The Thomas Chronicles

*** Update***

I grew up watching superhero cartoons where within a 30-minute episode, the hero dashes the plans of evil villains and the villain, in one way or another, screams, “I’ll get you! I’ll get you next time!”

You can see the evil villain holding up his fist and quivering with anger and clenched teeth.

This reminds me of the Democratic reaction today to Bush’s speech to Israel.

Senator Biden called the speech, “Bullshit!”

Speaker Pelosi, that paragon defender of free speech and supporter of the Fairness Doctrine called Bush’s speech, “beneath the dignity of the office of the president and unworthy of our representation,” even though he was voted into office by a national election while Pelosi reached her high office through the votes of her Democratic peers.

Pelosi went on to say this:

“The tradition has always been that when a U.S. president is overseas, partisan politics stops at the water’s edge. President Bush has now taken that principle and turned it on its head: for this White House, partisan politics now begins at the water’s edge, no matter the seriousness and gravity of the occasion. Does the president have no shame?”

While this may be true that we usually don’t conduct partisan politics overseas (I doubt this is entirely true), this is rich coming from a women who flew across the world to meet with various dictators, like Syria’s Assad, and other enemies wearing a hijab as though she were the Secretary of State.

So, what did President Bush say to spark the usual Democratic foaming at the mouth this time?

Speaking before the Knesset, Bush said that “some people” believe the United States “should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Oh, so President spoke truthfully. It is the Democrats who made the deductive leap to accuse the President that he referred to presidential hopeful, Senator Barack Obama. The President may very well have implied the good senator from Illinois, but what he said was just the self-evident truth of the matter. It takes an incredible amount of rosy pink on the glasses to not see it.

For myself, I think it’s about time President Bush said something about the insanity of our current domestic and foreign situation.

I’ll have to agree with Michelle Malkin this morning. Obama and the Dems have got to calm themselves down.

Update 5/15/08::

This is the statement from the Obama camp:

“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack,” Obama said in the statement his aides distributed. “George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

“George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists”?

This is a man who said he would talk to, otherwise known as “engage”, leaders of rogue states, including Iran, North Korea, and Cuba, all of whom has sponsored terrorism. Moreover, his church, the United Trinity Church of Christ has allowed Hamas to publish their terrorist propaganda in their newsletters.

His policy proposal sounds like engagement to me.

“False political attack”? No, I’d call it stating the obvious, self-evident truth by Obama’s own statements. This is even one of the main points of contention in the Democratic Primary, which makes it well known to just about everyone.

I don’t know what to make of Obama’s flat, categorical contradiction of himself…

Vegetarians the world over must be shaking in the boots from the news last week. What if it catches on?

Last month, the Agence-France-Presse, the oldest news agency in the world, reported that the Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Gene Technology in Geneva, Switzerland, “condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason.” …

What really got people talking was that this Swiss governmental ethics committee came up with guidelines to protect “the dignity of plants.”

So, on the one hand groups, like PETA have been pressing for vegetarianism from as far back as I can remember, (which granted isn’t so long); on the other hand, the “federal Ethics Committee on non-human Gene Technology” in Switzerland pronounced that it was immoral for humans to arbitrarily murder plants because the deserve dignity as a creature of the plant world.

Are the people from PETA going to starve as a result of this malarky? Are we to have a pang of conscience every time we partake in, Oh my goodness, a fully sumptuous bowl of salad?

Perhaps in due time, we might have to pay Vegetation Credits to a company to ease the burden of our overtaxed hyper-consciences and find that Al Gore has forgone his copious bovine diet in favor of spinach and radishes. Only he’d probably own the company holding the credits.

It was reported Tuesday by the Guardian that the British police solved “[o]nly 3% of street robberies in London… using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.”

The CCTV phenomenon in the UK has thus far been very much akin to car alarms here in the US. In the US, car alarms shake rattle and roll the neighborhoods at all hours of the day, waking people up from their slumbers at two a.m. just because an eighteen-wheeler truck decided to pass by, etc. And with all that ruckus, after all the beeps, honks, and wha-wha’s, these obnoxious things don’t prevent barely any car thefts.

Likewise, the CCTV’s in Britain has failed to provide any meaningful deterrent to people committing crimes. After all, people who’ve been trying to stay abreast of this controversial Orwellian fiasco have heard trickling reports of victims of crimes standing in front of the camera crying for help to no avail.

Here are a couple of the more visible examples of the CCTV’s failure:

Earlier this month [January 2008], a court heard how a microphone mounted on a CCTV device recorded the groans of father-of-three Mark Witherall, 47, as he was beaten and left to die by raiders after catching them at his house in Whitstable, Kent.

In another case, a microphone on a CCTV camera picked up the screams of a woman and her child who were attacked and abused last year by a would-be arsonist at their home in Lancashire.

The cameras literally sat there and observed a man beaten to death and a woman and child attacked and neither it nor anybody behind the camera did anything to stop it. And British police are often loathe to backtrack to the CCTV’s images of committed crimes because, well, “it’s hard work”.

After spending billions of pounds on this ineffective system, and in the process created the foundation for a dictatorship, Britain’s reaction isn’t to admit failure and recommit resources elsewhere. It is to up the ante.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said, “Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.“[Emphasis is mine.]

That’s an interesting statement, isn’t it? People are committing crimes and the CCTV’s are not preventing them from happening because, ultimately, people don’t fear it. The logical question to ask is: If criminals have to fear the CCTV’s in order to not commit crimes, what can they do to make the criminals fear the CCTV’s? What deterrent should be in place to instill that fear?

But there is another elephant-sized problem they haven’t addressed. CCTV’s are indiscriminate in their observations; they see and hear whatever is in their paths irrespective of a person’s status as an ordinary citizen or a criminal.

So, what assurances can they possibly give to a population which is already under the watchful eye of tens of thousands of cameras that these new measures won’t further erode their freedoms? Would whatever is made to instill fear in the hearts of criminals through these CCTV’s would also instill fear in the hearts of ordinary citizens?

To give the CCTV’s more teeth than they currently have, New Scotland Yard is launching these new initiatives:

· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

The reasoning behind this increase in the centralization of information is clear enough. The local police is overwhelmed with criminal cases, and it is just too much effort to track down and ask for permission to share information from various authorities and jurisdictions. An integrated national system to share information, video images, etc. would make the jobs of the British police easier.

However, this kind of system is fraught with perils, and I’m afraid the power of this system would eventually or immediately devolve to the bureaucrats in Whitehall.

[Detective Chief Neville said] “We are also going to start putting out [pictures] on the internet, on the Met police website, asking ‘who is this guy?’. If criminals see that CCTV works they are less likely to commit crimes.”

Cheshire deputy chief constable Graham Gerrard, who chairs the CCTV working group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Guardian, that it made no sense to have a national DNA and fingerprint database, but to have to approach 43 separate forces for images of suspects and offenders. A scheme called the Facial Identification National Database (Find), which began collecting offenders’ images from their prison pictures and elsewhere, has been put on hold.

…

Asked about the development of a CCTV database, the office of the UK’s information commissioner, Richard Thomas, said: “CCTV can play an important role in helping to prevent and detect crime. However we would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are only used for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals. We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained as part of the initiative.”

When one of the primary safeguards against widespread governmental abuse has been to keep information decentralized in many different spheres of authority, what safeguards then can there be? Is any being currently proposed or is this nothing other than a vague genuflection toward civil liberties?

It should bear mentioning at this point that one of the primary arguments for the CCTV’s, especially the talking CCTV’s, was to discourage “anti-social behavior”, and since “anti-social behavior” can mean a number of different things to a number of different people, one can only conclude that the standard of judgment for what is “anti-social” is entirely subjective to the viewer who sits somewhere behind the nebulous glass lenses of the camera.

Will people demonstrating “anti-social behavior” be registered and cross-referenced and collated into Britain’s national image database of potential criminals? Also, when does the identification of “anti-social behavior” or undesirable behavior become the identification of undesirable people?

Such inferences and questions has led some to speculate whether Britain has just created an “Orwellian Infrastructure” for a future dictator to utilize.

And if this is so, what is to become of freedom in the British Isles. In twenty-five to fifty years, would they even recognize it as being lost?

I hadn’t heard about this curiosity in Islamic law until I browsed Michelle Malkin’s blog today.

Apparently, back in 2003, Malaysia’s courts decided that a divorce was valid if the husband text messaged his wife three simple sentences:

I divorce you.
I divorce you.
I divorce you.

Thank goodness our courts didn’t go the same route.

Saying “I divorce thee” three times, as men in Muslim countries have been able to do for centuries when leaving their wives, is not enough if you’re a resident of Maryland, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeals rejected a Pakistani man’s argument that his invocation of the Islamic talaq, under which a marriage is dissolved simply by the husband’s say-so, allowed him to part with his wife of more than 20 years and deny her a share of his $2 million estate.

It would be an understatement to call that the process of divorce in Muslim countries childish. It’s like some four year old closing his eyes and saying, “Abracadabra” three times and a magical bike would appear.

Increasingly, the Left’s version of freedom of speech is to deny others their freedom of speech. That is, “I have the perfect right to shut you up.” In other eras of our history, we would call this censorship when one forcibly silences unwanted opinions. Any rational person would see this as antithetical to freedom of speech where ideas are exchanged and debated in the marketplace of ideas.

Or as the pro-choice activist says to a cop in this video, “You’re going to arrest me for my freedom of speech?”

If he hasn’t forgotten, vandalism is against the law…

(hat tip: Michelle Malkin)

I’ve been tagged by the famous The Desert Glows Green.

Here are the rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?
I was just entering college as a freshman English Lit. student.

2) What are five things on your to-do list for today?
Work on organizing a board at work.
Make tuna salad.
Complete my math homework. (I’ve returned to college recently.)
Sleep.
Make sure I give my cat at least one round of play. (She gets lonely when I’m not playing with her.)

3) What snacks do I enjoy?
Jalapeño chips.
Beef jerky.
Vanilla ice cream.
Rice pudding.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire
Buy a large spread of approximately 30 acres out in New Mexico, Northern Arizona or Oregon near a small town.
Build a home with a interior courtyard that’s equipped with a library and comfortable chairs.
And… I don’t know. Maybe a car?

5) Three Bad Habits
I’m too intellectually lazy at times.
I don’t clean up after myself as often as others would like me to.
I talk too much when I get excited.

6) 5 places I have lived…
Houston, TX
Boston, MA
Los Angeles, CA
That’s it.

7) 5 Jobs I have had
World class coffee slinger.
Editorial assistant at a literary magazine.
Teaching remedial English for college students.
Furniture salesman.
Administrative work in the fashion industry.

7) Six suckers, er people I want to know more about…

I think I’ll refrain from tagging other blogs… for the moment

… if you’re son is deployed to Afghanistan, and you suddenly hear this? (WARNING: Graphic language and sounds)

Apparently, this soldier accidentally pressed the redial button on his cellphone when he was in the middle of a firefight with the Taliban. His family got to hear the details of the attack and was horrified when the call was cut off right after someone yelled, ” Incoming! RPG!”

It turns out that the soldier, whose name is Stephen Phillips, got out of the fight alive and well.

This incident was just yet another reminder that we are facing a tough and resilient enemy. Should we fail in our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamofascist disease come here. It is easy to blame President Bush and go along our merry way. It is not so easy, however, to blame him when we recognize that President Bush is the only man who stood and still stands in the way of this madness and our country.

Whatever you think of the man, he has been steadfast and immovable when everyone wanted him to retreat and withdraw, including the Republicans. He has capitulated on virtually everything in his second term as President… but not this.