Phyrfight Intel

Andrew C. McCarthy on Iraq

It’s All About 9/11
The president links Iraq and al Qaeda — and the usual suspects moan.

…On September 12, 2001, no one in America cared about whether there would be enough Sunni participation in a fledgling Iraqi democracy if Saddam were ever toppled. No one in lower Manhattan cared whether the electricity would work in Baghdad, or whether Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia could be coaxed into a political process. They cared about smashing terrorists and the states that supported them for the purpose of promoting American national security.

Andrew C. McCarthy on Iraq on National Review Online

From Gandalph 23

Sheik Aal Mahmoud: If the husband wants to use beatings to treat his wife, he must never ever do it in front of the children. It must remain between him and her. It must be done according to the following conditions: He must not cause bleeding or bruise her body. He should avoid her face and other sensitive parts of her body. As we’ve said, the limitations on beating are: They must not cause bleeding, they should not break any bones, they should not be on the face, and they should not bruise her. If the husband violates these rules, he violates the rules of Allah. If she has been hurt, the husband is held liable for what he has done, because the woman is not his merchandise. He cannot do to her whatever he wants. Even if the wife forgives the husband, it does not mean Allah will do the same on Judgment Day.

“Whew!

For a minute there, I was afraid that islam was, you know, supporting men beating their wives, but clearly, they are for the equality of the sexes. Whew!”

You don’t have to be a total moron to be against the war on terror, but it helps. 9/11?, these bone-heads claim that Bush’s “regime” planned the whole thing. With “citizens” like these , who needs Islamo-facists?

This is a sad day for civil liberty.

“The 5-4 ruling – assailed by dissenting Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as handing “disproportionate influence and power” to the well-heeled in America”.

Netscape
Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes

Have you read the PATRIOT Act? Of couse not. Then how can you have an opinion? Here’s the Act.

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s take on the The USA PATRIOT Act.
EFF: USA PATRIOT Act

It is called the Cowon iAudio X5, and it kicks the IPod’s ass. As you go through the list of features I’m about to give you, you need to remember one thing: the X5 costs is the same price as an original IPod.

Features: Audio playback- mp3, WAV, OGG Vorbis, WMA, ASF and FLAC; Video playback- XviD and MPEG4; Picture display- JPEG; FM Tuner which can record FM and has a programable record feature. There is also a line in record. The X5 has another unique feature: it can connect directly to another USB device and transfer files without a PC as an intermediary. All of this for $300. There are two versions of the X5, one with a 20G HDD and 30G HDD. The 20G costs $300 and the 30G is slightly more. The battery lasts 14 hrs. with the 20G and 35 with the 30G. The smaller version is said to be very slim, about the size of an orignal IPod and the bigger version, well, a little bigger. If this doesn’t convince you to get one check it out at Cowon’s website or at CNet.

Xbox: The Science of Your Brain on Games

“We had a hard time finding kids who were bad at school but good at games”

“successful gamers must have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources”

EFF: RFIDs in Schools

Across the nation, public schools are using RFIDs to turn campuses into pervasive surveillance networks. EFF is fighting to stop these schools from tracking students using RFID technology.

God I love living in Texas. This from the TSRA.

TSRA Members and Texans:

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR
R i c k P e r r y
For Immediate Release
June 17,2005

Gov. Perry Signs Bills to Protect Gun Owners’ Rights

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today signed legislation aimed at clarifying existing firearm laws, enhancing protections for law-abiding gun owners and reducing barriers for gun ownership.

“The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right of every law-abiding citizen of our country,” Perry said. “This legislation will clarify existing firearm laws, enhance protections for law abiding gun owners and reduce barriers for gun ownership.”

The bills Gov. Perry has signed include:

* House Bill 225 (Driver) which extends the renewal period for a concealed handgun license from four to five years without an increase in renewal fee.
* House Bill 322 (Hupp) which reduces all fees for a concealed handgun license for military members and veterans by 50 percent and lowers the age from 21 to 18 for members of the military or veterans to obtain a concealed handgun license.
* House Bill 685 (Rose) which exempts military members and veterans from taking the range portion of the concealed handgun licensing process if they had been weapons certified in the military within the past five years prior to application for the license.
* House Bill 1483 (Frost) which will expand methods by which applicants for a concealed handgun license may pay the fees to include personal check, cash, and credit card. Currently only cashiers checks and money orders are accepted.
* House Bill 823 (Keel) which clarifies the current definition of “traveling” as it relates to someone carrying a firearm. Current law is ambiguous and is interpreted differently by courts and law enforcement.
* House Bill 1038 (Isett) which reduces the fee for renewal of a canceled handgun permit for senior citizen by 50 percent. The current renewal fee for a senior citizen is $70 for a four-year renewal period and this bill will reduce that fee to $35 for those 60 years of age or older.

All bills become effective Sept. 1, 2005.

Copyright 2005, Texas State Rifle Association.

Another example of governnent “protecting” their subjects….ah I mean citizens.

British government to announce widespread smoking ban – Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

This story is so maddening I almost don’t know where to begin.

A couple of kids in Amherst Mass spend time and money on a science fair project that shows how dangerous BB guns can be. Sounds like a good applied physics and engineering project to me. And very worth while because BB guns can be dangerous and more education about the dangers could prevent injures and maybe even save a life.

But nooooo! Their completed project is rejected. Why you ask? Because BB guns are too dangerous. I wonder how many of the accepted projects used HCL or NH4, or gasp, H2SO4, probably none, they might be dangerous. I myself entered a middle school science fair with a rocket! Thats right a fire breathing 300 mile an hour rocket! Do you suppose that would be dangerous? What kind of science do they study in Mass., Paper Mache? I have an idea! Why don’t we just forbid science all together. Wouldn’t the world be safer and isn’t safety the only thing that is truly important? I mean we don’t really need silly things like individual rights or privacy or exploration and science, we need safety. Safety for the children’s sake. And who better to keep us safe that the government.

Story:
http://www.local6.com/news/4598678/detail.html

Gandalf 23’s take on the EU constitution. As he often says,”WTF“.

PBS’s funding is under attack. Peggy Noonan (really smart person) thinks its worth saving. Click here to find out why.

This is an excerpt from interesting article by a heath activist
William Campbell Douglass II, MD, who has been calling for government intervention on the behalf of school children for some time. It seems he has had an epiphany about government involvement in people’s lives. I attached the whole doc below as it is from a newsletter and I cant link to it.

His website: http://www.realhealthnews.com

… The bottom line is this: It isn’t the Feds’ job to protect us from ourselves by limiting what private industry can make and how they can promote their products – only to protect us from what’s patently unsafe. However, it is the combined duty of government, parents, educators and competing free-market entities to provide a balance between the freedom to destroy ourselves with consumption and the disciplined “wise use” that leads to a life full of choices, options and variety. Come to think of it, let’s leave the government out of the “wise use” equation. Can you imagine the government giving out wise advice on any subject?

Sure, it might be simpler if we banned all hazardous things – junk food, cigarettes, guns, motorcycles, fast cars and all related advertising – or allowed the legal system to sue them out of existence…

But it just wouldn’t be America anymore if we did.

Full article
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Chinese Gamer Sentenced – News From 1UP.COM

A chinese gamer, angry that someone sold his virtual sword that exists only in the virtual world of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), stabbed another to death. This is just crazy.

The Islamo-Fascist bin laden gives, as one of his reasons for hating us, our “materialism” and he somehow thinks that that has corrupted us. Some people are material and some are not, that is called the real world. Recent events have shed a light on something that I think is worth pointing out: the extreme materialism of those who have been captured in World War IV, and others in the Islamic world. I am talking about handling the Koran. When I heard that people were becoming enraged and later killing people simply because they “thought” the Koran had been mishandled, I couldn’t believe it. How can a person mishandle a book? For a material book to have that much control and power over some one is materialism at its most extreme. Allow me to put it this way: some paper with some words written on it was touched and that caused people to go insane and kill other people who did not touch the paper with words written on it. Sounds pretty absurd when I put it that way.

The prisoners in Cuba should thank Allah that they have the ability to pray and read the Koran. Our government is going far beyond what is necessary in this respect. When one of our soldiers is captured they are presented to the world on video and then beheaded (a violation of the Geneva Convention, for state vs state wars).

There is a simple solution to this problem of “mishandling”; don’t give prisoners a Koran. There is no law or treaty that says we must do this. Simply allowing them to continue living is our gift to them. To see how far our government is going to appease this scum look at this DOD document (which sickens me).

From: American Center for Law and Justice

In her English 101 course, Bethany Hauf, a freshman at a community college in California, was told that she could pick the topic to be discussed in the quarterly term paper. She chose to discuss “Religion and its Place within the Government.” The professor, Michael Shefchik, responded by noting the controversial nature of the topic, calling it one the “two most taboo and subjective topics.” While he approved the paper, he had a specific request that Bethany not mention God in the paper. In fact, in an email, the professor specifically told Bethany “I have one limiting factor—no mention of big “G” gods, i.e., one, true god argumentation.” He went on to say in the same email that the separation of church and state has to be respected, and it would be more appropriate to discuss the topic from a different vantage point. Specifically, the professor stated that “perhaps ‘Religion has no place in government’ would be a more viable and topical subject.”

After presenting a draft of the paper to Shefchik, as required by course requirements, Hauf was told that because she had written off topic about God, at best, she would be graded 69 out of a possible 100 points. Shefchik told Hauf that among the reasons for the low grade was that references to “God” could be offensive. After presenting her paper on Friday, Shefchik handed out the final grade on Monday and gave Hauf a score of 49 out of a possible 100 points for the research paper.

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Three links: Original Story, Update 1 and Update 2.

The 9/11 “memorial” may have more about Abu Ghraib than New York’s heroic firemen.

Debra Burlingame , sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines fight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, tells how George Soros and others may be subverting the 9/11 memorial.

Article

I discovered The American Spectator yesterday and linked to one of Ben Stein’s articles. He has an interesting perspective. Here is a excerpt from another one of his articles on the true cost of the war on terror, written after visiting children who have lost parents in the war .

“I WISH I WERE ELOQUENT enough to tell you how brave these kids were and what a price they are paying. To lose a father while the rest of us complain about taxes and the stock market and the price of real estate. Quite a sight. Quite a concept.

How can we possibly repay them? How conceivably?”

Full Article

My kids were asking me about the whole Watergate thing the other day. I gave them my views on Nixon. When I was a kid growing up in Texas I had friends that had bomb shelters in their back yards because we were afraid that the Soviets would rain hydrogen bombs down on us. You don’t know what its like to be at school and have the kids of military families picked up early because their dads called from the SAC base and told their wives that the base was being sealed and the threat level was being raised to DEFCON 3. Those were scary times. Nixon did something about that, among other things. Like they said in “Star Trek” only Nixon could go to China.

Ben Stein’s view of Nixon vis a vis Watergate.