The First Church of Free Speech

[b]Bush Warns That Terrorists Have the Advantage[/b]
By Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 15, 2006; 1:26 PM

President Bush said today the government is doing “everything in our power to protect” the American people from another terrorist attack but warned again that terrorists have the advantage when attacking the United States.

“They’ve got to be right one time,” Bush said at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean. “We’ve got to be right 100 percent of the time to protect the American people.”

Bush’s comments came as British police announced they had arrested another suspect in the alleged plot that became public last week to blow up several airliners bound for the United States from Britain.

“[b]We disrupted [i]a terror plot, a plot where people were willing to kill innocent life to achieve political objectives[/i],” Bush said.[/b]

The suspect — the 25th person to be arrested in Britain in connection with the plot — was detained west of London in the Thames Valley area, London’s Metropolitan police said today, according to news agency reports. Twenty-four people were initially arrested, but one was released. No other details were immediately available about today’s arrest.

“The United States of America is engaged in a war against an extremist group of folks bound together by an ideology willing to use terror to achieve their objectives,” Bush said after a closed-door morning meeting at the counterterrorism center with top national security officials and CIA Director Michael Hayden. The center, established last year, was created to analyze all intelligence dealing with terrorism collected by every U.S. agency.

In his remarks, Bush said it was “our solemn duty to protect the American people.”

He said America was “safer than it has been, but it’s not yet safe. The enemy has an advantage when attacking our homeland.”

Notice the bolded portion. Bush’s official definition of a “terror plot” is a plot where people are willing to kill innocents to achieve political objectives. Good going, George. Since all wars are meant to achieve political objectives, you’ve just admitted that either every life lost in Iraq has been a legitimate target, or the United States is engaged in terrorist activity. Schmuck.

Well, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference was last week, and Apple unveiled some killer [url=http://www.apple.com/macpro/]quad-core towers[/url] and a look at the next version of Mac OS X, code-named [url=http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/]Leopard[/url]. But I guess a lot of people were disappointed that Jobs didn’t announce a new iPod or iTunes movie rental service. You know, because those are just the things you’d expect at the World Wide Developer Conference.

It’s a show for the software developers, folks. Now I know that Mac hackers who were big into ResEdit back in the Classic days like to think that they qualify as software developers, and therefore WWDC announcements should cater to what they’re interested in, but sorry folks. Just because you’ve installed developer tools and compiled some open source project with configure/make/make install doesn’t make you a developer. So WWDC is not going to cover your interests.

Now that I’ve demeaned these people, let’s switch focus. There was a lot of crowing about Steve Jobs “[url=http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/08/1455255]losing his touch[/url]” at this keynote. Some even speculated that he was sick and/or dying. So I guess now that people can’t blather on about how “Apple is dying” anymore (because a whole lot of stock analysts would disagree), they’ve switched to “Steve Jobs is dying ZOMG!!!” Seriously, how retarded are these people? They’re yet more iPod-crazy fanbois who expect Jobs to talk about the damn iPod every time he’s on-stage. Once again, the World Wide Developer Conference centers around developers. At times, the interests of developers and end-users will coincide (like the Intel transition). Other times, they will not (announcement of new APIs in Leopard).

So, enough about the pointless yammering from uninformed, snobby journalists. Jobs showed off Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X. And to be honest, it looks like it’s going to beat Vista senseless. Now I don’t just say this as a Mac fan. Before the Leopard announcement, I was seriously concerned that the next version of Mac OS X just wouldn’t stack up to all the new stuff being offered in Vista. I have to give Microsoft credit. From what I’ve seen of Vista, both from online reviews and my own limited exposure to the betas, it looks like they’re really taking security seriously this time around, and they’ve done a huge overhaul of the already impressive NT kernel. There are a lot of really cool features in Vista, some of which are borrowed from OS X and others which are actually pretty original.

But from what I saw of Leopard, it’s not contest. The new backup technology, Time Machine, has an equivalent in Vista. But the Vista equivalent is … well, frankly, not nearly as cool. Time Machine’s interface is a fucking star field with a giant vortex in the background. You know, like in Star Wars. This is the shit only Apple people could dream up, and it’s cool as hell. Microsoft’s interface is, as always … Properties. Boring.

Oh and just for the record, Time Machine does not use ZFS. A lot of Solaris and Linux people were going on about how it “must” use ZFS for what it was doing. It doesn’t. I went to lunch with a bunch of engineers from Apple on Friday while I was out in San Francisco. Time Machine has nothing to do with ZFS. It is also not a versioning system. It backs up incrementally. Meaning that if you make a hundred changes to a file in an hour, there will only be one change saved at the end of the hour. (Assuming your increment is one hour.)

Also, Apple’s finally incorporating virtual desktops into OS X. Nice. I’ve been pining for this feature for a while now. In fact, when I was interviewing with Apple, they asked me what I’d like added to or changed in OS X. I told them I wanted virtual desktops. I guess they took me seriously. In any case, this is how virtual desktops should be. They’ve been around forever in Unix and Linux, and there are plenty of OS X applications for them as well, but Spaces is integrated into the OS. Virtual desktops are one of those things that seriously benefit from such integration.

I also have it on good authority that OpenGL is going to be massively overhauled in Leopard. We’re talking [i]huge[/i] improvements here. I won’t go into detail, but what I’ll say is this. Apple’s OpenGL improvements throughout the various iterations of OS X haven’t been all that spectacular. They’ve updated GL and made a few modest speed improvements for the rendering path and such for the upgrades, but really, nothing all that great. (I’m not talking about things like CoreImage and QuartzGL, which are big deals, but they do not affect the actual rendering path the underlying GL implementation uses; they work with that path.) This all changes in Leopard. Apple’s been hard at work getting a mammoth update to OpenGL out the door while incorporating the smaller changes into their shipping operating systems.

I also here that thread creation performance in the kernel has improved greatly. If true, this would be great news. Mach has been pretty weak on things like IPC and fork()/exec(). One of the applications I wrote made heavy use of IPC, and I was seriously surprised at how long it took to create a child process in a separate thread that communicated back with the parent. It was so bad that I had to put a barber pole progress bar to pass the time for the user.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Steve Jobs is alive, Apple is doing well and Leopard will eat Vista’s lunch (at least for desktop users; I believe Vista will still be the king of the managed workstation space). We’ll just have to wait until Spring 2007 to see what dressing Leopard would like with its plate of Vista.

David Horowitz has a soft spot for Holocaust “revisionists”. Otherwise, why would he carry their demented maunderings on his site? He has run articles by Alan Dershowitz (see my column about Dershowitz and Churchill), who falsely accused a man of calling his own mother a Nazi collaborator. In his August 10 column in the Huffington Post, he goes one better and insinuates once again that Maryla Finkelstein was a Nazi kapo. Of course he isn’t the only Holocaust “revisionist” who defames Maryla Finkestein in order to smear her son.

A crank by the name of Steven Plaut (who recently lost a libel case in Israel because he was caught in a lie about Ben Gurion University Prof. Neve Gordon) matter-of-factly called Norman Finkelstein a Holocaust denier and his mother a Nazi collaborator. Another marvel of intellect by the name of Phyllis Chesler, whose columns appear on Horowitz’s website also called Finkelstein a Holocaust denier, as did David Horowitz himself on The Dennis Prager Show. The reason Horowitz and Plaut go out of their way to slander Norman and Maryla Finkelstein is because they are just a couple of depraved liars. Chesler and Dershowitz do so to settle a score with Norman Finkelstein who humiliated them. The exposure of Dershowitz as a fraud and a plagiarist (among other things) is documented in Beyond Chutzpah. The exposure of Phyllis Chesler as a low grade moron is also contained in that vivacious tome: In her book The New Anti-Semitism she refers to India as an Arab country… twice!

Of course the smears against Maryla Finkelstein are debunked rather easily. If she were a kapo, she wouldn’t have been a prosecution witness at a war crimes trial in Germany, nor at a deportation hearing for a Nazi war criminal in the U.S. -she would have been a defendant.

The smears against her son are also easily dismissed by anyone with even a passing interest in logic. Finkelstein has been on the record for a number of years about how his mother and his father are the only members of his family who survived the Final Solution. In articles, interviews and his excellent book, The Holocaust Industry he details what it’s like to be the son of Holocaust survivors and the efforts they had to go to just to get the meagre compensation they received.

Now, in order for Finkelstein to be a Holocaust denier, or “diminisher”, or “trivializer” or whatever barracks lawyer term those who slime him want to use, it means that when he wrote about all but two members of his family being exterminated by the Nazis he was lying. The two positions can’t be reconciled: Either his aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on were killed in the Shoah (in which case Finkelstein can’t be a denier or any of those other euphemisms), or they weren’t (in which case the Holocaust is a hoax).

The former can’t be the case. The public record is full of Finkelstein’s essays, books and interviews about what happened to his family during the Second World War. So if we take Horowitz, Plaut, Chesler and Dershowitz at their word, it means the Holocaust never happened and Norman Finkelstein’s relatives are alive and well and frolicking on a beach in Sydney as Mel Gibson’s crazed Jew-hating father claims. In other words to accuse Norman Finkelstein of being a Holocaust denier is to engage in Holocaust denial. It’s also the kind of thing one would come to expect from only the most sadistic and moronic of the world’s lying little pricks.

On the way home from work I listened to Michael Medved’s show. I do this because it’s funny to hear the smug little prick squirm when even the not-so-bright talk radio callers outwit this self-styled intellectual.

Today’s guest was David Horowitz, a former commie/ Black Panther groupie who think his transformation into a neo-Nazi is a change for the better, and proprietor of a website that runs columns by Holocaust deniers and shits on the graves of Holocaust victims and survivors. This time, for a change of pace, Horowitz decided to smear a living Holocaust survivor: George Soros, who only survived because his well-to-do family bribed Christian families to take them in and pass off the 13-year-old Soros as one of their own. For this, Medved and Horowitz accused Soros of being “assimilated” to Naziism (I guess that makes Anne Frank an “assimilated Nazi” too, since she was hidden by Christians from the Nazis.).

They also accused him of being behind all sorts of hellish plots to make money by destroying America, legalizing weed and joining a coven of other “leftists” like the Baba Yaga of American politics: Hillary Clinton. They also accused him of being behind the defeat of Sore Loserman in Connecticut with his sinister money and front groups. In other words, they dipped their hands into the sewer for every Jew-baiting piece of crap to fling at him except the one about him killing Christian babies to make matzo.

Where did Horowitz come up with the sources for this avalanche of horseshit? There are four main ones:

Laurie Mylroie, who claims Saddam Hussein blew up the World Trade Center on 9-11 and is responsible for every other vile deed she can think of; Lyndon LaRouche, his own neo-Nazi website, and straight out of his ass.

Media Matters has more on Horowitz’s lies, doctored quotes and other bullshit here:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200608020003

To top it off, Medved and Horowitz smeared Soros as a self-hating Jew. Like two I could name who traffic in anti-Semitic stereotypes to paint a Jewish businessman as Super Shylock? I’m no apologist for Soros or any other zillionaire who moves his money offshore to dodge taxes, but this has the be the most repulsively anti-Semitic thing I’ve ever heard on the radio -even outdoing the Savage Wiener’s diatribes that must have sounded better in the original German.

No wonder Michael Medved is such a shameless apologist and fanwhore for Mel Gibson.