Mark Bossingham

Jack shoots Curtis

FOR GOD'S sake, I started watching the DVD of Season Six of 24 last night after Thanksgiving Dinner. We got to episode four when things went all to hell. The last time I wasn't able to finish watching a season was Season Three when Jack shot Ryan in the head as demanded by a terrorist. While I wasn't going to cut him any slack for executing his own guy, a case could be made that he was saving lives: the terrorist was certain to kill a lot of people if he Jack didn't kill Ryan.
    This time no such case could be made. Jack shot good-guy Curtis because was about to kill a terrorist, who according to the script had killed thousands of innocents over a 20 year career. They even provided us with a graphic description of they guy's handiwork--the beheading of two special forces soldiers under Curtis' command. So Curtis' has a reasonable grudge and is going to act on it. But the president (David Palmer's younger brother, Wayne) has cut a deal with the terrorist honcho.
    So when Curtis threatens the terrorist, Jacks murders Curtis, with a ridiculously well-aimed shot to the throat. The entire incident didn't advance the plot a bit. Just an idiotic bit of TV pornography tossed in by the show's producers for shock value. The problem is that Jack is a the two-time murderer.
    It's fine when Jack boosts the bad-guy body count, but his killing of his own guys is offensive.
    Another problem with Season Six is politics. For the first five seasons, the writers pretty much ignored the subject. Not this time. Sure to be a main character, is a shrieking ACLU harpie. She is President Wayne Palmer's sister. Who knew he had a sister? Did I miss her? The Palmer family has been around since the jump. Where did this one come from?
    I will finish watching the show this time because it was an early Xmas present, but just as last year's season was easily the best, this one promises to be the worst.

Enviro-fascists murder African children

IN APRIL 1972, after seven months of testimony, EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney stated that “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. ... The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. ... The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.”
    Two months later, EPA head [and Environmental Defense Fund member/fundraiser] William Ruckelshaus - who had never attended a single day’s session in the seven months of EPA hearings, and who admittedly had not even read the transcript of the hearings - overturned Judge Sweeney’s decision. Ruckelshaus declared that DDT was a “potential human carcinogen” and baanned it for virtually all uses.
    Since Ruckelshaus arbitrarily and capriciously banned DDT, an estimated cases 14,163,947,500 (and counting) of malaria have caused immense suffering and poverty in the developing world.--from JunkScience.com.

    These are real dead children we are talking about here. And don't even start in with your let 'em eat cake--excuse me--mosquito nets. Their deaths are on your hands. And now, after murdering literally millions, you expect thinking human beings to convert to your global warmist religion? History remembers the millions lost to Stalin in the Soviet Union; the millions starved by Mao. History will remember you, too.

Today's "scary" AP story

THE SOBS at The Associated Press are at it again. Even a cursory reading of this story shows how desperately misleading the lead and headline are. I suppose we can expect to see this as a front page, 48-pointer at the Japan Times, a newspaper that has lost all touch with reality and really needs some adult supervision.

"Army desertion rate up 80 pct. since '03"

WASHINGTON - Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

Holy shit, Sarge! They must be abandoning their posts in fucking droves. An 80 percent increase indeed! ... all the way up to an astronomical rate of 0.9 percent.

Maybe not a bad time to explain the difference between AWOL (Away Without Leave) and desertion. A member of the military is AWOL if he is away from his command without permission up to 30 days. He may be classified as a deserter on day 30.

The Deep End

I LINKED to this column of mine months? years? ago. But I like it and it has probably vanished from the Asahi site by now. So here it is, preserved from company Webmasters:

It was a warm September day in Kyoto. The horrid summer sun that had baked the valley and turned thousands of tatami-clad apartments into hellholes was on the move—there were others to torment, elsewhere.

    The teacher smiled and checked her watch as she watched her Nihongonauts splashing happily in the total immersion pool. As always, she tried to look stern, but her kindness gave her away—as always. She drifted away for a moment. Lamenting the losses, the teacher assured herself that she had done everything possible, that she had done the best she could. No one could see how the casualties wounded her. She wouldn’t let them.

    One of her colleagues touched her on the sleeve. She blinked once, feeling the warmth of the concrete beneath her bare feet. He was pointing at the German Guy. He moved rapidly through the water like a machine. She looked away, finding his tiny Euro swimsuit distasteful, his arrogant precision simply dull. Yet, she admitted, he was by far the most accomplished student in class.

    She preferred the Korean Girl. She circled the pool, beautiful in a vermilion suit. Her technique was enchanting. She had embraced the breaststroke. Somewhat of an anachronism, it gave her a courtly grace. She caused barely a ripple in the water, as if she feared even the slightest wave would call attention to her and be seen as rude. Her classmates smiled with affection as she slipped past. She whispered encouragement to everyone.

    The teacher shook her head and laughed as the Malaysian Hottie in a silver bikini performed her splashy backstroke. The immersion pool was her stage and she was a star. She was unable to keep pace with the German, but she had an easy, at times carefree charisma that kept her classmates amused and—whoops, there was a bit of that carelessness in action—she rammed the German. He grunted and powered ahead; she laughed knowing it was the last day and all mistakes would be forgiven.

    The teacher glanced at her watch. Only seven minutes to go and they could all climb out of the pool. She’d shoved the lot of them in six months before and all but two had survived. The victims had made it through the hiragana and katakana, but had wiped out on the kanji.
A laugh, and then another, rang out. The Chinese—the biggest group of students—were dog-paddling their way around the pool in a happy bunch. All had taken to kanji like ducks to water. But the katakana had gotten up their noses. They had found themselves battling a riptide of mangled English words.

    Two minutes left, and for Big Walt, the American, the end couldn’t come too soon. The size of three little salarymen or two larger ones, he was clinging to the edge of the pool counting down the seconds until graduation.

    The teacher knew Big Walt was no dummy. He was a computer programming genius, but as soon as she’d tossed him into the pool he’d clammed up. His voice was so soft; she wasn’t ever really sure what he was saying. Once in a while she’d been able to coax him into deeper water but not often. His only consolation was that he wasn’t the worst swimmer in the immersion pool. That soggy honor belonged to the other American.

    The teacher looked around for her last remaining student. He talked too much to ever really learn what she had to teach. She liked him anyway. He was funny and had a knack of keeping the best swimmers from intimidating the others.

    Counterintuitively, if not surprising, he could say pretty much anything he wanted. But when the pool spoke in return, he was completely out of his depth. The ability to ask a question was of little value if you couldn’t understand the answer.

    At last the teacher spotted her 71 percent, barely-passed-the-course American. She leaped into the water. He was unmoving, sinking to the bottom. A strong swimmer—it was her pool after all—she grabbed him by his baggy surfer trunks and dragged him up from the depths. Other teachers pulled him out of the water.

    “He’s not breathing,” Big Walt said, the emergency elevating his voice into the audible range. “Somebody do something.” He pulled himself out of the pool and began pounding on his friend’s chest.

    “Stop!” the teacher shouted, “You’ll beat him to death.”

    She knelt next to her most incoherent student and gently pried his language-challenged jaws open. Her lips touched his. His eyes flew open. He winked—he laughed—he said: “Finally”—all in perfect Japanese.

Hollywood a casualty of war

IT PLEASES me no end that Hollywood’s attempts at “educating” the masses have failed miserably. The linked article is replete with lame excuses to explain why no one is paying to see these anti-war movies, leaving out the obvious: The average movie-goer is better-informed about what’s going on in Iraq and the world than idiots  like Brian De Palma. The only people who are interested in watching movies that portray U.S. soldiers, Marines, CIA and FBI agents as fools, tools and criminals are elitist baby-boomers, their spawn and the witless reviewers at my newspaper. I guarantee WE will give "Redacted" numerous thumbs up.
Due to their monolithic reading and viewing habits, these morons still haven’t realized that the battles are all but won in Iraq. Sure, the place is a mess, but what Middle Eastern country isn’t. Sure, the Iraqi legislature is having trouble passing key legislature, but their record is still better than that of the current Democrat-controlled Congress in the United States.
This spate of drivel from Hollywood seems a last gasp attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by limousine liberals and their enablers in the press.
And are they not cynical? Hollywood producers know that only a handful of Americans are going to pay to see a movie about U.S. soldiers murdering an Iraqi girl, but it will play big in Venezuela, Germany and with the British chattering classes.
I repeat: Are you war weary? And if so why? Has your Starbucks cup gotten heavier? Feet hurt from prowling for a cute pair of shoes at the mall?

"Rendition," a drama starring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal about the CIA's policy of outsourcing interrogation of terror suspects, has taken just under 10 million dollars at the box office, a disastrous return.
Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis's latest film "In the Valley of Elah," about a father investigating the death of his son in Iraq, earned favorable reviews but less than seven million dollars following its release in September.
Even the action-packed "The Kingdom," starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, fell well below its 70 million budget with around 47 million dollars in ticket sales.
The poor returns do not augur well for more war films due for release in North America later this month, notably the Robert Redford-directed drama "Lions for Lambs" and Brian De Palma's hard-hitting "Redacted," based on the real-life rape and murder of an Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers.

FBI doublespeak

COULD SOMEONE please explain what the hell this means. I realize the Feds are always in full CYA mode, and maybe if you are a government gnome you really can have it both ways.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 (AP)—An FBI report warned al-Qaida may be planning to strike shopping malls in Chicago and Los Angeles during the Christmas season, but a bureau official said Thursday there was no information it was a credible threat, Reuters reported.
The document, called an intelligence information report, was intended for law enforcement and the intelligence community, Reuters quoted FBI spokesman Richard Kolko as saying.

Al Qaida is toast in Iraq

I THINK Iraq is still a huge mess, but the security situation is vastly improved. Most importantly Al Qaida has been (as long as the Democrats don’t come in and promptly abandon the Iraqis “for the children” or whatever) defeated. That is huge and goes a long way to restoring U.S. credibility in the region. Here’s a story from AP that must have been literally painful for them to write. Note the absence of a “ yeah, but” in the lead.

BAGHDAD - In a dramatic turnaround, more than 3,000 Iraqi families driven out of their Baghdad neighborhoods have returned to their homes in the past three months as sectarian violence has dropped, the government said Saturday.

It's the economy, idiots II

HERE’S A bunch of facts, as opposed to those “feelings” liberals so dearly love:

Bureau of Labor Statistics released new jobs figures – 166,000 jobs created in October.  Since August 2003, 8.31 million jobs have been created, with 1.68 million jobs created over the 12 months that ended in October.  Our economy has now added jobs for 50 straight months – the longest period of uninterrupted job growth on record. The unemployment rate remains low at 4.7 percent.
        •        Real GDP grew at a strong 3.9 percent in the third quarter of 2007.  The economy has now experienced six years of uninterrupted growth, averaging 2.8 percent a year since 2001.
        •        Real after-tax per capita personal income has risen by 12.7 percent – an average of over $3,800 per person – since President Bush took office.
        •        Real wages rose 1.2 percent over the 12 months that ended in September.  This rise is faster than the average rate during the 1990s.
        •        Since the first quarter of 2001, productivity growth has averaged 2.6 percent per year.  This growth is well above average productivity growth in the 1990s, 1980s, and 1970s.
        •        The deficit today is at 1.2 percent of GDP, well below the 40-year average.  Economic growth contributed to a 6.7 percent rise in tax receipts in FY 2007, following an increase of 11.8 percent in FY 2006.

M's refuse option on Guillen

I LIKE Jose Guillen but basically, they don’t have the luxury, with one of the worst starting rotations in baseball:
The Mariners on Friday officially declined to exercise their 2008 option on the contract of Jose Guillen, bringing the outfielder one step closer to free agency.The Mariners had five days after the conclusion of the World Series to pick up their $9 million option, and now owe Guillen a $500,000 buyout.

Rumor also has it that the Angels are considering taking it in the shorts from Scott Boras and signing A-Rod. Contrary to what some believe, this if it comes to pass can only help the Mariners.

It's the economy, idiots

THE U.S. economy grew by 3.9 percent for the second quarter this year, the highest number in four years. The first quarter was 3.8 percent. Inflation is down, unemployment as well. Yet, the idiots, while admitting their personal economic situation is good or excellent, inexplicably insist we are either in a recession or soon will be. Idiots. Go live in Old Europe and enjoy their suicidal demographics and nonexistent growth rates.