Political Digest for January 10, 2010

I post articles because I think they are of interest. Doing so doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with every— or any—opinion in the posted article.

Honor at Last for Roy P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ7968BbMnU&feature=related
Unbelievable story. A must-see.

The Crotch-Bomber’s Victory
Assume during WWII, the allies could have inflicted several million dollars of damage on Germany, at a cost of one poorly-trained combatant taken prisoner, and a few hundred dollars for expenses. Would that have been a victory?

So, yes, Al Qaeda’s Christmas Crotch-Bomber failed to blow up the plane. But he succeeded far beyond his cost, even if he does spend the rest of his life well fed with good medical care at taxpayer expense. That’s cost #1. The trial and incarcerating him will cost several millions. The hit to the economy of people who curtail flying will not be calculable. The expense of installing new screening methods and procedures is certain to run into billions. That’s a lot of damage for one POW to brag about.

And all the changes will leave us almost no safer. Yes, planes might be slightly safer, though they are still going to be vulnerable. What about all the other targets: schools, malls, government building, hotels, casinos, churches and synagogues? We are an open society, where “undocumented guests” even slip into the White House, where the open border has allowed the entrance of an estimated 12M people who are not here legally, and where we have tens of millions of undefended targets. Some of those jobs Americans won’t do those undocumented workers are here for include murder. In the twisted religious-political movement that millions of jihadists adhere to, your local day care center is a legitimate target of war. They are proselytizing that sick ideology throughout the world, including in the London university the crotch-bomber came from and in mosques in our cities.

Defense alone does not win wars or football games. As the President has discovered, pretty speeches in Cairo, bowing to the Saudi king, and the open hand to Iran has not deterred the crotch-bomber or his terrorist brethren. There will be more such “isolated incidents.” And the system won’t always work.

Nothing will change their minds. Only finding them and killing them will make our children safer.

Must-Read: Obama can't say who we're at war with
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/president-227600-obama-war.html
Excerpt: Not long after the Ayatollah Khomeini announced his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the British novelist suddenly turned up on a Muslim radio station in West London late one night and told his interviewer he'd converted to Islam. Marvelous religion, couldn't be happier, Allahu Akbar and all that. And the Ayatollah said hey, that's terrific news, glad to hear it. But we're still gonna kill you. Well, even a leftie novelist wises up under those circumstances. Evidently, the president of the United States takes a little longer. Barack Obama has spent the past year doing big-time Islamo-schmoozing, from his announcement of Gitmo's closure and his investigation of Bush officials, to his bow before the Saudi king and a speech in Cairo to "the Muslim world" with far too many rhetorical concessions and equivocations. And at the end of it the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we're still gonna kill you. According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world's superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can't blame the world's mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion…. What did the Pantybomber have a membership card in? Well, he was president of the Islamic Society of University College, London. Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a burning jeep into the concourse of Glasgow Airport, had been president of the Islamic Society of Queen's University, Belfast. Yassin Nassari, serving three years in jail for terrorism, was president of the Islamic Society of the University of Westminster. Waheed Arafat Khan, arrested in the 2006 Heathrow terror plots that led to Americans having to put their liquids and gels in those little plastic bags, was president of the Islamic Society of London Metropolitan University. Doesn't this sound like a bigger problem than "al-Qaida," whatever that is?

Obama's New Year Gift To The Saudi King by Nonie Darwish
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/01/obamas-new-year-gift-to-the-saudi-king.html
Excerpt: Islam is in trouble at the heart of its birthplace, Saudi Arabia, and consequently in other Muslim countries. Muslim leaders and media are desperately trying to regain control both internally and externally. Muslims are starting to openly and defiantly question; while the international image of Islam is being tarnished daily with every act of terror, hate speech and calls for jihad from the pulpits of mosques. The traditional open calls for violence and jihad Islam got away with for centuries is now under scrutiny especially after 9/11. Islam is now under the microscope. That is the quagmire of Muslims today. How can they continue teaching their basic religious jihad education but still save face and Islam's reputation in a culture where image and honor is everything. The West is not fully aware of what is happening in the Muslim world today where taboo topics are being discussed by brave Muslim reformists and former Muslims. There are ground braking Arabic TV and internet shows aired inside homes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, etc, discussing what ordinary Muslims were never allowed to heard before. The brilliant Rachid Hmami, a Former Muslim turned Christian and originally from Morocco, has a show, Suaal Garii 'Daring Question,' that is making shock waves across the Middle East. Another equally effective show, is that of the brave Coptic priest, Father Zakareya Botros, who was imprisoned in Egypt for proselytizing to Muslims. Father Botros's show is a huge success in exposing tyranny, contradictions and weaknesses in Islam. Muslims who call in, are often in shocked by what they hear for the first time about their own religion, yet another proof that Muslim establishment intentionally spreads misinformation and ignorance of basic Muslim doctrines to Muslims. Many Muslims, even from Saudi Arabia, call in to renounce Islam.

CIA bomber's wife says war must go on against US
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100108/ap_on_re_eu/eu_turkey_cia_afghan_attack;_ylt=AijP4BBgkCJBLihgjsjD2.B0bBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTMyYmF0ZnNxBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMTA4L2V1X3R1cmtleV9jaWFfYWZnaGFuX2F0dGFjawRwb3MDMzMEc2VjA3luX3BhZ2luYXRlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDY2lhYm9tYmVyc3dp
Someone better tell Obama the War on Terror ain’t over and send her the Islam-is-a=religion-of-peace memo. Excerpt: ISTANBUL – The Turkish wife of a Jordanian doctor who killed seven CIA employees in a suicide attack in Afghanistan says her husband was outraged over the treatment of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison and the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defne Bayrak, the wife of bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, said in an interview with The Associated Press that his hatred of the United States had motivated her husband to sacrifice his life on Dec. 30 in what he regarded as a holy war against the U.S.
Bayrak also said Friday, "I think the war against the United States must go on."

Mid East:Tension On Egyptian Border,17 More Soldiers Injured
http://www.ansamed.info/en/news/ME03.XAM18325.html
The UN condemns Israel when it builds walls and shoots Palestinians, so I’m sure we’ll hear from them on this. Just hold your breath. Excerpt: CAIRO, JANUARY 6 - In addition to having shot and killed an Egyptian soldier in a tower, today's clashes on the Rafah border injured another 17 soldiers, including 10 officers. The number was specified by news agency, MENA, which stated that a general, a colonel, and a commander were all injured. On the other side of the border, according to AFP, five Palestinians were seriously wounded by gunfire from Egyptian soldiers who reacted after about 200 protesters, demonstrating against the new barrier under construction by Egypt, threw rocks at the troops. Gunfire was reportedly exchanged by both sides. Another 15 Palestinians were injured when Hamas police reacted with nightsticks and tear gas, and fired shots into the air to disperse the protestors. The demonstrations was reportedly organised by Hamas officials in power in Gaza to protest against the barrier, which should put an end to the construction of underground tunnels used to smuggle goods and weapons into Palestinian territory, bypassing the Israeli blockade.

Threats Lead Food Agency to Curtail Aid in Somalia
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/africa/06somalia.html
Excerpt: After weeks of receiving threats and demands that it dismiss many female employees and pay a “security fee” to an Islamic extremist group, the United Nations World Food Program announced Tuesday that it was suspending food deliveries to one million people in southern Somalia indefinitely. (Ah, my New Age, Kumbaya, Leftist friends, tell me again how all cultures are equally valid, even those who would murder people bringing food aid to a million starving people because some of the aid workers were women!)

Beating the Dead Terrorist Horse
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NTk4ZmJkYWU5MjljY2VhOGNlNDYxYzdlYzNlNzgwYmM
Excerpt: Most of the current acrimony over counterterrorism is stale. The debate is simply a rehash of issues that were discussed and, in fact, resolved early last decade. Let us review them one more time.

British woman 'arrested in Dubai after being raped'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/6949008/British-woman-arrested-in-Dubai-after-being-raped.html
Excerpt: A 23-year-old British woman on holiday in Dubai told police she had been raped, only to be arrested herself for having illegal sexual intercourse. (See, she admitted to having sex, but under Shari’a Law, as handed down to the Prophet in the 600s by Allah, and is thus perfect and not subject to question, she must have four Muslim males as witnesses to prove rape, or to prove infidelity, absent a confession. She is lucky she is in modern Dubai. In some Muslim countries, women in this position have been stoned to death for adultery. It happened to a teen girl not long ago. I’m sure the National Organization of Women plans to speak out about this sometime.)

Federal judge tosses Gitmo detainee’s confession as coerced
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/01/08/it-begins-federal-judge-tosses-gitmo-detainees-confession-as-coerced/
The fruits of BO’s try-them-in-civilian-courts policy. Can’t convict him, but can hold him. Message to military—take no prisoners. Excerpt: In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

CIA Diverting Resources from Spying on Terrorism to Tracking ‘Global Warming’
http://commonamericanjournal.com/?p=8915
And if terrorists kill you, it’s a win because your carbon footprint drops. Excerpt: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) makes an absurd claim that tries to show a correlation between ‘global warming’ and where to find al-Qaeda’s next hiding spots. If you really want to understand where al-Qaeda and other bad guys are going to move next, one of the things you to have to understand is climate change.” (So what were those recently-arrested terrorists doing in Chicago—it’s freezing here!)

Multiculturalism Will Bring Us Our Next 9-11--Rabbi Nachum Shifren
http://www.newswithviews.com/Shifren/nachum105.htm
Let's start by saying what everybody already knows: We will have another terrorist attack in the U.S. We just don't know when or where. What we as Americans are basically asked to do is be guinea pigs in an out-of-control terrorist experiment, where assessments will determine the best way for us to die. How has the greatest, mightiest country on earth been reduced to groveling and bowing down to cut-throat murderers? When did we become apologists for our individual freedoms and Constitution. Our Judeo-Christian heritage? Let's take a walk through memory lane, to those tarnished halls of American academia, where our notions of academic freedom and striving for excellence, have long been discarded.

Obama's buck-stopping goes only so far
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obama_buck_stops_where_analysis
From the AP: Excerpt: He says "the buck stops with me," but nearly a year into office, President Barack Obama is still blaming a lot of the nation's troubles — the economy, terrorism, health care — on George W. Bush. Over and over, Obama keeps reminding Americans of the mess he inherited and all he's doing to fix it. A sharper, give-me-some-credit tone has emerged in his language as he bemoans people's fleeting memory about what life was like way back in 2008, particularly on the economy.

Pilots association brings President Obama back down to earth
http://www.ihatethemedia.com/pilots-association-brings-president-obama-back-down-to-earth Excerpt: If you'd been flying on Christmas day, wouldn't you have wanted your pilot to know about the potential danger?President Obama tried to look a little more presidential by playing a little fast and loose with the truth. And the Allied Pilots Association called him on it.

Holder’s Haste Makes Waste of Intel
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmQwZWZlY2RjMTc0NjdhMTNjNzkyZjZiYTVlYTA3Yzc
Excerpt: Eric Holder’s Justice Department rushed to file an indictment Wednesday against Flight 253 terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The telling document is a monument to lost opportunity. Come hell or high water, the Obama administration will press ahead with its commitment to treat al-Qaeda’s war against the United States as a crime wave best managed by the federal courts. “Al-Qaeda,” in fact, is a term you will not find in the bare-bones, seven-page charging instrument. Nor will you encounter such words as “Yemen,” “jihad,” “terrorism” — neither “Islamic” or “Islamist.” And if you’re looking for the names of any co-conspirators — such as the al-Qaeda satellite (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) that has publicly claimed credit for the attempted Christmas Day atrocity, or the enemy combatants who’ve been running that outfit since their improvident release from Gitmo — you’d best look elsewhere. Mentioning “enemy combatants,” of course, would be tantamount to saying there is an ongoing military conflict. It would be as if Congress had authorized the use of force after an attack against the United States — as if we had, say, a couple of hundred thousand American troops in harm’s way. There’s no hint of that in this indictment.

Plans to transfer two Guantanamo detainees overseas raise concern
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/75009-plans-to-transfer-two-gitmo-detainees-raise-concern
Excerpt: The Obama administration’s plans to transfer two more Guantanamo Bay detainees overseas in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt is causing consternation on Capitol Hill. Just days before the near takedown of a passenger jet over Detroit, the State Department notified Congress Dec. 22 of its plans to transfer two more detainees overseas, according to a Senate e-mail notification obtained by The Hill.

What we can do about terrorism
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2010/01/09/what-we-can-do-about-terrorism-don-bendell/
Excerpt: Without being seen by our seemingly half-asleep national security forces, eight members of al-Qaida, trained in both Pakistan and Yemen, took over the midwest American high school armed with AK-47s, pistols, rocket propelled grenades, two machine guns, and remote-controlled Claymore mines. Within minutes of the school take-over, even before the local police and sheriff’s deputies arrived in force, the radical jihadists started screaming “Alluyah Ahkbar!” over and over while mowing down dozens of screaming innocent students and teachers. Firing their automatic weapons, they also tossed hand grenades down hallways and into some rooms filled with hiding children. Hundreds of children and teachers were executed even before the first SWAT team was in place. This is horrible and inexcusable, isn’t it? It is fictional but similar happened in Russia. Alarmingly, it is the exact scenario which has been practiced in al-Qaida training camps over and over, just waiting to launch such attacks in America. Shall we wait for our children to die to then act decisively? (Well, I’m not the only one awake at night sweating this. See this post: The Next Terrorist attack on America)
http://tartanmarine.blogspot.com/2009/09/essay-next-terrorist-attack-on-america.html

Risky Ally in War on Polio: the Taliban
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126298998237022117.html?mod=djemITP
MEHTAR LAM, Afghanistan -- Knocking on door after door, thousands of volunteers fan out every month across southern and eastern Afghanistan, vaccinating children against polio, a disease eradicated almost everywhere else in the world. Usually, the volunteers -- sent by the government and sponsored by United Nations agencies -- bring a single-page letter requesting people to cooperate, "for the benefit of our next generations." The letter's signatory: Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed supreme leader of the Taliban.

Australia: Muslims go jihad funded by you and me: 19 years of welfare
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_EjUx9-3vA
The jihad is everywhere there is civilization.

24
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0110/Cheney_group_recalls_24.html
Parody.

TSA
http://viralfootage.com/?p=4996
Satire. Too funny.

Scott Brown trims Senate gap in poll
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view.bg?articleid=1223448
Excerpt: Energized opponents of the Democrats’ national health-care overhaul have catapulted GOP Senate hopeful Scott Brown within striking distance of Attorney General Martha Coakley, a leading pollster said yesterday. “It has nothing to do with Brown and everything to do with the political environment we’re seeing nationally,” said Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen reports, which released a poll yesterday putting Brown just 9 points behind Coakley, 50 percent to 41 percent.

Want to help Brown?
http://www.brownforussenate.com/

MoveOn Rolls Into Massachusetts
http://commonamericanjournal.com/?p=8985
Excerpt: The liberal group — which recently campaigned for liberal Democratic senators to kill a health care bill that didn’t include a public option — is asking its members to help Democratic candidate Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election for Senate.

National Dems To Throw Support Behind Mitch Landrieu In Mayor's Race In Exchange For Mary's Vote
http://www.thedeadpelican.com/2009/mary22.htm
The bribes pile up. Excerpt: Mitch's backing by the national Democratic party comes as part of a deal his sister Senator Mary Landrieu struck with the Obama white house. It is widely known that Landrieu received $300 million in medicaid funding in exchange for her vote to begin debate on the Obama health care proposal. But sources tell THE DEAD PELICAN that Landrieu's vote has also secured support for her brother Mitch in the New Orleans mayor's race, by the National Democratic party! Mary's support for the Obama White House will kill Landrieu's chances for re-election, sources tell THE DEAD PELICAN. "She's doing something nice for little bro' on her way out," said a top insider.

Jay Dardenne Allows Mary Landrieu's Recall
http://qwertyaltofuori.blogspot.com/2010/01/jay-dardenne-allows-mary-landrieus.html
Excerpt: "On Dec. 29, a recall petition was filed by Ruben Leblanc of New Iberia, for the recall of Mary Landrieu. Sec. of State Jay Darden stated that he WILL accept the filing."

Economist Who Touted Obamacare Was Under Contract With HHS for $297K
http://commonamericanjournal.com/?p=8981
Excerpt: MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the leading academic defenders of health care reform, is taking heat for failing to disclose consistently that he was under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services while he was touting the Democrats’ health proposals in the media. Gruber, according to federal government documents, is under a $297,600 contract until next month to provide “technical assistance” in evaluating health care reform proposals. He was under a $95,000 HHS contract before that.

CMS report raises doubts over Medicare savings claims
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/75051-cms-report-raises-doubts-over-democrats-medicare-savings-claims
Excerpt: Senate Republicans have seized on a new report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services calling into question some of the savings Democrats claim would result from healthcare reform. Most significantly, the report finds that national healthcare spending would increase slightly as a result of legislation passed last month by the Senate and questioned whether the legislation would achieve as much savings from Medicare as Democrats predict. The CMS report estimated that national health expenditures would increase by $222 billion or 0.6 percent from 2010 to 2019. The Senate plan purports to achieve $483 billion in Medicare savings over the next 10 years, including $118 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage plans, a program favored by Republicans that distributes Medicare benefits through private providers.

The Risk of Catastrophic Victory
http://commonamericanjournal.com/?p=8969
Excerpt: Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory. If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise. If health care does not pass, it will also be a disaster, but only for the administration, not the country. Critics will say, “You didn’t even waste our time successfully.” What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a miscalculation on the part of the president. The administration misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and began his work under the spirit of 2008—expansive, part dreamy and part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated ,the president ran into the spirit of 2009—more dug in, more anxious, more bottom-line—and didn’t notice. At the exact moment the public was announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second, the administration decided to devote its first year to health care, which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything, but not right away.

Icy hazards persist through US, deep into South
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100109/ap_on_re_us/us_winter_weather
Notice the people who said that Katrina proved Global Warming and there were worse hurricanes to come, now say you can’t disprove global warming based on one storm. Be funny if they didn’t want to wreck our economy over it. Excerpt: In Florida's Panhandle, vapor was rising off the Gulf as warm water met the frigid air. "It's so cold that sparrows that have crawled under the plastic on our heated deck don't want to leave," said Scooter Montgomery, manager of Peg Leg Pete's Oyster Bar on Pensacola Beach.

Liberals’ Go to War on Science; Surrender on Terror
http://townhall.com/columnists/KenBlackwell/2010/01/09/liberals%e2%80%99_go_to_war_on_science;_surrender_on_terror
Excerpt: Conversely, liberals play “hardball” when their opponents are not terrorists or criminals, but instead, American businesses and industries. One such example is the left’s battle against Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used for more than a half century to make plastics more durable. Though clearly less consequential than the war on terror, the Left’s war on BPA serves as a microcosm of the larger attempt to use “junk science” and litigation to redistribute wealth from job-producing American industries into the hands of trial lawyers and liberal special interest groups. In this regard, the Left’s attempts are reminiscent of their past battle against the insecticide DDT. In the 1960s, many developing nation’s had nearly wiped out malaria, but it came back after DDT was banned. It did not matter that DDT was harmless to humans – and actually saved lives -- the Left attacked it, ultimately causing 50 million preventable deaths. Despite the fact that BPA has consistently been proven by the FDA to be harmless to humans -- and despite the fact that the FDA is about to release a new study on the chemical in a few weeks -- several media outlets (most notably the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the LA Times) have called on the FDA to rule that the chemical is dangerous -- before the new study comes out. Talk about pre-judging a case…

Global Warming’s Next Big Lie: If We Don’t Act Fast, CO2 Will Poison Our Oceans!
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/01/08/get-ready-for-the-next-big-lie-if-climate-lies-fail-now-its-time-to-push-ocean-lies/
Excerpt: First, they called it “global warming”. Then they noticed there had been no warming for 15 years, and cooling for 9, so they hastily renamed it “climate change”. Then they noticed the climate was changing no more than it ever had, so they tried “energy security”, and even named a Congressional Bill after it. Then they noticed that most Western nations already had bountiful energy security, in the form of vast, untapped domestic supplies of oil, gas, coal, or all three, so they switched to “ocean acidification”. This is the new phantasmagoric for the tired, old scare whipped up by the NRDC and the environmental extremist movement for their own profit at our expense. The world’s corals, they tell us, will be eaten away by the acidified ocean within not more than ten years hence. Shellfish will be no more, their calcified carapaces and exoskeletons dissolved by the carbonic acid caused by our burning of fossil fuels. The oceans will die. Sound familiar? Yet, as the indefatigable Craig Idso here demonstrates, the scientific consensus – if science were done by consensus at all, which it is not – is that the rising “ocean acidification” scare is just more piffle.

Devaluation ups stakes in Venezuela election year
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN096521320100109
Well, what did they expect? The elect a leftist president who believes in central planning, big government and massive spending, who doesn’t trust the free market. Of course they will go the way of Zimbabwe…hey, wait, didn’t we…? Excerpt: Venezuelans rushed to the shops on Saturday, fearful of price rises after a currency devaluation that will let President Hugo Chavez boost government spending ahead of an election but feeds opposition charges of economic mismanagement. In a bid to jump-start the recession-hit economy of South America's top oil exporter, Chavez on Friday announced a dual system for the fixed rate bolivar.
It devalues the currency to 4.3 and 2.6 against the dollar, from a rate of 2.15 per dollar in place since 2005, giving the better rate for basic goods in an attempt to limit the impact of the measure on consumer prices.

The checklist manifesto
http://www.theweek.com/article/index/104890/The_checklist_manifesto
A very interesting article, though not political. From The Week, a news Magazine I subscribe to. Excerpt: Then a nurse noticed that the patient had stopped babbling. His heart rate had skyrocketed. His eyes were rolling back in his head. The nurse called for help and the members of the trauma team swarmed back into the room. They stuck a tube down his airway and pushed air into his lungs, poured fluid and blood into him. They still couldn’t get his pressure up. So now they were crashing into the operating room—stretcher flying, nurses racing to get the surgical equipment set up, John grabbing a No. 10 blade and slicing through the skin of the man’s abdomen in one determined swipe. When John pierced the abdominal cavity itself, an ocean of blood suddenly burst out of the patient. “Crap.” Blood was everywhere. The assailant’s blade had gone more than a foot through the man’s skin, through the fat, through the muscle, along the left of his spinal column, and right into the aorta, the main artery from the heart. “Which was crazy,” John said. Another surgeon joined to help and got a fist down on the aorta above the puncture point, stopping the bleeding. He said he hadn’t seen an injury like it since Vietnam. That description was pretty close, it turned out. The other guy at the costume party, John later learned, was dressed as a soldier—with a bayonet.

Quote
We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction. - Aesop