This is depressing–from the website of Defense Training expert John Farnam, evidence that the Bush Administration, and the National Guard leadership are much more interested in avoiding an “incident” than they are in protecting their own.

John Farnam’s Quips–Unarmed and “Ready?”

26 Sept 07

Confirmation of pernicious gun-phobia, with requiem fear and distrust, that still paralyzes the Army, even today. From a friend in the NG:

“I have been activated several times since 9/11. On one domestic guard detail near the border, we were initially issued our M-16A2s and fully-charged magazines, but sternly instructed never to actually load our rifles, under any circumstances. Rifles were to remain ‘unloaded at all times!’ However, some atta-boy up the food-chain soon realized the career-ending insanity of issuing us peons potentially-functional weapons. Suddenly, ammunition was whisked away. Magazines suffered the same fate a day later.We were told that rifles and magazines (even empty ones) actually inserted into magazines wells looked ‘too militaristic.’

I’m sure the same atta-boy then realized the ridiculousness of obviously unloaded rifles being carried about by uniformed Guardsmen. The conspicuous solution: take away our rifles too! Sure enough, that happened two days later.

All this time, our guard posts were being actively surveilled by suspicious people with video cameras, on foot and in vehicles. None were ever confronted.

When word got back to Santa Fe that we had all advised our families on whom to sue when we, now completely defenseless, were attacked and murdered by invading Mexican drug dealers, rifles were mysteriously “returned”. That, at least, was the cover-story for public consumption.

The truth is that rifles were placed in a locked room, inside a locked building, nearly a quarter mile away from our guard post. Magazines were locked in a different room. Keys to the various locks were given to our sergeant who was told that weapons and ammunition were to be unlocked and issued (a process that would take at least an hour) only upon direct attack of the post. Even then, soldiers would have to sign out weapons and ammunition, individually. After all that, we were then told point-blank that if any of us ever actually fired a shot, we would all spend the rest of our lives in Federal prison!

It being obvious that our safety, indeed our very lives, meant nothing to the atta-boy in question, nor anyone else up the food chain, I began carrying my personal pistol, concealed in a shoulder holster. Blades too! With my encouragement, others did the same. We put together an (unauthorized) plan whereby those of us who were thus armed would hold off the bad guys until rifles could be accessed.

When we finally stood down, a CWO, asked me directly if I had been carrying personal weapons during mobilization. ‘Of course not! Where did you get such a crazy idea?’ His unkind reply was, Well, if you had, and I had known it, I would have had you court-martialed.’ I countered, ‘Why would you ever think those of us down here actually doing the job would ever place any value on our own lives? Why, we know we’re just highly expendable, cannon-fodder, and when we’re all massacred, because we’re unable to defend ourselves, you’ll just recruit more. Right?’ I could hear him grind his teeth as he walked away in a huff. I’m sure my comments made him late for coffee!”

Comment: What makes me most angry is that no one seems to care a whit for the lives and safety of these brave lads who courageously volunteered to serve their Country. For one, I will serve no one who doesn’t trust me with my weapons! These guys, correctly and audaciously, took matters into their own hands. In the end, we’re all going to have to!

Thomas Jefferson reminded us, “Who bend their swords into plow-shears will plow for those who don’t!”

I took Mrs. Anonymous Attorney to the Kennedy Center last night for the premiere of Indoctrinate U, a new film documentary on political correctness run amok on America’s college campuses. Pre-release reviewers haven’t missed how Evan Maloney, the film’s maker, acts as the right’s answer to Michael Moore, confronting officials outside their offices with a boom mike and camera crew, only to be escorted away by the police most of the time.

Point made: college officials oversee a totalitarian atmosphere of left-wing orthodoxy that holds up “diversity” and “tolerance” as gods, but there’s no real intellectual diversity and breathtakingly little “tolerance” for conservatives, libertarians, Christians, or whites. It’s near-impossible to get them on camera to explain themselves, and when they do, they sound very much like people so pickled by years stewing in groupthink that they don’t realize how ridiculous they sound — or have any idea how to parry with a questioner. A Bucknell professor named Geoff Schneider catches himself referring to “sentencing” a student to sensitivity training, and the odious Noel Ignatiev of Harvard sounded like a talking Onion parody with comments like “whiteness must be destroyed.”

Meanwhile, the real “oppressed” are the dissenting students who are shut up and shut down by the PC apparatus. One white student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo found himself threatened with expulsion and forced psychological treatment for posting a flyer about a black conservative speaker. There’s incredible footage of Ward Connerly being shouted down by “pro-diversity” students, and near-violence breaks out when the Army Corps of Engineers shows up to a campus job fair.

I was disappointed not to see footage of the Minutemen fracas at Columbia. Readers looking for an immigration disaster documentary should check out Byron Jost’s “Line in the Sand.”

There’s a hilarious sequence the movie where Maloney sets out to find the “men’s center” by talking to the sour-faced feminists at campus women’s centers. Appearances by K.C. Johnson, Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) and John McWhorter give the film a boost.

Maloney’s effort is fast-paced and funny, if late: Someone like David Horowitz (who’s not in the film) was chronicling this scandal in “Heterodoxy” more than ten years ago. It also avoids truly politically incorrect territories like racial difference (Jared Taylor’s encounters at a Canadian college or the reactions to Michael Levin at CUNY would have been good examples) and neoconservatism as an ethnically Jewish movement (witness the SPLC’s “investigation” of Kevin MacDonald - though one fears what would happen if a documentarist showed up to the SPLC’s surely heavily-guarded stronghold in Alabama).

Still, Maloney is the first to bring the phenomenon to the screen, and it’s definitely worth seeing.

It is axiomatic that immigration causes pressure on the wage levels of competing workers. Less often agreed is the concept that certain immigration can be destructive of the moral standards of Society. A perfect proof of both assertions appeared in Friday’s New York Post:

AFTER-SCHOOL SEX SPECIALS ‘BROTHEL TARGETED HS KIDS’ By PERRY CHIARAMONTE September 28 2007

Teens at a Lower East Side high school were getting their sex education outside the classroom after being targeted by pimps who lured them to a nearby brothel and enticed them with cut-rate romps…Police sources said that a pingpong hall was a front for the whorehouse in the back of the establishment, and that it was run by Benjie Zheng, 47, who lived a few blocks away, and Ming Liuchang, 48, of Queens.

The men would try to lure students to the Robo-Pong Training Center by distributing business cards outside the school, sources said. The cards were printed only with a contact number, an image of a topless woman - and a word, “Good.”…
Zheng and Liuchang allegedly recruited immigrant women off the street to peddle flesh in hidden rooms at the center, whose hours were posted on a sign adorned with rulers and pencils and the words “School Days.” …

Two undercover detectives paid cash after Zheng told them, “You can pick any of these girls for sex, and it will cost you $35,” according a criminal court complaint….”It was obvious that they were targeting young students, because the prices were so low,” said one disgusted police official, adding, “Most brothels charge at least $100.”

The women allegedly would return the cards to Zheng at the end of their shifts, receiving $15 for each one.

One reads that this kind of corruption is normal in Asiatic cities… but in New York?

More obviously, it will come as a surprise to most who frequent New York that anything of importance can be purchased for $15.

The discounting these immigrant entrepreneurs resorted to obviously stems from competitive pressure, rather than educational philanthropism. Elementary economic analysis suggests something appalling has happened on the Lower East Side.