Author: Kevin

I Don’t Know Exactly What to Say…

But I’ll say a lot anyway.

As I type this, The Smallest Minority will receive its 250,000^th recorded site visit on Sitemeter since I set up the service on May 16, 2003.

Thanks, y’all.

Check out this graph of the last 11 months of traffic:

Or this graph of 85 weeks of site visits (I didn’t save a couple of weeks, apparently, but it’s pretty obvious when I got a link from Kim du Toit or Steven Den Beste, or an Instalanche)

For a pretty-much single-issue blog, those aren’t bad numbers. (I’m not Kim du Toit, but hey, who is?) And it’s a slow, but steady progression.

I started this blog to give me a place to be an advocate for individual rights – a place to voice my views and to hopefully help educate a populace that too often hasn’t been told what their rights are supposed to be under the system of government we’re supposed to be living in. I hope I’ve done at least some of that. I hope to do a lot more of it. Thank you all for visiting, and reading, and most especially, commenting. This thing works better with feedback. Thanks to everybody who has linked to me, either in a post, or in their blogrolls. That’s feedback too, and I really appreciate it.

As I just checked, visitor number 250,000 came from IP 69.139.92.# and went directly to my February 2004 archive page to see this cartoon from last year’s Superbowl, brought by a Google search on “Political Cartoons.” That cartoon has brought me a LOT of traffic, and still does.

Well, Mr. or Ms. Visitor, if you checked the front page after looking at the cartoon, thanks for visiting. Tell your friends! Y’all come back, now, y’hear?

And the Answer is…

Apparently “yes.”

I’d have stolen the title from the Geek with a .45’s post linking to this story, but I’ve already used something very close to that for a different post of my own. Let’s review:

Actress shot dead outside New York bar

Friday, January 28, 2005 Posted: 1724 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — An aspiring actress and playwright whose work explored life’s darker sides was shot and killed as she confronted an armed robber during an early-morning street holdup.

The robber ran off with his accomplices, police said. No arrests have been made.

Nicole duFresne, 28, had just left a bar in a trendy section of the Lower East Side with her fiance and another couple early Thursday when they were approached by four or five men.

Witnesses told investigators that one of the men grabbed for the other woman’s purse and duFresne intervened, asking, “What are you going to do, shoot us?” A man then fired one shot at her, police said.

“One of them said, ‘Give me your money.’ I didn’t see he had a gun. I didn’t understand what was happening,” said Jeffrey Sparks, duFresne’s 28-year-old fiance.

Sparks, an online music producer, said he pushed the mugger aside and was pistol-whipped on the face.

DuFresne died from a gunshot wound to her chest.

The couple, both from Minneapolis, moved to Brooklyn from Seattle two years ago and were to be married in October.

A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, duFresne was a founding member of the Present Tense Theater Project and acted with the LAByrinth Theater Co., according to her online resume. She wrote a play called “Burning Cage” with Mary Jane Gibson, who was with her and her fiance at the time of the shooting.

“Burning Cage” is about two women in a Boston asylum who are targeted for clandestine brainwashing experiments with LSD and shock treatments. The play toured in 2002 at fringe theater festivals in Canada and the United States.

DuFresne’s other play, “Matter,” is about an amnesiac whose apartment is taken over by a violent and seductive intruder. It was performed in Brooklyn in 2003.

Actress & playwright. Resident of New York. Former resident of Seattle. Apparently never a resident of Reality. I guess she believed that in gun-free NYC the answer to her question was “no.” And I guess she didn’t believe that someone would be willing to kill for the contents of someone else’s purse.

And, I’m sure, her friends are blaming the gun for her death, not the goblin behind the trigger, though he could have just as easily have used a knife.

Why do so many people not understand that evil exists in the world, and is banal, not exotic? DuFresne wrote about how a “violent and seductive intruder” could invade an apartment, but can’t believe someone will shoot her during a mugging? “Those without swords may still die upon them,” indeed.

I’m HOME!

And, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll get reaquainted with my wife.

Blogging resumes… sometime.

I TOLD You I’d Be Gone Some in January

But, I’m back. It’s hell being out of town with no internet access.

I’m suffering from severe withdrawal, but I still have work to do. Expect some posting later. Perhaps much later.

Failure of the Will

Gary Cruse’s latest Best of Me Symphony is up. In this week’s entry, Wince and Nod has a piece on the war in Vietnam. He reviews McNamara’s view of the war in contrast to Dr. Jerry Pournell’s, and finds Pournell’s the more convincing argument. The war in Viet Nam was not, Pournell argues, a war against the North Vietnamese, it was a war against the Soviet Union – a war we were winning:

Well, I don’t disagree except that we did not lose the war in Viet Nam. We accomplished what we needed, which was a long campaign of materiel attrition as part of the Seventy Years War. In 1973 we demonstrated that at small cost we could hold South Viet Nam forever, and bleed the North and their Russian allies white as we did.

The Democrats threw away a victory. We weren’t defeated, we simply came home when the Democrats decided that having won it wasn’t worth defending the Gooks with American blood and treasure. If that sounds harsh, I am sorry, but it’s what happened. We had won. The border was stabilized in the sense that it took a large army to cross it and ARVN with U.S. supplies and air support could destroy any such large army. Every time and to the last man.

Yet that “small cost” was more than enough to let the media tell us that “we couldn’t win” over and over until we believed it.

Wince argues:

I grant you the North had the will. Americans had the will, too, and would have kept it if our leaders had not failed us. First Johnson, McNamara and the defense department failed by running the war poorly from 65 to 68. Then Nixon failed by blowing up his own Presidency and his own party. Then the Democrats failed in 1975, when all they had to do was provide supplies and air power. At that point we had successfully Vietnamized the war, but they required American style material, air power and logistical support, which we abruptly and cravenly cut off. I cannot forgive the Congressional Democrats for dishonoring our commitment in this fashion. From whence do you think our reputation for having no staying power came?

Wince leaves out the power of the 5^th Column of the media. Howard Fineman’s January 12 MSNBC piece on “The Death of the American Mainstream Media Party” illustrated that power:

Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it’s pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things. The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS’s star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon’s fate as the first president to resign.

The piece I referred to yesterday where Knight-Ridder Newspapers has declared the war in Iraq “unwinnable” is another.

Vietnam and Iraq do share many parallels. The most striking one is that what we are fighting isn’t the “insurgents” in Iraq, just as what we were fighting in Vietnam wasn’t the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. In Vietnam we were fighting the Soviet Union. The VC and North Vietnamese army were their proxies. We were fighting the ideology of communism by, as Dr. Pournell points out, bleeding it white economically. In Iraq we are fighting another ideology, but this time it is not one we can defeat economically. It’s one we can only defeat by establishing the conditions necessary for individual freedom in the Middle East. I’m not Steven Den Beste, and I’m not Victor Davis Hanson, and I’m not Bill Whittle, but even if I cannot express it as logically, clearly, or eloquently as they, I understand that what we are fighting is militant Islam – a force in the world that is virulent, powerful, and dedicated to the destruction of freedom and democracy throughout the world. This is a religious war, because one side of it isn’t a country, but a religion.

Another parallel is that the government’s announced reasons for fighting in Vietnam weren’t the core reasons we fought. We did it to fight Communist expansion, but the goal was the actual destruction of the Soviet Union. As Dr. Pournell pointed out, that took seventy years. Certainly we invaded Iraq to unseat Saddam Hussein and remove him as a threat, but the more important reason was, as Steven Den Beste diagrams in his “strategic overview” of the Global War on Terror:

The large solution is to reform the Arab/Muslim world. This is the path we have chosen.

Any bets on how many decades that will take? Any argument on just how important that goal is?

As I said yesterday, the only way we will lose this war is if we lose our will. The media is doing everything in its power to sap our will, and I’m goddamned tired of it. The media lost the war in Vietnam, and it’s trying to repeat the achievement. But this time an American pullout means a lot more that the deaths of a few million brown people and the loss of American pride. We pulled out of Vietnam after we had accomplished what needed to be accomplished, and then we abandoned the South Vietnamese in an unconscionable act of cowardice. THEY paid the price of that cowardice. If the media “wins” again, WE will pay, and so will the rest of the world.

Where’s Uncle Walter When You Need Him?



or

Too Bad Dan Ra^ther’s Shot His Wad of Credibility

He could have broken this story on the CBS Evening News and convinced everybody.

It seems that Knight-Ridder Newspapers group has concluded that the Iraq war is unwinnable.

An analysis of a U.S. newspaper group concludes the United States is headed toward defeat in the Iraqi war.

The Knight Ridder Newspapers analysis of U.S. government statistics shows the Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq steadily gaining on the U.S. military, the Detroit Free Press, owned by Knight Ridder, reported Saturday.

Among factors cited:

— U.S. military fatalities from hostile acts rose from an average of about 17 per month in May 2003 to a current average of 82 per month;

— The average number of U.S. soldiers wounded by hostile acts per month has spiraled from 142 to 808 during the same period;

— Attacks on the U.S.-led coalition since November 2003 rose from 735 a month to 2,400 in October;

— The average number of mass-casualty bombings has grown from zero in the first few months of the U.S.-led occupation to an average of 13 per month; and

— Electricity production has been below prewar levels since October.

“All the trend lines we can identify are all in the wrong direction,” said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy research organization.

In other news, Knight-Ridder announced that, with the firing of the great General George McClellan, the Army of Northern Virginia will be unstoppable. The civil war is unwinnable. All the trend lines are in the wrong direction.

Also, after the fall of Singapore and then Corregidor, the war in the Pacific is unwinnable. All the trend lines are in the wrong direction.

Now that the media has shown itself to be a “clear and present danger” due to the fact that it has thrown the wrapper off its activities as a Fifth Column, perhaps now the President can make the moonbats really froth at the mouth by invoking the government’s power of censorship in time of war.

Yes, I’m serious.

The only way we will lose this war is if we lose our will. The media is doing everything in its power to sap our will, and I’m goddamned tired of it. The media lost the war in Viet Nam, and it’s trying to repeat the achievement. But this time an American pullout means a lot more that the deaths of a few million brown people and the loss of American pride.

Mostly Cajun Has a Birthday

His first blogiversary is today. Drop by and wish him well, if his commenting software will let you. (It wouldn’t let me.)

Congratulations! Here’s to many more!

OK, WTF???

I go to Connie du Toit’s blog today and this is what I see:

System Offline

January 20, 2005: This blog/site is no longer in service. I apologize for any bad links which sent you here only to find this message. Thank you to all who played and contributed over the years.

See you in comments.

With warmest and best regards to all who deserve it,

Connie

aka “The Mrs”

You got some ‘splainin’ to do, Lucy. No archives? No explanation, no nothing?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m hurt. You’ve got my email. I expect to hear from you.