James R. Rummel

I am a self defense instructor who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

They Call THIS the “Nuclear Option”?

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The Laotian immigrants that I work with were streaming hip-hop songs from their native country today. Every so often a few recognizable syllables would sometimes rush past my ear in the torrent of Lao. It was a slang word popular with American rappers that begins with the letter “N”.

The significance of this story is that people will find unexpected uses for technology if there is some sort of reward. The Internet was originally intended for the fast transfer of data between scientists and engineers, yesterday it was used by my coworkers to stream crappy popular music from a dirt poor Communist state. If they decide to buy the CD, then both a Laotian rap group and the country’s economy will benefit from the influx of hard American dollars.

There is an anecdote about the beginnings of photography in the 1830’s. The story goes that the assistant of Louis Daguerre was caught by the police on a Paris street when he offered to sell naughty pictures to men passing by. The picture, so it is said, was of a woman making love to a horse.

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Hitch is Unimpressed

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I haven’t written anything about the Harriet Miers nomination because I really don’t have an opinion. The reason why I don’t have an opinion is due to the fact that I don’t know anything about Miers or the issues at hand to form one.

A glance at the blogosphere would seem to indicate that this is extremely rare, a pundit who refuses to bloviate simply because he knows enough to realize that he doesn’t know enough. But that’s what sets the Chicago Boyz apart, and I’m not about to buck that trend.

Christopher Hitchens, it would appear, has been paying closer attention. He wonders why we can’t just stop pretending that there’s no “religious test” for the Supreme Court.

What in God’s name—you should forgive the expression—is all this about there being “no religious test” for appointments to high public office? Most particularly in the case of the U.S. Supreme Court, there is the most blatant religious test imaginable. You may not even be considered for the bench unless you have a religion of some kind. Surely no adherent of any version of “originalism” can possibly argue that the Framers of the Constitution intended a spoils system to be awarded among competing clerical sects.

Read the whole thing.

The Slaughter of Innocence

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The UK Telegraph reports that UNICEF Belgium has produced a short film in order to raise money for a program to rehabilitate former child soldiers in Burundi. The film shows the popular cartoon characters The Smurfs as their village is bombed. The final shot is of Baby Smurf as he cries in a field of unmoving blue bodies and the ruins of the village burns in the background.

The reasoning behind such horrific images is to motivate jaded contributors to open their wallets and dig deep.

Philippe Henon, a spokesman for UNICEF Belgium, said his agency had set out to shock, after concluding that traditional images of suffering in Third World war zones had lost their power to move television viewers.

If relatively bloodless scenes will rake in the cash, why didn’t the people who created the ad really lay on the gore? It seems that they wanted to but cooler heads prevailed.

Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis for the campaign, said the agency’s original plans were toned down. “We wanted something that was real war – Smurfs losing arms, or a Smurf losing a head -but they said no.”

So this is the civilized version. Glad they cleared that up for me.

The Smurfs have been around since 1958, so it’s certain that most adults have a certain amount of affection for these beloved childhood icons. The ad is also not to be broadcast before 9 PM, an obvious attempt to reduce exposure to younger viewers. But Smurfs are, after all, cartoon characters that are at the center of children’s lives. Images showing the violent death of these characters are bound to have a profound and long lasting effect on the most vulnerable and impressionable section of the population.

Everyone involved in the project say that they just want to raise money for a noble and worthy cause, but I can’t help but think that there is another agenda here.

Red Bait

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It was a given while I was growing up that Sen. McCarthy‘s hunt for Soviet agents in the US government was a sickening example of paranoia gone wild. The common wisdom said that lives were needlessly ruined, innocent people and their reputations were destroyed, and America teetered on the brink of becoming a Fascist state where the FBI would be far worse than the Gestapo.

Heh. Talk about paranoia gone wild.

The reason why this take on McCarthy’s crusade is absurd is due to the fact that he was substantially correct. Declassified documents from the Venona Project, a top secret effort to intercept and decode Soviet messages, essentially proved that there were spies on the Russian payroll working at sensitive jobs inside the US government. Some of them even refused payment for betraying their country, so dedicated were they to the most murderous ideology the world has ever seen.

A film co-written and directed by George Clooney tells the tale of veteran newsman Edward R. Murrow, a journalist who used his television pulpit to stand up to Sen. McCarthy and start his fall from grace. I was wondering how Clooney would handle the fact that Murrow, by discrediting McCarthy and ending attempts to reveal the agents who were working for a hostile foreign power, was actually doing the Soviet’s work for them. Alas, he handles it by making sure that there isn’t a hint of it anywhere in the film. According to these two reviews, the movie portrays Murrow as a hero for speaking truth to power and bringing down the brutish Senator before he could destroy any more innocent lives.

The Venona Project translations of Soviet communiqués have been available to the public for more than ten years now. Even so, a shockingly small percentage of people are aware of them. It would seem that the majority of the people interested in this subject simply swallow the story outlined in the first paragraph and don’t ever bother to read up on it. That’s a great pity. It’s also a great pity that Clooney’s movie will probably be a fairly big hit for a drama that’s all talk and no action.

I think I’m going to miss this one when it comes to my multiplex, though. I just don’t see any reason to reward a filmmaker for perpetuating a thoroughly debunked myth.

The Power of Language

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On October 1, a suicide bomb went off on the campus of the University of Oklahoma at Norman. The only death was the person who was carrying the bomb, Joel Henry Hinrichs III. There were no injuries.

Both Federal and local law enforcement officials have been investigating the crime, and so far they have been very cautious about the information they release to the news media. This has generated a fair amount of frustration from pundits who see the incident as a clear attempt at an act of terrorism. The police should simply give voice to the obvious, they say. A good example of this is given by Firehand at Irons in the Fire.

“As to the disclaimers from the feds(“No, no, no evidence of anything like terrorism”), they do not give me a great deal of confidence.”

Speaking as someone who once worked in law enforcement, I can say with confidence that the police are required to operate under rules and restrictions that are alien to the general public. Speaking in the broadest possible sense, if you haven’t been in the trenches then you just don’t have a clue.

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