9 out of 10 top pages at Conservapedia homosexuality-related

Chapeau doff to the Party Pooper. Excluding the main page of the conservative alternative to Wikipedia, every single page in the top ten is related to homosexuality. The list:

1. Main Page‎ [1,916,218]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,586,114]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [517,543]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [421,339]
5. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [396,018]
6. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [388,730]
7. Homosexual Couples and Domestic Violence‎ [373,363]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [331,743]
9. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [292,841]
10. Homosexual Agenda‎ [271,023]

Gay Bowel Syndrome? Seriously, I can not imagine what use conservatives could possibly have for detailed information about the mechanics of gay sex.

Well I've done the legwork and read the page on Gay Bowel Syndrome just to see what these conservatives are so interested in. The first half of the page is a rather dry description of the syndrome (constellation of symptoms). The second half of the page is a description of the history of the term, the perception of the term as one carrying a negative bias by gay activists, and the efforts to have the term removed from med school textbooks. Nothing particularly titillating.

Still it is wierd that every single page in the top ten except the main page is about homosexuality.

I wish they included more statistics on their website. I would love to know what page 11-20 are.

Wars of Blood and Faith, condensed, part one

I am printing here some of the more provocative and interesting passages from Ralph Peters' 2007 book Wars of Blood and Faith. I am a bit pressed for time, so here's part one.

Clausewitz had it Backwards
p. 39-40 [I]t may be our predilection for prolonging even the most wretched peace that ultimately makes our wars so bloody. After a century of Euro-American conflicts, it requires little effort to make the case that the quickest way to inspire a shooting was may be to cling to the dream of peace in our time. . .Idealistic American communists abetted Stalin's crimes while conservatives insisted that Hitler wasn't our problem. . .The massacres at Srebrenica can't be blamed on Serb militias alone--Europe's pacifists were the enablers. Darfur screams, while we stop up our ears.

p. 40 Along with our nibbling at Clausewitz, we also snack on a few crumbs from Sun Tzu, without any real comprehension, that "to win war without fighting is the highest form of victory." Our assumption is that the maxim has a pacific, if not a pacifist, sense: victory without bloodshed! Hurrah, hurrah! Such an interpretation is profoundly wrong. Sun Tzu's primary emphasis in that passage isn't on avoiding battle--that's secondary--but on winning by alternative means. The distinction is critical. Sun Tzu would have found Western peacekeeping operations incomprehensible: avoiding battle and losing.

p.41 The conundrum is that our military strength makes our policy-makers lazy. Neglectful of other instruments and means of national power, they inevitably find themselves forced to resort to military solutions.
The Chinese understand perfectly that policy is an extension of war beyond the crudities of the battlefield, and they act upon the insight skillfully. The Russians grasps it, too, if less coherently . . . (as with the depth-of-winter gas shut-offs to Ukraine and then Georgia). The French have acted as if engaged in comprehensive warfare with all other parties for four centuries, failing only because their means were never commensurate with their exaggerated ambitions.

p.43 Brilliantly, the Chinese have managed to harness the greed of influential elements within our own business community to prevent the implementation of policies by Washington that might reduce China's artificial trade advantages and limit our own self-inflicted vulnerabilities. By allowing a relative handful of American corporations to grow rich, the Chinese have paralyzed our government's ability to defend our workers, our industries, and our economy. We have reached the point where lobbying veers into treason. The Chinese view our relationship as a war conducted through nonmilitary means. Under such advantageous economic conditions, they are perfectly happy to refrain from shooting.

p44 Saudi Arabia, for example, has engaged in a merciless religious war against the West for more than three decades, yet it has not only done so while convincing our national leaders, Republican and Democrat, that we're "friends," but has managed to gain the protection of America's military on the cheap, even as it refuses meaningful cooperation with our forces. To preserve the profits of a handful of multinational oil companies, we protect a repellent, throwback regime that willfully created Osama bin Laden and his ilk.

p 45 The target of the suicide bomb isn't really flesh and blood--it's the video camera, that powerful, postmodern "other means" of securing a military advantage without possessing a military.
By refusing to instill a warlike spirit in other fields of our national policy, we only make "real war" inevitable.

The Hearts and Minds Myth
p50 Self-righteous journalists love to claim that the first casualty of war is the truth, but that's a self-serving lie; the first casualty of any form of violence is reason, that weakest and most disappointing of learned human skills.
We are, indeed, engaged in religious wars--because our enemies have determined that these are religious wars. Our own refusal to understand them as such is just one more debilitating asymmetry.

p 51 We must get over out impossible dream of being loved as a nation, of winning hearts and minds in Iraq and elsewhere. If we can make ourselves liked through our successes, that's well and good. But the essential requirement for the security of the U.S. are that our nation is respected and our military feared.

p52 We need to be tough on ourselves. Begin by listing the number of religion-fueled uprisings throughout history that were quenched by reason and compromise--call me collect if you find a single one. Then list the ethnic civil wars that were solved by sensible treaties without significant bloodshed. Next, start asking the really ugly questions, such as: Hasn't ethic cleansing led to more durable conditions of peace than any more humane approach to settling power relations between bloodlines? Shouldn't we be glad when fanatics kill fanatics? Is there a historical precedent for coping with violent religious fanatics that does not include bloodshed to the point of extermination?

The Myth of Immaculate Warfare
p54 The siren song of techno-wars fought at standoff range makes military solutions more attractive to political leaders than would be the case were they warned about the war's costs at the outset.

p56 [T]he impressive -in-theory capabilities of the latest weapons cloud the vision of military planners, leading them to focus on what the systems can do instead of concentrating on what needs to be done. Rather than buying the weapons we really need, we twist the conflicts we face to conform to the weapons we want to buy. The resulsts are flawed war plans based on unrealistic expectations--in short, Iraq

Politically Correct War
p62 You can trust to kinds of officers: those who read a great deal and those who don't read at all. But beware the officer who reads just a little and falls in love with one book. A little education really is a danegrous thing.

Clinton can't win

You've heard it before, a few times I bet. Well let my voice be one more in the choir saying that Hillary Clinton has got no shot at the White House, and that the worst thing that the Democrats could possibly do is put her up against a Republican candidate. Unless a right-leaning third party candidate appears to split up the conservative vote.
Hillary Clinton can not possibly win because she is unbelievably reviled. I've heard people, several people, tell me that they will only vote if they can vote against Clinton.
You've heard this, you know this. Just helping you let it sink in.

Torture and tortured verbiage

There's been a lot of hot wind blowing around about waterboarding, 'simulated drowning', stress positions, and torture in general these days. Much of this talk seems to me to be as usual missing the whole point. People talk about the aptness of the name waterboarding. It seems to me that one reasonable definition of waterboarding would be 'the sensation of drowning without (normal) danger of dying'. That sounds very cruel and unusual to me.
Stress positions, as well, seem to be very uncomfortable and may have the potential to do lasting physical damage. I have heard the lasting physical damage complaint issued time and time again in the press, but I think that to even bring it up implied a definition of torture that includes as a necessary component lasting physical harm. While waterboarding may be done with no lasting permanent harm done, so can rape, but this does not make rape, even when done in controlled conditions and supervised by psychologists, an acceptable form of interrogation.
So we find ourselves with a concept, torture, that is ill-defined and murky in the public and legal imagination. People's immediate reaction is to go with their default reaction. Liberal hearts around the world gush in empathy with the hooded and besodden victims while eye-for-an-eye justice hungry conservatives feel a rush of hot vengeful blood to the head and rush to the defense of harsh interrogation techniques. Neither side gives a thought to whether these techniques are torture, why they are torture, or whether they work. People who view every morcel of information on the war with intense scrutiny seize upon memes like 'harsh interrogation tactics don't work' and blindly trumpet them without a second thought to their veracity. The other side points to successful results of harsh interrogation with the same blind faith in information that bolsters their own practically inborn opinions.
That's just weak. I equate the interrogation debate to the abortion debate, in that I think both are matters for professionals to figure out without letting politics get in the way. If harsh interrogation doesn't work, why would professional interrogators use such methods? Because know-nothing people in the administration are pushing them for intel that simply isn't there or isn't available, or because the administration wants to send some sort of method? For every mook on the street in America to have an opinion about something they know nothing about is nothing new, but in this case the amount of scrutiny given to a necessarily unsavory-looking task like intelligence gathering techniques is bringing a lot of very embarassing attention to our government. Honestly, it's not even a matter of knowing how the sausage is made anymore. If we open up the slaghterhouse doors to observation by every knucklehead in town we're going to wind up with no knockwurst at all.

My reaction to the new Inter-Korean Agreement in a nutshell

a) Roh Moo-hyun and his predecessor Kim Dae-jung and cohorts have created, in the Sunshine Policy, an atmosphere in which South Korea expects to reconcile with North Korea through dialogue Advances are touted by astute politicians while setbacks are studiously ignored.

b) As the Marmot points out, likely next president Lee Myeong-bak will be politically bound to go through with the joint plans made by Roh and Kim Jong-il. To not do so would be seen as unacceptable provocation.

c) As much of the joint projects will be funded by private industry (hat tip to the Marmot again), Korea's corporations will have a vested interest in both the international perception that North Korea is making progress and the continued cooperation of the Kim regime.

d) With both politicians and corporations in South Korea heavily invested in the perception of progress on the North-South issue, advances both real and imagined will be touted more vigourously while setbacks will be swept so far under the linoleum that it'll take the ondol extra long to heat up.

e) As for North Korea, they now recognize that pointing missiles at Seoul and threatening to turn the city into a lake of fire is no longer a viable means of extorting aid. It is both cheaper and easier to demilitarize while allowing the placement of South Korea's public and private sector's cherished symbols of peninsular unity to be built, at South Korean expense, in North Korea. Now, all North Korea needs to put South Korea in appeasement mode is close a plant or, in a kind of reverse Gazprom maneuver, close the South Korea-China train line. A master stroke, I must say.

Ahmedinejad pulling a Chavez

He's providing nuclear education to those nations that need it and offering a Coalition for Peace to the smaller nations who resent those nations with UN vetoes.
Plus he's claiming that all the problems in the world today are caused by an unfair settlement of World War 2 in favor of the winners. That means he's pulling a you-know-who.