I love reading a good fisking. A certain Brian Cherry has written a pro-Intelligent Design (aka neo-creationist) article in something called The Washington Dispatch, and it's a tragic testimony to detoriating science education and general ignorance. Even by creationist standards it is really pathetic; you hardly find two sentences in the row without massive factual howlers and general nonsense.
Ed Brayton at the Panda's Thumb has great fun debunking, fisking, slaughtering, dissecting, picking apart, and demolishing the article. Enjoy!
Judging by Cherry's angry letter in response to this well-deserved fisking, his editor has been so busy correcting his typos he just didn't have time for his factual errors.
The families of three Italians held hostage in Iraq led a march near St. Peter's Square on Thursday after the abductors threatened to kill the captives unless Italians carried out a "huge demonstration" against the war.
Giving in to demands is a certain way to ensure that terrorists worldwide learns that kidnapping Italians is a good idea. Paying a ransom, in any form, is encouraging future blackmail.
It must be noted the march was very far from "huge", as only a few thousand gathered. Maybe most Italians are made of sterner stuff than certain Spanish voters.
The relatives described the march as a peace rally and said they were not giving in to the captors.
Yeah, they all just happened to be around the area at the time.
Via Tim Blair, who asks why they didn't march against terrorism.
Update: Here is the actual SEC filing. I wonder if I will ever stop thinking about how cool the Net is that allows us all to link directly to original source documents? I hope I never will, but after us comes a generation that has never experienced a different world.
You may have heard about the Miami radio hosts who were fined $4000 by the FCC for making a prank call to Cuban President Fidel Castro, pretending to be his good friend Hugo Chavez.
But the FCC ruled last week that the station violated a regulation requiring that participants in phone conversations be told in advance if the call is being broadcast.
"It was in fact the intention and result of WXDJ's actions to fool and surprise the recipients of the call," the FCC said.
Now the radio hosts with WXDJ-FM, Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero, are making a collection of pennies to pay the fine in person using 400,000 cent coins.
Dump it on the desk of the FCC moron who made this decision.
Poll: Iraqis are thankful, but want US forces to leave
A new comprehensive opinion poll in Iraq shows that Iraqis still say that removing Saddam Hussein from power was worth the hardships suffered, but now they want the coalition forces to leave.
But while they acknowledge benefits from dumping Saddam a year ago, Iraqis no longer see the presence of the American-led military as a plus. Asked whether they view the U.S.-led coalition as "liberators" or "occupiers," 71% of all respondents say "occupiers." [...]
"I'm not ungrateful that they took away Saddam Hussein," says Salam Ahmed, 30, a Shiite businessman. "But the job is done. Thank you very much. See you later. Bye-bye."
I wished that was true. If the coalition really did a Spanish retreat now, and things went downhill fast, the US would be accused of betraying the Iraqis.
Many Iraqis are angered at how US forces operate, saying they are disrespectful to the people. However, very few base such opinions on personal experiences:
That negative opinion of the behavior of the troops rarely is based on direct contact. Iraq is a country the size of California with a population of 25 million. Many areas are sparsely patrolled. Only 7% in the poll say they based their opinions on personal experience.
Instead, Iraqis get their information from others. For about a third, it's pan-Arabic television such as the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite news channels. The networks frequently show scenes of U.S. forces shooting into Iraqi neighborhoods in hot spots such as Fallujah, an anti-American stronghold in the center of the country.
Al-Jazeera is doing the work of a thousand rocket propelled grenades. It is really an active enemy combatant.
It is interesting to note that the media will fault the coalition forces in Iraq both for failing to bring law and order, and for doing it. Security in a run-down third world country means taking out the bad guys. When the bad guys have heavy weapons, it means military intervention and hard fighting. But the media is whining that doing this will anger the ordinary Iraqis, and a few hours later the same media will bemoan the lack of security.
Even those who would rather see Saddam continue to fill up his mass graves while western journalists reported how sanctions were killing Iraqi children, will have to realise that Iraq cannot reasonably be un-invaded now. It's a war that has to be won, and the coalition forces are strong and capable and, I believe, able to defeat the enemy while inflicting minimal collateral damage. If they are allowed to do their job.
Norway state broadcaster invents Jewish conspiracy theory
Norwegian state broadcaster NRK really hates Israel, and is willing to resort to any dirty propaganda trick to invent an evil Jewish conspiracy where none exists. Bjørn Stærk personally witnessed the ugly fraud:
I can point out for the record that NRK's reporter Eirik Veum is a liar. I don't use that word lightly. I was there, remember. I thought his tale of a lone NRK journalist suddenly coming around to a less anti-Israeli point of view sounded fishy, but others didn't, and he took advantage of them. He used deception and pure invention to smear Israel and assassinate the character of an NRK critic. This was not an honest mistake.
We can call it a rather modest, if no less sinister, Norwegian version of the Protocols of Zion.
Sometimes the rhetorical guard drops, and it's obvious that underneath European anti-Israelism there is more than a vague undercurrent of anti-semtism. The usual rhetorical ploy that they "only oppose Israel's policies" is getting easier and easier to see through.
The situation has been detoriating surprisingly fast, and I don't think we have to wait too long for outright "the Jews control the world" conspiracy theories becoming... well, I guess kosher is the wrong word right now.
According to Palestinian authorities, the robbers were ordinary criminals. There are however reports of terrorists stealing explosives from each other (!).
Rarely do one bomb explosion solve so many problems at once.
Frenchman Michael Soussan, a former program coordinator for the $100 billion fund, is expected to be the star witness of a House International Relations Committee hearing looking into Saddam's gigantic $10.1 billion rip-off.
Committee sources said Soussan, now a New York-area writer, is expected to give the first, under oath, public account from an insider about how top U.N. officials were aware of Saddam's oil smuggling and kickback schemes but chose to let him get away with it.
