and I try to imagine for a moment, the horror of those passenger on the second jet in those final seconds, as they realized they were all going to die.

I try to imagine what it must been like for those in the WTC stuck above the flames, faced with only one last choice: How will I die today?

We owe it to those who died that day, to all those who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most importantly to our children facing a world of dangers undreamed of by those whose crystallized moment of shared consciousness was November 22, 1963 , to never forget, and to never, ever relent in our pursuit of justice and our focus to try to eradicate the threat of terrorism.

Maybe, if we are resolute, and if we are strong, the toughest choice our children will ever face will be: How will I live today?

And just maybe, just maybe, when asked "Where were you on September 11, 2001", they will look at the questioner with the sort of pinched-brow incomprehensibility that comes from living in a world where the answer to such a question has no context.

America as a Just Aggressor

I've been in a particularly dark mood lately, from the events of last week in Russia, so I haven't been able to complete my piece on Space.

I've been busy reading Cap'n's Quarters, Powerline, and reading and commenting to Eject cubed, as well as IMAO and Mountaineer Musings in an attempt to lighten up. I've also been answering email, so I figured I would drop one of my emails here, as it holds up fairly well against charges of moral iniquity as an argument for action.

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“On March 19, 2004, President Bush asked, “Who would prefer that Saddam's torture chambers still be open?’ Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management--US management.” -- Ted Kennedy

I'm not very familiar with My Lai, except as a passing reference. As cruel as that episode may have been, history has proven that it was not representative of the U.S. Some, like Ted Kennedy, would argue that the Abu Ghraib incident is proof that we are on the same moral plane as Saddam. However, the fact that the military self-policed this prior to any sort of media circus shows how far indeed we have come out of the barbarism that we all descend from.

I have become familiar with the realities of war, and with the deplorable depths humanity shows all too much interest in plumbing. I've looked at a lot of sites on the internet, read a lot of stories about previous wars and the current conflicts, and particularly reviewed many accounts of the actions happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Worse, I've seen pictures and videos of the horrors these creatures we call Terrorists visit upon their victims.

There are so many things I've seen that I almost wish I hadn't, but, like so many things in life, being a grown-up in this world means making the best decisions I can based on the fullest information. Seeing a young Russian soldier held down with a knee pressed against his head while an ululating savage screaming Alu Akbar saws at his throat with a dull knife is not something I would force anyone else to see. But having seen that, and having seen the images of Islamic women dressed in white gowns to better contrast the blossoms of blood as they are stoned to death in sports arenas for having done the unforgiveble act of having been raped, gives me a certain insight into the darkness our enemy wishes upon us under Sharia.

I would never force anyone to watch these things. They are absolutely brutal and can leave you in that sort of numb resonance you feel after having bounced your head off an icy sidewalk. But I have absolutely no respect for those who would argue for dialogue with these brutes under the pretense of moral equivalency, all the while averting their eyes from the incontrovertable: these barbarians are NOT LIKE US. And they don't want to be.

Atrocities happen every single day. What distinguishes us from the ululating animals is how we respond to those atrocities.

They rush to the streets chanting and singing and cheering when 156 children are cut down from behind when fleeing the martyrs of a Death Cult, vowing more death, more mayhem, more Terror.

We, on the other hand, resolve to bring our malefactors to justice. We rightly decry those among us who eschew the tenets of good citizenship and prop them up for everyone to see as an example of how NOT to be.

And then we, most of us I'd like to think, resolve to be better.

We ignore those differences, and we ignore the resolve of the enemy, at the greatest of perils.

Re-Affirming an Ideological Solution to Terrorism

Look at this picture. It should win a Pulitzer; it captures a moment in our history more eloquently and evocatively than any other image I have seen in recent years.

You gaze upon this grieving mother's face, and you cannot help but be there, sharing in her anguish, clutching your own throat in an unconscious and hopeless attempt to try to stem a cataclysmic flood of grief, of horror, of anger.

How could this happen? We are living in the 21st century, for God's sake. We've all but wiped out small pox, polio, tuberculosis and god knows how many more killers of our children. How can we have come so far, only to see this child brought down in a brutal instant?

How?

This answer to this is the answer to the incomparable Bill Whittle's fleeting doubts in "Flight Safety" , and can be found, in part, in the words of the caption beneath the photo:

"A woman grieves over the body of her child killed when Russian troops stormed a school seized by gunmen in the town of Beslan, in the province of North Ossetia near Chechnya, September 3, 2004. Russian soldiers battled Chechen separatists on Friday to end a two-day-old school siege ..."

"gunmen"

"separatists"

Reuters is, like much of the world's press, an international mouthpiece for the left. They operate under a bias so ingrained as to immediately evoke terms of moral relativity for any agent with the good sense to stand up to "the man", despite the most horrific of means. They possess a worldview that they cling to as desperately as if it were a lifeboat in hurricane-driven seas. When the lifeboat starts losing air, they instinctively clutch it harder, with the predictable effect of forcing out the remaining air even quicker.

The Leftist ideology maintains that every human action of depravity is explicable by following a tenuous string of emotionally causative factors, and bestowing the mantle of victimhood upon those wielding the grenades, the machetes, the plastic shredders or whatever tool will suit the purpose of carrying out their expression of rage.

Thus these monsters who stormed a school, set explosives so as to make the end result inevitable, and ultimately detonated those explosives and scattered automatic fire into the backs of fleeing children, are called "gunmen" and "separatists".

I have a confession to make:

I am a gunman and a separatist as well. I own guns. And I would prefer to be independent of our current bloated and ineffectual government.

How then is it that I, and millions just like me, don't enter schools and kill innocent children to accomplish this? If I can be wrapped up in the same contextual label as those creatures in Ossetia, who just happen to be Muslim while I am agnostic, how can I not act the same way as them?

So which is more likely:

That the ideology of the American Right is somehow bucking the odds when it doesn't turn out inhumane killers like those "poor" "misunderstood" "fundamentalist" "separatist" "rebel" "freedom-fighting" "gunmen" who happen to be Muslim?

Or that the ideology of the international Left has, despite the lessons of history in the application of it's formula, and despite the lack of supporting evidence in any free society, accurately identified the root causes and proper solution to Terrorism?

How did it come to a school full of children being blown up? I submit that it did in no small part due to entities such as Reuters failing to accept the reality of the world: Bad people do exist, and will commit evil acts without even a pretense of civil discourse.

In the end, regardless of cause and effect of policies past, what remains is the defining of a solution to the problem that faces us.

The Left's proposals on this issue the past 30 years are heavy on pop-psychology platitudes, but are dangerously light on the desired results. Indeed, judging from the words of Osama bin Laden himself in calling the US a "paper tiger", it has been demonstrated that the ideology of the Left cannot help but encourage monsters such as him, in promulgating the idea that these terrorists can be reasoned with, paradoxically if only we don't antagonize those who have chosen to be antagonized merely by our existence.

The Right's proposals have simply resulted in the liberation of 50 million people in the last 2 years.

I occasionally question my ideology as well, as an exercise in keeping myself honest. It is an excellent thing to do, and I have no fear that Bill Whittle's introspection will result in his abandoning the principles of rationalism and empiricism when defining the world in which we live.

UPDATE: On a related issue, from Winds of Change. Concluding point:

What kind of states would be born if they were led by bin Laden, Arafat or the terror masters of Chechnya? Do we want to grant statehood or political power to people whose vision is so clouded in rage and blood?

Is the War On Terror Winnable?

Without further ado, onto a question of war:

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President Bush's (mis)statement the other day claiming that the War on Terror (henceforth WOT) could not be won was more accurate than I think most people are willing to accept.

Terrorism is a method. It is not a distinct opponent that anyone can identify and target, rather it is a tool that widely disparate and often disorganized groups of people can use to great effect in their cause.

Among many things required to win a war, one of the big ones is that you must know who the targets are. Another is that you must have the popular support of your citizenry. The fundamental error of our current approach is that we haven't officially and definitively identified for the citizens of the U.S. just who is the current enemy in a very broad war. And the Lauer/Bush exchange perfectly demonstrated the naive ignorance of the Left as to who the enemy is, and the failure of the Right in explaining and reminding the world of who that enemy is.

In a narrow sense, our clearest and best organized enemy in the WOT is the deeply fundamentalist wing of Islam that violently divides the world in two, Dar al-Harb, and Dar al-Islam.

In a broader sense, that war also includes those people and nations who enable terrorists: Moderate Islamists who tacitly approve through inaction and non-condemnation of terrist members of their faith. Also included are China, Russia, France and Germany who have each continued to play the cynical game of trading values and lasting peace for profit and short-term immunity from attack.

In the end, however, the WOT can not be won simply by destroying those players, or by convincing them to abandon Cold War era foreign policies. As long as there is a human being willing to attack others indiscriminately, the tool of Terror will always be in play. And I would submit that there will never be a lack of people willing to wield that tool, and consequentially, there will never be an end to terrorism,.

The rationale behind the the Bush Administration's demure explanation is quite simply driven by the influence of the media and the delicate sensibilities of the Left. Bush knows, in the case of this battle in the War on Terror, he cannot come out and say definitively: Our enemy today is Islamofascism. The media will not allow a full explanation of this sort of statement. It will not allow for the case to be made clearly before playing the race card, signifying the end of rational debate, and the beginning of a dizzying spin into inaction and national self-recrimination.

These are the consequences of a lost PC war: Political Correctness was aimed primarily and to the most scathing effect at conservative "offenders" and now, when we most need someone to speak plainly about the threats we face, our President has blinked, and left the door open for anyone with a political axe to grind to question a patently absurd aspect of the WOT as waged under his administration.

The War On Terror will never be won, any more than the War On Drugs, or Poverty, or Cockroaches. The battle against our enemies this day however, can most assuredly be won, and I believe will be won. Furthermore, actively promoting the growth of democracy has in the past, and will in the future, help ease the conditions which decieve people into thinking violence against innocents is a winning strategy.

So while the media and the Democrats play their silly "gotcha" game over a poorly stated concept, and while Bush fumbles to clear things up while kowtowing to the PC gods, the rest of us should try to keep above the fray and not allow ourselves to be confused by semantic arguments that have absolutely nothing to do with policy. Politics are what they are. We the people need to keep our eyes on the prize and make our decisions based upon the realities of the world, not the machinations of political campaigns and their camp followers.