Why is This News?

In a dog bites man story:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) – Thomas Beatie, who was born a woman but lives as a man in Oregon after surgery and hormone treatment, is expecting a second child, Beatie has told Barbara Walters in an interview set to air on television on Friday.
Beatie, 34, who is legally a man but kept female reproductive organs when he had a sex-change operation 10 years ago, is in his first trimester of pregnancy, he told celebrity interviewer Walters for the ABC news program "20/20" that will air on November 14. Walters highlighted the interview on her daytime chat show, "The View," on Thursday.

When you cut through all the politically correct BS...what you have is "Woman Gets Pregnant". But because she had her breasts removed, we act like it's a medical miracle. Ridiculous.

Well We Know Who Our Friends Are...

Certainly not Russia

The Russian company building Iran's first nuclear power plant has renewed a commitment to complete the project, the official IRNA news agency reported on Tuesday.
Russia, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, is building the plant at Bushehr on the Gulf coast of Iran despite a long-running standoff over Tehran's controversial nuclear drive.
The Russian contractor said in December that Bushehr would not come on line before the end of 2008, amid repeated delays in construction, contractual disputes and international tensions over Iran's nuclear programme.

Aw, the fact that Iran is supposed to stop Nuclear production hinders Russia's efforts to make Iran a nuclear power. I might feel bad if not for the fact that Iran wants to kill all their neighbors and I'mm opposed to that. What a shame.

Another Shocker!

Men want women. Women want men.

WHAT A TWIST!

Who knew?

It was the feminist dream of the 1960s – a world in which men and women share the load equally.
But it seems the fairer sex has all but abandoned the struggle. According to research published today, most men want a traditional wife – and women are often only too happy to oblige.
In turn, it claims that the husband women most desire is a ‘retrosexual’ – meaning they are more hunter gatherer than a ‘metrosexual’ stay-at-home father.
...
Tanya Jackson, corporate affairs manager at the building society, said: ‘A lot of women used to think they wanted a metrosexual man.
‘But then they realised they were fed up with a man who spent longer in the bathroom than they did.
‘Many women now feel they actually want a hunter-gatherer and they will look after their man in return.’

Despite a constant drumbeat about how women and men should be interchangable, they aren't. We are born with different natures and seek out the other to complete ourselves. While lots of people bought into the feminist claptrap, it didn't take long to see that the Feminist Empress had no clothes and, even worse, no grasp of reality.
While women tried the guru's nonsense for years, the basic nature of women told them they wanted a real man. Because gender roles aren't "societally defined", they are genetically instilled. While every girl wanted the sensative guy who was into girly movies, once she had it...she was disappointed. The feminist noise ruined a lot of families and left a lot of broken people. But basic human nature is correcting new age silliness. Even the feminists are abandoning their fancy ideas. Little Miss "like fish need a bicycle" has even gotten married. Stupid ideas can only hold out so long against people's basic nature. It's about time the cycle is correcting itself.

Another Case of Liberal Compassion

In Indonesia:

These locals have long viewed the dragons as a reincarnation of fellow kinsfolk, to be treated with reverence. But now, villagers say, the once-friendly dragons have turned into vicious man-eaters. And they blame policies drafted by American-funded environmentalists for this frightening turn of events.
"When I was growing up, I felt the dragons were my family," says 55-year-old Hajji Faisal. "But today the dragons are angry with us, and see us as enemies." The reason, he and many other villagers believe, is that environmentalists, in the name of preserving nature, have destroyed Komodo's age-old symbiosis between dragon and man.
...
"For us, giving food to the dragons is an obligation, our sacred duty," says Hajji Adam, headman of the park's biggest village, Kampung Komodo.
Indonesia invited the Nature Conservancy, a Virginia-based environment protection group, to help manage the park in 1995. An Indonesian subsidiary of the group, called Putri Naga Komodo, gained a tourism concession for the park in 2005 and is investing in the conservation effort some $10 million of its own money and matching financing from international donors.
With this funding and advice, park authorities put an end to villagers' traditional deer hunting, enforcing a prohibition that had been widely disregarded. They declared canines an alien species, and outlawed the villagers' dogs, which used to keep dragons away from homes. Park authorities banned the goat sacrifices, previously staged on Komodo for the benefit of picture-snapping tourists.

Not surprisingly, this led to some rather tragic consequences, the dragons going for the next easiest food source...

A year ago, a 9-year-old named Mansur was one such victim. The boy went to answer the call of nature behind a bush near his home in Kampung Komodo. In broad daylight, as terrified relatives looked on, a dragon lunged from his hideout, took a bite of the boy's stomach and chest, and started crushing his skull.
...
A few months later, Jamain's neighbor Mustaming Kiswanto, a 38-year-old who makes a living selling dragon woodcarvings to tourists, and whose son had been bitten by a dragon, was attacked by another giant lizard after falling asleep. In June, five European divers, stranded in an isolated part of the park, said they successfully fended off an aggressive dragon by throwing their weight belts at it.
To the villagers in Komodo, the recent incidents provide clear evidence of an ominous change in reptile behavior. "I don't blame the dragons for my boy's death. I blame those who forbade us from following custom and feeding them," says Jamain. "If it weren't for them, my boy would still be alive."

A centuries old truce, for lack of a better word, has kept the lizards mostly docile. And when they got out of line, the villagers dogs would help protect them. Without the incentive of free easy food, and the disincentive of fighting off protective dogs, the dragon has turned to vulnerable humans as an easy food source. Small children, sleeping people, anything that looks like easy prey is fair game. After all, the Komono Dragons haven't had to get their own food for centuries. It's not likely they'd go back to trying to hunt. Well, at least we know the liberals are sorry for their actions...

The boy "shouldn't have crouched like a prey species in a place where dragons live," says Marcus Matthews-Sawyer, tourism, marketing and communications director at Putri Naga Komodo. "You've got to be very careful about extrapolating and drawing any conclusions."

Oh.

Despite such disbelief in the Komodo villagers' theories, executives at the Nature Conservancy's headquarters in the U.S. pledge to reach out and tackle local fears. "Any concern expressed by the villagers will be taken seriously and we will address it if we can," says Chief Communications Officer James R. Petterson. "The Komodo effort is a work in progress."

No measures have been taken as of yet, and it's doubtful any will. Because the conservancy doesn't care about the people, just this fantasy Utopia for the animals. For liberals, it's never about the consequences of the action, just the action itself and how it makes them feel. What's a dead child here and there when you're busy saving the Earth. As the soviets used to say, you have to break a couple of eggs to make an omelet.

It's funny that, even though Republicans are the "Racist ones", it's always liberal ideas that rack up the piles of little colored bodies.

Colleges Confront Violence

Sort of

Fromk USA Today

The training drills teachers and students in a "survival mindset," said Randy Spivey, a former U.S. Department of Defense hostage negotiator who is executive director of the center. The center's roster includes retired FBI agents and others with federal law enforcement experience.
"There are two extremes. On the one hand is paranoia, and on the other is oblivion," he said. "We're just trying to get people to keep this on their radar."
The training discourages cowering in a corner or huddling together in fear, Brouillette emphasized at the Kansas City session.
Instead, Metropolitan Community College faculty members were taught to be aware of their surroundings and to think of common classroom objects — such as laptops and backpacks — as "improvised weapons."

You know waht really works great as a weapon? A gun. Number of gunmen stopped with laptops? Zero. Number of gunmen stopped with guns? A lot higher than zero. Of course this is a moot point, as the numbers show. Allow people to be armed and crime usually goes down. (In Missouri it has stayed constant.) Criminals are usually like everyone else...they'd prefer to not get shot. Thos who are going to kill themselves anyway CANNOT be deterred. All that stops them is dying.

Of course some stupids have to object:

The sort of aggressive survival response cited by Brouillette troubles school violence researcher Loren Coleman, a retired University of Southern Maine professor.
Showing students violent images of school shootings could trigger post-traumatic stress or other reactions that resident advisers, graduate assistants and similarly untrained workers would be unequipped to handle, Coleman said.
And the techniques shown in instructional videos such as "Shots Fired" could provide inspiration for troubled students considering their own acts of violence, Coleman suggested.
"You more or less are giving them a blueprint for how to avoid law enforcement," he said.

Not to beat a dead horse...but how many school shootings have been stopped by the police? If you guessed zero, you're correct. Cho needed no help in avoiding the police. The gunmen at Columbine had no problems getting away from police until they ended their miserable lives. The police have been a non-issue in school shootings. Even when they get there, they are completely ineffective. The main reason is that the Police are meant to solve crimes after they happen, not prevent them. The only impediment to a crime is an armed victim. Until we start dealing with defense from that position, we won't get anywhere.

Jim Webb Discusses the Consequences of Vietnam

And shows just why simply leaving a war zone neither serves America's interests abroad, nor "relieves suffering" of the country where the war is...

Webb On Vietnam

In Vietnam, the propaganda machines must work full time to convince an increasingly restless population that the communist war effort was uniquely nationalist and "pure," and that the rigid disciplines that allowed Hanoi to prevail in war still have validity as the future threatens to pass them by.
Here at home, a quiet but intense debate has raged over our involvement, with the forum largely controlled by the media and academia, two of the most staunchly antiwar communities during the conflict (a third being Hollywood). All of these groups have a large stake in having the war remembered as both unnecessary and unwinnable.
Simplistic, cartoonish mythologies accompany both the communist and antiwar versions of the war, no doubt bringing solace to those who were on the right side of its outcome. It is easier to understand why our former enemies persist in such notions than it is to comprehend why so many of our own best and brightest still cling to the illusion that allowing -- or in some cases assisting -- a Stalinist takeover in South Vietnam was an honorable enterprise. The communists paid a heavy price for this victory, and it is natural that they should continue to rejoice in it. What is not natural is that our own commentators, now provided with so much evidence to measure results, should abet the rewriting of history.
In order to justify the war as more of an inevitable reunification of the country than a communist takeover, scant mention is made of other nationalist parties inside Vietnam that the communists systematically eliminated beginning in the first days after World War II. The continuing focus on American and other "atrocities" (My Lai is a national monument) blurs the reality that assassinations were an essential part of the communist insurgency. According to the late Bernard Fall, communist terrorists killed an average of 11 government officials daily during the early 1960s -- the equivalent in this country of an Oklahoma City bombing every day, for years. In a form of deliberate amnesia, commentators rarely mention that such policy-driven assassinations continued throughout the war, with thousands being executed in the city of Hue alone during the brief communist occupation in the 1968 Tet offensive.
...
In order to demean attempts to nurture a democracy in the south even as a war was being fought, the South Vietnamese are continually portrayed as corrupt "puppets" of the U.S. Communist leaders, meanwhile, are elevated to the now-familiar caricature of the selfless noble savage. Communist soldiers -- who fought well but lost repeatedly -- are reverentially referred to as wily guerrilla fighters who continually bested the inept, over equipped forces of the U.S. and South Vietnam. These misrepresentations persist despite Hanoi's admission that more than 1.4 million of its soldiers died in the war, as opposed to 58,000 Americans and 245,000 South Vietnamese.
...
In terms of attitude, the most comprehensive survey of those who fought in Vietnam (Harris, 1980) indicated that 91% of those who served were "glad they served their country," 74% "enjoyed their time in the military," and 89% agreed with the statement that "our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win."
The American antiwar movement, whose former members dominate the present administration as well as many of the media and academic filters through which the debate must pass, is benignly portrayed as a reactive force that mobilized only in response to a failed American strategy. In truth, many of its core leaders were dedicated to revolutionary change in America even before the Vietnam War started (the infamous Students for a Democratic Society was created by the Port Huron Statement in 1962). Many of them -- including members of the influential Indochina Peace Campaign -- continued to coordinate directly with Hanoi after the American military pullout in 1973.
...
This vote was a horrendous blow, in both emotional and practical terms, to the country that had trusted American judgment for more than a decade of intense conflict. It was also a clear indication that Washington was abandoning the South Vietnamese even as the North Vietnamese continued to enjoy the support of the Soviet Union, China and other Eastern bloc nations. The vote's impact was hardly lost on North Vietnamese military planners, who began the final offensive only five weeks later, as the South Vietnamese were attempting to adjust their military defenses.
Finally, the aftermath of Saigon's fall is rarely dealt with at all. A gruesome holocaust took place in Cambodia, the likes of which had not been seen since World War II. Two million Vietnamese fled their country -- usually by boat -- with untold thousands losing their lives in the process. This was the first such Diaspora in Vietnam's long and frequently tragic history. Inside Vietnam a million of the South's best young leaders were sent to re-education camps; more than 50,000 perished while imprisoned, and others remained captives for as long as 18 years. An apartheid system was put into place that punished those who had been loyal to the U.S., as well as their families, in matters of education, employment and housing. The Soviet Union made Vietnam a client state until its own demise, pumping billions of dollars into the country and keeping extensive naval and air bases at Cam Ranh Bay.

The irony is that Webb gets Vietnam so right, and correctly argues that we owe our servicemen and women who served (no one wishes to slam their own service after all), he gets Iraq soooo wrong.
The two are damn near identical wars. But Webb wishes to glorify the lost Vietnam war, elevating the valiant serviceman over the incompetant Congress, while at the same time villifying Iraq and the Commander in Chief who wishes to avoid the mistakes of the past. Not only is it odd given Webb's stance on Vietnam, but it becomes downright paradoxical that Webb's son is in Iraq, and he seems to wish the same awful degredation of his son's military service that the anti-war radicals back then gave to his service. And he panders to the modern day anti-war factions while slamming the Vietnam variety.

Basically, if Webb has his way, history will repeat itself under his watch. What makes this so tragic is that he's so damned brilliant on Vietnam and so damned stupid on Iraq.

Like father, like son. In 20 years, we'll have this same article written by his kid, with Iraq replacing Vietnam, and Cindy Sheehan replacing Hanoi Jane.