Sailor Beware!

....and we all should be aware of Skippy's new girlfriend.

MSM whitewashes French gang violence

This was going to start out as "The quote about France from earlier this week still holds..." while reporting another example of why an unarmed, weak, beaten (French) people are serfs. Yawn, I know. Stick with me on this. Lorenzo from ILYS (you have to love the provocative opening picture) linked in comments on an assault in Southern France that would not happen in the Southern U.S.. For those that do not read French, an English version came out today in the Washington Times, via the very French AFP.

Gang terrorizes train in France

By Marc Burleigh
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
January 5, 2006

PARIS -- A gang of more than 20 youths -- thought to be North African immigrants -- terrorized hundreds of train passengers in a rampage of violence, robbery and sexual assault on New Year's Day, French officials said yesterday.
The five-hour-long criminal frenzy was "totally unacceptable," French President Jacques Chirac told reporters. "Those guilty will be found and punished, as they deserve."
The gang of between 20 and 30 youths boarded the train, heading from Nice on the French Riviera to Lyon, in eastern France, early on Jan. 1, as it carried 600 passengers home from New Year's Eve partying overnight.

Before we slam the MSM for their intentional misrepresentation of the facts because they don't think the uneducated masses can handle the truth, lets look at attack. If 20~30 youths board throw themselves in a group of 600 people in any Southern state and those youths start stealing, beating,and sexually assaulting - there is going to be shooting. But let's go back to the situation at hand. The punks were only armed with knives and screwdrivers, and not all of them had weapons. Let's assume that half the 600 serfs of France were men. (yes I will be sexist here; just work with me) That is over 10 to 1 odds. This assault went on for an hour and a half. Oh, want to rely on the French Police to save you?

Once inside, they went wild, forcing passengers to hand over mobile phones and wallets, and slashing seats and breaking windows.

A 20-year-old woman cornered by several of the marauders was sexually molested.
"It was a real scene of pillage on the train," said the regional state prosecutor, Dominique Luigi, adding that the passengers were in a state of "panic."
Train staff alerted police, and the train pulled into a station to wait. The three officers who initially turned up later were joined by reinforcements.
A waitress in a bar near the station said two young women from the train had come inside in tears.

"They told me there had been groping. They talked about sexual assaults. They were really traumatized," she said.

The train resumed its journey with the heavy police presence on board but, just before Marseille, the youths pulled the emergency stop and many escaped.

This reads like Scrappleface.

Only three -- two 19-year-old Moroccans and a minor, all living in France -- were arrested. Both men were being held for robbery and one also was facing charges of sexual assault. The minor was to be judged separately.
Three others -- a man and two boys -- were arrested briefly in Marseille but were released despite reports they were carrying a knife, a screwdriver and a small amount of hashish.

Who is to blame?

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has championed hard-line security policies in France, partly blamed the state rail company SNCF for not communicating better with the police.
"The problem is that law-enforcement services didn't know that there was a promotional fare going," he said.

I'm sorry. France is lost. Sarkozy is Right wing. Time for another Revolution and a Sixth Republic.

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But....lets use this to beat up on the MSM. Note the title and substance of the WashTimes article above. Don't give me the "Right wing newspaper" crap. The article came from AFP for goodness sakes. Note the "demographic" info. Who is the target today? Why, the NYT's Belgian mistress the IHT.

Raucous train ride outrages France

By Doreen Carvajal
International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 2006

As public outrage spread days after a group of youths terrorized passengers during a two-hour spree of violence on a suburban train on New Year's Day, President Jacques Chirac pledged Wednesday to punish those involved in the incident.

Read the whole thing here if you want, but I will tell you what you won't read. You won't read about ethnicity or crying women, but you will read about the politics of it. Mrs. Salamander gets credit for focusing on the title. Raucous is not how you describe what happened.

rau·cous Pronunciation Key (rôks) adj.

1. Rough-sounding and harsh: raucous laughter.
2. Boisterous and disorderly: “the raucous give and take of American democracy” (Charles Kuralt).

Doreen Carvajal and her editors are not serious journalists.

Now, I want to ask you a question. How would Doreen have written this if the punks were English soccer hooligans going after a train full of Muslim immigrants? What if it were kids coming back from a tractor pull that got on a buss full of people coming from Howard University.

As for the French. What do you think would have happened if 20-30 drunk Christian punks TRIED to do this on a train coming out of Basra?

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BTW, ILYS has the best visuals on this. Check it out.

Speaking of Communist butchers...

Building off yesterday's post, do not miss Wednesday's Jeff Jacoby article, 9,240 Victims and Counting.

One would have to be willfully blind -- a useful idiot, in Lenin's phrase -- to believe such a reeking falsehood. But when it comes to Castro, useful idiots have never been in short supply. From Norman Mailer to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Jesse Jackson to Ted Turner, a long line of admirers has swooned over the bearded tyrant, lavishly praising his wisdom and charm -- and never showing the slightest interest in his real record: cruelty, repression, and a death toll in the tens of thousands. ... Werlau, who lived in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, saw firsthand how international awareness of human rights atrocities helped Chile reinstate its democracy. ''The Castro regime executed more people in just its first three years than the Pinochet regime killed or 'disappeared' in its entire 17 years in power," she says. ''Yet Castro's victims, who number so many times more -- and who include not just political opponents but entire families assassinated for trying to flee -- remain unknown, ignored, or forgotten.

Read the whole thing - he covers an important project to hold Cuba's Communists and its useful idiots to count. BZ.

20th Century Deathcount

Power gradually extirpates for
the mind every humane and gentle virtue.
----Edmund Burke. A Vindication of Natural Society

The latest issue of National Geographic has a solid write-up on mass murder (genocide) in the last century. This graphic tells the story better than about anything.

Chew on it and think about a couple of things. (1) When you ask a Leftist about "Government mass murder" or "murderous dictators" who is most likely to come out of their mouth? Hitler, Pinochet, and somehow the US would most likely be in the top 5. The real hip will say "Guatemala." What you won't hear, beside the Hitler ref, is the ground truth (i.e. they couldn't find China's ocean of blood if it was poured down their baggy pants).

Following the references in the NG article, I found a treasure of treasures (not the political blindness of the Yale site) about gov'munt death that reminds me why the Right was right about the Cold War; R.J. Rummel's (he's a blogger) work (all online) DEATH BY GOVERNMENT. You need to read the whole thing. You will find the facts about how Bush's goal to bring democracy to totalitarian governments is the right strategic thing to do. You will get all the stats you need. See where the real Top 10 come from. Find out the who and why. Get a perspective on the ethnic make up of the skull count. And feel better about being a member of a community of flawed democracies.

There is one shocker (at least for me) out of this. Look at this list of the most lethal regimes. Did you note #4? Yep, post-WWII Poland. Look at the research.

Within a few years of the war's end ... 15,000,000 .. German civilians would be thrown out of Poland, the Baltic States, Memel, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and the Eastern areas of Germany (this is as though the Netherlands, Afghanistan, or Greece were totally emptied of all humans by force). .. 500,000 to 3,700,000 Germans, probably near 1,900,000, would die or be killed in this process (in addition to those that died during the wartime evacuation and flight) ... Poland is of special interest because of the large number of Germans its regime killed. But these are not the only ethnics that it murdered. .. adds to this the Polish post-war killing of Jews (lines 8 to 12) and Ukrainians (lines 15 to 17). .. these numbers are very conservative and do not take into account the murder of war-time collaborators; nor the execution of captured guerrillas then fighting the pro-Soviet Polish regime, and guerrilla sympathizers. But I can find no estimates of such a toll in the sources. .. the total democide for these years .. places Poland among the megamurderers.

Gulp. I dug around the research, and unless the University of Hawaii is hosting fraud; there are some interesting things in this data that I don't think the NYT will cover anytime soon. I won't wait for the BBC documentary either.

BTW, USNA professor Barbara Harff has a good Q&A video here, via Clark University's Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Reminds me of an old girlfriend....

Ohhhh, we all know the type.

It is, however, surprisingly difficult to apologize to her. I started by admitting the joke was a cheap shot, to which she grunted in agreement.

Mostly though, for the entire conversation, she did the reporter trick of not talking so I'd keep babbling and saying more incriminating things. By the time I hung up, I was pretty sure I'd made things worse.

MoDo. Shiver.

3/4 mile shot

Bravo Zulu Staff Sgt Jim Gilliland. Glad you're on our team.

That is with a 30 cal, not 50 cal sniper rifle. 1,367 yards. Higher res here.

Serious work.

Gazing through the telescopic sight of his M24 rifle, Staff Sgt Jim Gilliland, leader of Shadow sniper team, fixed his eye on the Iraqi insurgent who had just killed an American soldier.

His quarry stood nonchalantly in the fourth-floor bay window of a hospital in battle-torn Ramadi, still clasping a long-barrelled Kalashnikov. Instinctively allowing for wind speed and bullet drop, Shadow's commander aimed 12 feet high.

Click to enlarge

A single shot hit the Iraqi in the chest and killed him instantly. It had been fired from a range of 1,250 metres, well beyond the capacity of the powerful Leupold sight, accurate to 1,000 metres.

"I believe it is the longest confirmed kill in Iraq with a 7.62mm rifle," said Staff Sgt Gilliland, 28, who hunted squirrels in Double Springs, Alabama from the age of five before progressing to deer - and then people.

"He was visible only from the waist up. It was a one in a million shot. I could probably shoot a whole box of ammunition and never hit him again."

Later that day, Staff Sgt Gilliland found out that the dead soldier was Staff Sgt Jason Benford, 30, a good friend.

Iraq factfile

The insurgent was one of between 55 and 65 he estimates that he has shot dead in less than five months, putting him within striking distance of sniper legends such as Carlos Hathcock, who recorded 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam. One of his men, Specialist Aaron Arnold, 22, of Medway, Ohio, has chalked up a similar tally.

With an American sense of humor.

All told, the 10-strong Shadow sniper team, attached to Task Force 2/69, has killed just under 200 in the same period and emerged as the US Army's secret weapon in Ramadi against the threat of the hidden Improvised Explosive Device (IED) or roadside bomb - the insurgency's deadliest tactic.

Above the spot from which Staff Sgt Gilliland took his record shot, in a room at the top of a bombed-out observation post which is code-named Hotel and known jokingly to soldiers as the Ramadi Inn, are daubed "Kill Them All" and "Kill Like you Mean it".

On another wall are scrawled the words of Senator John McCain: "America is great not because of what she has done for herself but because of what she has done for others."

And the right attitude.

"Hunters give their animals respect," he said, spitting out a mouthful of chewing tobacco. "If you have no respect for what you do you're not going to be very good or you're going to make a mistake. We try to give the benefit of the doubt.

"You've got to live with it. It's on your conscience. It's something you've got to carry away with you. And if you shoot somebody just walking down the street, then that's probably going to haunt you."

Although killing with a single shot carries an enormous cachet within the sniper world, their most successful engagements have involved the shooting a up to 10 members of a single IED team.

"The one-shot-one-kill thing is one of beauty but killing all the bad dudes is even more attractive," said Staff Sgt Gilliland, whose motto is "Move fast, shoot straight and leave the rest to the counsellors in 10 years" and signs off his e-mails with "silent souls make.308 holes".

Hat tip ILYS. (see, I H/T'd a French guy. Fair and balanced...)

Final word on "Brokeback Mountain"

By Larry David. 'Nuff said.