Something lighter.

Via Goldberg

Dogs Welcoming Home Soldiers

And then Bill Whittle A Message For All of America's Veterans

Sad. Expensive. And frightening.

How are things going in the United Kingdom?

Well... Roger Kimball has the story:

Every phone call. Every email. Every text message. Every web site visited. I land at Heathrow and discover that Big Brother in England will be recording it all: the entire electronic career of every private citizen will salted away for a year in a gigantic database and “available for monitoring by government bodies.” Six-hundred and fifty-three government bodies, to be precise, including the police and local council authorities. They will not need a warrant from a judge but only the authorisation of a “senior” police officer or equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority to rifle through who you’ve talked to when about what. This is more or less the equivalent of a hall pass in your local high school. Adding insult to injury, the British taxpayers are going to be forced to fork over some £2 billion to spy on themselves.
...

29 percent of the British people are in favor of this preposterous scheme. But the Home Office insists that it will push it through anyway. In this post-democratic era, what does the will of the people mean when put up against the inclinations of political bureaucrats?

Despite how much it's revilved, expect it to pass. After all, what would the public do? Protest, refuse to comply? Vote the bums out?

I have been quoting this observation of David Hume frequently of late: seldom is freedom lost all at once. Here in England we have another example of how it oozes away. Sad. Expensive. And frightening.

And that's why, their liberty has been nibbled away bit by bit. So what's another bit?

It's come to this

Roger L. Simon talked about how Political Correctness kills.

Tip of the iceberg.

Why did the Feds drop their investigation of Hassan?

He wasn't "likely to be violent."

Wonderful. That worked out so well.

Though even if he wasn't voilent, that doesn't excuse him contacting the enemy.

Ace shows just how clueless some people are

Chris Matthews: "It's not a crime to call Al Qaeda, is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?" Matthews spins on behalf of his wannabe-boyfriend Obama and the incompetents in the federal government.

Funny, seems to me that after 9/11, National Security Concern Trolls like Chris Matthews were pretty sure we should have rolled up the Mohammad Atta cell based upon pilot-training inquiries.

But now we have a guy in the army calling Al Qaeda on the phone and Chris Matthews is generally perplexed as to what we could have possibly have done to stop this.

Um, in any security position, having or attempting to have communications with the enemy is a crime, or at least a cashiering-level offense, if it's not reported immediately.

Meanwhile how does our president respond?


Well on Saturday he said this:

“Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

Lovely. He tells us not to "jump to conclusions" about Hassan but those that disagree with his political plans...

Glen Reynolds has more.

Best of hands.

And what made Hassan's count so high? “Packed into cubicles with 5-foot-high dividers, the 300 unarmed soldiers were sitting ducks.”

Because "An Army base is no place for weapons.”

Safety Deposit?

Not so safe in the United Kingdom.

In the UK the police can break into a safety deposit boxes if they feel that there's enough criminal use. And not just the boxes they've confirmed to be used or owned by criminals. Nope, all of them.

However, by talking to scores of box-holders, none of whom have spoken before, Live has uncovered a different version of Operation Rize, one that shows how the vast majority of those caught up in the raids were innocent. They have had their lives turned upside down over the past 17 months. Many have struggled to recoup their money and possessions, been forced into legal trench warfare with police lawyers and told they must prove how they came by the contents of their boxes.

In the eyes of the UK, it's your fault for keeping cash and valuables in a facility criminals also happen to use. And you'll be guilty until you can prove otherwise.

Charming.

Quarantine

Via Instapundit, Breitbart has a clip on what the Whitehouse is trying to do...



National Review has a bit more on the subject.

It's not science when physical evidence is a problem.

The global warming lobby is in a spot of trouble.

The global warming alarmists have a problem: They've claimed for 15 years that there is simply no natural mechanism that could possibly explain a one degree change in global temperatures, so all warming must be man-made.

Now that we have a period of cooling, they're claiming there is a natural mechanism big enough to both cool the earth from its 1998 high and also wipe out the "expected" additional warming that should have occurred since then. (The big cooling year of 2007 wiped out over a degree Farenheit of global warming -- in fact, it erased most of the warming that occurred this whole century.)

So -- um, what? There is no natural mechanism to explain a degree of warming, but there's a big-ass natural mechanism you now concede to conveniently explain away the cooling? Couldn't the 1975-1998 "warming" be explained as simply as the diminishment of the 1940-1975 cooling phase? If a cooling force abates, does not the earth warm?

Ponder that. These people have a problem squaring that's happening in the real world with their pet theories.

And here's more thoughts on being wrong.

According to the BBC, the world has been cooling since 1998, although some claim the warming is only in hiatus. What do we make of that? The issue has been so politicized that it is hard to find rational scientific judgement. For someone like Gore – a non-scientist – to be so adamant about it feels almost off-putting. It makes me want to believe in global warming less. He’s the exact wrong person to be delivering this kind of message, especially since there are scientists who write well (many better than Gore). But his narcissism and greed have placed Al out front.

The Rule of Three

Third time's a....

Back when I did computer tech support, we had a rule of thumb for evaluating the significance of reports of unusual and previously unreported failures .

*One report of a failure is a fluke.

*Two reports of a failure is a coincidence. It might just be two users making the same error.

*Three reports indicates a pattern of failure that arises from the hardware or software itself.

This rule of thumb evolved after observing the failures of millions of computers. We learned that three separate computers would only suffer the same failure if the failure arose from a common source in the computers themselves. Just three machines out of millions told us we most likely had a systemic problem.

Hmmmm....

And similarly with ACORN. Once is a fluke, can happen with any large organization, twice coincidence but...

Three identical reports of the same failure from three separate offices indicates the criminality arises from the organization itself. It is highly unlikely that, out of the hundreds of Acorn offices around the nation, the journalist just happened to wander into the three offices whose managers wouldn’t blink an eye at helping to set up a brothel using children.

This degree of organizational systemic rot has to come from the head. I think that much is obvious. Something in Acorn’s organizational culture made these people feel that it was okay and expected for them to give the criminal advice that they did. Certainly, if Acorn had been a private for-profit company, three separate and wholly unrelated incidents would have been enough for leftists to demand the heads of the corporate officers.

The really disturbing part is how in all three cases the managers of the Acorn offices don’t even bat an eye when the journalist asks about setting up a brothel. Further, they seem to have the logistics and legal tangles of using a brothel to fund a political career already well thought out. I don’t know about you, but if someone ask me how to run a brothel using minors and how to funnel that money into the a political campaign, I would have to stop and think about it for while. The fact that they have the answers already queued up and ready to go tells us one thing…

The emphasis here is that it's the same failure. The same response to a given stimulus. That makes it extremely hard to say "it's all a coincidence".

The really disturbing part is how in all three cases the managers of the Acorn offices don’t even bat an eye when the journalist asks about setting up a brothel. Further, they seem to have the logistics and legal tangles of using a brothel to fund a political career already well thought out. I don’t know about you, but if someone ask me how to run a brothel using minors and how to funnel that money into the a political campaign, I would have to stop and think about it for while. The fact that they have the answers already queued up and ready to go tells us one thing…

They knew how to do this; they had plans on how to do this. Not just one office, but many offices. They were not surprised when a pimp came to them for advice.

But this is what I really don’t understand:

This systemic criminality is an act of treason against both Acorn’s supporters and the people they were supposed to help! There is no other word for this level of betrayal. Honestly, what greater crime could an organization commit against the sensibilities and trust of leftists than to support criminal activities that degrade the communities of our nation’s most poor and helpless? What greater sin is there in the leftists’ lexicon than the literal sexual enslavement of children?

Where is the blind rage from the left? Why aren’t they mobbing the offices of Acorn and dragging the corporate officers out into the street? How bad do things have to become within a leftist organization before the rest of the left says, “Enough! You are no longer part of us!” How long will it take for the left to cast Acorn from the fold? How long before they stop making excuses and condemning those who brought this evil to light and instead clean their own house?

Remember this the next time someone says how inherently heartless the Right is and how inherently moral the Left is.

Remember.

Remember that it took two outsiders to do this undercover operation, and when they broke the story it was still ignored by the Mass media. They did not want to do this story and when it came out they did their best to ignore it; they're still trying to ignore it.

What do you call a news organization that concentrates less on reporting the news and more on keeping unpleasant facts from emerging?

Oh look, it's up to four now.