Thursday, December 16, 2010

"to enhance national resilience"

Not a bad idea. Here's a handy-dandy 92 page US Government guide: Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation. It even has a two page acronym list. I don't see any listing for "Deep Kim Chee", but then that's a euphemism, not an acronym. DKC would be an excellent acronym to add to the list, though. Anyway, there was a "multiagency modeling effort" which I think is newspeak for "a government study" which came up with this:
The big surprise was how taking shelter for as little as several hours made a huge difference in survival rates.
Even just staying in your car could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
If people in Los Angeles a mile or more from ground zero of an attack took no shelter, Mr. Buddemeier said, there would be 285,000 casualties from fallout in that region.

Taking shelter in a place with minimal protection, like a car, would cut that figure to 125,000 deaths or injuries, he said. A shallow basement would further reduce it to 45,000 casualties. And the core of a big office building or an underground garage would provide the best shelter of all.

“We’d have no significant exposures,” Mr. Buddemeier told the conference, and thus virtually no casualties from fallout.
William J. Broad has the story in the New York Times.

Funny how the news media mocked the Reagan Administration when they said pretty much the same thing.

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Mao & the Great Leap Forward

The post below was ultimately inspired by the New York Times' Op-Ed "Mao's Great Leap to Famine" by Frank Dikotter.

Dikotter went through the declassified records in China.
In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed....People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten....Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.

When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot.
So when you see someone with a Mao-image t-shirt or purse, this is what that person seems to think is appropriate.

But then, as Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty of the New York Times said of the forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians by Joseph Stalin: "But - to put it brutally - you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

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Communism vs Nazism

What's the difference? Not big enough to respect Communists.

Glen Reynolds has a nice little back and forth over at InstaPundit.

Back in the 1970s I had some German friends in West Berlin who insisted communism was wonderful. They disliked all those governments, like East Germany and the Soviet Union, because they pretended to be communist, but weren't. My friends granted the rights abuses of the "communist" states, but defended communism by saying that REAL communism had never been tried: if it had, the results would have been, as Marx predicted, peace, prosperity, and freedom. Since the commies were not peaceful, prosperous, and free, they were not practicing real communism.

These were pretty smart, and extraordinarily well-read people. I think they were very, very deeply in denial. How can Marxists pretend that Marxism is scientific if every time Marxism is tried at a national scale and the results are not peace, prosperity, and freedom, but violence, poverty, and oppression, they simply claim that therefor "real" Marxism wasn't applied? The results "prove" that real Marxism wasn't applied because the theory is correct no matter what the real life effects?

No real world experiment produces the predicted results, therefor the theory is correct: it was the experimenters who are always wrong.

That's Marxist science for you.

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Austria MP Ewald Stadler Speaks of Turkey

Here.

The amount of applause is interesting. I bet this won't lead to warmer relations between Austria and Turkey.

The Europeans have done a lousy job of integrating immigrants, and their labor laws make it all the more difficult, but it seems that quite a few of the immigrants never did see themselves as on the way to assimilation, but as invaders using the host countries tolerance against them.

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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Condoleezza Rice on the Iraq War

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