allvoices Dan's thoughts: June 2006

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

North Korean Missiles: A Good Thing

The best thing to do for the Korean people and the cause of world peace maybe to let North Korea build and test all the ballistic missiles it wants.
Contrary to media reports these missiles are no threat to the United States, Japan or any other country. Yes, the North Koreans could conceivably fire a missile at the United States or Japan. The US would immediately retaliate against such an attack perhaps with a nuclear missile lobbed at North Korea’s capitol of Pyongyang, a series of devastating conventional air attacks or an invasion and occupation of North Korea. Obviously, the generals in Pyongyang, know that their horde of peasants armed with 1950s Russian weapons couldn’t stand up to an attack by the modern US and South Korean armies so they would never risk an attack on either country.
The missiles North Korea is building are essentially a World War II technology - a souped version of the V-2 rockets the Nazis fired at London in 1944 and 1945. They are crude but very expensive to build and maintain especially to a poor nation like North Korea. Yes, these missiles can be fitted with nuclear warheads of a 1950s design, but they do not give North Korea any military advantage over the US or any other country.
The missile program will weaken and undermine the North Korean regime. The resources that could be used to shore up the sick monstrosity known as North Korean Communism or help the North Korean people will be wasted on the missiles and nuclear bombs. The missiles won’t be weapons they’ll be piles of scrap metal rusting away on launch pads. The waste of North Korea’s limited resources will hasten the collapse of Mr. Kim’s dictatorship and pave the way for North Korea’s return to civilization.
History bears me out here, the Soviet Union collapsed largely because the Russian Communist Party built up the biggest arsenal in human history. That massive arsenal of tanks, planes, helicopters, missiles, submarines, artillery, nuclear warheads, poison gas and biological weapons did the Kremlin no good. The Soviet Union still collapsed, the Red Army still pulled out of Eastern Europe and Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall still came down. Russia ended up not as a mighty military power but as an impoverished third world nation.
If Russia with its vast resources couldn’t maintain such a massive military machine how can North Korea, a poor isolated nation? Communist Russia possessed some of the best scientists, engineers and administrators on Earth and it still collapsed. North Korean is ruled by a buffoonish playboy and his cadre of sycophants so how long can it last?
Since the North Korean missile program is only a threat to the North Korean Communists why are the media and political leaders so hysterical about it? In the United States, defense contractors smell tax money the existence of North Korean missiles gives Congress a pretext to waste on tax money on strategic missile defense. Strategic defense missile won’t work and serves no military purpose but it will generate lots of lucrative contracts for technology and aerospace companies and lots of campaign contributions for Congressmen.
In South Korea the sorry fact is that a lot of South Koreans don’t want the North to collapse because they’re afraid of several million desperate North Koreans pouring over the Demilitarized Zone in search of food and work. South Korean politicians are also afraid of the high taxes they’d have to level on their people to finance the rebuilding of North Korea. If the North Korean Communist dictatorship can be propped up the North Korean problem can be left for the next administration to deal with.
The Chinese, Russian and Japanese governments also fear the chaos that could result from the collapse more than a heavily armed North Korea. So they prop up North Korea with foreign aid and investment while trying to get the North Koreans to divert their resources from weapons programs to something more constructive.
The question that faces us is, do our leaders have the courage to let North Korean Communism die off like the miserable diseased monster that it is or will they let the hysteria mongers drive us to adopt policies that will keep the North Korean people enslaved while wasting our tax money on weapons that don’t work?

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Male Emasculation and Terrorism

Something very disturbing happened in Canada a while back, police in my mother’s homeland broke up a ring of Islamic terrorists operating in the Toronto area.
These terrorists had some very frightful plans they were going to blow up buildings, fly planes into buildings in imitation of September 11 and most disturbing of all invade the Canadian Parliament and behead prominent politicians including the Prime Minister. Yet these plans weren’t the most disturbing thing about these terrorists, the disturbing thing about the terrorists was who they were.
The terrorists were clean cut, upper class young men from the Toronto suburbs, not a bunch of scruffy taxi drivers hanging out in a dingy backroom Mosque. Most of the young men were born and raised in Canada. They were the kind of lay about young male losers every North American suburb is full of: professional college students, potheads, aimless losers drifting from job to job. Most of them were of an Islamic background but at least one was raised Hindu according to news reports.
These terrorists sound more like something out of the movie “Fight Club” than the Middle East, a cadre of men who finding no place in society turn violently against it. Men who not finding society very satisfying embraced a violent fantasy and tried to make it reality. The fantasy was Islamic terrorism but it could have just easily been neo Nazi racism, gangster rap or Communism.
Like the Columbine High School gunmen these men were lonely and embittered. They planned to turn against society and lash out against those they viewed as their tormentors.
Just look at the things and people these men were targeting, first the Canadian Parliament and its politicians. The leaders who have worked hard to turn Canada into a politically correct, welfare state, an environment hostile to men and traditional masculinity. Then there was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation which fills the airwaves with Cultural Marxist propaganda. They were going to take it over and change the programming.
In other words these men were lashing out at the institutions of male emasculation. They cloaked themselves in the language and trappings of Islamic terrorism but what they were really fighting was male emasculation.
Of course, the fear of male emasculation is one of Islamic terror’s big selling points. Many Muslim men (not to mention many Latino males) see modern American and European society as having emasculated its male population and fear it will do the same thing to them.
Sadly enough these fears are not without justification, all around us we see signs of male emasculation. The feminization of the educational system, schools have become female centric and some experts now tell us that more than half of the male students will simply drop out because they feel school for girls and fags is the most disturbing symptom of this. Seven 11 won’t lack for clerks in the future and street gangs will find lots of new recruits among these uneducated males.
Another symptom is the politically correct cultural Marxism taught in the schools and the media. Traditional male values and attributes are portrayed as evil. Feminine attributes are praised as good. Where we once had real men as movie stars guys like Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and Rock Hudson (yes I know he was gay but he behaved like a man when he was on screen), we have now have scrawny little effeminate runts like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt portrayed as heroes.
Now even traditional figures of masculine power like super heroes and cowboys are portrayed as part of “gay culture.” “Gay culture” being whatever writers at The New York Times label gay culture. A phenomenon mindlessly celebrated as progress by the hacks at The New York Times and other major media outlets.
Worse any man who shows the least bit of civilization i.e. combing his hair, being polite, reading books or wearing a nice suit is portrayed as “gay.” To be heterosexual a man must be an ignorant, rude, crude, beer swilling lout.
Is it any wonder men are rebelling against this culture? Especially men in Canada once a nation of rugged backwoodsmen now well down the road to becoming a feminized cultural Marxist utopia.
The hot air spewing media elite won’t see it this way, the xenophobes on the right will see it as another argument against immigration. The peace nicks on the left will say the terrorists were angry at Canada’s support of the American war effort in Afghanistan. The Cultural Marxists will claim that the Moslem men who grew up with swimming pools and country club memberships were victims of discrimination.” No effort will be made to ascertain the underlying causes of this disturbing behavior.
So perhaps the Terrorists from the Toronto suburbs aren’t the vanguard of a radical Islamic Fifth Column. Perhaps they are something worse, a harbinger of things to come, a violent male revolt against the feminized brave new world the elitists are trying to create for us.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Journalism

The thing most people don’t understand about journalism is the fundamental dishonesty of the profession.
Lying or exaggeration is a basic part of the journalist’s job description because every journalist has to sell the story. Selling the story means making the story seem important or interesting to the reader, listener or viewer.
To sell the story the journalist often has to lie or at least exaggerate because most news stories simply don’t matter to most people. The famine in Africa, the war in Central Asia, the terror attack in Europe, the fire in Pennsylvania and the car accident across town don’t affect the average person. Nor do the latest session of the city council, the county commissioners’ latest hearing on zoning, most court cases and virtually everything politicians do. The journalist has to make the average person want to read or watch a story about these things.
Appeals to the news consumers’ civic duty only go so far, how often have we heard the tired mantra: “to be a good citizen or a compassionate human being you must read the newspaper or watch the news everyday?” Obviously this isn’t true and it only goes so far anyway.
The only tools the journalist has to sell most stories with are hype and sensationalism. Every story must be hyped up and every problem presented as a threat to everybody in society.
Take crime, a story about a shooting in the hood, moron A shoots moron B because moron B is selling crack on his corner. That obviously doesn’t effect the rest of society most people don’t use crack and have enough sense to stay away from drug dealing thugs. Yet the journalist must sell the story so the story becomes one of the epidemic of crack and gang violence.
Remember the gang hysteria that filled about ten years ago? The story was drug dealing street gangs were about to storm out of the ghetto and take control of every suburb in America it didn’t happen.
Recent history is littered with examples of such hysteria. The elections of 2002 and 2004 were predicted to be close or upsets instead they were yawners. Sept. 11 was not followed by a wave of even deadlier attacks as the media predict, an AIDS epidemic didn’t sweep through America’s heterosexuals, even though the media predicted all of these things. The media made those predictions because journalists know that fear sells.
The public has become immune to such media hype as falling newspaper sales and ratings for TV news demonstrate. So the news becomes more and more sensational as the crime situation demonstrates.
Crime rates, particularly rates of are at historic lows but you wouldn’t know it from the TV news. Every national newscast begins with a story about a sexual predator or a killing spree. News magazine shows and cable networks focus most of their reporting on violent crimes many of them years old. The media does this because it knows violence or fear of it sells news.
The result is that Americans live in fear of crime at a time when most people are in little or no danger of violence. People are buying guns, locking their doors and hooking up alarm systems even though they are probably safer than their parents were thank you media.
Does this mean that we can’t trust the news media? No it means we can’t trust journalists to report upon ordinary stories. The big news as every journalist knows sells itself there’s no need to hype something like Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina, or the Tsunami in Asia. Such news is sensational enough by itself, but such stories don’t come along everyday. So the journalists result to their old tricks to sell their stories.
The question we should ask ourselves why we keep falling for the journalists’ lies? They’ve been telling them for well over a century.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

What To Do About Iran?

What To Do About Iran?
By Daniel G. Jennings
The crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a perfect example of what’s wrong with modern American foreign policy. The media manufactures a crisis i.e. the hype and hysteria about Iran’s attempts to enrich uranium, and demands that the president and the international community do something about it. Then if our leaders and their foreign counterparts do something the media condemns whatever course of action they take.
The possibility of Iran manufacturing nuclear weapons is hardly a grave crisis, Iran is several years away from building a nuclear bomb at best. It will take several years of research, construction and testing for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. By the time the bomb is ready the Iranian government maybe democratic or our best ally.
And even if the Iranians succeed in building a nuclear bomb so what? An Iranian nuclear bomb would be no threat to the USA, or the rest of the world. The US has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons of its own. If Iran used its nuclear weapons against the US would incinerate Tehran, no Iranian leader would dare use the nuclear bomb. Nor would nuclear Iran be a threat to Israel, Israel has it’s own nuclear stockpile.
A nuclear armed Iran wouldn’t necessarily be a strong nation. The Soviet Union created the greatest stockpile of nuclear weaponry in human history. Yet it still collapsed into the ash heap of history.
Nor would Iran be likely to supply a nuclear bomb to terrorists. Would the Iranians go to all the time and expense of manufacturing a nuke to give it to terrorists? Most of the Islamic terrorists are Sunni Moslems and the Iranians are Shiites, whom the Sunni hate. Would the Iranians give their arch enemies a nuclear bomb?
Since the Iranian nuclear bomb wouldn’t be much of a threat to the US or any other nation. The crisis over it is a false one that is a threat to international peace and stability. So what should the United States do about this crisis?
As I see it we have three options, the best option Plan A, would be to do nothing. To sign a face saving agreement of some sort with Iran then quietly ignore the Iranian nuclear ambitions.
This would humiliate the ayatollahs and their windbag of a president. They’d be exposed as what they are hot air merchants. It’d send the message to the developing world that nuclear weapons won’t attract attention or make you a great power. That would do more to contain nuclear weapons than all the attention focused on them.
Iran is only building nuclear weapons because of the attention paid to it. Take the attention away and the motivation goes away.
The next option, Plan B would be to rely on diplomacy to use sanctions, etc. to force Iran to agree to halt it’s nuclear program. The problem with this strategy is that it obligates the US and the International Community to take action against Iran whether it makes sense to do so or not. The US might be obligated to take actions that could antagonize a potential friend and who knows Iran might be one of our best allies in a few years.
The worst option would be plan C military action, attacking another country destroying its property, killing its citizens and potentially bringing down its government and for what? The possibility that Iran might build nuclear weapons sometime in the future. The risks of such a course of action out weigh the perils.
So the answer to the question what should we do about Iran is an obvious one. We should do nothing and let the situation sort itself out.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

C-470

C-470: What Should Be Done?
By Daniel G. Jennings
Denver
The metro area is now debating what to do about C-470, the congested freeway on the West Side. The current proposed solution is a bad one: toll lanes for drivers who want to avoid crowded lanes.
From personal experience on the 91 Freeway between Riverside and Orange County in Southern California I know that drivers don’t use such lanes. The Denver Post has ably reported on the failures of toll road projects around the nation including Denver’s vaunted Northwest Parkway. The fact is drivers simply won’t use toll roads when they can drive for free on good alternate routes. Toll roads only work when there is no alternative, as is the case in many places back East.
Coloradoans don’t use toll roads but they do use light rail as the packed trains on RTD’s existing transit system demonstrate. So why not instead of building toll roads, build a light rail line along C-470 from the Tech Center to Golden. Such a line could connect with RTD’s existing system at Mineral Avenue, the T-Rex at the C-470/E-470/I-25 Interchange and the proposed West Corridor in Golden. Such a rail line could also connect to a light rail line up E-470 to DIA and the Northern Suburbs. E-470 was designed to coexist with light rail tracks.
I know such rail lines aren’t in RTD’s FasTracks plans but they could easily be added. Polls indicate that drivers are willing to pay extra taxes to expand C-470, so why not a T-Rex style project to use gas or property tax revenue and federal funds to pay for extra lanes, a light rail line and park n rides on C-470 and a light rail line on E-470?
Rail lines that the public would actually use would make a lot more sense than toll lanes nobody would actually drive on. The question is do our public officials have the sense to see that or not?