Petrified Truth

Tony Snow returning

Here's some giood news: White House press secretary Tony Snow reports back to work tomorrow. Not cured, but not defeated either.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, who will soon begin chemotherapy to fight a cancer recurrence, told fellow alumni at Davidson College that he feels great and plans to return to work Monday....

During an impromptu question and answer session Saturday, Snow said he has become closer to God and his family because of the cancer.

"I am actually enjoying everything more than I ever have," he said. "God hasn't promised us tomorrow, but he has promised us eternity."

Amen to that.

Civil war vs terror

Religious scholar Michael Novak makes a hugely important point about what's going on in Iraq right now.

Two false assertions are being made these days about the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq. The first is that they have been fighting one another for ages. The second is that they are currently waging civil war upon one another....

This is not civil war in Iraq; it is a limited, strategic, and tactical ploy whereby foreigners try desperately to inflame Iraqis against one another. The aim of these foreigners is to bring about such a cataclysm of murder and insecurity and fear that their tiny, tiny minority can then capture total power — just as the small minority of Bolsheviks did in the early rise of the Soviet Empire; just as the tiny bands of ruthless black shirts and brown shirts under Mussolini and Hitler spread social paralysis to launch the rise of Fascism. Mayhem requires only a ruthless few.

Those who falsely call this a “civil war” in Iraq are conferring on al Qaeda a success that al Qaeda has not been able to bring about itself. They are puffing up a phony, contrived civil war far beyond the bounds of reality.

Rejection

The President's ongoing desire to find a way to deliver a de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens continues to ring alarm bells, including among those who are geting shot at as the "boots on the ground" on the US-Mexico border.

Relations between Border Patrol management and rank-and-file agents appear unusually tense, with many agents feeling estranged from their leadership and angered by President Bush's push for what they view as amnesty for illegal immigrants.

The rift widened this week when leaders of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing 11,000 of the force's 13,000 agents, made public its unanimous vote of no-confidence in Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar.

Local union representatives, rather than their national leaders, pressed for the vote at their recent convention in Corpus Christi, council Executive Vice President Richard Pierce said. More than 100 of the local leaders, most of them senior agents, participated....

"This no-confidence vote is an indictment against the entire administration and its policies, including Michael Chertoff and the president," [union President T.J.] Bonner said. "Their policies and their philosophy is just counter to what the men and women out there on the line believe needs to be done to secure our borders."

Under-performing

Is the GOP headed for further failure in 2008, despite the best efforts of Democrats to throw away their own prospects (and our country's security)? The omniscient Instapundit says maybe so:

Democrats -- who mostly made other issues than the war their priority in the '06 election and who lost (Ned Lamont, anyone?) when they put the war up top -- are now claiming that the elections were a mandate for surrender. Republicans may be tempted to endorse the idea that the elections were a referendum on Iraq, too, because that would get the GOP Congress off the hook for its miserable performance on, well, just about everything else. In fact, however, the elections were very close, and regardless of the war the GOP could have at least retained the Senate with only a very modest improvement in performance -- an improvement almost no one was willing to make....

[T]he GOP delegation is, for the most part, just as corrupted as the Dems -- and they managed to get that way faster -- and there's no longer any stomach for challenging the status quo.

Owning defeat

The Democrats and their leaders like Harry Reid are propelling the nation towards catastrophe, willfully, almost intentionally. The price will be large.

Mr. Reid's strategy of withdrawal will only serve to enlarge the security vacuum in which Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents have thrived. That's also true of what an American withdrawal will mean for the broader Middle East. Mr. Reid says that by withdrawing from Iraq we will be better able to take on al Qaeda and a nuclear Iran. But the reality (to use Mr. Reid's new favorite word) is that we are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, and if we lose there we will only make it harder to prevail in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Countries do not usually win wars by losing their biggest battles.

As for Iran, Mr. Reid's strategy of defeat would guarantee that the radical mullahs of Tehran have more influence in Baghdad than the moderate Shiites of Najaf. It would also make the mullahs even more confident that they can build a bomb with impunity and no fear of any Western response.

The stakes in Iraq are about the future of the entire Middle East--and of our inevitable involvement in it. In calling for withdrawal, Mr. Reid and his allies, just as with Vietnam, may think they are merely following polls that show the public is unhappy with the war. Yet Americans will come to dislike a humiliation and its aftermath even more, especially as they realize that a withdrawal from Iraq now will only make it harder to stabilize the region and defeat Islamist radicals. And they will like it even less should we be required to re-enter the country someday under far worse circumstances.

The power of shoes?

Advice for management, as overheard on the bus going to work this morning:

"I'm so serious, my productivity would go up times ten if they'd just let me wear open-toed shoes."

Who would've guessed it's so simple?

Tony Snow makes an appearance

We tend not to pay attention to the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. The self-congratulatory coziness between the Washington politicians and their media hangers-on was never too insightful in the best of times, and now it's mostly just another platform for leftist gasbaggery, of which we have too much anyway.

However, besides documenting yet another instance of Hollywood mental midgets making fools of themselves, the Washington Post did note this encouraging tidbit: Tony Snow is up and around.

Tony Snow made his first public appearance since he announced the recurrence of his cancer, and received a standing ovation when he was introduced.

That's good news and we hope it's a sign of progress in his battle against "the dragon."

C-SPAN has video coverage (Real). Snow's introduction is about the 9:30 mark. Skip the rest.

New KISD leader

Interesting: our Katy ISD has selected its first new superintendent in more than twenty years.

Strong decision-maker. Outstanding communicator. Enthusiastic leader. Team builder. Child-focused visionary. A real leader and a genuine, open, up-front individual.

Glowing descriptions and adjectives were used Thursday after Katy school trustees returned from a two-hour closed session with the name of a lone finalist — Alton Frailey — to whom they plan to offer the superintendent's job to next month.

Leonard Merrell, the current superintendent, has announced his plans to retire.

In ringing endorsements for the selection process, in which trustees culled candidates from a field of 24 applicants, and for Frailey, who has for two years been superintendent of the fast-growing DeSoto Independent School District near Dallas, the seven trustees made it clear that they'd reached a consensus.

The fact that Frailey is black may be a bit of a plus in our district due to its rapidly changing demographics. We need someone who is both an effective internal leader and who will rapidly earn public trust as the district tries to deal with a significant number of students who have difficulty keeping up.

The board seems quite pleased. I notice that nattering naysayers are already out there, critical of someone they don't even know.

Evil spirits

Here's Peggy Noonan, touching on the Virginia Tech sociopath Cho Seung-hui, the enervated responses of our cultural leaders, and the predatory aftermath from our mass media. It's a strange brew we are drinking.

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

The last testament Cho sent to NBC seemed more clear evidence of mental illness--posing with his pistols, big tough gangsta gonna take you out. What is it evidence of when NBC News, a great pillar of the mainstream media, runs the videos and pictures on the nightly news? Brian Williams introduced the Cho collection as "what can only be described as a multi-media manifesto." But it can be described in other ways. "The self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist" is one. But if you called it that, you couldn't lead with it. You couldn't rationalize the decision.

Such pictures are inspiring to the unstable. The minute you saw them, you probably thought what I did: We'll be seeing more of that.

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

Not prepared

This makes the heart sad: today's tragedy at Virginia Tech University leaves at least 33 dead, more injured, and hundreds of family members and friends battered by grief and worry.

Second, it's very troublesome to consider that a public institution could be so unprepared and unable to communicate rapidly with its constituents. Students went to class unaware, unwarned, and unprotected more than two hours after the initial shootings.

Students complained that there were no public-address announcements or other warnings on campus after the first burst of gunfire. They said the first word they received from the university was an e-mail more than two hours into the rampage — around the time the gunman struck again.

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.

"We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur," he said.

He defended the university's handling of the tragedy, saying: "We can only make decisions based on the information you had on the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it."

Steger said the university decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means of notifying members of the university, but with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out to everyone.

This means that five years after 9/11 public officials are still unprepared, mentally and logistically, for the threats that stare back at us from the face of modern evil. Call this domestic terrorism and then think about it. And know that Virginia Tech is not unique.

We better learn, and set our expectations much, much higher.

The Blast - 1947

Remembering human courage during the Texas City disaster 60 years ago today - KUHF reports.

"As I approached, the first thing I noticed was a big black man carrying a body out on his shoulder and laying it down in the clear, and then returning into that inferno, and then coming back again. And I stopped him, and I said “Are these your friends, or you relatives?” He said “No.” He said “I don't even know them.” He said “but they need my help and I'm helping them”. And someone told me that he had been down into that inferno a dozen times."

The Children of Hurin

Via TheOneRing.net, here's a link to a Harper Collins UK "trailer" for the forthcoming publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin.

It's been a long time coming, and now April 17 is the day.

Information overload

Quanitfying what you already suspected:

According to a first-ever IDC/EMC Corp. released in early March, the information explosion we've all become so accustom[ed] to is about to take off so fast new mathematical terms (think exabyte, which is equal to a billion gigabytes) will have to enter the popular lexicon to account for it all.

During 2006, the "digital universe," i.e., all the bits and bytes created by everyone, everywhere, was 161 billion gigabytes or 161 exabytes. Over the next four years, the IDC predicts that number to grow six-fold every year for a 57% CAGR.

To get an idea of just how much information is flowing around globe right now, 161 exabytes is "approximately three million times the information in all the books ever written," according to IDC.

About half of all that seems to be in my Inbox.

Places to go

Now there's possible evidence of large caves on Mars.

A Mars-orbiting satellite recently spotted seven dark spots near the planet's equator that scientists think could be entrances to underground caves....

"Caves on Mars could become habitats for future explorers or could be the only structures that preserve evidence of past or present microbial life."

Let's go explore; faster, please.

G-flushing

Check out Google's exciting new technical breakthrough. Amazing.

Google announces free in-home wireless broadband service

"Dark porcelain" project offers self-installed plumbing-based Internet access

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 1, 2007 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA)™, a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.

"We've got that whole organizing-the-world's-information thing more or less under control," said Google Co-founder and President Larry Page, a longtime supporter of so-called "dark porcelain" research and development. "What's interesting, though, is how many different modalities there are for actually getting that information to you - not to mention from you."

For years, data carriers have confronted the "last hundred yards" problem for delivering data from local networks into individual homes. Now Google has successfully devised a "last hundred smelly yards" solution that takes advantage of preexisting plumbing and sewage systems and their related hydraulic data-transmission capabilities. "There's actually a thriving little underground community that's been studying this exact solution for a long time," says Page. "And today our Toilet ISP team is pleased to be leading the way through the sewers, up out of your toilet and - splat - right onto your PC."

Too nice

On the 25th anniversary of the Falklands war, historian Niall Ferguson understands how Great Britain's standing in the world has degraded, down to the level of naval helplessness.

Let that be a lesson. Even before Britain's politicians and churchmen had finished saying sorry for slavery last Sunday, 15 Britons found themselves temporarily enslaved by the Iranian government. When will our masters ever learn that, in international relations, nice guys finish last?

This is indeed what comes of being too nice. A month before expressing his "deep sorrow and regret for our nation's role in the slave trade", Mr Blair had announced his intention to reduce British troop levels in Iraq by 1,600 within a matter of months. "The next chapter in Basra's history," he declared, "can be written by Iraqis." Unfortunately, it looks more likely to be written by Iranians. And somehow I don't think they'll be saying sorry afterwards.

Until this crisis, Iran had been on the diplomatic rack. Last weekend, the United Nations Security Council imposed new sanctions to punish the regime in Teheran for continuing with its nuclear programme. This reflected growing impatience, even on the part of hitherto indulgent Russia, with the Iranians' persistent defiance. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, is never to be underestimated. To regain the diplomatic initiative, he targeted the weakest link on the Security Council. This turns out to be us.

...

As he approaches the 10th anniversary of becoming Prime Minister, Mr Blair consciously invites comparisons with Lady Thatcher, the only other premier since Lord Liverpool to endure for so long. Yet this new crisis of captivity, like Mr Blair's needless kow-towing over slavery, exposes the profound differences between him and her. When it comes to the crunch, Mr Blair's greatest defect is that he is, despite his undoubted transgressions, fundamentally a nice guy. Margaret Thatcher was neither. Nor, come to think of it, was Queen Victoria. Nor Britannia.