Our broken immigration system

US Musical tours by British musician are being cancelled due to immigration visa problems, reports the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, foreign music acts need a "P-1" class visa to get in the US. To get such a visa, the musicians must prove to a US bureaucrat "that they have been 'internationally recognized' for a 'sustained and substantial' amount of time." This is not easy for new and trendy acts. British pop star Lily Allen failed to achieve P-1 status and was therefore denied a visa to perform at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Ms. Allen's mistake was that she tried to apply legally. If she had just crossed the border illegally undocumented, Pres. Bush and others in Washington would want to offer her not merely a travel visa but full citizenship.

Previous leftist-terrorist alliances

The Wall Street Journal reports on ties in the 1980s between the East German secret police (Stasi) and terrorism in the West:

The Stasi sympathized with the anti-capitalist ideals of the Red Army Faction, but Stasi leaders were concerned about placing their trust in a group of uncontrollable leftist militants, a review of Stasi records shows. Stasi officials did not want to tarnish East Germany's international reputation, so they toyed with different concepts for cooperation with terrorist groups, according to a prosecutor who has investigated Stasi involvement with terrorism.

One suggestion, contained in a document prepared for new officers assigned to the unit, was to emulate Romanian intelligence, which successfully worked with the terrorist "Carlos" to bomb the Radio Free Europe office in Munich, Germany, in 1981. To assist in such operations, the [Stasi's] Wartin unit developed highly specialized explosives, poisons and miniature firearms.

About 1980 the Stasi also proposed a second strategy: instead of using a terrorist group directly -- such cooperation always contained risk of discovery -- they could simply execute attacks so similar to those of known terrorists that police would never look for a second set of suspects, according to Wartin records. The Wartin leadership called this strategy the "perpetrator principle," according to Stasi records. The unit's progress in implementing the steps to imitate terrorist attacks is described in a series of progress reports by Wartin officials between 1980 and 1987.

In September 1981, Red Army Faction terrorists attempted to kill U.S. Gen. James Kroesen in Heidelberg, Germany, shooting a bazooka at his car. About the same time, members of the same Red Army Faction team visited East Germany, where they were asked by the Stasi to shoot a bazooka at a car containing a dog. The dog died, according to court records.

In Wartin, officials wrote up a detailed description of the Red Army Faction members' re-enactment of the Kroesen attack. "It is important to collect all accessible information about the terrorist scene in imperialist countries, to study and analyze their equipment, methods and tactics, so we can do it ourselves," a senior Wartin official wrote in February 1982, according to the report.

German prosecutors suspect that the Stasi succeeded in carrying out assassinations in the West, possibly including the Nov. 1989 assassination of Mr. Herrhausen, the chairman of one of Europe's most powerful companies, Deutsche Bank, while laying blame on other terror groups.

It is fortunate for us that Al Qaeda terror operations, so far anyway, lack the sophistication of the Stasi.

Who wants to be the last to die for a regulation?

There is an interesting letter to the Wall Street Journal today on the subject of auto gas mileage regulations, known as corporate average fuel economy standard (CAFE):

Higher government fuel economy standards for vehicles aren't only a royal waste of money, they're also a killer regulation -- literally. Current CAFE standards increase traffic deaths by restricting the production of larger, more crash-worthy cars; according to a 2002 National Research Council study, CAFE contributes to about 2,000 deaths per year. This toll will get even worse if these standards are made more stringent. But while proponents drone on endlessly about how raising CAFE would reinvigorate the auto industry and save the planet, they never once mention the fact that it would make driving more dangerous. In short, CAFE is a blood-for-oil regulatory war, waged on civilians.

Sam Kazman
General Counsel
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington

If Mr. Kazman's statistic is true, then far more Americans are dying each year from CAFE than from fighting in the Iraq war.

Climate disaster predicted

Under the heading of environmental news, Reuters reports that disaster is coming:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global warming could send world agriculture into serious decline by 2080 with productivity collapsing in some developing countries while it improves in a few rich nations, a study reported on Wednesday.

So, what climate expertise is behind this study? The next paragraph reveals:

India, Pakistan, most of Africa and most of Latin America would be hit hardest, said economist William Cline, the study's author.

So, the study's author, Dr. William Cline of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, is not a climate scientist or any other kind of hard scientist: he is an economist.

Liars vs. the perfect world

A Wall Street Journal editorial comments on the lowered state of political debate in the US:

Important as was yesterday's appearance before Congress by General David Petraeus, the events leading up to his testimony may have been more significant. Members of the Democratic leadership and their supporters have now normalized the practice of accusing their opponents of lying. If other members of the Democratic Party don't move quickly to repudiate this turn, the ability of the U.S. political system to function will be impaired in a way no one would wish for.

Well, with one exception. MoveOn.org, the Democratic activist group, bought space in the New York Times yesterday to accuse General Petraeus of "cooking the books for the White House." The ad transmutes the general's name into "General Betray Us."

"Betrayal," as every military officer knows, is a word that through the history of their profession bears the stain of acts that are both dishonorable and unforgivable. That is to say, MoveOn.org didn't stumble upon this word; it was chosen with specific intent, to convey the most serious accusation possible against General Petraeus, that his word is false, that he is a liar and that he is willing to betray his country. The next and obvious word to which this equation with betrayal leads is treason. That it is merely insinuated makes it worse.

....

In an editorial on Sunday, the New York Times, after saying that President Bush "isn't looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public," asserted that "General Petraeus has his own credibility problems." We read this as an elision from George Bush, the oft-accused liar on WMD and all the rest, to David Petraeus, also a liar merely for serving in the chain of command. With this editorial, the Times establishes that the party line is no longer just "Bush lied," but anyone who says anything good about Iraq or our effort there is also lying. As such, the Times enables and ratifies MoveOn.org's rhetoric as common usage for Democrats.

....

Can this really be the new standard of political rhetoric across the Democratic Party? There was a time when the party's institutional elites, such as the Times, would have pulled it back from reducing politics to all or nothing. They would have blown the whistle on such accusations. Now they are leading the charge.

Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy.

I disagree with the WSJ to the extent that they claim this is something new: Liberals have always maintained that their answer is the only possible answer and those who disagree must do so for sinister reasons. A part of their philosophy is that the world is perfectible. If you believe that the world is perfectible, it follows that questions have only one correct answer (and that would be, obviously, the liberal answer). This also explains their extreme frustration with current events: they believe that the world would be perfect if only Republicans stopped disagreeing with them.

NY Times attempts to deny the obvious

While the following sentence is from a nominal "news" story in the New York Times, it is hard to imagine how it could spin any faster:

When Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, suggested the war was not integral to the anti-terror effort since members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, sometimes called Al Qaeda in Iraq, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led, is not part of the Qaeda network behind the Sept. 11 attacks, the general offered a quick retort.

Hat Tip: BotW.

Art or Science?

James Taranto notes that even news organizations will admit the obvious every once in a while:

'More Art Than Science'
So a couple of weeks ago we were in New Orleans, on the precise anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall two years ago. And the weather wasn't bad. What happened? Isn't it hurricane season? And weren't hurricanes supposed to get even worse courtesy of "global warming"? It didn't quite work out that way, as Bloomberg reports:

Hurricane researchers, who forecast seven more storms this season, have flubbed the past two annual estimates because of unusual El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The predictions reflect variables that make this kind of weather forecasting "more art than science," said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Two of the nine Atlantic hurricanes predicted already have occurred for the season that ends Nov 30. Last year, five storms emerged after nine were anticipated.

Remember that: Weather forecasting is "more art than science." Except of course when the forecasters want to dismantle our entire industrial economy. Then it's settled science that no one may even question.

Peace protestor confesses to murder

The AP reports:

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - A U.S. citizen has confessed to using an axe to kill a Dutch student after failing to find a soldier to attack, his lawyer said Tuesday. ....

[Defence lawyer Peter] Gremmen said [suspect] Hartmann wanted to punish the Netherlands for its support of the war in Iraq....

"He hates soldiers, and says that the army kills people, so it would be legitimate if he were also to kill someone . . . from the American military - or from its NATO allies," Gremmen said in a telephone interview.

When he failed to find a soldier at the Roosendaal train station, "he got such a crazy, disturbed idea that he killed a civilian," Gremmen said.

Previous posts on violent anti-war protesters are here and here.

UPDATE (July 2008): Hartmann has been sentenced to 15-years for this murder.

What was Hsu's agenda?

Sen. Clinton's campaign has decided to return $850,000 in donations associated with Norman Hsu. While Mr. Hsu has some interesting associates, we still don't have answers to the key questions: where was his money coming from and what was he expecting his contributions to buy? The importance of these questions is illustrated by what we know now about the similar prior scandals. As John Fund writes, the head of Chinese military intelligence provided funding in 1996 for the purpose of influencing the election in the favor of Democrats:

A 1998 Senate Government Affairs Committee report on the scandal found "strong circumstantial evidence" that a great deal of foreign money had illegally entered the country in an attempt to influence the 1996 election. Johnny Chung, a bagman for the Asian billionaire Riady family, confessed that at least $35,000 of his donations to the Clinton campaign and the DNC had come from a Chinese aerospace executive--a lieutenant colonel in the Chinese military who he said helped Mr. Chung meet three times with General Ji Shengde, the head of Chinese military intelligence. Mr. Chung testified that Gen. Shengde had told him, "We like your president very much. We would like to see him re-elected. I will give you $300,000 U.S.. You can give it to the president and the Democratic Party."

Norman Hsu's agenda remains unknown.

Politically incorrect science

Computer image analysis has new life to a once discredited discipline: phrenology. Examination of the shape of a child's face allows quite accurate, or so it is claimed by Prof. Peter Hammond and his colleagues, diagnosis of a variety of genetic disorders. For example, a face that is narrow at the temples with a short upturned nose, an upturned mouth, and a small jaw indicates Williams Syndrome.

San Francisco liberals drive blacks from the city

USA Today reports:

African-Americans are abandoning this famously progressive city at a rate that has alarmed San Francisco officials, who vow to stop the exodus and develop a strategy to win blacks back to the city. In June, Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed a task force to study how to reverse decades of policies — and neglect — that black leaders say have fueled the flight. ...

According to Census estimates, the number of blacks here shrank from 13.4% of the population in 1970 to just 6.5% in 2005 — the biggest percentage decline in any major American city.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is not that San Francisco's policies are anti-black. Rather it is that they are anti-poor and and anti-lower-middle-class. San Francisco's minimum wage, $9.14/hour, is the highest in the nation. Its apartments are subject to rent control. As a consequence, few jobs are available for low-skilled labor and living space is hard to find. These liberal policies, which nominally are intended to help the poor, always seem to have "unintended" consequences.

Is he or isn't he?

Last week's bin Laden video, the first since 2004, would seem to provide strong evidence that bin Laden is still alive. Some factors, though, raise doubts. For one he is wearing the same clothes and sitting in front of the same background as the 2004 video. The new video has long periods of bin Laden speaking while the video only shows a still picture. further, the reference to current events is entirely or mostly when the still image is shown. This is all consistent with the video being outtakes from some old recording, processed, of course, as is easy these days, to make his beard appear darker.

Also, adding doubt, the video's talking points, adopted from the Democratic party, sound more like they were written by an American, say Adam Gadahn, than the bin Laden of old.

The principal evidence that bin Laden is still alive is then the scratchy low-quality audio that accompanies the video and seems to mention current events. A commenter at HotAir wonders, since fathers and sons often sound strikingly alike, if the voice could be from an adult son of bin Laden.

On the other hand, creating doubts about whether bin Laden is alive or not might be part of an al Qaeda's security strategy: A fake tape would not produce clues as to Osama's actual whereabouts while a real tape might.

UPDATE: According to the AP, the newest bin Laden video, released today Sep 11, 2007, uses the same trick: bin Laden speaks on the audio track but the video shows only a still image.

Liberal logic of group identity

If the accuser is a poor black female and the accused are well-to-do white males, then, by liberal logic, the accused are guilty until proven innocent. Analogous logic appeared to have been applied in a case in the UK involving gay foster parents. The gay couple in this case, Ian Wathey and Craig Faunch, have been convicted of repeatedly abusing four boys put in their care. They were able to do this even after a social worker had been given photographic evidence that abuse was occurring. According to a recently released report, the social workers refused to take the allegations seriously for fear of being considered "homophobic." In other words, because the accused were gay and therefore members of a "victim" group, they were considered automatically innocent.

The couple was arrested only after an unidentified woman bypassed the social workers who were in charge of the children's welfare and took her accusation directly to the police. Fortunately, the UK police don't try to follow the same rules of political correctness as the social services do.

A generalization is a common pattern discerned from a few examples. Liberal logic works in the opposite direction: it assumes that individual cases, such as Duke rape case and UK gay foster parents case, must obey their generalizations. Merely questioning the generalization opens one for accusations of racism or homophobia. There is a word for assuming that individual cases must obey the generalization and that word is prejudice: Political correctness is prejudice.

Who was it who does not want peace?

"Israel in fact does not want peace. It cannot survive without aggression, treachery and military messages," Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal said Thursday, a day after IAF aircraft allegedly violated Syrian airspace in an overnight operation.

Psychological projection?

UPDATE: Israellycool catches Reuters' caption writers in a lie about this incident.

Kathleen Willey's house burglarized, manuscript is missing

Kathleen Willey was the Democratic campaign volunteer who went to the oval office to plead that she needed a job. Allegedly, Bill Clinton offered her something else. She says that her house was burglarized over the weekend. The burglars left behind all the jewelry and electronics but they took a copy, but not the final copy, of a manuscript for her upcoming book.

Those talking points need to be double-checked

Mark Bellis performed a study on life expectancy of rock stars which found that rock stars do tend to die young. From the Reuters story:

American stars Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys and Johnny Ramone of the Ramones all died in their 50s.

Bellis suggested that the high death rate among older American musicians could be related to the continent's greater appetite for reunion tours, exposing the artists for more years to an unhealthy "rock'n'roll" lifestyle.

It could also be due to the poor medical outlook for impoverished American ex-pop stars who have no health insurance, he said.

(emphasis added.)

The financial assets of most rock stars are private. However, for Jerry Garcia, we know more because his former wives fought publicly over his estate. Whatever the cause of Mr. Garcia's heart attack, it was not lack of money.

Who says government work is non-profit?

"[T]here is evidence of corruption running into the hundreds of millions of dollars" in the World Bank's projects in India.

Rice Derangement Syndrome

Glenn Kessler, a Newsweek "journalist," has written a book, The Confidante, attacking Secretary of State Rice. As reported by AFP:

"The invasion of Iraq, the missed opportunity with Iran, the breach in relations with Europe, the Arab anger at a perceived bias against the Palestinians -- all of these problems were the direct result of decisions she helped make in the White House," he writes.

"The breach in relations with Europe"? That might have existed four years ago but both France and Germany have now replaced their old anti-American governments with new pro-American ones. Whatever "breach" there was is no more. Further, it ended, for the US, the best possible way: Their governments moved toward our positions.

Mr. Kessler's claim that there ever was an "opportunity" with Iran seems fanciful. Mr. Kessler may not understand the "perceived bias against the Palestinians" but it might have to do with the fact that the evidence shows that their military intentionally targets schools and child care centers.

Fact checking at the New York Times

Over the years, the New York Times has published a lot of innuendo and false information about a lot of people. Now, some of those people would like the Times to correct the record. According to its public editor, the venerable Times does not want to be bothered with the fact-checking required to make its articles accurate.

Poetic justice

Ice blocks global warming trip.