Patterico's Pontifications

1/17/2008

“Desperation and money do bad things.”

Filed under: Terrorism — Justin Levine @ 4:54 pm



[posted by Justin Levine]

Well said.  [h/t: LGF]

Though something tells me there is another dynamic at work here – the widespread culture out of Washington that naively wants to believe that radical groups such as CAIR have moderate elements that can somehow “bridge” the gap as peacemaker between the West and Islam, and therefore, we should reach out to them.  There is no “firewall” between genuinely moderate elements within Islam and the radical anti-Western forces. The social and financial interconnections between these camps are far too complex for that kind of reasoning. The only question is how many degrees of separation are there within any given Islamic “charity” group. As Hamas and Hizbullah demostrate, you can’t really separate out the charity work from the terrorist actions with these groups – even though there is no question that Hamas and Hizbullah engage in “charity” work in order to help build their popular support. 

The Bush Administration, State Department and FBI are all guilty of this folly. The difference here is that Silijander’s own entanglement with lobbyist money pushed his naivete into a more dangerous and duplicitous level.    

Bridge Collapse Resulted Mainly from Design Flaw

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:22 am



It turns out that bridge in Minnesota, which was designed and constructed in the early 1960s, collapsed mainly because of a design flaw:

Sixteen fractured gusset plates in the center span on Interstate 35W were a main cause of the deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis last August, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on Tuesday. The plates, which connected steel beams in the truss bridge, were roughly half the thickness they should have been because of a design error. How that flaw made it into the bridge is unclear; according to NTSB chairman Mark Rosenker, investigators couldn’t find the original design calculations. Extra weight from construction was also a factor in the tragedy, which killed 13 people and injured 100.

I blame George W. Bush.

(Link via Instapundit.)


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