Category: Internet

— Stockton Record reports:
“San Joaquin Delta asparagus growers, at what should be the peak of the harvest season, razed many of their fields in recent days because [of] a sudden collapse in prices.”

— Our junior senator is really, really mad about the suicide bombers in Israel. Well, OK, not about all of them, just the women, and she’s got her colleagues in the Senate to go along with a meaningless act of stereotyping suggesting that suicide bombing only be done by men:

Boxer rails at ‘tragic development’ of female suicide bombers / But so far Senate resolutions, letters to U.N. get few results — “I am trying to wake people up to what it means when women start blowing themselves up. It’s a tragic development that has not gotten enough outrage around the world,” she said yesterday.

Before leaving for its spring recess, the Senate passed a resolution condemning women’s involvement in suicide attacks. “The involvement of women in carrying out suicide bombings is contrary to the important role women must play in conflict prevention and resolution,” the resolution said.

And here I thought female suicide bombers were the True Feminists of the Islamic world.

— The Chomskian Left is fast making itself irrelevant by irrationally opposing the war, which will make the project of hard-core religious conservatives like John Ashcroft so much easier in the future. Sharp self-criticism by Michael Berube, Nation and Narration, in Context.

So, faced with an enemy as incomprehensible and as implacable as bin Laden, much of the left checked the man’s policy positions on women, homosexuality, secularism, and facial hair, and slowly backed out of the room. They didn’t move right, as so many Chomskian leftists have charged; they simply decided that the September 11 attacks were the work of religious fanatics who had no conceivable point of contact with anything identifiable as a left project save for a human-rights complaint about the sanctions against Iraq. As Marx himself observed, there are a number of social systems more oppressive than that of capitalism. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are good cases in point.

Those leftists who support the war are just a little too gleefully going after their rivals, it seems.

— Miranda Devine says female suicide bombers tell the truth about the gentle sex:

The ugly truth about women, that was for so long hidden behind a saccharine-sweet facade of Queen Mother-style femininity, is that we have always been aggressive and competitive. It’s just that we used to have subtler outlets. Like each other.

Suicide bomber Ayat al-Akhras’ last words were a cut at the men in the Arab armies who slept while she had to do the dirty work.

— Please read PejmanPundit on President Bush’s statement Thursday on the Middle East peace process:

Nonetheless, fellow bloggers and gentle readers, with all due respect and in all seriousness, I tell you this: you all have to calm down just a little bit.

It’s a tricky thing to ride the Mid-East pony, but Pejman believes the President has struck the proper balance.

— Tom Friedman’s latest peace plan for the Middle East, The Hard Truth, strikes me as sensible enough. He correctly observes that the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank – replete with settlements – is inflammatory, while turning the territories over to a terrorist like Arafat is a recipe for disaster, so a third party has to take control while the Israelis make an orderly withdrawal:

Either leaders of good will get together and acknowledge that Israel can’t stay in the territories but can’t just pick up and leave, without a U.S.-NATO force helping Palestinians oversee their state, or Osama wins — and the war of civilizations will be coming to a theater near you.

I don’t see what’s not to agree with here. The current Israeli leadership, Sharon, and Arafat have a long history of animosity toward each other going back at least to the Lebanon incursion, and that doesn’t help things.

For another point of view, see VodkaPundit, who argues that the Israeli presence in the Territories is irrelevant to Arab hostility toward Israeli. While that’s technically true, the occupation (and especially the settlements) help stoke the fires of hatred. I never have understood why Israel doesn’t install a puppet government over the territories composed of pro-Israel Arabs; maybe because there aren’t any.

— Stupid White Men is number one on the non-fiction bestseller list here (ahead of The Female Orgasm) and in France the number one best seller is a bizarre book claiming the US government invented the air attack on the Pentagon

A bizarre book claiming that the plane that ploughed into the Pentagon on September 11 never existed, and that the US establishment itself was at the heart of the New York and Washington attacks, has shot to the top of the French bestseller lists to indignation on both sides of the Atlantic.

No more frog-bashing for me — they do it so much better to themselves.

— Tom Friedman scratches his head and asks how to end suicide bombing:

…the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.

But how? This kind of terrorism can be curbed only by self-restraint and repudiation by the community itself. No foreign army can stop small groups ready to kill themselves. How do we produce that deterrence among Palestinians? First, Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay. Second, America needs to make clear that suicide bombing is not Israel’s problem alone. To that end, the U.S. should declare that while it respects the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism, it will have no dealings with the Palestinian leadership as long as it tolerates suicide bombings. Further, we should make clear that Arab leaders whose media call suicide bombers “martyrs” aren’t welcome in the U.S.

Etc., etc., and all very naive. Tom, get serious — the only tactics that will defeat this tactic must, of necessity, be just as barbaric as suicide bombing. You’re dealing with people who believe their cause places them above conventional morality. So let’s encourage Israel to take the surviving family members of suicide bombers into custody, to put them on trial, and ultimately put them to death. Or simply shoot them, all of them, summarily. Failing that, the bombings will continue as long as there is one live Jew in the Middle East.

— Bjørn Stærk has done gone over to the dark side. See The People’s Blog – Countdown to the Revolution, with Bj?rn St?rk

I quit writing on the web when I realized that nobody cares about the ignorant hate speech of a right-wing nut.

He’s ahead of the rest of us – by several hours.

— I wonder what the effect would be on the insane daily suicide bombings in Israel if Mr. Sharon was to announce that every time a civilian is killed by a terrorist, Mr. Arafat will lose a body part. Bomb a civilian, off goes a hand or a foot. Bomb two civilians, say bye-bye to an arm or a leg. Bomb three, off with his head. Perform the amputations on Palestinian TV (should be better than Porn, right?).

Once Arafat is history, they can go on down the list of Palestinian leaders. It’s a thought.