Bill Whittle has a great essay that the supposed reality based community should take to heart. Excerpt:

I have a mental map of the world. So do you. So did Lenin, and al-Zarqawi, and Winston Churchill, and Attila, and Ronald Reagan. Everyone has an internal map of how the world works.

The problem is that we get rather fond of these maps. Some people get so fond of these maps that they do nothing but sit around in the dark depths of the chart room and compare maps. If they see something on another map that seems to agree, more or less, with what they have sketched out on their own, they feel vindicated. This is human nature. I do it, and you do it too.

People will sit in the chartroom, and argue about their maps, while the ship of history rips out her keel. But as the arguments rage hither and yon down in the chartroom, as maps and cartographers are bandied back and forth like trading cards and people come to blows over mapmakers dead a century or a millennium before, there does remain one small, unassuming little token of hope. Not much really -- just an action so simple and obvious that we overlook it time and time again. What can we do to end this arguing about which way to sail and on what map? How can we tell where the reefs and channels really are? Dear God, is there nothing we can do to get an answer among all these authorities?

Well, there is something we can do. We can get up from the chartroom of theory, this dungeon of pointless debate and argumentation, and go and stand on the bridge. We can look at the world as it really is, and draw new maps as we go on.

When you use your common sense, your personal experience, over any of the so-called "social theories" being sold at fire sale prices, you are looking out the window and seeing whether or not the map matches the coastline. If it does not, then it doesn't matter how credentialed or tenured or respected the cartographer is or was -- he is wrong. He says river delta; there sits a barrier reef. Wrong!

Read the whole thing, for it is good.

We miss you.

Taking down Zarqawi has already brought huge dividends as you can see from this tiny article that you probably won't hear about because the media is busy being useful idiots for CAIR over a video put out by a Marine which is about being ambushed by the brother and father of a girl who led him into the ambush and who ends up getting shot by her brother and father. Much investigation, teeth gnashing, and self-flagellation will be required and that will leave little time for reporting on the fruits of the labors of our military.

Amazing how outraged CAIR is over this fictionalized account inspired by another fictional piece, the move Team America World Police, yet I don't recall them expressing any outrage over the myriad Islamofascist snuff movies. Hypocritically they are trying to paint the Marines as a organization thirsting for the blood of civilians via this dark humor fictional video, when not that long ago they were taking pains to make sure that the real life beheading video of civilian Nick Berg didn't cast any negative light on supporters of Islamofascist terrorism. And the reliable useful idiots of MSM are only to happy to help.

update: Why you will no longer find Andrew Sullivan on my blogroll, exhibit a:

it seems more than a little dispiriting that a U.S. Marine is bragging that he can kill two unarmed little girls.

Actually, it seems a little dispiriting that someone as supposedly intelligent as Andrew Sullivan is so ready to believe such bile and would publish something like this without verifying the substance. Something he half-heartedly apologizes for today:

But even on this interpretation, this Marine's tale is of grabbing an innocent little girl as a human shield, and laughing maniacally as "blood sprayed between her eyes." And if you watch the video again, you'll see a broad smile flicker across the guy's face as he sings about the little girl's face being blown apart.

Honestly, who does this interpretation say more about? The Marine that thought the brother and father wouldn't shoot their own daughter, even though they just shot the other one for bringing home a Marine? Seems to say more about the terrorists that killed them so wantonly, which by the way, is the only example of civilians being killed in the video, but we all already know the value that Islamofascists place on those of the female gender. Or maybe it says the most about the likes of Sullivan who are quick to jump on any propaganda that makes our military and country look bad, regardless of context.

update: maybe everything would be ok if the singer weren't a dirty white boy. Watch the video with scrolling lyrics here, and if you are as pissed off about this namby pamby hand wringing and, even worse, railroading of an innocent Marine, use the contact information at the end of the video to express yourself.

update: more on the CAIR and their hypocrisy here, along with evidence that your pressure will make a difference in how the USMC is handling this.

and men - apparently the key demographic when investigating terrorism. Gee, what else could the terrorists have in common besides age and gender?

Why such tortured language in an attempt to obscure the obvious?

Al Gore's fictional movie is based on junk science. But we already knew that, right?

Excerpt:

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field...

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

Moonbats - RTWT. STFU. TIA.

Questioning the patriotism of the "loyal opposition?" Yeah, you could say that.

This film illustrates in crystal clear detail why the U.S. military needs to recruit very dumb, totally uneducated, and mostly southern cracker soldiers who are already racist bastards who have never left their hometowns and believe all the garbage they are taught in school about how we are the good guys, and everything we do is just and right. The Army can then brainwash them to treat other human beings in such a grotesque and inhuman manner. Anyone who had any previous education, intelligence or just plain decency, would never consent to treat people in the unbelievably harsh manner in which these prisoners, most of which were just swept up in raids and had nothing to do with he Taliban, were treated.

Let's not forget, though, that their intelligence is also very much in question:

You read that the suspects were not connected to al-Qaida, and you're confused for a moment. Maybe it won't be over if they get Osama bin Laden (provided he isn't really in an supersecret Idaho prison). What if the "terrorists" hate you for their own reasons? The evildoer-in-chief said "they hate our freedoms" -- as if we have freedoms, really, just try and get a bike-messenger job that has full health benefits. But what if rights and mixed-sex education and an economy based on sustainable hemp-based art installations mean nothing to them?

Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them. They are having a bad day, what with Zarqawi getting killed and taking Haditha off the front page for a minute or two and with the Canadians making a bust of a huge international terrorist ring with the help of US intelligence techniques that they so despise (in spite of their widespread use in the Socialist Utopias of Europe). Of course, these "alleged terrorists" who represent a broad strata of society are entitled to a presumption of innocence, unlike our Marines.

You remember this guy, right? The terrorist in Iraq who was there before the Iraq war even though there supposedly weren't any terrorists in Iraq until we drew them there by going to war? Well, one things is for sure - he isn't there now.

Forgive the loonie lefties who can't even be bothered to take note of this, they are busy mourning Juan Cole's rejection by Yale, who by God owes them for having accepted W. Funny to me is that Yale will take a confirmed member of the Taliban in, but Cole is too hard core even for them.

They are also busy raging with indignation at Ann Coulter for her just nasty words about 4 of the 9/11 widows and Cindy Sheehan. Funny, they didn't seem nearly as outraged when Ted Rall was engaging in the same behavior, and even worse behavior.

Anyway, it won't be long before the atypical alleged behavior of a few will again be used to overshadow the heroics of the many and smear the good name of a whole country, by those who are all the while lamenting the "barbaric" killing of another terrorist - you know, terrorists - the guys that have a policy of deliberately targeting women, children, civilians, whomever. The ones engaging in guerilla warfare and hiding in houses with women and children. Not Marines, terrorists. See the difference - one thinks they are legitimate targets, the other is investigated and prosecuted if and when this type of thing happens.

Oh, didn't have to wait too long - it's already starting.

But don't question their patriotism. They know the bad guy when they see him.

Update: Time for a quick litmus test.

Consider this statement from a Sunni intellectual in Iraq:

"Goddamn that motherfucker for what he has done to Iraq."

Is the subject of this statement George W. Bush or Abu al-Zarqawi?

If you suspect that this gentleman is speaking of Bush rather than Zarqawi, you are a barking moonbat. If you suspect this gentleman is speaking of Zarqawi, not only are you right, but you are not a moonbat.

(hat tip to INDC Journal)

From an editorial in the London Times entitled "The Wrong Target":

Terrorism, not America, is a real and present threat to our freedoms

Al-Haditha, a town on the Euphrates northwest of Baghdad, is still a place where fighters blend into the populace and literally use civilians as cover. Coalition forces may shoot only when threatened, ground rules that call for exemplary discipline and courage in conditions where their observance increases the risk of injury or death.

That should be acknowledged in the context of what appears to have been an appalling collapse of US military discipline in al-Haditha, where 24 Iraqi civilians were allegedly murdered by a company of US Marines after a member of their patrol was killed and two were injured by a roadside bomb. America's determination to demonstrate zero tolerance of such crimes should also be acknowledged; they in no way reflect US policy, or typify the conduct of American forces. Al-Haditha must not be made the subplot of a spurious morality play whose demon king is not terrorism, but the use and alleged abuse of US power.

America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since Ronald Reagan accurately described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire". Anti-Americanism is not confined to the usual radical chic suspects of the Left; in Britain, it infects the High Tory Establishment, "good Europeans" and little Englanders alike. So why are we all anti-Americans now?

American stumbling on the rough road since 2001 has played some part. Yet had there, inconceivably, been no wrong steps, had America been positively obsequious in courting international support (and it has done more on that score than its critics admit), anti-Americanism would still be on the rise. The US is never less popular than when it is aroused and determined in defence of democratic freedoms, never less trusted than when the world is most reliant on its unmatched ability to project power.

Democracies are psychologically ill-adapted to open-ended confrontations where there can be no decisive victory, the essence of the effort to subdue global terrorism. Eternal vigilance is a wearisome business. The more vulnerable that Europeans feel, the more liable they are to shift blame across the Atlantic.

The strength of disdain is a measure of Europe's weakness. Smugness is one of Europe's great contemporary exports. We may all think that we know America, its music, its culture, its self-confident exceptionalism. We tend to forget that Americans fight only with extreme reluctance. We overlook their penchant for agonised self-criticism; everything bad we know about the US, we know because Americans inexhaustibly rehearse their society's shortcomings. There has never been greater transparency, whether than on the battlefield or the boondocks, and there has never been more open debate about the country’s virtues and vices — the internet has transformed the quantity and, at times, the quality of the conversation.

Better than most, Muslims understand why Islamist terrorism is war at its unholiest, an existential threat to societies. Iraqis may resent occupation, but they fear a weakening of US resolve. Their fears should be ours. Were it to become politically impossible for a president to keep America’s forces engaged from its shores, then the backbone of international security would be broken. America-bashing may be a popular sport, but its adherents prefer not to contemplate its consequences.