Bill Whittle: The Bridge in Your Mind

I first stepped foot on Iraqi soil in FOB Anaconda outside of Balad in September 2004.  A couple hours later we were en route to FOB Gabe outside of Baquba and for the first time got a first-hand look at Iraq and immediately thought, "what the hell happened to these people?"

The "Baghdad Battery"

Babylon, Nineveh and Ur were all in Iraq.  All were part of great civilizations so far ahead of the majority of the world that foreigners who traveled there could only marvel at their wonders.  By comparison, my ancestors in Central America, southern Spain and southern Germany were still swinging from trees when Babylonian scholars were mapping the heavens, devising calendars that are still accurate today and even inventing a battery probably used for electroplating.

My Central American ancestors were still living in the stone age - literally - when the Spaniards arrived.  They hadn't even invented (or discovered) the wheel!

So, what the hell happened?  How did primitive, backward Europeans not only overtake, but quickly out-pace Middle Easterners so thoroughly?  Arabs use two main excuses; the Crusades and Genghis Khan.  My reaction to that is, "Seriously?  Genghis died in 1227, and the last Crusade ended in 1272.  What've you been doing since then?"

As far as innovation goes, the answer is; "not much".  The reality is that Middle Eastern culture stopped innovating about 700 years ago, and in many areas actually regressed.  But, why?  It comes down to a pattern of thought, which eventually becomes a culture, which then feeds into people's patterns of thought.  It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, unless it's interrupted by an outside source.  Bill Whittle talks about the pattern of thought that enabled Westerners to build the most prosperous, most free societies in history.
 


As Whittle makes clear, other cultures can - and have - integrated that pattern of thought into their own cultures - some even more successfully than Westerners.  In other words, there's nothing inherent about it.  We're not entitled to the liberty, opportunity and prosperity we enjoy.  Millions before us won it for us through toil, great risk, war and blood.

Traveling to Kuwait, Iraq, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan has deepened and broadened my love and appreciation for Western culture and my adopted country - the United States of America - more than all the history books I've read ever could have.  Let's not lose our ancestors' hard-won victories like so many great civilizations have.  Let's learn from their mistakes.  Let's preserve our liberty (without which opportunity and prosperity are impossible), and defend it from all who threaten it.

UPDATE: And speaking of losing our liberty, this is how it's most likely to happen; not by foreign invasion, but by legislative and judicial over-reach.

Mom With a Gun

She's 18 years old, her husband died of lung cancer, leaving her to raise their baby boy alone, and a week later two thugs broke into her house.



She killed one intruder with a shotgun and the other ran away, called 911 and turned himself in. There are a few factors to note.

1. This is the kind of story that gun-grabbing, anti-Second-Amendment types love to ignore and/or deny exist.  Reality disagrees.  Dr Gary Kleck published a study in 1995 concluding that up to 2.5 million Americans used guns to defend themselves from criminals in 1993.  In 1997, the Department of Justice published a study concluding that 1.5 million Americans used guns to defend themselves from criminals in 1994.  The National Institute of Justice reports that in 2005 "477,040 persons were victims of a crime committed with a firearm" and that "Homicides committed with firearms peaked in 1993 at 17,075".  That means that Americans use guns to defend themselves from criminals 3.1 to 5.2 times more often than criminals use them in crimes, and 87.8 to 146.4 times more often than criminals use them to kill their victims.
2. Gun-grabbers claim they want to protect people by keeping guns away from criminals.  Let's assume they're right in concluding that gun laws keep guns out of the hands of people who refuse to obey the law (they're wrong).  The criminals that broke into Mrs McKinley's house did not have a gun.  They had a knife.  Who do you think would have the advantage in a fight to the death between two drugged out male criminals armed with a knife and an unarmed 18-year-old mom with a baby boy?
3. Gun-grabbers claim that only well-trained people - such as military or law enforcement professionals - are capable of defending themselves or others with guns.  Most gun owners - they claim - are more likely to kill themselves than a potential attacker.  Mrs McKinley said she'd only shot her late husband's shotgun once before she killed a criminal with it. Furthermore, the millions in Dr Kleck's and the NIJ's studies prove the gun-grabbers ignorant or liars.  Training is good, more training is better, but even untrained people use guns to defend themselves effectively hundreds of thousands of times per year.
4. Gun-grabbers claim that police are perfectly capable of protecting all of us and therefore we don't need to own guns privately.  Mrs McKinley was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher for 21 minutes!  Think about that!

Mrs McKinley's guns served their purpose perfectly.  Guns are physical equalizers.  They give physically weaker people an advantage over physically stronger opponents.  Even if the criminals had been armed, she still would've had the advantage because she knew where they were.  They didn't know where she was.  She ambushed them. 

Gun-grabbers hate stories like Mrs McKinley's.  Gun grabbers believe Mrs McKinley should've turned her late husband's guns into the police after his death and allowed her attackers to have their way with her - whatever that might mean.  In their eyes, that would've been the morally superior thing to do. 

Thank God for the Second Amendment.  Thank God Mrs McKinley and her baby are safe.  May her dead attacker burn in Hell, and may the live one fry. 

Aimee: Standards of Beauty

Aimee published a great post along the lines of mine on "Anorexic Action Heroines", but (obviously) from a woman's perspective.

What is beauty?  How do you define it?  Do you see yourself as beautiful?  What would you have to change about yourself to see yourself that way?  What is your ideal body image?  Why do you have that image?  Come on, ladies.... let's get real here.  Let's be honest with how we feel about ourselves and ponder why we feel that way.  What makes you feel the way you do?

For a long time I bought into the idea that anorexic-looking, big breasted, exceptionally tall celebrities are the ideal of beauty.  If only I could get my 5'4'', slightly pudgy self to magically transform into a 5'11'', 110 pound woman with a 42-inch bust, then I would finally be beautiful.

What do you think?   Is this your standard of female beauty?

Or is it something more like this? 

Or is it something else?  Why? 

Bill Whittle: Three Years of Obama

Illuminating economic charts of 2011

The American Enterprise Blog shares the seven economic charts of 2011 they believe are the most enlightening.  I would have included this one...

which helps explain this one.

This is their number one pick, and it's a good one..

We who opposed President Obama's "recovery" "plan" need to keep presenting this one over and over through the election. 

OWS is "Just Like the Tea Party"

Remember when Tea Party protesters caused millions of dollars in damage, left tons of trash to be cleaned up by others and defaced public property?  No?  Huh, me neither.  Weird, isn't it?

Repairs to City Hall’s lawn where the Occupy group set up camp on Oct. 1 will require an estimated $400,000. The police action to clear out the encampment on Nov. 30 cost more than $700,000. Additional expenses are attributed to hauling away debris from the camp, and cleaning up graffiti that defaced City Hall marble walls and trees. Mayor Villaraigosa says more budget cuts will be necessary to offset the costs.

Which is precisely the opposite of what the occupiers claimed they wanted.  Congratulations!  From the LA Times:

Sanitation officials said Wednesday that they expect to haul away 30 tons of debris from the Occupy L.A. encampment –- everything from clothing to heaps of garbage to oddball curiosities left behind by the protesters who lived at the City Hall tent city for two months.

The UN is a Joke

A sick, twisted, astronomically expensive joke. Further evidence (as if we needed any more):

The 66th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on Thursday observed a minute's silence to mourn the death of Kim Jong Il, leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 66th General Assembly session, asked the representatives of 193 UN member states attending a plenary session on economic and financial affairs to pay tribute to the late DPRK leader, who died on Dec. 17. 

The move was at the request of the DPRK, said the president, and the one-minute silence was observed before the start of the plenary meeting of the General Assembly.

Seriously?  "Mourn the death of Kim Jong Il"?  "Pary tribute to the late DPRK leader"?  The man starved millions of his own people to death, enslaved the rest and terrorized his neighbors, and these people think it's appropriate to mourn and pay tribute to him?  

Don't get me wrong, I'm not surprised.  This is the same organization that's had countries like Cuba, Libya and Iran on its "Human Rights Commission".  It just never ceases to amaze me that some Americans continue to have faith in this decomposing corpse of an organization.