Pyrojection is now up and running at its new home!

http://www.pyrojection.com

More from Den Beste, but this time not on France. Thursday he made a post that I've been mulling over since, to the effect that the reason we've found very little in the way of WMDs in Iraq may be that Saddam kept getting hoodwinked.

I don't buy it, and neither do a couple of other bloggers who commented so far. The reason is quite simple: Every intelligence agency in the world that could find their own rectums on a map knew that Saddam had large quantities of biological and chemical weapons, and had an intricate program in place for creating not just more of the same, but also an eventual nuclear weapon. They knew his programs were ongoing. This wasn't just something the US made up or greatly exaggerated, although le radical left would dearly love to believe that.

The only thing that gives this story credibility is the known fact that al Qaeda has tried several times to buy fissionable material from the Russian mafia, and each time they've gotten scammed. But Saddam Hussein was not al Qaeda, and in spite of severe restrictions from sanctions he would have had means to purchase weapons that were not commonly available--maybe not plutonium, as such, but he could well have at least come close to buying weapons-grade uranium, and there's no question that he bought all kinds of refining equipment. Hussein's Iraq had tremendous amounts of money to throw at good suppliers and would be willing to establish a very very lucrative business relationship with anyone who'd deal with him. Compared to Hussein's efforts, al Qaeda was (and remains) a bunch of underfunded bumblers. They can still do a lot of damage, sure, but they've always lacked the resources of a state (Afghanistan surely didn't count for much there) and the strong central organization of Hussein's bureaucracy.

The WMDs existed, and in vast quantities. Saddam Hussein continued to produce biological and chemical agents. He continued his nuclear program (which was proven in documents found in a scientist's home during the UNMOVIC inspections). All that went on at least up to some point last year when he may have let it all go mostly dormant in the face of an oncoming resumption of inspections. No intelligence agency in the world ever believed otherwise, because they had plenty of data to give them a pretty good estimate of Hussein's capabilities. There's even a chance, and I don't think it's an especially poor one, that he already had at least one nuclear weapon. (And if so, there's a good chance that multiple intelligence agencies knew about it, but for safety's sake have kept that under wraps.) All of the above was borne out not only during the inspections process by what was found, but by items found during the war and in particular by those mobile labs that were discovered soon afterward.

To explain why few or no WMDs besides those have been found, there are two possibilities.

Scenario A: While shutting down production facilities for the inspections, Hussein ordered weapons to be hidden in bunkers built expressly for that purpose, and/or buried in small bunches out in the desert. The documentation of their locations has either yet to be found (or was destroyed) or is still being sifted through, or else no organized effort has been made to visit likely sites while stabilizing the country has taken first priority.

Scenario B: We have found and continue to find WMDs, but we're not yet prepared to document what we found and how we found them. Den Beste himself has brought up the point before that merely saying what we know can expose intelligence sources; that's a little less of a danger than before the war, in some cases, but surely things like satellite capabilities we'd prefer to keep under wraps. It may be necessary to build a plausible paper trail from seized documents to show how we found various sites, and so reconciling one branch of the search to another for public consumption may take some time. Eventually an announcement will be made of just how much we have found so far, and an "official" story of how it was found that will leave intelligence sources safely covered.

I think it's scenario B. The odds against finding anything by now are too low, and really I haven't caught the administration saying much along the lines of "We haven't found much"--rather they're letting the press whine "Why haven't you found anything?" and they're giving form-letter answers. Right now the US and Britain don't have a lot to lose by letting the antiwar brats simmer--especially while the human crisis becomes clearer every day.

Augh. It only gets worse for France. I don't know whether to pity them the bed they've made, or worry that when they finally lie in it it's going to somehow spill over and screw half the world including me and my family.

I get this from a series of further posts by Steven Den Beste. They're best summed up like this:

Major media is so thoroughly ignoring or downplaying the situation that it borders on (and probably is) collusion. That's my take on the post, not necessarily Den Beste's.

[USS Clueless] Reader Adrian says France has a deeper problem of political entrenchment that stems from various forms of idealism. I think it's fairer to call it utopianism, and in my book a utopian is too stupid to be called human. The actual bullet points are a lot less insulting, but even less flattering. Be sure to read this one.

Reader Brian has some suggestions that are tunnel-visioned and hopeless, focusing on how individuals can hold on a little longer at the expense of others without really correcting the big problem. Den Beste has a thorough and very scary response.

Another reader writes that an implied threat of reprisals is keeping a lot of people silent who are nominally free to speak up. Adrian weighs in again to say that doomsday's probably further off, but inevitable.

It's enough to give you some serious heebie-jeebies. It's hard even to feel the satisfaction of watching them get the government they deserve, and all of its consequences.

Hard, but not impossible.

The massive striking in France has fouled up an already shoddy economy, and it's caused a lot of other grief besides. Basically a lot of public unions are striking to try to keep the gravy flowing, but it's worse than that: Whole cities in France have shut down. Today Steven Den Beste has passed on a letter from a reader within France who wants to bring some of the atrocities to light. Apparently the thugs behind this crap have gone so far as to violently attack anti-strike demonstrators and even people who voice their disapproval in a newspaper. And the police are collaborating with the thugs.

This is the same France that spent a solid year talking down to us about foreign policy and just about everything else. When they get their ducks in a row, then they can pick up their cozy little delusions of grandeur again. A lot of ordinary French citizens are only just starting to wake up to an uncomfortable question: "We let all this happen?"

Yep. Having a little thing like direct representation instead of sham democracy makes all the difference, doesn't it?

If any police department pulled that crap here, the entire precinct would be thrown out on their ear, and any top brass who had even slight connections to the affair would get the boot as well. Oh, I could see something like that happening at a civil rights protest in the deep South well over half a century ago, but then that's not a comparison that smiles on the French unions. Le schmucks.

Today Scott Peterson's lawyers are using a bizarre Satanic cult defense and trying to tie this theory--that they apparently pulled literally out of their butts--to the mysterious brown van discovered by the police. So they're just gonna make up random thugs here as a defense? Is there any actual reason to suspect a cult was behind the murders?

Well, maybe the autopsies revealed something that the rest of us don't know. I suppose that's possible. But then it's also likely that anyone twisted enough to engage in human sacrifice would at least have a much better idea of how to dispose of the bodies.

From what I know of the case, the defense's strongest argument is the lack of actual hard evidence pointing to Scott Peterson, even in the face of abundant circumstantial evidence. Conjuring up bad guys out of nowhere to use as scapegoats is a move of desperation that the surviving Peterson's lawyers shouldn't have to make.

I have to wonder who else was in that hat. Serial killers? Gypsies? Vampires? Underpants gnomes?

The meme from that idiotic BBC story alleging PFC Jessica Lynch's rescue was faked has been gaining traction. In spite of being debunked immediately and thoroughly, somehow the story survived into the back channels and the mainstream media remained totally ignorant of that. Recently a local news story asked if the rescue was faked, based on that BBC report. Gads. It's like the last two weeks never happened.

So naturally now, a fool of a Congressman--and by fool I mean Democrat--has actually gone to the trouble of leveling an accusation and demanding more proof. Moron. I wonder if the residents of his district really think they deserve him.

Attention has been drawn to the April 1 rescue since a British Broadcasting Corp. report indicated the dramatics surrounding Lynch's rescue were unnecessary.

Reports of the rescue say the U.S. commandos broke down doors and went in with guns drawn, carrying Lynch out with helicopter and armored vehicle backup, even though there was no Iraqi military presence and the hospital staff didn't resist.

The hospital's staff has said they tried earlier to return Lynch to American troops but the ambulance carrying Lynch was fired on, so the driver sped back to the hospital.

Except that the BBC report was totally and completely unchecked, quoting from sources who would quite literally say anything. This ambulance story is a load of crap and that ought to be obvious; soldiers would have warned an ambulance--via signals or motions--to stop if it was approaching them, and then checked it out. The idea of workers using a working vehicle to send out Lynch instead of just waiting for US forces to arrive on their own is absurd, but not as absurd as suggesting that they'd actually return to a hospital that for all they knew could again be crawling with Fedayeen by the time they got back. The abortive ambulance trip alleged by the BBC report would be risky to the point of suicide. It would, however, be a great little story for someone to casually spin to an overanxious reporter running a Twit Factor of about 11.

Enter the BBC. Enter the blogosphere; exit another chunk of the BBC's hyperinflated credibility. Two weeks later, enter the second-string American media. Then, enter Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), fashionably late to the party.

Kucinich, ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations, asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a letter to release unedited footage of the rescue and answer the following questions:

Did U.S. troops encounter any Iraqi forces in the hospital?

Were U.S. troops fired upon during the rescue operation?

Did U.S. troops have information suggesting that Iraqi forces had abandoned the hospital?

None of which are relevant to the rescue operation. If the Army had reason to believe there would be little enemy presence, all the better; if they thought there would be some but were pleasantly surprised, that's okay too. No way would they be dumb enough to send in troops with blanks, though, totally unprepared for action.

Did Lynch sustain any gunshot or knife wounds?

If she didn't, should they have left her there?

Did U.S. officials have information suggesting that hospital staff were trying to deliver Lynch to American forces?

No. Duh! The story of the Iraqi lawyer who provided valuable intelligence about the hospital and first alerted our troops to Lynch's captivity there is much better known than that of these vague hospital sources who conveniently only spoke up two months after the fact. If there was any truth at all to this ludicrous yarn, more than a whiff of it would have been heard long before the BBC ran with it.

Did U.S. forces fire at ambulances?

In the context of this non-story, that question is beneath contempt. There may be a time in the future, God forbid, that it's reasonable to ask, but that time is not now. Here it's just like asking "How long has the President been secretly beating immigrants on Thursday nights?" It's a loaded question, predicated entirely on a lie. And Dennis Kucinich is too inhumanly stupid to know not to ask. Nor does he have a working bovinexcremeter, or he'd have the minimal intelligence needed to dismiss the allegations as complete crap.

I mean come on, Dennis. For 7 or 8 weeks, these practically anonymous sources do absolutely nothing to contradict the widely reported and plausible story, and now suddenly they deliver a story that's wildly implausible on several counts? That alone should have tipped any thinking person to the fact that the new story was bogus, or at least very greatly exaggerated. I expect a Beeb goon to leap to such a conclusion and others to publish it without a first thought; I expect better of most US Congressmen. Make that one less, now.

Kucinich, one of nine Democrats vying for his party's presidential nomination, has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war.

By the polls, the majority of Americans favored the war. The Democratic Party wants to unseat Bush, whose strongest issue is foreign policy, in 2004. You do the math.

Then explain it to Kucinich. "That doesn't add up" is a concept that doesn't seem to cross his mind.

There's a local commercial right now praising the Destiny USA project (and ClearChannel's new involvement in it) that will expand what is now Carousel Center into the largest mall in the country, inevitably drawing hundreds of thousands more Canadian coins into our economy.

Funny thing: They show a construction site that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the expansion. If there's actual construction going on right now for the mall, I haven't seen it, and I drive by the site several times a week. (There has been some preparation done to the site itself, but I haven't seen any significant movement on it in a while and there were still no structures up the last time I saw it.) The only construction going on nearby that I've seen is the glacial construction of a new sewage treatment plant, which with any luck will put an end to the rancid smell put out by the old.

"It's happening," they say. Gads I hope so, but so far I've seen diddly crap of it, and what little I've heard has been of more committee wrangling. (Thank Mayor Matt Driscoll, who originally held things up just long enough to Rick Bragg himself onto the project, killing a lot of momentum in the process.) One thing's for sure: The 2004 timeline they had going for it is definitely out the window now if it was ever believable to begin with. Construction in Syracuse is not a year-round affair--although that sewage treatment plant seems to want to prove me wrong on that by actually taking a year. I'm pretty sure skyscrapers have been built faster.

Wow. You know your career's washed up when they've been making jokes about the way you dropped off the planet for 10 years or so, but if that doesn't convince you, starring in an off-broadway play about porn but not breaking into the industry itself has to be a big clue. (Link from PseudoPsalms.)

Caffey and Anna Waronker are the composers of Lovelace: The Musical, while Wiedlin is acting as creative consultant. Playwright Jeffrey Bowman wrote lyrics and will direct. Tina Yothers of "Family Ties" fame will star. A showcase production will take place June 20-22 and June 27 in Los Angeles.

(Emphasis mine.) That's using the term "fame" rather loosely, isn't it? People of New York: Write down the hotline number on the back of the Worcestershire sauce bottles.

More on (pun intended) the Sultaana Freeman case over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Florida apparently does allow some exemptions to the photograph requirement for a driver's license, although I don't know why any of them would apply here. Quoting from the same article Volokh quotes, with his notes:

[Howard Marks, an ACLU lawyer who is representing Freeman] and [Sultaana] Freeman also say the state should exempt her from unveiling because the state already makes exceptions for temporary-permit drivers, foreigners and military personnel with out-of-state licenses.

None of which applies to Freeman. Temporary-permit drivers would probably not need a photo, and if the Florida DMV operates like the New York DMV does, generating an actual license for them would just be a paperwork load for no good reason. And anyone with an out-of-state license would already have their picture on that. And Freeman is a US-born convert to Islam, which sort of kills the foreigner exemption.

As evidence, Marks cited the more than 4,361 temporary licenses issued without pictures in the past five years to drunk drivers, suspended motorists and others with impaired health and bad vision.

Isn't that like saying that if one guy gets away with knocking off a bank, you should too? Just because people who shouldn't get licenses at all are being granted exemptions does not mean Freeman should; it means loopholes in policy should be closed. I may be missing something here, like a reason the state would want to issue a license to those people, but nothing comes to mind.

"An exemption is an exemption," Marks said in his opening salvo. "If you're going to give it for secular reasons, you have to give it for religious reasons."

That doesn't really follow. The secular reasons are based on practicality and are intended to be strictly objective. Religious reasons can be whatever anyone says they are. The only way this argument would have any merit would be if one of the valid reasons for granting an exception to the photo requirement were that the driver simply didn't want their photograph on there for any reason. Quoting Volokh directly now:

The article also points out that Freeman has a criminal history, though that shouldn't, as a legal matter, materially weaken her claim.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that exemptions are exceptions, and they don't fall under the category of things you issue equally--rather they're a matter of using your own best judgment. That said, it seems pretty clear that since there are public safety reasons behind the use of photos on drivers' licenses, a good enough criminal history should nix your chances of getting special treatment at the DMV.

For those who followed the last three, it's Race Day again. Tonight on CBS, The Amazing Race returns for its fourth run.

InstaPundit dreams of flying cars. As cool as the idea sounds and as much as I've always wanted my own, I'm skeptical of this report which puts a positive spin on the prospects of the aircar. The flaws discussed even in the article are many: Weight, restrictions on where you can fly, price, and capability as both plane and car. Here's the Achilles' heel of the whole shebag:

NASA’s Bushnell, however, believes it is unlikely that the FAA or municipal governments will allow swarms of personal aircraft to be buzzing around highly built-up areas. Lots of people are therefore going to continue traveling in and out of big cities—and they’ll most likely have to do so on roads. Thus, says Bushnell, for aircars to be mass-market vehicles, they will have to operate just as efficiently on the ground as in the air.

This doesn't sound significant in light of my mentioning "restrictions", but ask yourself: Why would mass use of skycars be preferable to ground cars?

Answer: By adding a third dimension to travel, you would ideally gain much wider maneuvering room, allowing highways to effectively carry more load with less congestion. Flying cars are desirable to alleviate traffic jams, not to jaunt from Philadelphia to Boston. What the article doesn't say is that in air mode, these skycars would be low-speed planes--but low-speed only for a plane, meaning it would have to travel at a good clip to stay aloft. In air mode, skycars would only be useful for traveling between cities, not within them.

Does that sound like the dream of the flying car to you? If it does, then you lack imagination. The point of flying cars is that you won't have to get stuck behind the old lady in the screwy hat going 30 miles an hour, only to be pinned in a 2-hour traffic jam because some yahoo on a cell phone clipped somebody in his SUV right at an offramp. In short, the dream of the flying car is not, should not be, for intercity travel, but intracity travel. The flying car would be ideal as a commuter vehicle, and deeply flawed as anything else.

So the skycar, designed as more airplane than car, could never live up to this ambition, because it couldn't really maneuver in cities while flying, or would be considered unsafe. Really we have no flying technology at present that solves this problem.

The flying car is a dead letter until antigravity is a workable and practical technology. Even then it may never be, because it was a dream of a naïve era that thought we'd be building colonies on Mars in the '60s. There's simply no getting around the fact that most people want this thing to get around traffic jams, and nothing we have now can do that. (Furthermore, any flying vehicle that fails does so catastrophically, and would drop like a rock. You'd need antigravity just so you could have a backup system.)

What we really want this for is to solve one of the most implacable and grating problems of the automotive age: How to get from point A to point B reliably in a minimal time, without getting stuck unpredictably at point C, D, E, or F. Whoever solves that problem will make more money than some continents will ever see.

The other endemic car problem of our age is parking. The best anyone ever came up with was the idea of parking garages, which are rather limited in both size and capacity. Parking lots sprawl out to the horizon yet are never big enough. Whoever solves that will make the highway congestion guy look like a third-rate burger flipper.

The low-hanging fruit that's already been picked is mass transit. Unfortunately that breeds a slew of problems all its own, revolving around terminals, schedules, stops, overcrowding, disease, and that greasy idiot who left a sandwich on the floor about 4 weeks ago. Europe is still enamored of mass transit, though, mostly I think just because overreliance on it is such a profoundly stupid idea. The rest is a misplaced faith in mass transit as an environmental savior, and a deeply inbred desire to handle all of life's problems via government projects. But then they never developed America's love affair with the automobile either. Most European cars are stunted little rodents that make you wonder why any company that hates cars so much as to deform them into wheeled sardine tins would ever make a car in the first place.

I think the Red Bull Flügtag is a great idea... if they get the idiots responsible for their animated commercials to man the flying contraptions. And if there wasn't any cushy water to land in--or there were sharks in it.

Now and then there's a story that just makes you want to sit back and say "Oh gads," then slap the idiots responsible. Setting: The other state where this kind of crap happens--Florida. Enter one Sandra Kellar, a.k.a. Sultaana Freeman.

A Muslim woman suing to keep her veil on for her driver's license photo took the stand Tuesday, saying Florida's insistence on photographing her face violates her religious rights.

"I don't unveil ... because it would be disobeying my Lord," said Sultaana Freeman, 35.

Yes, you read all that correctly. She actually wants the veil on her license photo. Doubtless there are millions of people in the country who would love to do the same, especially given the license photos they're saddled with already. But the reasons they don't get to do that are obvious.

Both sides planned to call experts in Islamic law at the nonjury trial, which was to continue Wednesday. A copy of the Quran was entered into evidence.

And Sharia has what, exactly, to do with this? The issue at stake is Florida law, not Islamic law. Holding a driver's license is not an absolute right; therefore refusal to grant one for reasons that overlap a religious interest does not necessarily constitute persecution.

Right now what they'd basically be arguing over in Islamic law would be whether in fact she's right in saying this is a religious matter, or whether she's just dippy. But really I think they can concede this ground; whether it violates her religion is not ultimately the point.

Freeman, a convert to Islam previously known as Sandra Kellar, wore her veil for the photo on the Florida driver's license she obtained after moving to the state in 2001.

Nine months later, she received a letter from the state warning that it would revoke her license unless she returned for a photo with her face uncovered.

Freeman claims her religious beliefs require her to keep her head and face covered out of modesty and that her faith prohibits her face from being photographed.

Unless Islam prohibits logic (Wahabbists seem to think it does), this impasse has a simple solution: Don't apply for a driver's license, or anything else with a photo ID. Duh!

Her attorneys argued that state officials didn't care that she wore a veil in the photo until after the Sept. 11 attacks, an allegation the state denies.

If the state was careless beforehand, that doesn't mean they have to keep being careless now. Some bonehead at the Orlando DMV office obviously was either too stupid to tell her to take off the veil, or too easily pushed off the subject, or too frazzled to deal with her just then, and thus they shuffled the problem onto someone else. Even if the entire department as an institution had been allowing this as a matter of policy, which I don't believe for a second, it stands to reason that they'd revoke that policy after a heightened security risk proved a need to actually do something intelligent in a bureaucracy for once.

"This is about religious liberty. It's about whether this country is going to have religious diversity," said Howard Marks, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

It's a shame the ACLU can't actually take up causes that merit attention; they have to get fixated on this kind of BS.

Hey Howie, here's your clue for the year: Religious diversity doesn't mean you can fudge a major component of your photo ID (unless, possibly, you're requried to have one) any more than it means you can lie in court on Tuesdays because the Goddess of Bunk commanded you to the last time you got stoned.

No, I'm not comparing Islam to that, but let's take a reality check here. No one's holding a gun to her head to get a license. She doesn't have to have one. If she does, then she's gonna have to do what other Muslim women in this country do and just get a regular photograph without it. No one ever needs to see her face unless she signs a check or gets pulled over in traffic. That's not a significant breach of modesty.

Assistant Attorney General Jason Vail argued that having an easily identifiable photo on a driver's license is a matter of public safety.

"It's the primary method of identification in Florida and the nation," Vail said. "I don't think there can be any doubt there is a public safety interest."

The sheer clarity of this compared to the "diversity" crap boggles the mind. As does the irony of the Assistant Attorney General's name.

I don't know what's dumber: That someone would try to pull a stunt like this or that the ACLU would defend them on it. I suppose neither was entirely unexpected.