This is depressing–from the website of Defense Training expert John Farnam, evidence that the Bush Administration, and the National Guard leadership are much more interested in avoiding an “incident” than they are in protecting their own.

John Farnam’s Quips–Unarmed and “Ready?”

26 Sept 07

Confirmation of pernicious gun-phobia, with requiem fear and distrust, that still paralyzes the Army, even today. From a friend in the NG:

“I have been activated several times since 9/11. On one domestic guard detail near the border, we were initially issued our M-16A2s and fully-charged magazines, but sternly instructed never to actually load our rifles, under any circumstances. Rifles were to remain ‘unloaded at all times!’ However, some atta-boy up the food-chain soon realized the career-ending insanity of issuing us peons potentially-functional weapons. Suddenly, ammunition was whisked away. Magazines suffered the same fate a day later.We were told that rifles and magazines (even empty ones) actually inserted into magazines wells looked ‘too militaristic.’

I’m sure the same atta-boy then realized the ridiculousness of obviously unloaded rifles being carried about by uniformed Guardsmen. The conspicuous solution: take away our rifles too! Sure enough, that happened two days later.

All this time, our guard posts were being actively surveilled by suspicious people with video cameras, on foot and in vehicles. None were ever confronted.

When word got back to Santa Fe that we had all advised our families on whom to sue when we, now completely defenseless, were attacked and murdered by invading Mexican drug dealers, rifles were mysteriously “returned”. That, at least, was the cover-story for public consumption.

The truth is that rifles were placed in a locked room, inside a locked building, nearly a quarter mile away from our guard post. Magazines were locked in a different room. Keys to the various locks were given to our sergeant who was told that weapons and ammunition were to be unlocked and issued (a process that would take at least an hour) only upon direct attack of the post. Even then, soldiers would have to sign out weapons and ammunition, individually. After all that, we were then told point-blank that if any of us ever actually fired a shot, we would all spend the rest of our lives in Federal prison!

It being obvious that our safety, indeed our very lives, meant nothing to the atta-boy in question, nor anyone else up the food chain, I began carrying my personal pistol, concealed in a shoulder holster. Blades too! With my encouragement, others did the same. We put together an (unauthorized) plan whereby those of us who were thus armed would hold off the bad guys until rifles could be accessed.

When we finally stood down, a CWO, asked me directly if I had been carrying personal weapons during mobilization. ‘Of course not! Where did you get such a crazy idea?’ His unkind reply was, Well, if you had, and I had known it, I would have had you court-martialed.’ I countered, ‘Why would you ever think those of us down here actually doing the job would ever place any value on our own lives? Why, we know we’re just highly expendable, cannon-fodder, and when we’re all massacred, because we’re unable to defend ourselves, you’ll just recruit more. Right?’ I could hear him grind his teeth as he walked away in a huff. I’m sure my comments made him late for coffee!”

Comment: What makes me most angry is that no one seems to care a whit for the lives and safety of these brave lads who courageously volunteered to serve their Country. For one, I will serve no one who doesn’t trust me with my weapons! These guys, correctly and audaciously, took matters into their own hands. In the end, we’re all going to have to!

Thomas Jefferson reminded us, “Who bend their swords into plow-shears will plow for those who don’t!”

I took Mrs. Anonymous Attorney to the Kennedy Center last night for the premiere of Indoctrinate U, a new film documentary on political correctness run amok on America’s college campuses. Pre-release reviewers haven’t missed how Evan Maloney, the film’s maker, acts as the right’s answer to Michael Moore, confronting officials outside their offices with a boom mike and camera crew, only to be escorted away by the police most of the time.

Point made: college officials oversee a totalitarian atmosphere of left-wing orthodoxy that holds up “diversity” and “tolerance” as gods, but there’s no real intellectual diversity and breathtakingly little “tolerance” for conservatives, libertarians, Christians, or whites. It’s near-impossible to get them on camera to explain themselves, and when they do, they sound very much like people so pickled by years stewing in groupthink that they don’t realize how ridiculous they sound — or have any idea how to parry with a questioner. A Bucknell professor named Geoff Schneider catches himself referring to “sentencing” a student to sensitivity training, and the odious Noel Ignatiev of Harvard sounded like a talking Onion parody with comments like “whiteness must be destroyed.”

Meanwhile, the real “oppressed” are the dissenting students who are shut up and shut down by the PC apparatus. One white student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo found himself threatened with expulsion and forced psychological treatment for posting a flyer about a black conservative speaker. There’s incredible footage of Ward Connerly being shouted down by “pro-diversity” students, and near-violence breaks out when the Army Corps of Engineers shows up to a campus job fair.

I was disappointed not to see footage of the Minutemen fracas at Columbia. Readers looking for an immigration disaster documentary should check out Byron Jost’s “Line in the Sand.”

There’s a hilarious sequence the movie where Maloney sets out to find the “men’s center” by talking to the sour-faced feminists at campus women’s centers. Appearances by K.C. Johnson, Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) and John McWhorter give the film a boost.

Maloney’s effort is fast-paced and funny, if late: Someone like David Horowitz (who’s not in the film) was chronicling this scandal in “Heterodoxy” more than ten years ago. It also avoids truly politically incorrect territories like racial difference (Jared Taylor’s encounters at a Canadian college or the reactions to Michael Levin at CUNY would have been good examples) and neoconservatism as an ethnically Jewish movement (witness the SPLC’s “investigation” of Kevin MacDonald - though one fears what would happen if a documentarist showed up to the SPLC’s surely heavily-guarded stronghold in Alabama).

Still, Maloney is the first to bring the phenomenon to the screen, and it’s definitely worth seeing.

It is axiomatic that immigration causes pressure on the wage levels of competing workers. Less often agreed is the concept that certain immigration can be destructive of the moral standards of Society. A perfect proof of both assertions appeared in Friday’s New York Post:

AFTER-SCHOOL SEX SPECIALS ‘BROTHEL TARGETED HS KIDS’ By PERRY CHIARAMONTE September 28 2007

Teens at a Lower East Side high school were getting their sex education outside the classroom after being targeted by pimps who lured them to a nearby brothel and enticed them with cut-rate romps…Police sources said that a pingpong hall was a front for the whorehouse in the back of the establishment, and that it was run by Benjie Zheng, 47, who lived a few blocks away, and Ming Liuchang, 48, of Queens.

The men would try to lure students to the Robo-Pong Training Center by distributing business cards outside the school, sources said. The cards were printed only with a contact number, an image of a topless woman - and a word, “Good.”…
Zheng and Liuchang allegedly recruited immigrant women off the street to peddle flesh in hidden rooms at the center, whose hours were posted on a sign adorned with rulers and pencils and the words “School Days.” …

Two undercover detectives paid cash after Zheng told them, “You can pick any of these girls for sex, and it will cost you $35,” according a criminal court complaint….”It was obvious that they were targeting young students, because the prices were so low,” said one disgusted police official, adding, “Most brothels charge at least $100.”

The women allegedly would return the cards to Zheng at the end of their shifts, receiving $15 for each one.

One reads that this kind of corruption is normal in Asiatic cities… but in New York?

More obviously, it will come as a surprise to most who frequent New York that anything of importance can be purchased for $15.

The discounting these immigrant entrepreneurs resorted to obviously stems from competitive pressure, rather than educational philanthropism. Elementary economic analysis suggests something appalling has happened on the Lower East Side.

Are you old enough to remember this McGovern proposal? I am, and so are the guys at the Powerline blog:

George McGovern, who was crushed by Richard Nixon in a landslide in 1972, has gone down in history as one of our most feckless Presidential candidates. McGovern ran on a far-left platform that included a proposal that at the time was deemed risible–the “demogrant.” The demogrant program was simple: the federal government would write a check for $1,000 to every American. In 1972, that idea was so widely ridiculed as over-the-top pandering, as well as economically pointless–even Hubert Humphrey savaged it–that McGovern quietly abandoned the idea.

But the demogrant has returned! Today, Hillary Clinton unveiled her own demogrant proposal: every newborn American baby will get a birthday present from the federal government in the form of a $5,000 check. Buying votes, I guess, is something that never goes out of style.Power Line: The Second Coming of George McGovern

I was struck by a line later in the item, where it’s noted that Hillary

“apparently first sketched it out in her 2006 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council unveiling the DLC’s American Dream Initiative. In that speech she proposed “providing a baby bond to each of the 4 million children born in America every year, a $500 savings bond at birth and again at age 10.”

My first thought was “Each of the 4 million children born in America every year?” Couldn’t they limit it to American kids? And then I remembered, each of the 4 million children born in America every year is an American citizen, whether the American people like it or not.

And that’s going to be a continuing problem for programs to help the poor in America–they won’t generate a lot of enthusiasm if they’re seen as programs for transferring money from one ethnic group to another. Hillary unveiled this proposal at a forum hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus. It would go over well with La Raza, too. White voters–not so much.

See Steve Sailer’s More Diversity = Less Welfare? for more.

I know I’m late to the story about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, and the personal insults Columbia President Lee Bollinger made in his introductory speech, but my question is about Persian culture (or cultures–it’s a big, very old, very complicated place). I don’t know much about Persia, but a lot of it is desert, and don’t West Asian desert cultures put a very strong emphasis on hospitality?

Winston Churchill wrote about the Pathans who live to the east of Iran:

“Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud… For the purposes of social life … a most elaborate code of honour has been established and is on the whole faithfully observed. A man who knew it and observed it faultlessly might pass unarmed from one end of the frontier to another. The slightest technical slip would, however, be fatal. The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest…”

Did Bollinger come across as an ill-bred barbarian to people from that part of the world for accepting the role of host but then failing so badly in his duty to be a polite one?

Bollinger got his Ivy League sinecure because he defended “diversity” (i.e., quotas) so vociferously at the U. of Michigan, but an enthusiasm for multiculturalism often goes along with ignorance about other cultures.

You can have lots of free speech if you’re President of Iran, and you can have lots of free speech if you’re a protester physically attacking members of the Minutemen on stage at a speech. If you are a Minuteman, forget it. John Leo has a column on it here:

No Free Speech, Please - This is Columbia
September 28, 2007
Mindingthecampus.com

Posted by John Leo

Ann Coulter seems to be the first writer to guffaw over Lee Bollinger’s statement that Columbia University has a “long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate…” There is no such tradition, and very little debate at Columbia, particularly if one of the proposed debaters or speakers happens to be conservative.

Last October, Columbia radicals stormed a campus stage, knocking over furniture, creating pandemonium and preventing speeches by Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and a colleague. Nobody seemed very upset about this, least of all Lee Bollinger, who issued a tiny bleat about free speech before referring the issue to a committee where it languished for three months. Awakening briefly on Christmas weekend, the committee administered an undescribed slap on the wrist to an unknown number of unidentified members of the censoring rabble and there the matter ended.

Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain, whose book Debating Immigration.I recently reviewed at VDARE.com, writes in the Tennessean:

When teens aren’t taught value of life, it can have deadly consequences

By CAROL SWAIN

Much sport has been made of the deadly sneaker that the district attorney introduced as a weapon. What is missed is the fact that sneakers and fists can become lethal weapons under the right circumstances.

Almost a year ago, my 41-year-old brother, Kevin Henderson, died from injuries he sustained on his job after he was attacked by a group of teenage boys.

According to a neighbor who witnessed the attack, five teens knocked my brother to the ground, kicking and stomping him until the neighbor intervened. Kevin staggered home, collapsed into a coma and was declared brain-dead within hours of the attack.

It took many months for a measure of justice to occur. So far, two of the five boys have been charged with first-degree manslaughter. Like Mychal Bell, one of the boys has been held many months without bail. He awaits sentencing, and the family hopes he will go straight to prison. Most, if not all, come from single-parent households.

Perhaps the boys meant to kill him. Perhaps it was an accident. In any event, a life was lost because a gang of boys mortally wounded a man who left home for his job, not knowing that he would never return.

I offer this story of a senseless killing to provide another perspective on what might have been going on in the head of the Jena district attorney. [More]

Or possibly “You don’t deserve a break today” (list of historic McD slogans here–make up your own jokes.) McDonald’s, aside from employing illegals in their restaurants, and in the Florida fields where the tomato, pickles, and special sauce grow, is well known for the kind of pandering to Spanish speakers that Brenda wrote about yesterday.

The Associated Press: Over 40 Arrests in Nev. Immigration Raid

By SCOTT SONNER – 54 minutes ago

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Federal agents raided 11 McDonald’s restaurants in northern Nevada and made dozens of arrests Thursday as part of an investigation into illegal immigration.

Agents for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made at least 56 arrests in Reno, Sparks and Fernley after raids at the restaurants and a franchise corporate headquarters in Reno, agency spokesman Richard Rocha said.

“They are people suspected of being in the country illegally. As far as I know, they were all McDonald’s employees,” he told The Associated Press.

The investigation began five months ago and was sparked by an identity theft complaint, Rocha said. A local law enforcement agency then gave ICE information that illegal immigrants were working at specific McDonald’s restaurants, he said.

Lenin famously remarked that capitalists would sell their enemies the rope by which to hang them. These days, the capitalists are Spanish-friendly and are happy to destroy America for money by making it “bilingual.”

The New York Times Magazine observes how a Hispanic-focused ad agency creates marketing messages that are more culturally appropriate to that audience. Business prefers a direct route to Juan’s wallet, unencumbered by waiting for him to learn English or assimilate to mainstream America.

In comparison with some of his colleagues in Hispanic advertising, in fact, John Gallegos runs a moderate-size shop. There are more than a hundred United States ad agencies, not including the publicistas in Puerto Rico, that now work almost exclusively in Spanish. The bigger Hispanic agencies have accounts like McDonald’s (Me encanta, which roughly translates to “I’m lovin’ it”), and Chevrolet (Subete, “Get in”). Bounty’s slogan in English, “The quicker picker-upper,” appears in Spanish as Con Bounty si puedes - “With Bounty, yes you can.” T-Mobile does Estamos juntos, “We’re all together.” Toyota does Avanza confiado, “Advance confidently.” Wal-Mart reportedly spends more than $60 million a year on reaching Hispanics, and for some years the Wal-Mart Spanish tag line, composed by a Houston agency called Lopez Negrete Communications, was Para su familia, de todo corazon. Siempre. Which lofted the blunt English “Low prices, always,” into a line enduring enough for a tombstone: “For your family, from the heart. Always.”

From this vantage, the grim admonitions of anti-immigration groups are hard to hear distinctly; they’re drowned out by the sound of cash registers.
[How Do You Say"Got Milk" en Espanol? New York Times Magazine 9/23/07]

An industry magazine reveals an interesting nugget from the marketing world: Hispanic consumers are seen by companies as being more brand-loyal than us independent Americans.

SOME OF THE MOST APPEALING characteristics of Hispanic consumers may be more transitory than marketers think. Take the notion of brand loyalty, where Hispanics supposedly show more long-term affinity for brands than their mainstream “Anglo” counterparts. New data from Nielsen Homescan’s Hispanic market research suggests that brand loyalty among Hispanics drops, depending on their degree of acculturation, as measured by language of preference.

For example, only 33% of English-preference Hispanic households purchased a particular cola to the exclusion of others, versus 70% for Spanish-preference households. And this trend is broadly reflected across a variety of categories in food and packaged-goods, including laundry detergent, cereal, toothpaste and beer.
[Media Daily News Adios: Nielsen Finds Hispanic Brand Loyalty Declining 8/23/07]

Language assimilation decreases brand loyalty among immigrants — fascinating. One can assume companies that have a big market share among Hispanics will want to maintain their edge by pandering even more and will support policies that keep immigrants in linguistic ghettos.

Vietnam veteran and author David Drake has published the latest in his series of Republic of Cinnabar novels, now available as an ebook from Baen Webscritptions.

The Republic of Cinnabar series is a science fiction series based on various incidents in Earth history. This one is based on Thomas, Lord Cochrane’s activities in helping Chile get free of Spain. Cochrane was seeking in South America what the Bush Administration is seeking in Iraq: patriots who wanted peace, good government and national prosperity more than they wanted to enrich themselves and their relatives. These were, and are, in short supply.

They’re not that easy to find in American politics, although the dedicated work of many Congressmen and Mayors continues to inspire, (Senators, not so much.)

Here’s what David Drake had to say about the historical context.

What comes through powerfully in every English memoir I’ve read involving Latin America at that time is that almost none of the players (Bolivar may have been a exception) had a concept of a nation that was greater than the individual’s own clan/family/tribe ruling as many of its neighbors as possible. Consistently when a region revolted from the colonial power (Spain or Portugal), the districts revolted from the capital and then the wealthy magnates revolted from the district government (which was generally run by one of the several powerful families in that district). The magnates than spent their time in burning out rival magnates.

If you’ve been following Latin American politics for the past fifty years or so (I suspect the problems go much farther back, but I personally don’t), you might reasonably come to the conclusion that nothing much has changed. For even more vivid modern examples of clan-based politics, consider Iraq and Afghanistan.

The business of When the Tide Rises is taken largely from real events in Chile, Peru, and Brazil. The major naval action, however, is based on the 1811 Battle of Lissa. (The 1866 Battle of Lissa is fascinating, but in fiction you couldn’t make one side as incompetent as the historical losing side was. As one example, the gun crews of the defeated flagship forgot to load shells and therefore fought the battle firing blank charges.)

I write to entertain readers, not to advance a personal or political philosophy (I don’t have a political philosophy); nonetheless, my fiction is almost always based on historical models. When you read When The Tide Rises,you might occasionally think about today’s news and remember that it’ll be tomorrow’s history.

Heaven knows, I thought about the news while I was writing.Introduction To When The Tide Rises.

[Disclaimer: David Drake is not responsible for this posting--I'm just quoting him.]