Category: Networks

protein wisdom quotes this from World Tribune:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

So why indeed is this not top news in the mainstream media?

Don’t forget to do something about prostate cancer, the most common form of cancer. The Prostate Cancer Foundation has a challenge going with Major League Baseball to raise money for education and research.

Now back to our regularly scheduled ball-busting.

I wasn’t surprised to see the Pistons run circles around the Lakers on their home court in game 1 of the NBA finals, frankly. The Pistons showed they have both talent and character in their series with Indiana, and the ability to carry out the coaches plans with perfection. They’re a team that lacks a super-duper star, but what they have is more important – 11 guys who are willing to check their egos at the door and go out on the court and do whatever it takes to win. The Lakers are basically a two man team with a supporting cast of waterboys who get so flummoxed whenever they touch the basketball they turn it over as quick as possible. Shaq and Kobe are great players, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a team sport, right? Putting single coverage on Shaq and Kobe – basically demolishing their star status and making it a five-on-five game – was all it took to blow their minds.

Unless the Lakers can learn the fundamentals of NBA defense in two days, the Pistons will win it in 5.

See Laker soul-searching here.

We finally got some decent barbeque in Portland yesterday, from LOW Barbeque at the Portland Farmers’ Market at PSU. “LOW” stands for “Laid-Off Workers” on account of the fact that the proprietors, Rodney and Kyle, have 15 years experience in the semiconductor business but no current gig in that industry. They smoke up brisket, pork spare ribs, and lamb ribs and sell it at the farmers’ market and from a little stand in SE Portland.

Before serving their first customer, the boys returned to their native Texas for a tour of the principal barbeque joints, such as Louie Mueller’s in Taylor, Smitty’s in Lockhart, and Crosstown in Elgin. They skipped Kruez on this trip since they used to eat there a lot in the old days before the hassle in the Kruez family and all the unpleasantness. The study trip shows you how serious these boys are about their meat, and it’s chronicled here with pictures – don’t watch on an empty stomach.

The article in the New Statesman about the alliance between hard-left and hard-right forces in the anti-war movement’s getting a lot of attention today (Jarvis, Simon, Hurryup Harry, et. al.) and it’s fair reading, although a bit insular. It makes the point that the SWP/radical Islamist alliance behind the anti-war movement wasn’t reported by the BBC on orders from management:

The anti-war movement wasn’t a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba’athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn’t this a story?

It’s a great story, I cried. But why don’t you broadcast it?

We can’t, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won’t let us.

…and goes on to marvel about the fact that the far left has become, in effect, pro-fascist. How this transformation has come about bears some examination (Simon does his usual soul-searching on the issue), and in the end comes down to one key observation, I think: a generation ago, the left had a plausible case that socialism’s ability to manage the distribution of wealth was indispensible for the creation of just societies. But socialism, we’ve learned, can only achieve just distribution by suppressing the formation of wealth, that is, it can make us all equally poor but it can’t make us all equally rich.

On balance, the poor fare better in a free economy than in the condition of state-managed (and some would say -mandated) poverty that socialism creates. So the forces of progress have been forced to abandon socialism, leaving only a hard core behind. Fascists have always been in favor of state-run economy, so they have the core issue in common with the hard left. And this is the way it’s always been.

Yummy.

If you’re a wack-job:

NEW YORK – Abu Hamza al-Masri, the fiery Muslim cleric whose shuttered London mosque was linked to Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe bomber Richard Reid, was arrested Thursday in Britain, accused in a U.S. indictment of trying to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon and providing aid to al-Qaida, officials said.

Or you could just go the Portland Farmers’ Market and look at the chickens.

Turns out Mort Kondracke said it already:

In this respect, there is a real danger that Iraq could become like Vietnam – a self-inflicted defeat. Public support for the war is down, and even conservative columnists such as David Brooks and George Will are implying that Bush’s aims are unachievable.

Just as we lost Vietnam in the newsrooms and not on the battlefield, Iraq will be quagmire or success depending on America’s attention span.

Via Matt Welch.

Citizen Smash – The Indepundit explains it all:

The artillery shell discovered earlier this week, according to General Kimmitt, contained a “mix-in-flight” binary chemical warhead. This type of warhead, as noted above, was not used in the Iran-Iraq war, and was not included by Saddam in any of his weapons declarations.

Keyword = new.

Any questions?

There’s an interesting little aside at the end of this essay by Christopher Hitchens on Hersh’s fantasy:

So a Sarin-infected device is exploded in Iraq, and across the border in Jordan the authorities say that nerve and gas weapons have been discovered for use against them by the followers of Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad well before the invasion. Where, one idly inquires, did these toys come from? No, it couldn’t be.

Oh, but it could, couldn’t it?