The Idiom

I Am Spartacus!

2010-11-17T01:03:00.002-05:00

Kid Various encourages everyone to join the #IAmSpartacus campaign on twitter:

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant, yesterday lost his appeal against his conviction and £1,000 fine for a comment he made in jest when he was concerned that he might miss a flight to Belfast.
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" he wrote in January.
...Under the hashtag #IAmSpartacus – a reference to the film in which Spartacus's fellow gladiators show their solidarity with him by each proclaiming "I am Spartacus" – thousands of people have copied Chambers's original message.

This guy tweeted an obviously non-serious threat out of frustration, the tweet was picked up by British security authorities, and this man's life was ruined. He's was arrested, jailed, lost his job, etc. Because we have surrendered WAY too much liberty to the state in the name of "security."

The terribly sad thing is that as Kid Various repeated the message in a tweet, he was afraid. That's right, the Kid felt fear. In America. In our free society. Because what would happen if this tweet was picked up by the government? What if the government officials could not demonstrate any common-frickin'-sense? (which basically describes all government officials.) What if The Kid's employers, in another branch of the government, fail to demonstrate any common-frickin'-sense? The little voice in the back of The Kid's head was saying "Hey, is this the wisest course of action?"

Maybe it's not the wisest course of action. But it's definitely a necessary one. Because when the situation has deteriorated so much that you second guess yourself for sending out an innocuous tweet, things have gone too far. It's time people stand up and say "Enough!"

Enough with the naked body scans!

Enough with being pushed around by high-school dropout, minimum wage earning bureaucratic drones!

Enough with the cameras! (and the war on YOUR cameras!)

Enough with zero tolerance policies that remove all discretion!

Enough with the death of common-frickin'-sense!!!

We Knew There Was A Reason...

2010-11-15T10:45:00.002-05:00

That Stormtroopers couldn't hit the broadside of a friggin' Star Destroyer:

In one war-time study, a Brigadier General found that "only 15 to 20 [percent] would take any part with their weapons." And that this was consistently true, "whether the action was spread over a day, or two days, or three." Eighty percent of the soldiers would not fire, due to nothing more than their innate desire to not take a human life. We also know that the vast majority of shots fired in battle, miss.

Yep. They just have the normal human (clone) reaction to shoot wide. Oh yeah and those helmets? They should really forgo them:

That's right: If the Stormtroopers had just taken off their helmets, they would have probably won the war. Especially considering that they're an elite battalion of well-funded techno-warriors, up against a space hillbilly, a gigolo, a pampered socialite and a furry version of Sloth from the Goonies. It all comes down to the basic principle of dehumanization.

Away

2010-11-14T12:49:00.002-05:00

We have been away a while haven't we? It's really quite sad, as life has overtaken Kid Various and his Idiom pals. We'll try to do better. If only for the fact that the intervening months have turned The Kid's mind to jelly. There is nothing better to honing your skills than writing every day, and right now, The Kid can't write anything longer than a laundry list. We're trying to make good. Please bear with us.

In any case, take a look at this lame review of "The Closing of The Muslim Mind" that The Kid wrote. The book isn't lame. It's fantastic. In fact, Kid Various thinks it required reading for those who want to understand the Long War. It's just the Kid's prose that's lacking. When he was in grad school, Kid Various could knock out 20 pages without batting an eye. Nowadays, uh... what was I saying????

Outstanding overview that pinpoints the decline of Islamic thought in the 9th century with the triumph of the Asharites over the Mutazalites. These names likely mean nothing to most Americans, but they are critically important to today's world and the conduct of the Long War.

Essentially, Sunni Islamic thought was initially extremely diverse (the book does not delve into Shiism.) The Mutazalites taught that God's creation was open to human reason. That, essentially, God's laws and intentions could be discovered by reason. In this, they clashed with the Asharites who felt that if God's will was divinable by human reason, if he followed laws that could be deduced by reason, then that put limits on his power. And God is all powerful. Therefore they rejected basic concepts like "cause and effect" which is the case to this very day. Strictly speaking, in Islam, there is no cause for anything except God. If one drops a ball, gravity does not make the ball fall. God makes the ball fall - directly. If does not act at that very moment, the ball will not fall.

By contrast, in Christianity, and in the Enlightenment culture spawned from it, God may be the first cause, but he has set up an order that can be divined by humans. He creates gravity that is the cause of the falling ball. He can perform a miracle and stop gravity, but in most cases he is not acting.

The triumph of the Asharites over the Mutazalites essentially put an end to Islamic philosophy, in favor of revelation and jurisprudence. In other words, it was not important to divine the meaning of God's laws and how they related to humans. Instead Islam demanded that humans simply follow revealed law, and then set up an elaborate system of jurisprudence to administer said law.

This has profound consequences for the present day. It's frequently said that Islam has not undergone an Enlightenment period. This is true, but what is worse, it will be difficult for it to do so, because of the demotion of reason in the Islamic faith, which is central to modernity.
This is an excellent book, very readable and is a great introduction to Sunni Islamic thought for the average reader.

Bring It On!

2010-11-14T12:45:00.000-05:00

A public service announcement, from Dr. Steele:

Singaporean Health Care

2010-11-14T12:21:00.002-05:00

If the Administration really wanted to "bend the cost curve down" they could do worse than to look at Singapore.

Medisave, which covers about 85 percent of all Singaporeans, is a component of a mandatory pension program. Employees typically pay 20 percent of their wages into the Central Provident Fund (CPF), while employers pay 13 percent. (Since 1992, the self-employed have also participated.) At the beginning of 2007, CPF had over $1 billion in surpluses.

Medisave accounts can be used to pay directly for hospital expenses incurred by an individual or his immediate family. Limits are in place on the extent of Medisave funds that can be used for daily hospital charges, physicians’ fees, and surgical fees. The idea is to cover fully the bills of most patients in state-subsidized wards of public hospitals. Beyond that, individuals dip into their own pockets or use benefits from insurance plans (see more on this below). Medisave can also be used for expensive outpatient treatments such as chemotherapy, renal dialysis, or HIV drugs.

Medishield, the second part of the program, is a national insurance plan that covers the higher cost of especially serious illness or accident, which in Singapore’s system is described as “catastrophic.” Singaporeans can choose Medishield or several private alternatives, some offered by firms listed on the Singaporean stock exchange. Premiums for the insurance plans, including Medishield, can be paid using Medisave accounts.

Medifund, the third part, was established by the government for the roughly 10 percent of Singaporeans who don’t have the means to pay for their medical needs, despite the government’s subsidy of hospital and outpatient costs. The fund was set up in 1993 with $150 million, with the budget surplus providing additional contributions since then. Only interest income, not capital, may be disbursed.

It's actually very close to the set up Kid Various has. The Kid has a health savings account and a high deductible insurance plan. He puts money into his HSA every pay period, and can take money out to pay for all health care costs up to $4,000. After $4,000 in expenses the insurance kicks in. Therefore, Kid Various gets cheap insurance (the high deductible plan is moocho cheapo because he is not using insurance to pay for little scrape and sneeze) and pays for regular maintenance out of his pocket - but can't spend that money (the HSA) on anything else so he doesn't waste it on hookers and blow - thus being incentivized to shop around for health care.

It's a great system, and as we all know, because the President promised "If you like your health plan, you can keep it..."

Oh wait a minute. Kid Various can't keep his health plan? It's illegal under the new Obamacare federal regulations? Oh Noes!

So what does Obamacare do instead? It severely curtails the use of flex plans by limiting them to $2500 per year. (The average annual cost of health care in the US is more than $7000 a year per-capita.)

For people who use flex plans, the sharply reduced amount means they’ll have to either buy a much more expensive insurance policy, or go uninsured. It’s a totally crazy move which flies in the face of Obamacare’s stated objective of making healthcare more affordable for everyone.

And of course, you should be reading (and re-reading) this excellent Obamacare primer:

ObamaCare: The sum of all fears

Recent polls reflect America’s zeal for repeal, as does an August ballot referendum in Missouri rebuking the individual mandate, which succeeded by a margin of 71-29. Throughout the lengthy public debate, President Obama and his surrogates consistently ridiculed and denounced critics of the bill as bad-faith, fear-mongering propaganda merchants.
The facts now prove there was plenty to fear in good faith.

We're Back! With Gay Animal Kingdom!

2010-11-14T12:18:00.001-05:00

And... we're back! With Mutual of Omaha's Gay Animal Kingdom!

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in “penis fencing,” which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.

Don't ask us why we love this stuff. It's just our forte.

What America Will Look Like If The White House Gets Its Way | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

2010-03-21T03:35:00.000-04:00

What America Will Look Like If The White House Gets Its Way | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

A picture of America’s future under Obamacare can be revealed, though, after peeling away the pages and digging through the dirt. Here’s 10 things you can expect:

Paying Zero for Public Services | Exploring the interactions among public opinion, governance, and the public sphere

2010-01-28T01:21:00.000-05:00

Paying Zero for Public Services | Exploring the interactions among public opinion, governance, and the public sphere

Interesting. But I still don't understand what prevents the corrupt public official throwing the petitioner out of their office and then having them shot in the head when no one is looking.

Randy Barnett's response to 'State of the Union: How did he do?' - The Arena | POLITICO.COM

2010-01-28T01:20:00.000-05:00

Randy Barnett's response to 'State of the Union: How did he do?' - The Arena | POLITICO.COM

Tacky, tacky, tacky...

In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen?

8 Things That Suck About the iPad - apple ipad - Gizmodo

2010-01-28T01:19:00.000-05:00

8 Things That Suck About the iPad - apple ipad - Gizmodo

Ok, maybe The Kid won't have to buy one after all. The lack of multi-tasking is a big downer.

The Kid was upset because this looked like a Kindle-killer. And he likes his Kindle. It may be simple and not very expandable, but it's not meant to be. It's meant to do one thing well - replace a book. And that it does an excellent job at.

Al-Qaeda has a new strategy. Obama needs one, too. - washingtonpost.com

2010-01-24T03:12:00.000-05:00

Al-Qaeda has a new strategy. Obama needs one, too. - washingtonpost.com

The Kid has often wondered why AQ has not yet deviated from its focus on the spectacular to overwhelming small scale attacks.

Tough Love Needed for Haiti by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online

2010-01-21T01:15:00.000-05:00

Tough Love Needed for Haiti by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online

It’s hardly news that poverty makes people vulnerable to the full arsenal of Mother Nature’s fury. The closer you are to living in a state of nature, the crueler nature will be — which is one reason why people who romanticize tribal or pre-capitalist life (that would be you, James Cameron) tend to do so from a safe, air-conditioned distance and with easy access to flushing toilets, antibiotics, dentistry, and Chinese takeout.

» The Filibuster Is Constitutional and Essential for Freedom - Big Government

2010-01-16T03:03:00.000-05:00

» The Filibuster Is Constitutional and Essential for Freedom - Big Government

The one thing I can say is that I remember not so long ago when a bunch of fucking ntiwits in our party wanted to kill the filibuster in order to get half a dozen of President Bush's judicial nominees through. To which I responded "You know, someday, maybe soon, WE'RE GOING TO BE IN THE MINORITY!!!" Thank God Sen.... McCain cut that shit off at the pass. It's the only thing now standing between us and slavery.

Luis Garicano and Richard A. Posner: What Our Spies Can Learn From Toyota - WSJ.com

2010-01-16T01:04:00.000-05:00

Luis Garicano and Richard A. Posner: What Our Spies Can Learn From Toyota - WSJ.com

We have an unwieldy multiplicity of agencies that operate largely independently. Dysfunctional bureaucratic incentives decree that an attack involving a repetition of a known terrorist procedure is the most damaging politically, so shoes are scanned because a shoe was used in an attempted airplane bombing. Now underwear will be scanned as well. The government seems always to be playing catch-up to the terrorists.

Zombie » From Each According to His Ability: “Progressive Pricing” Coming Soon to a Nation Near You

2010-01-14T00:56:00.000-05:00

Zombie » From Each According to His Ability: “Progressive Pricing” Coming Soon to a Nation Near You

This bodes ill... Equality under the law is a bedrock principle of our society.

Last week the Swiss newspaper Blick broke the story of a guy who was caught driving above the speed limit through the town of Mörschwil and given a speeding ticket for $290,000. No, that’s not a typo — two hundred and ninety thousand dollars.

What could possibly justify such a large fine? One simple reason: The guy was rich. And under a new scheme of “progressive pricing” that’s becoming more and more common across Europe, rich people must pay higher fees for things because they can afford it — and because, well, they’re rich, and therefore deserve extra punishment.
...Underlying this whole drive toward “fairness” is what I consider a rather twisted worldview. The whole reason why anyone bothers to become rich in the first place is so that minor expenses don’t remain burdensome. If you’re broke and shivering and unable to pay your heating bill, your immediate response is usually, “I need to get a job!” But what if, having gotten that job and made more money, your heating bill is raised proportionally, to account for the fact that you can now “afford” to pay more. If this happens with every expense — and it already does happen to a certain degree with taxes — then what’s the point of making more money in the first place? You’ll always be at the same level of brokeness, since however much you earn, your expenditures will rise and fall in conjunction with your earnings. This, of course, is the recipe for individual inaction, which, multiplied a millionfold, becomes societywide inaction, which leads to the kind of cadaverous economies seen in communist countries.

Star Wars Burlesque: Tatooine-Styled Shenanigans at the Bordello - Los Angeles Music - West Coast Sound

2010-01-12T09:58:00.000-05:00

Star Wars Burlesque: Tatooine-Styled Shenanigans at the Bordello - Los Angeles Music - West Coast Sound

New levels of awesome...

Will Soon Be Kickin' It ANDOR-STYLE!!!

2010-01-11T07:51:00.001-05:00

Only 2 more days till open beta!

Commentary » Blog Archive » Blair, Israel, and the Global Struggle

2010-01-11T07:47:00.000-05:00

Commentary » Blog Archive » Blair, Israel, and the Global Struggle:

Wow. What a remarkably clear sighted response from Blair. I guess this is why the guy was such a steadfast ally in Iraq, because he understands that we are all in the same position, fighting the same overarching phenomenon. And therefore, we are placed by our enemies in the position of having to respond, which unfortunately entails, as does all warfare, civilian casualties. But what Blair understands, and what the critics of Israel (or the critics of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan) do not, is that the enemy bears the moral responsibility for the civilian casualties.

"Even more remarkable, however, is the next sentence: “I mean, we face this [situation] continually. We face it now, actually, in places like Afghanistan.”

In short, Westerners should understand Israel because they’re in the same boat: their own armies are causing civilian casualties “in places like Afghanistan” for the exact same reasons.

So why do many Westerners either refuse to see the parallels or regard their own armies’ behavior with similar incomprehension and outrage? In Blair’s view, the heart of the problem is that too many Westerners fail to understand that they face a determined enemy waging a long-term global struggle, not a series of discrete, unrelated local conflicts."

Crack TSA Manhunt Corners National Security Threat - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online

2010-01-10T10:15:00.000-05:00

Crack TSA Manhunt Corners National Security Threat - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online

Great minds think alike:

Shutting down the airport, wasting thousands of people's time by pointlessly rescreening them, treating them as animals in pens without food or drink or bathroom breaks for hours on end, causing them to miss their flights and screwing up their lives... none of that is Mr Jiang's fault but that of the money-no-object TSA that imposes stupid petty rules on everybody else but doesn't even follow its own. And that's why Senator Lautenberg's anger is misdirected: It's not Mr Jiang's fault that Newark's "security" is a laughingstock.

Absolutely pitiful...

» The Survival of the Republic: A Second Reason for Reading Montesquieu - Big Government

2010-01-10T09:10:00.000-05:00

» The Survival of the Republic: A Second Reason for Reading Montesquieu - Big Government

It is hard to see how republican government can survive in a world of unfunded and partially funded mandates in which the federal government systematically turns the state governments into instruments of federal policy. It is hard to see how it can survive in a world in which the legislative power confers on administrative agencies the right to make regulations that have the force of law, the right to enforce those regulations, and the right to establish courts to adjudicate disputes arising from the enforcement of those regulations. To an ever-increasing degree, decisions that affect our lives are made in camera behind closed doors by women and men who are unaccountable. That is, as Montesquieu once pointed out, the very definition of despotism.

The reason it is hard is BECAUSE we don't make our kids read Montesquieu, or Locke, or Madison, or Mill, etc.

Mark Steyn: Obama can't say who we're at war with | president, obama, war - Opinion - The Orange County Register

2010-01-10T05:19:00.000-05:00

Mark Steyn: Obama can't say who we're at war with | president, obama, war - Opinion - The Orange County Register

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? The president has now put citizens of Nigeria on the secondary-screening list. Which is tough on Nigerian Christians, who have no desire to blow up your flight to Detroit. Aside from the highly localized Tamil terrorism of India and Sri Lanka, suicide bombing is a phenomenon entirely of Islam. The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonist's home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is, likewise, a phenomenon of Islam. This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious – that this "war" is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London.
But the president of the United States cannot say that because he is overinvested in a fantasy – that, if only that Texan moron Bush had read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his Miranda rights and bowed as low as Obama did to the Saudi king, we wouldn't have all these problems. So now Obama says, "We are at war." But he cannot articulate any war aims or strategy because they would conflict with his illusions. And so we will stagger on, playing defense, pulling more and more items out of our luggage – tweezers, shoes, shampoo, snow globes, suppositories – and reacting to every new provocation with greater impositions upon the citizenry.

No, a nearby supernova won’t wipe us out | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

2010-01-10T01:54:00.000-05:00

No, a nearby supernova won’t wipe us out | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

A Type Ia does put out more high-energy radiation than a Type II supernova, which is caused when a massive star’s core collapses and the outer layers are ejected. That’s what most people think of when they hear about a supernova. Those have to be really close to hurt us, certainly closer than 25 light years. But even with their added power, a Type Ia just doesn’t have the oomph needed to destroy our ozone layer (as the press release indicates) from 3300 light years away. It would have to be far closer than that.

Unless it was the Hobus supernova! What classification is that?

Priorities

2010-01-10T01:51:00.000-05:00

Man arrested in Newark airport security breach - Yahoo! News

New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who was briefed on the arrest, said authorities found Jiang with "sheer, hard police work" of sifting through records and following leads. But he expressed anger that Jiang faces a charge he described as a "slap on the wrist" and will only be given a fine of about $500.

"This was a terrible deed in its outcome — it wasn't some prank that didn't do any harm — it did a lot of harm because it sent out an alert that people can get away with something like this," Lautenberg said.

The senator called Jiang's actions "premeditated" and said even though the his actions were relatively benign, "what he did was a terrible injustice" to the thousands of people who were inconvenienced.

So, Senator Lautenberg's main beef is that this guy slipped under the rope to say good-bye to his girlfriend - NOT that the TSA closed the entire terminal for 6 freaking hours! Maybe Lautenberg should become the next head of the TSA. He certainly has the right mindset.

We're Living IN The Future!

2010-01-10T01:34:00.000-05:00

TSA funding airport mind-reading scanners | Raw Story

"It sounds like science fiction," WeCU CEO Ehud Givon told the Jerusalem Post. "But I can assure you that the technology is very real. We have accuracy rates that are higher than 95 percent."

Supporters of mind-reading technology argue that it would reduce waiting lines at security checkpoints and reduce the hassle for travelers.

The Kid Needs This For STAR TREK: Online

2009-11-17T14:27:00.003-05:00

New exascale computers!

The world's fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops.
But Jaguar's record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The U.S. Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful -- an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The later project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the U.S. is co-developing.

Because we're going to need this to get the full effect for STAR TREK: Online

KSM Trial = FAIL

2009-11-17T13:50:00.002-05:00

When Kid Various was a, well, kid - his grandfather used to take him to Madison Square Garden to see the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus... The Greatest Show On Earth!

Well - the circus is coming back to town, in the form of the trial of Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 attacks. This has got the worst idea to come out of the Obama White House yet (and that's saying something.) It literally makes no sense whatsoever.

Pat Buchanan, who seems ever more determined to consign himself to the lunatic fringe of political debate (Poland was asking for it...) writes a surprisingly cogent piece on just why bringing KSM into a civil court is the height of ridiculousness. Short answer: He's not supposed to be there!!!

And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.

When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.

Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.

We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?

Good point Pat! Here's another:

Were not KSM's Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but that his family would be killed and he would be water-boarded if he refused to talk?

And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?

Jules Crittenden notes that empaneling the jury should be hysterical!

Once you get past ”Do you know anyone who died in the Twin Towers” or ”Were you in New York, or in the United States of America, or on Planet Earth on Sept. 11, 2001″ and “Do you believe al-Qaeda poses a threat to western civilization or just to innocent commuters,” that kind of thing, then you get some other tricky particulars. Muslims, thumbs up or thumbs down? Jews and Christians, OK or not OK? Never mind the dhimmi, what about atheists? Very haram. I’m guessing anyone who ever saw any vid of Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl getting their heads sawn off is immediately disqualified. Highly prejudicial. Ditto the jets-hitting-buildings, people-dropping, buildings-collapse footage.

and he notes, this effectively ends the war. Or at least, it ends the war for us - our enemies won't see it that way.

The Department of Justice, by determining these men have full constitutional rights and that they should be able to pursue them here, has also opened the door to all kinds of civil actions based on notions of unlawful imprisonment and harsh treatment. Could they really deprive these men of their right to seek redress? That what they were accused of are war crimes is no longer relevant. What they are accused of have been reduced to simple criminal acts, the defendants to criminal suspects, engaged in alleged criminal conspiracies. The GWOT effectively is over, at least our involvement in it. Al-Qaeda can keep playing, we’re all done.

The decision to bring KSM to trial in New York isn't even internally consistent. It's not like they said, "Evil Chimpy McBushitler created these military tribunals and they're not acceptable so we are trying all enemy combatants." No. Holder said some enemy combatants will face military tribunals, but KSM and four others will be tried in a civilian court. Why? What's diference between them and the others? By what legal criteria are they judged differently [CRICKETS CHIRPING]

Even leaving aside the stupendously bad decision to give enemy combatants access to constitutional rights (which they have never had previously.) The decision makes no sense politically. What does the president get out of this? Because Kid Various sees a lot of downside but absolutely zero upside except making the ACLU happy. As James Taranto notes:

You have to wonder if the Obama administration and its supporters bothered to think through the implications of their decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other enemy combatants as civilians. An immediate effect, and one that will only be strengthened by an actual trial or trials, is to bring 9/11 back into the public consciousness. That can't be good for President Obama.

Add to that this idea which should make the president wet the bed at night. If Holder came to Kid Various with this ludicrous proposal, The Kid would have just one question. "What if KSM walks?"

[HOLDER] Oh, mister president, that won't happen! We have so much evidence. No jury would...

[KV] Blah, blah, blah - WHAT...IF...HE...WALKS?

What, KSM doesn't get presumption of innocence now? Guiltier men than him have walked free. No matter how remote a possibility, if KSM walks, Obama's presidency won't be worth shit.

Kid Various just gets the sinking feeling that this hasn't been thought through very thoroughly.

Gay Penguin Gene Much Older Than Anticipated

2009-11-16T01:34:00.001-05:00

Ancient penguin DNA raises doubts about accuracy of genetic dating techniques

This is potentially huge, as we thought we had a good handle on a standard rate of mutation in species.

Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.

Sadly for creationists, it seems that we have been underestimating the rate at which mutation takes place. So species are actually much older than we thought. No word yet, on when the "gay gene" in penguins appeared.

The Issue is Nothing Less Than Slavery

2009-11-15T14:02:00.003-05:00

The central problem that Kid Various has with Obamacare is not its cost (although it is indeed debilitating) or the fact that it will displace his current mode of insurance (it will, The Kid has a health savings account married to a high deductible plan, which means it's insurance - not a way for him to get someone else to pay his doctor bills. And such arrangements are banned under the House bill.)

No, the problem is that by becoming the main health care provider/regulator the federal government fundamentally redefines the concept of what it means to be a free citizen.

You'll be given money to pay for it: Since premiums will be such a burden, families making up to $96,000 will get federal subsidies. By squashing lower-cost high-deductible plans, Congress makes insurance expensive. Then it spares you with someone else's money. You should be grateful.

That is the problem: The poor and old aside, most of us now buy our own coverage or earn it through an employer. The new normal will be health care as a gift from government.

What can be given can be taken away. Are you eating right? Exercising? You're not still drinking, are you? Authorities merely nag us now. When we owe them our health care, they can start demanding.

Do not imagine they will hesitate to use this power. The House puts the Internal Revenue Service and all its compassionate flexibility in charge of enforcing the insurance mandate. If you don't buy, there will be penalties. Those penalties can include the slammer, Congress itself points out.

They'll go further. At 1,990 pages, the bill has room for dreams of utopia, and so health care reform demands affirmative action in nursing schools (page 1379), calorie lists on menus (page 1510) and inspections (voluntary, for now) of expectant parents (page 1176). These are not, even now, the restrained ambitions of a modest government.

They are signals of a new relationship. When we all are on the take, voluntarily or not, we are no longer exactly free citizens. We are, in part, dependents. And as dependents are customarily told by Dad, "If you live in my house, you live by my rules."

We have been fighting a rearguard action against losing our basic freedoms for some 70 years. Ironically, we may triumph in our fight for freedom abroad, only to become slaves at home.

Counter-Enlightenment Morons

2009-11-15T09:22:00.004-05:00

Wait, you can't be bothered to take an inexpensive pill once a day that will halve your chance of getting prostate cancer. AND it'll also grow your hair back? What are you, a fucking moron? Can Kid Various have your share?

Take prostate cancer, the second-most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, surpassed only by easily treated skin cancers. More than 192,000 cases of it will be diagnosed this year, and more than 27,000 men will die from it.
And, it turns out, there is a way to prevent many cases of prostate cancer. A large and rigorous study found that a generic drug, finasteride, costing about $2 a day, could prevent as many as 50,000 cases each year. Another study found that finasteride’s close cousin, dutasteride, about $3.50 a day, has the same effect.
Nevertheless, researchers say, the drugs that work are largely ignored. And supplements that have been shown to be not just ineffective but possibly harmful are taken by men hoping to protect themselves from prostate cancer.

And this:

Others, like Cecilia Anderson, who is 57 and lives in Houston, worry about side effects. “I felt like my quality of life was in question,” she said. “I am busy, I am out there. I totally love my life and don’t want it to be compromised.” Her lifetime risk of breast cancer is 20.5 percent, compared with an average risk of 9.8 percent for a woman her age. Ms. Anderson declined the drugs. “I live a different lifestyle,” she said. “I eat organic foods, I exercise. Through all of that comes a spiritual element as well. Mind, body, and spirit are all connected.”

Ms. Anderson, and The Kid says this in the nicest possible way, is a fucking idiot. She's "so busy" that she can't find time to pop a pill in the morning with her useless organic ginseng root tea? She's a raving apopheniac! Mind, body, and spirit are not connected! And your mind and spirit aren't going to help you out when your body starts its epic fail lady.

And the worst part is, as the article notes, drug companies are thinking twice about developing preventive drugs because people don't use them. So the Counter-Enlightenment nonsense is depriving Kid Various of extremely important preventative treatments.

And it is Counter-Enlightenment nonsense, because it's not laziness. You'll note that these idiots can find the time to ingest useless saw palmetto root extract but don't like to take "drugs." Because "drugs" are not "natural" and therefore dangerous.

The Kid is surrounded by idiots!

Warm-blooded Dinosaurs Worked Up A Sweat

2009-11-15T08:40:00.001-05:00

Warm-blooded Dinosaurs Worked Up A Sweat: "The results of both the simple and complex method were in very close agreement: based on the energy they consumed when moving, many dinosaurs were probably endothermic, athletic animals because their energy requirements during walking and running were too high for cold-blooded animals to produce. Interestingly, when the results for each dinosaur were arranged into an evolutionary family tree, the authors found that endothermy might be the ancestral condition for all dinosaurs. This pushes the evolution of endothermy further back into the ancient past than many researchers expected, suggesting that dinosaurs were athletic, endothermic animals throughout the Mesozoic era."

What's the Property Tax Rate on a Decatur Class Light Cruiser?

2009-11-15T03:29:00.004-05:00

Doesn't Kid Various ALREADY pay enough taxes to the United Federation of Planets? I mean, they basically tax all of his salary. Which is really a misnomer since he doesn't really get, well, paid at all. There's more of a 100% tax on his labor - since all of the value created by his labor is confiscated by the Federation to pay for the schooling of poor Denebians or whatever...

We STARFLEET officers are paid with the satisfaction of a job well done!

Although in a non-Gene Roddenberry reality, The Kid imagines that STARFLEET officers would be among the laziest beings one would ever come across in the universe.

[COMMS OFFICER] Captain! We're getting a distress call from the Epsilon 9 listening post! They're under attack by Klingons!

[CAPTAIN] Let them handle it. Not my job...

Well, the Federation definitely does have some real world parallels - that being that an all encompassing government will try anything to get that extra strip of latnium out of you.

Governments are looking at ways to justify taxing virtual items because they now have real-world value, even if they exist only on a server somewhere. With this inevitable tax comes intrusive and overbearing regulation. More bureaucracy and less freedom; that’s always a good thing, right?
Governments such as China, Britain, South Korea, the U.S., and Australia have considered the virtual world as the next step in levying property and income tax. In fact, Britain already imposes a VAT tax on the rent and sale of virtual property for the game Second Life. Not to be outdone, the U.S. Congress recently reconsidered its position on taxation of virtual items and income.

Members of the United Federation of Planets Bureau of Revenue Enhancement
persuade yet another race to generously share the wealth.

Two Major Developments

2009-11-15T01:30:00.003-05:00

With the health care bill, the Ft. Hood shootings and the interminable dithering over Afghanistan (victory is a choice Mr. President) two major developments in the war of the Enlightenment vs. its discontents have gone almost unremarked. Both have to do with the U.S. losing its ability intervene in major war theaters.

One, Iran has taken a giant leap forward towards becoming a regional hegemon and boxing the U.S. out of the Middle East with a major advance in weaponizing its nuclear program. It has been developing an advanced "implosion trigger" for its nuclear weapons.

This is bad news. It means that as soon as Iran successfully tests a bomb (if they even test one, remember the first time we detonated a uranium gun-barrel type bomb was over Hiroshima, so reliable was the design) they will immediately be able to mate the weapon to one of their Shahab missiles, capable of reaching Israel. If Iran develops a solid-fueled rocket as well, they'll have a potential thermonuclear launch-on-warning capability just like the five members of the Security Council.

Second, the "credibility dominoes" are continuing to fall. Because of U.S. weakness vis a vis Iraq, Afghanistan, Poland, the Czech Republic, Honduras and Israel - Taiwan has now concluded that it cannot depend on the U.S. as a credible deterrent to Chinese aggression.

In the latest edition of its biennial military review, the Taiwan Ministry of Defense released a metaphorical bombshell. It noted that with China’s continuing and unrelenting military buildup, “it can now deter foreign militaries from assisting Taiwan.” This, of course, is a euphemism for deterring the United States. Since the U.S. deployed an aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait a decade ago when conditions heated on both sides of the divide, China has vowed to thwart any American military assistance for Taiwan. And if the report is accurate, that moment may have arrived.

Because of this perception, the Taiwanese will be forced to adopt a more conciliatory policy toward the Chinese, and Chinese influence will grow in Asia at the expense of the U.S.

Both of these situations are bad news for the U.S. At this moment, America's security strategy rests on the bedrock assumption that it can shape the international environment to better enhance our own security. Because we are the only global power, with the capability to project force into any region of the world, we force the players in those theaters to react to our moves - rather than we reacting to theirs. Both these developments alter that balance. And the more it is demonstrated that our actions will be reactive to the regional hegemons, the more pressure is applied to regional actors to accommodate those regional hegemons, thus further weakening our position, and constraining us to be even more reactive than proactive.

This is what a "forward strategy of apology" gets you.

Geek Alert

2009-11-15T01:24:00.005-05:00

Dude! Beaming in on February 2, 2010... Star Trek: Online. Freakin' sweet!

Klingon warrior pwns a Federen maggot

Kid Various has been following the development of this game for over a year. Finally! He gets his immersive TREK experience! Here's hoping it doesn't suck!

The Thuraya War

2009-11-15T01:13:00.003-05:00

Interesting post on the effect of Thuraya satellite phones on mobile, low-intensity desert conflict.

Desert warfare, as practiced by the Chadians and Darfurians, is based on mobility and surprise. The Landcruiser is the basic unit of military force. The possession of a Thuraya elevates a commander into a potential leader.

Tactical coordination is key to a successful operation. Before the Thuraya phone, guerrilla operations needed tight discipline and extremely careful planning. More often, the commanders gambled on surprise and the momentum of battle, relying on their prowess in combat to carry the day. Today, with the Thuraya phone, commanders in distant theatres can coordinate their actions. Or they can assemble forces from different places at very short order. They only need to agree on that day’s operation—tomorrow’s can be planned tomorrow.

Kid Various has some experience with this in that his political career spanned the time when cell phones first came into widespread use. He can remember a time when political campaigns were waged without the use of cell phones. It was a different world. You youngin's don't know, but back in the day, everything had to be meticulously planned. Really, really well. No, really. Even small events have a lot of moving parts, and it was real easy for everything to fall apart if everyone was not drilled to the plan. Nowadays, things can be put together on the fly. You expect to be adaptable. Unexpected events that would previously have caused event failure can now be adapted to in minutes. A totally different world.

We're Living In The Future!

2009-11-15T01:09:00.003-05:00

FUTURE ALERT!

Progress made on the contact lens display. You have no idea how amped Kid Various is for this. Contact lens displays which can link to your iPhone to give you 24/7 access to the net and augmented reality?

The future is AWESOME!

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. "Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away," says Parviz.

The War Against The Counter-Enlightenment

2009-11-15T00:52:00.003-05:00

One must always remember that what we are involved in is a war between the Enlightenment and its discontents. Which means that it is a two front war.

The Kid has been overtly focus on the the pre-Enlightenment (or pre-modern) challenge for the past few years, but this post by Dutch novelist Leon De Winter highlights just how dangerous the enemy is on the other, Counter-Enlightenment front - and why we are losing the battle:

If you want to know the scope of the illusions of Western liberal elites, you should read the fascinating editorial published in the Guardian on October 22, 2003. It shows the willingness of these elites to disregard the cruel facts, the radical agenda, and the apocalyptic ambitions of the Iranian regime.

Six years ago, the regime in Tehran executed the same policies, and was driven by the same ideology, as today. And the same Western political elites tried everything in their power to distort the perception of their counterparts in Tehran in order to avoid the harsh truth: the mullahs want to crown Imam Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution with a nuclear weapon.

The Guardian wrote that day:

Iran’s agreement to allow unlimited UN inspections of its nuclear facilities and to suspend its uranium enrichment programme marks a tremendous success for European diplomacy. It shows just what can be achieved when the European powers work together, rather than in opposition.

At the time, it was as clear, as it is now, that the three European ministers involved lied to themselves and to us. On their flight back, they knew that the surprising agreement they took home wasn’t even worth the paper it was printed on, but it was better to pretend that the mullahs were guys like them rather than accept the stubborn reality that some value systems and some concepts of human dignity are incompatible.

The frightening thing is that, on that day in 2003, the editorial writers of The Guardian, champions of the Counter-Enlightenment, really did think that the post-modern tactics had achieved some enduring benefit. Against all experience, and frankly, plain common sense. And this is why they are so dangerous. The Counter-Enlightenment defines itself in opposition to the Enlightenment, and therefore interprets any opposition to such as being basically compatible with its beliefs. Which is why the Counter-Enlightenment can believe that the United States is more dangerous than a nuclear armed Iran.

And therefore, as De Winter notes, the pre-modern wins with an assist from the post modern:

Even more impressive is how they controlled the Americans by helping to kill thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of drawing America’s fury, the mullahs convinced two administrations that a peaceful Iraq is impossible without Tehran’s willingness to stop the flow of roadside bombs, instructors, and various weapons across its borders. Basically, they took the American army hostage in Iraq — and they never saw the shadows of vengeful B-52s gliding over the roofs of their buildings.
No, they witnessed American politicians incapable of demonstrating the will to carry on to the media and their voters. The wings of the American eagle were clipped by a group of cheating and manipulating religious men who perfectly understand the mechanisms of the Western media game.

The Kid is hoping against hope that De Winter's final statement is untrue - but it is getting harder to deny:

It’s too late. The mullahs won. Only the desperate and heroic people in the streets of Iran can turn the tide.

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2009 | Get Smarter | Jamais Cascio

2009-07-19T14:15:00.000-04:00

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2009 | Get Smarter | Jamais Cascio

Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.”

Honduras' non-coup - Los Angeles Times

2009-07-11T09:58:00.000-04:00

The Kid had avoided commentary on the Honduran situation because, U.S. media being as useless as it is, has not been able to tell him straight out whether the removal of the former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was done in accordance with the Honduran constitution. Well, after digging around and trying to translate the Honduran constitution through google translate, he is ready to make his pronouncement:

The removal of Zelaya was not a coup, military or other wise.

The article below actually has a really good summary:

Honduras' non-coup - Los Angeles Times

As noted, Article 239 states clearly that one who behaves as Zelaya did in attempting to change presidential succession ceases immediately to be president. If there were any doubt on that score, the Congress removed it by convening immediately after Zelaya's arrest, condemning his illegal conduct and overwhelmingly voting (122 to 6) to remove him from office. The Congress is led by Zelaya's own Liberal Party (although it is true that Zelaya and his party have grown apart as he has moved left). Because Zelaya's vice president had earlier quit to run in the November elections, the next person in the line of succession was Micheletti, the Liberal leader of Congress. He was named to complete the remaining months of Zelaya's term.

It cannot be right to call this a "coup." Micheletti was lawfully made president by the country's elected Congress. The president is a civilian. The Honduran Congress and courts continue to function as before. The armed forces are under civilian control. The elections scheduled for November are still scheduled for November. Indeed, after reviewing the Constitution and consulting with the Supreme Court, the Congress and the electoral tribunal, respected Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga recently stated that the only possible conclusion is that Zelaya had lawfully been ousted under Article 239 before he was arrested, and that democracy in Honduras continues fully to operate in accordance with law. All Honduran bishops joined Rodriguez in this pronouncement.

That Zelaya was attempting to subvert the Honduran constitution is not even in dispute. The only real question is whether or not the Honduran Supreme Court acted appropriately in issuing an arrest warrant for him. Or if the Honduran Congress had to remove him first.

First off, this was not a military coup. The military detained and exiled Zelaya, but did so under an order form the Supreme Court and under its consitutional charge in article 272. There was no attempt by the military to act indpendently, or to try an seize power. Power was transferred to the civilian next in line of constitutional succession. Therefore, this was not in any way a military coup.

So therefore was it a civilian coup d'etat?

No. It was not. The thing The Kid had to puzzle through was whether or not the right to remove the President lay with the Honduran Supreme Court, or exclusively the Honduran Congress. The answer lies in article 239 to the constitution which forbids the President from seeking to extend his one, 4 year term. The constitution is so strict on this point, that it forbids the President to even propose the idea. If the President even suggests the idea of extending his term he "ceases his duty immediately forthwith." In effect, Zelaya removed himself, when he attempted to push through a referendum on extending his term. Therefore, it was entirely appropriate for the Supreme Court to write an arrest order, due to the fact that he was likely guilty of treason (as defined in article 4 of the constitution) and acted illegally in attempting the referendum, ignoring the mandate of Congress and firing the Chief of Staff of the Army.

All of this is probably moot in any case, as the Honduran Congress officially removed him from power by a vote of 122 to 6 the day after his arrest anyway. thus making it in no way a coup...

Well Of Course No One Cares About Muslims in China

2009-07-11T09:17:00.000-04:00

Well of course no one cares about the plight of Muslims in China. Least of all, other Muslim countries. The reason for this is obvious - Muslims are not being oppressed by either the United States or Israel. Therefore, no one really cares. To put it in a more general sense, people only care about the violent repression of Muslims, or any pre-modern people, when the "oppressing" is done by moderns. In other words, it's the fault line between the modern and the pre-modern that matters, not the actual acts themselves.

Pre-modern on pre-modern violence is not worth a blip on the global radar. After all, what can you expect from such people? But if a modern society combats the actions of a pre-modern one, it's wall to wall coverage and denunciations at the UN.

Pajamas Media » China Silences the Muslim World

And, of course, Beijing employs brute force. The latest official death toll from this week’s disturbances is 184, but that number appears to undercount the dead. Observers say that this is the most deadly series of riots in China since the Tiananmen massacre twenty years ago, but that assessment is questionable. Ethnic fighting flared in Yining, the capital of the short-lived East Turkestan Republic, in early 1997. The unrest is thought to have led to at least several hundred deaths, and subsequent executions added to the toll.

Yet the death of hundreds, and probably thousands, of Uighurs and the systematic destruction of their culture has been met with an eerie silence from Muslim nations. Nations that expressed incandescent rage at the United States due to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have, up until now, said nothing about Xinjiang. Why?

Pajamas Media » In Washington, Conservatives Are Never Really ‘In Power’

2009-07-03T11:48:00.000-04:00

Kid Various is of the opinion we need more politicization of the bureaucracy. The president should be making at least 30,000 appointments. Any position that has significant policy making power should be appointed. Europeans look at our system as inherently corrupt because we make our very top positions political appointments rather than have something like the British "permanent undersecretary."

But they ignore the fact that their systems are just as politicized - it's simply that the people at large have absolutely no ability to hold their bureaucracies accountable.

The genius of Andrew Jackson was that he realized that he was the only official elected by all the people, therefore he had not only the right - but the duty - to fashion the federal bureaucracy as he saw fit in order to implement the policies that the people had elected him to pursue. He came in and fired 10% of the federal workforce (which is where The Kid gets the 30,000 figure) and replaced them with his own hand picked people. (Lord how The Kid wishes he could do that!)

The President is elected by the people of the United States to pursue certain policies. Unless he has the power not only to make decisions, but to ensure those decisions are implemented, the people are being cheated.

Any position within the federal bureaucracy that influences policy decisions should have an indirect tie back to the popular will through the President.

Pajamas Media » In Washington, Conservatives Are Never Really ‘In Power’

First, most people do not understand the sheer magnitude of the executive branch. There are almost 3 million federal employees, 99 percent of whom are career civil servants over whom the president has virtually no authority. Seventeen states have fewer citizens than the federal government has bureaucrats. There are only a few thousand positions within the federal government that are subject to “noncompetitive appointment,” i.e., positions that the president can fill through political patronage. Among these are 1,137 positions that can be filled by presidential appointment with Senate confirmation; 320 positions subject to presidential appointment without confirmation; and 701 positions in the Senior Executive Service (the top level of managers within the federal ranks) that can be filled by non-career appointments.

As these numbers illustrate, it is the career civil servants who pull the millions of levers of power, not the few political appointees at the top of every agency. It is very difficult for the appointees to even keep track of the policies being implemented by the career staff, much less change them.

This would not be a problem if the career ranks were really filled with nonpartisan individuals (as the New York Times unwaveringly claims) who impartially carried out the policies of the president. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. From the State Department, to the Central Intelligence Agency, to the Department of Justice, and every agency in between, career employees are overwhelmingly partisan liberals, just like in the media and academic worlds. As Richard Perle has eloquently said, when George Bush tried to pull the levers of government, he never realized that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. The bureaucracies of these agencies have their own policies and they largely ignored President Bush’s directives and his political appointees, a problem President Obama will not have.

Tribalism is the real enemy in Iraq

2009-07-02T02:07:00.000-04:00

For someone not a specialist in this area, Pressfield is remarkably perceptive. In this short piece from 2006, he lays out just exactly what we are up against in the Long War. It's not "terror", it's not "islam." The Long War is a struggle between The Enlightenment and its discontents. And until we a) realize that, b) allow ourselves to admit that, we are going to be handicapped in prosecution of the War.

Tribalism is the real enemy in Iraq

The tribe must have a chief. It demands a leader. With a top dog, every underdog knows his place. He feels secure. He can provide security for this family. The tribe needs a Tony Soprano. It needs a Godfather.

The United States blew it in Iraq the first week after occupying Baghdad. Capt. Nate Fick of the Recon Marines tells the story of that brief interlude when U.S. forces were still respected, just before the looting started. Fick went in that interval to the local headman in his area of responsibility in Baghdad; he asked what he needed. The chief replied, "Clean water, electricity and as many statues of George W. Bush as you can give us."
...When we Americans declared in essence to the Iraqis, "Here, folks, you're free now; set up your own government," they looked at us as if we were crazy. The tribal mind doesn't want freedom; it wants security. Order. It wants a new boss. The Iraqis lost all respect for us then. They saw us as naive, as fools. They saw that we could be beaten.
...The tribe is the most primitive form of social organization. In the conditions under which the tribe evolved, survival was everything. Cohesion meant the difference between starving and eating. The tribe enforces conformity by every means possible -- wives, mothers and daughters add the whip hand to keep the warriors in line. Freedom is a luxury the tribe can't afford. The tribesman's priority is respect within the tribe, to belong, to be judged a man.

You can't sell freedom to tribesmen any more than you can sell democracy. He doesn't want it. It violates his code. It threatens everything he stands for.

"As many statues of George W. Bush as you can give us." That totally illustrates the point. Mr. Democracy always says that evrything in Iraq is so personalized. It's always "Bush this or Bush that" or "Obama this or Obama that." They have no concept of impersonal institutions. Everything revolves around the realtions of power amongst individuals within the tribal matrix. Not only do we not understand this, we do not allow ourselves to understand it. We do not allow ourselves to believe that these people think completely different from us - for that would be "othering" them. We have to get off that train.

Missing Our Moment in Iran by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online

2009-07-02T01:57:00.000-04:00

VDH on how we currently seem to have no problem giving comfort to cruel men...

Missing Our Moment in Iran by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online

Is XP Vehicles' inflatable car just a lot of hot air?

2009-06-30T15:26:00.000-04:00

Does anyone remember that commercial from SNL for that car made out of clay, The Adobe... The first car to break the $200 barrier!

Spokesman: These days, everyone's talking about the Hyundai, and the Yugo. Both nice cars, if you've got $3,000 or $4,000 to throw around. But, for those of us whose name doesn't happen to be Rockefeller, finally there's some good news - a car with a sticker price of $179. That's right, $179. The name of the car?

Adobe. The sassy new Mexican import that's made out of clay. German engineering and Mexican know-how helped create the first car to break the $200 barrier. At this price, you might not expect more than reliable transportation - but, brother, you get it! Extra features: like the custom contour seats, or the beverage-gripping dash. And the money you save isn't exactly small change!

Jingle:
"Hey, hey, we're Adobe!
The little car that's made out of clay!
We're gonna save you some money
that you can spend in some other way!
Hey, hey, we're Adobe!
Hey, hey, we're Adobe!
Adobe!"

[ show Adobe driver get into a fender-bender. She casually steps out of the vehicle and uses her hands to mold her bumper back into its proper shape, in under six minutes! ]

Spokesman: Adobe. You can buy a cheaper car. But I wouldn't recommend it!

Announcer: Not approved for street use in some states. No warranty either expressed or implied. All sales final.

Well get a load of this:

Is XP Vehicles' inflatable car just a lot of hot air?

It's has been a while since we heard any news about the inflatable car from XP Vehicles but it seems they are still out there and still planning to take the auto industry by storm. Freshly featured on the cover of Product Design & Development (PDD), the concept vehicle that doesn't employ airbags, but rather is the airbag

BYE-BYE, BABYLON - New York Post

2009-06-30T15:17:00.000-04:00

We are winning!!!

BYE-BYE, BABYLON - New York Post

Yet this situation seemed a pipe dream not so long ago: Iraq's security forces, serving an elected government, assume primary responsibility for the good order of their own country.
We all recall the delighted leftist claims that Iraq had entered a hopeless civil war. Wrong. That Iraqis preferred al Qaeda to us. Wrong. That Shia militias represented the people. Wrong. And that Iran would seize control. Wrong again.

Looking back over six years of good intentions, tragic errors, generosity, arrogance, partisan vituperation, painful deaths and ultimate vindication, two things strike me: the ever-resisted lesson that human affairs are more complex than academic theories claim, and the simple truth that most human beings prefer a measure of freedom to immeasurable repression.
...But other gains, too, emerged from the vilified Bush administration's actions: As we just saw in Lebanon and Iran, democracy now seems possible to populations that had almost given up.

Iran will be free one day, the only question is when. And it won't be because of President Obama's grotesque Cairo apologia.

The problem for presidents is that great changes don't conform to our political calendars. Derided for his "axis of evil" remarks, Bush now looks far wiser than Obama in the wake of North Korean threats of nuclear devastation and Iran's savage crackdown following a wildly fraudulent election (and Tehran's attack on Obama's "interference," even though our president initially defended the election results).

There is evil in the world. No matter how resistant Obama may be to learning that basic lesson, our enemies will hammer it into him.

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Thuggery 101: A Few Basics For President

2009-06-29T11:49:00.000-04:00

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Thuggery 101: A Few Basics For President

Lesson Three: The more we speak out about the harsh rule of thugs, the more oppressed people will come to respect us. Our past resistance to Ahmadinejad may help explain why the Iranian people seem to admire us more than do many in the Arab street, whose dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Egypt we so fawningly have praised.

Lesson Four: Thugs can never be trusted — whether an Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin of the past or the rogue's gallery of today. Ahmadinejad is lying about his peaceful plans for nuclear technology. Kim Jong Il continued his nuclear program when he promised that he would not. Syria's Bashar Assad hid his nuclear reactor under construction.

Lesson Five: Most of the world's problems are caused by a handful of thugs. Anytime one can be isolated and replaced by a consensual government, the world gets just a bit safer.

American Thinker: The Mullahs and the Tiananmen Option

2009-06-29T03:09:00.001-04:00

American Thinker: The Mullahs and the Tiananmen Option:

Twenty years later, in another youth lead revolution this time in Iran, the fate of a young student standing up against tyranny and oppression is well known. A beautiful girl Nada, a name meaning 'voice' in Farsi, was shot and killed. The horrific image of her death went around the world. It now looks like the Iranian rulers are taking a page from the PRC playbook and will try to fully crush the revolution.

The key is to watch how far the Iranian rulers will go in following what the PLA did in the aftermath of Tiananeman Square. It will get very ugly, I think.

Internally, he PLA immediately upgraded their internal security with state-of-the-art communication systems -- thank you American and other countries selling cell phone and communication satellite capabilities to the PLA. This being the 21st Century, look for the ruling Mullahs to focus on the Internet.

Unfortunately, the Iranian regime has the will to do whatever it takes to hold on to power. It will get uglier.

Always remember

American Thinker: Bush's Domino Effect

2009-06-29T02:55:00.000-04:00

The Bush effect is highly speculative, but there is no doubt that the Freedom Agenda has shaken up the region - to effects both bad and good. The claim that the Cairo speech had anything to do with Iran, however is patently absurd.

American Thinker: Bush's Domino Effect

While Professor Ibrahim credits what he calls the "Obama Effect" for producing the latest outbreak of reform in the Middle East, history will see something quite different: the Bush Effect. Democracy, elections, and freedom in Iraq could not fail to have an impact on the minds of Muslim moderates, especially in Iran. How does a woman or a young person in Iran manage to put up with a medieval tyranny when across the border in Iraq individuals are starting to flourish under the banner of self-determination and liberty?

Barack Obama's rather suspicious early response to the exciting and poignant cry for freedom in Iran should have finally ripped the blinders off of Obama's swooning supporters in the human rights establishment. Truth be told, never does Mr. Obama look as awkward as he does when he's forced to mouth support for "democracy" and "freedom" either at home or abroad. It's not in the nature of a socialist in other words to feel comfortable speaking about these things. Obama, like all socialists, is at his best lecturing, controlling and organizing.

Very few on the left and in the Muslim world will admit that the American liberation of Iraq was the catalyst for a beneficent domino effect in Lebanon and Iran. But they should be reminded that this was George Bush's vision from the beginning. In other words, it was Bush, despite fierce criticism, who believed in a stable Middle East built upon democratic principles. The same belief has animated the thousands of U.S. troops who have helped to implement this vision in Iraq.

Of Course We Are Superior

2009-06-29T02:50:00.000-04:00

Let The Kid make one thing perfectly clear. He has got no problem stating that our culture is superior to the pre-modern ones. Zero, nada, zip...

Of course we are superior

Apparently Greenwald thinks I'm guilty of applying a double standard -- concern for the treatment of uniformed hostages and ambivalence toward the treatment of terrorist detainees. Well, guilty as charged. I really don't care about the rough treatment to which men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were subjected even for the chance of gleaning valuable information. Gilad Shalit, on the other hand, is a uniformed combatant entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions.
The United States, Israel, and the rest of the civilized world do not target civilians, do not hide weapons in mosques, do not use our own children as human shields, do not send our own children to their deaths as suicide bombers, do not seek the extermination of an entire race of people. Terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the regimes that sponsor them, do. That is why we are morally superior to them, and they are morally inferior to us. And that is also why I'm confident that Gilad Shalit would give anything to have spent the last three years at Gitmo -- playing soccer, watching tv, getting three squares a day -- instead of being a prisoner of Hamas. Because even though they don't deserve it, we still treat our detainees better than terrorists treat theirs.

Machine Minds - Forbes.com

2009-06-28T11:51:00.000-04:00

Let's develop AI that won't destroy us? Kid VArious is all for that!

Machine Minds - Forbes.com

Animals to which humans are indifferent often lose their habitats and go extinct. If an indifferent superintelligence is created, especially if it is created as software and can therefore reproduce very rapidly, humans will be similarly endangered. After all, while most minds may not care about us, all possible minds will depend upon, and thus care about, certain basic resources such as matter. Superintelligences could be designed to care about us. In this case, they would protect us from our worst mistakes, including the mistake of creating an indifferent or thoughtlessly designed superintelligence.
Extra work will be required to design such concern into an artificial mind. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence was founded to make sure that such work is done before it becomes necessary. I hope we have centuries. Most experts say that 20 to 50 years is more likely. Once artificial intelligence is an imminent prospect, competitive pressures will probably favor those projects that compromise safety in order to progress faster. Many projects will justify such compromises on the grounds that if they don't hurry, even more reckless competitors will develop artificial intelligence first. Similar things happen all the time, but humankind can't afford this sort of race to the bottom. We will only get one shot at this. Let's get it right the first time.

Realism and Iran: Interesting Times: Online Only: The New Yorker

2009-06-28T11:41:00.000-04:00

From a realist, not a crazy neo-con like The Kid.

Realism and Iran: Interesting Times: Online Only: The New Yorker

In much of the punditry calling for dialogue with Iran, there’s been a strange naivete about the true nature of the regime—a confusion between the sophistication and tolerance of the Iranian people, and their rulers, who have always taken the most brutal measures to hold onto power. Some advocates of negotiation seem to think that the resistance and stupidity have all been on our side—that if only America showed a little respect for Iran, called it by its rightful name of “Islamic Republic,” stopped talking about carrots and sticks (which Iranians associate with donkeys), then Iran’s rulers would be glad to start talking. It turns out that they have more to fear from talk than we do—in fact, at the moment it’s hard to know exactly what they have to gain by it and a lot easier to see what they have to lose. Perhaps they have a keener sense of their own interests than American commentators, so obsessed with America’s own behavior, imagined.
With riot police and armed militiamen beating and, in a few reported cases, killing unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Iran’s cities, for the Obama Administration to continue parsing equivocal phrases serves no purpose other than to make it look feckless. Part of realism is showing that you have a clear grasp of reality—that you know the difference between decency and barbarism when both are on display for the whole world to see. A stronger American stand—taken, as much as possible, in concert with European countries and through multilateral organizations—would do more to improve America’s negotiating position than weaken it. Acknowledging the compelling voices of the desperate young Iranians who, after all, only want their votes counted, would not deep-six the possibility of American-Iranian talks.

Where's The U.N. On Iran? - Forbes.com

2009-06-28T11:39:00.000-04:00

Every time the Kid sees a tweet coming out of Iran asking, "where's the UN?" it breaks his heart. The UN is worse than useless, it is exceptionally damaging. In his travels, Kid Various has met numerous foreigners for whom the UN has been built up in their minds as some sort of supra-national world government. An institution to be respected. An institution to be obeyed. Shattered are their dreams when they reach out to the "world community" in times of crisis - only to be met with the bone chilling silence of an organization whose main occupation is to act as accomplice to the most heinous acts of despots and tyrants.

Where's The U.N. On Iran? - Forbes.com

Beyond Ban, where is the rest of the U.N. on the showdown and brutal crackdown in Iran? Well, last Friday, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, according to the U.N. News Service, "expressed concern" (though apparently not deep concern). With fastidious attention to the small print, Pillay noted that "the legal basis of the arrests that have been taking place, especially those of human rights defenders and political activists, is not clear." She may be right; the details right now are not clear. But the big picture certainly is.

What of the 15-member Security Council, which over the past three years has imposed sanctions on Iran, meant to stop its "proliferation-sensitive nuclear activities." You might suppose that with Iran's government brazenly violating these sanctions, the Security Council would take an interest in the recent tumult within the Islamic Republic. Perhaps the U.S. would be pushing the issue?

Nope. According to a Western diplomat connected with the Security Council, "Iran is not being discussed at the council right now."

Nor is the General Assembly exactly seized of the matter (as they like to say at the U.N.). The current president of the Assembly is Nicaragua's Miguel D'Escoto Brockman, a former Sandinista and current pal of the Tehran regime. In March D'Escoto made a five-day pit stop in Iran, his visit apparently bankrolled by the Iranian regime. This week he's making use of the U.N.'s headquarters in New York to host a conference on remodeling the global financial system.

Fancy that. They want freedom. Just like us | Daniel Finkelstein - Times Online

2009-06-28T11:25:00.000-04:00

Imagine. People don't want to be enslaved!

Neo-conservatism. Now more than ever...

Fancy that. They want freedom. Just like us | Daniel Finkelstein - Times Online

Now, there is something you need to know. I am a neocon. Given all that has happened over the past ten years, I am sure my PR consultant would advise me to drop this label. But I don't employ a PR consultant. So, stubbornly, I cling on to the designation. It declares my belief in two things - that in every country in the world, wherever it may be and whatever its traditions, the people yearn for liberty, for free expression and for democracy; and that the spread of liberty and democracy (not necessarily through the barrel of a gun) is the only real way to bring peace to the world. I believe that what we are seeing on the streets of Iran now is a vindication of these neoconservative ideas.

The clue lies in a single, almost heartbreaking, detail, tucked inside the reports of Iran's presidential election. Mir Hossein Mousavi - the dry, bureaucratic insider who became the unlikely hero of the reformist protesters - is not a charismatic man. But he did one truly eloquent thing. He held hands with his wife in public. He held his wife's hand. In public.

It makes you weep for a society in which that seems daring. But it turns out that for millions of people it was the hopeful sign they had been awaiting. It was a tiny crack in the dam. It was light in the darkness, a small battery torch of light, but light all the same.

For years we have been told, we neocons, that other cultures don't want our liberty, our American freedom. Yankee go home! But it isn't true. Because millions of Iranians do want it. Yes, they want their sovereignty, and demand respect for their nation and its great history. No, they don't want foreign interference and manipulation. But they still insist upon their rights and their freedom. They know that liberty isn't American or British. It is Iranian, it is human.

This idea that the critics of neocons advanced so vociferously, that liberal democracy can't be “transplanted” on alien soil - what does it mean to the people of Iran who have thronged the streets to express their will?

Does it mean that we think the morality police is just part of Iranian culture? Just their way of doing things? For the thousands of protesters it is not. It turns out that they don't think it's right for young girls to be arrested, snatched from the streets for wearing the wrong coat. And they don't think there is a cultural defence to beating these girls until their parents arrive with a “decent” garment.

They don't think that public hangings are Iranian, either. Nor arbitrary detentions of doctors who dared to organise conferences on Aids, nor keeping human rights activists in solitary confinement, nor sentencing trade union leaders to five years in jail for trying to organise fellow workers. They don't think there is anything culturally valuable in sentencing political activists to death after secret trials lasting less than five minutes, or returning lawyers to jail again and again for opposing the death penalty or “publishing insulting material with unacceptable interpretation of Islamic rules”.
It is not part of their precious heritage that someone be charged with a capital offence for circulating a petition on women's rights. Nor that nine-year-old girls should be eligible for the death penalty, and children hanged for their crimes. There is no special Iranian will, even given their religious conservatism, that students should be flogged in public for being flirtatious, and homosexuals hanged in the streets.

Neutrality Isn’t an Option by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

2009-06-28T11:20:00.000-04:00

Steyn skewers the president's "studied neutrality."

Neutrality Isn’t an Option by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early nineties, the attitude of much of the west to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder. As Osama bin Laden put it:

The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that two million Muslims were killed.

How come a catalogue of imperial interventions wound up with that bit of scrupulous non-imperial non-intervention? Because great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims. They swarmed to the Balkans to support their coreligionists and ran into a bunch of Wahhabi imams moving into the neighborhood with lots of Saudi money and anxious to fill their Rolodex with useful contacts in the west. Among the alumni of that conflict was the hitherto impeccably assimilated English public (ie, private) schoolboy and London School of Economics student who went on to behead the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl. You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.

Obama's Persian Tutorial - WSJ.com

2009-06-28T11:16:00.000-04:00

Obama's Persian Tutorial - WSJ.com

That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. We had tried to "cheat" -- an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers' cynicism and utter disregard for their people's intelligence and common sense -- and we were caught at it. Mr. Obama's statement that "the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised" put on cruel display the administration's incoherence. For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history's burden: "Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons." No Wilsonianism on offer here.

Mr. Obama will have to acknowledge the "foreignness" of foreign lands. His breezy self-assurance has been put on notice. The Obama administration believed its own rhetoric that the pro-Western March 14 coalition in Lebanon had ridden Mr. Obama's coattails to an electoral victory. (It had given every indication that it expected similar vindication in Iran.)

Little Green Footballs - Al Qaeda Leader: If We Get Pakistan's Nukes, We'll Use Them Against the US

2009-06-28T11:13:00.000-04:00

So wait... there are people out there who want to kill us and will use nuclear weapons if they ever get their hands on them? HOW COME THE KID WAS NOT TOLD THIS?

Little Green Footballs - Al Qaeda Leader: If We Get Pakistan's Nukes, We'll Use Them Against the US

If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday.

That's so surprising...

Let's Talk About It

2009-06-28T11:00:00.001-04:00

Wow. Maybe the reason Iran doesn't want to talk to us isn't because George W. Bush hurt their feelings. Maybe it's not actually in the interests of a scum-sucking regime to talk to us.

For the entire campaign and much of his presidency, Barack Obama has laid the blame for Iran’s actions on George W. Bush rather than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama would, unlike Bush, engage the Iranian regime. He would bring the Sweet Voice of Reason to the dialogue. Obama’s skills at international diplomacy, so evident during his years in the Illinois state senate, would tame the terrorist-sponsoring, Holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening, election-frauding, America-is-the-Great-Satan believing president of Iran and the mullahs who support him. So long as we didn’t provoke the Iranian regime — and so long as our president spoke respectfully of it and took the obligatory subtle jabs at the U.S. in the process — all things were possible. After all, how could Ahmadinejad be unmoved by the young, sophisticated, charismatic Barack Hussein Obama, author of The Cairo Speech (already deemed by Rahm Emanuel as one of the greatest foreign policy speeches ever made by an American president)?

Quite easily, it turns out.

It may be that the problems with Iran rested not with President Bush but with the nature of the Iranian regime itself. It may be that referring to the Iranian regime, as well as the regimes of North Korea and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, as an “axis of evil” wasn’t the source of the difficulty after all. It may be that those regimes actually were and still are evil. And it may be that leaders like Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il are immune to the charms of America’s 44^th president. They may interpret Obama’s efforts at outreach as signs of weakness. They may decide to set the terms of debate and, later, negotiations. And they may turn out to be so unreasonable and intransigent that Obama the Logician is flummoxed when it comes to dealing with them. Maybe Obama’s effort to cast himself as the Great Reconciler and the Great Apologizer will not only fail, but prove to be counterproductive.

Giving 'Realism' a Bad Name

2009-06-28T10:57:00.000-04:00

The whole turnaround by the Left on the issue of democracy and human rights promotion just puts the lie to the claim that they are actually interested in these issues. Their support was always tactical. It was always political. As should be self evident by the fact that large swaths of the American Left supported Stalin and Mao, who between them killed about 100 million people. People who lived in a REAL dictatorship. Not the Bush=Hitler imaginary type of dictatorship. The Long War is a progressive war against pre-modern killers who enslave their peoples. Note the distinct lack of giant paper mache puppets in the streets of Tehran these days.

But because it was waged by the "wrong people" we're now back "realism."

From the people who brought you September 11th... new and improved REALISM! Now with 60% more carnage!

Giving 'Realism' a Bad Name

Democrats were not always so tough-minded. For decades, they supported the causes of democracy and humanitarianism, regularly excoriating Republican presidents for coddling antidemocratic leaders. President Reagan was taken to task for his cozy relations with dictators like Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos (whom he eventually succeeded in moving aside), and the first President Bush was accused of fighting the first Gulf war to do the bidding of the Saudi king. Even George W. Bush, when it was politically convenient, was whipped with the lash of the Democrats' idealism. Almost all the Democratic contenders for the nomination in 2008 criticized his close relations to Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, with considerations of realism providing him no relief. Barack Obama was no exception

...But the Iraq war--and partisan politics--gradually changed the Democrats' calculation. As conditions deteriorated in Iraq, and as many finally accepted that President Bush was in earnest about his commitment to the spread of democracy, liberals flipped. They abandoned their previous commitment to principle, condemned Bush for idealism and ideological blindness, and embraced with fervor the position they labeled realism. Realism, if the word is taken at face value, seems to mean nothing more--or less--than seeing the world as it is, without blinders or excessive hopes or fears. But in the context of the debate in recent years, it came to refer to something much more specific: It meant a cessation of all principled talk about democracy and universal rights, including their philosophical foundations, and a willingness to engage with any and all forces that could claim to have created order. Democracy, realists say, is for the long run; in the short run our job is to deal with the forces of order.
Under the sway of this view, liberals were suddenly falling all over themselves to prove their manliness by dismissing Bush's naïveté. Among commentators and intellectuals, the passionate embrace of realism went further still. The real realists--no touch of sentiment or nostalgia here--took to ridiculing democracy itself. Hadn't democracy been promoted, to no good effect, in Palestine and Lebanon? (In the latter case, President Obama seemed last week to change his tune.) A Harvard professor even wondered out loud to me how much democracy was worth, even in principle, if it had elected George W. Bush. This was the cup of academic wisdom from which many of our politicians began to drink.

Totally tactical.

Power Line - Paul Rahe: Iran's trajectory

2009-06-28T10:47:00.000-04:00

And in keeping with "All Rahe... All the time..." Here's a post from Powerline where Prof. Rahe gives some thoughts on the Green Revolution:

Power Line - Paul Rahe: Iran's trajectory

If the authorities manage to restore order (as, I suspect, they will), the pot will nonetheless continue to boil -- unless they resort to severe repression and purge those within their own ranks who lent support, open or tacit, to the demonstrators. But if they do this, they will at the same time seriously narrow the base of the regime's support, and that will only hasten the day of reckoning. As Reuel Marc Gerecht argues in a trenchant piece in the Weekly Standard, we are witnessing a game-changing moment.

From all of this, the supporters of George W. Bush's policy in Iraq should draw consolation, for the elections that took place in that country under the American aegis contributed mightily to the discontent in Iran. The people of Iran were witness to the emergence within Iraq of a secular republic sponsored by an Iranian cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, possessed of an erudition and an authority rivalling and arguably surpassing that of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They were witness to elections that were really free and to public debate open in ways that debate within the Islamic Republic is not. Morever, in Quom, the stronghold of the Shiite clergy, the clerics who most fully command respect have long rejected, as contrary to Shiite tradition and the interest of Islam, the path of direct clerical rule pursued by Khomeini.

Iran today looks something like England in the wake of Oliver Cromwell's death. There has been a religious revolution; it never commanded full popular support; it is now seen, even by many of its most ardent supporters, to be a failure; and there will be a scramble to attempt to sustain the polity it produced. Ordinarily, American leverage does not amount to much. In this situation, it could nonetheless be considerable. Economically Iran is on the ropes. If we keep the pressure on, following the policy of the Bush administration, the regime may in fact collapse. If, however, in the interests of stability, in the manner of the so-called "realists," the Obama administration opts to take the pressure off and, in effect, bails out Iran's bankrupt regime, it may stumble on for some years to come.

The state despotic by Mark Steyn - The New Criterion

2009-06-28T10:44:00.000-04:00

And in addition to our own review of Prof. Rahe's important work below, here is Steyn's way better written, way more humorous review of the book:

The state despotic by Mark Steyn - The New Criterion

The professor opens his study with a famous passage from M. de Tocqueville. Or, rather, it would be famous were he still widely read. For he knows us far better than we know him: “I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be produced in the world,” he wrote the best part of two centuries ago. He and his family had been on the sharp end of France’s violent convulsions, but he considered that, to a democratic republic, there were slyer seductions:
I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

He didn’t foresee “Dancing with the Stars” or “American Idol” but, details aside, that’s pretty much on the money. He continues:

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…
The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

Indeed. And here's some more...

For Tocqueville, this is a critical distinction between America and the faux republics of his own continent. “It is in the township that the strengths of free peoples resides,” he wrote. “Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people.” In America, democracy is supposed to be a participatory sport not a spectator one: In Europe, every five years you put an X on a piece of paper and subsequently discover which of the party candidates on the list at central office has been delegated to represent you in fast-tracking all those E.U. micro-regulations through the rubber-stamp legislature. By contrast, American democracy is a game to be played, not watched: You go to Town Meeting, you denounce the School Board budget, you vote to close a road, you run for cemetery commissioner.

Does that distinction still hold? As Professor Rahe argues, in the twentieth century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent outposts: church, family, civic associations. Today, very little stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why schoolgirls in Dillon, South Carolina think it entirely normal to beseech Good King Barack the Hopeychanger to do something about classroom maintenance.

I say “Good King Barack,” but truly that does an injustice to ye medieval tyrants of yore. As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.” His Majesty was an absolute tyrant—in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. “The details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control,” wrote Tocqueville. But what would happen if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?
That moment has now arrived.

REVIEW: Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift

2009-06-28T10:29:00.001-04:00

A Good Synthesis of Montesquieu, Rousseau and de Tocqueville in Service of the Defense of Liberty,

June 5, 2009

Prof. Paul Anthony Rahe does service to the cause of freedom by producing a profoundly useful work entitled Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, de Tocqueville and the Modern Prospect. The author attempts to explain what de Tocqueville called many years ago, "democracy's drift." Meaning its descent into a "soft despotism" of centralized administration, barely perceptible over time. Rahe seeks serious philosophical support for his libertarian conclusions by appealing to the works of three great French thinkers. Montesquieu, whose work The Spirit of the Laws reflected his study of the English national constitution and first suggested the efficacy of separation of powers. Rousseau, who was voluminous works, including the Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, provided for an attack on individual liberty as the safeguard of societal progress, and argued that societies need to trade liberty for equality. And of course, the great de Tocqueville, in whose magnum opus, Democracy in America astutely observed the habits of the early 19th century American population and through which he developed a theory of how societies can avoid democratic drift.

It is useful to review a quote from de Tocqueville that the author puts in his conclusion:

"Certain peoples pursue liberty obstinately in the face of all sorts of perils and misfortunes. It is not the material goods that it offers them that these peoples then love in it; they consider it itself as a good so precious and so necessary that no other good console them for its loss and that they find, in tasting it, consolation for everything that occurs. Other peoples tire of it in the midst of their prosperity; they allow to be snatched from their hands without resistance: for fear of jeopardizing by such an effort the very well-being they owe to it. What do they lack with regard to remaining free? What, indeed? The taste itself for being free. Do not ask me to analyze this sublime taste, it is necessary to experience it. It enters of its own accord into the great hearts that God has prepared to receive it: it fills them, it inflames them. One must renounce making mediocre souls understand what they have never felt."

In short, de Tocqueville is stating Rahe's hypothesis that with time and prosperity, free societies allow their Liberties to be selectively chipped away, which the author sees as having been happening to the United States for the past 75 years.

Rahe breaks his book down into four distinct parts; the first three dealing with the works and political insights of the philosophers mentioned above. In this he provides a valuable service for people who are interested in *why* these philosophers are important to the history of political thought and of Liberty, but don't necessarily want to slog through the large amount of material produced by them.

In this, the author is similar to others like Karl Popper, who digested Plato and Hegel in his The Open Society and its Enemies vols I & II, Allan Bloom, who provides for an excellent review of Nietzsche in The Closing of the American Mind, and Francis Fukuyama, who does similar work for Hegel and Koejeve in The End of History and the Last Man.

The last section of "Soft Despotism..." synthesizes the political insights of these authors in support of Rahe's conclusion that democratic society essentially harbors the seeds of its own destruction. That a drift towards a centralized administrative "soft despotism" is a natural part of the life-cycle of a free society and must be actively resisted. His arguments are not new, but they are convincing, and he has done a great service by demonstrating that the fear of democratic drift is not a recent phenomenon. In fact the three great French philosophers that are the focus of this book had no trouble in discerning the possibility of it.

A key concept that runs through each of the philosopher's thought is that of "uneasiness" (inquietude) that all three mark as a characteristic of all free societies. It is this uneasiness, about one's place in society, one's future prospects (the treadmill effect to be more modern about it) that is the force that drives free men to slowly proffer up their Liberties to an administrative despotism that convinces them it can relieve their insecurities.

Rahe's remonstrances against gently accepting the administrative despotism in which one could argue we are currently living is an important clarion call for all those who are interested in the cause of Liberty. Backed up by serious political philosophy and analysis, it deserves to be widely read.

Silence Has Consequences for Iran - WSJ.com

2009-06-28T10:25:00.000-04:00

You may remember Jose Maria Aznar. He was the Spanish PM who stood by the U.S. in Iraq, and whom the Spanish electorate tossed out several days after Al Qaeda murdered over 300 people in a coordinated terrorist attack, under the theory that maybe if they didn't make the primitives angry, they would would leave them alone. Well done citizens of Al Andalus!

Aznar demonstrates in the WSJ where he stands on that equation. Standing up for freedom against a pre-modern totalitarian regime in Iran and risking their anger, or remaining silent and hoping they'll go away? What a noble European.

Silence Has Consequences for Iran - WSJ.com

This is no time for hesitation on the part of the West. If, as part of an attempt to reach an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, the leaders of democratic nations turn their backs on the dissidents they will be making a terrible mistake.

President Obama has said he refuses to "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs, but this is a poor excuse for passivity. If the international community is not able to stop, or at least set limits on, the repressive violence of the Islamic regime, the protesters will end up as so many have in the past -- in exile, in prison, or in the cemetery. And with them, all hope for change will be gone.

To be clear: Nobody in the circles of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or Ahmadinejad is going to reward us for silence or inaction. On the contrary, failing to support the regime's critics will leave us with an emboldened Ahmadinejad, an atomic Iran, and dissidents that are disenchanted and critical of us. We cannot talk about freedom and democracy if we abandon our own principles.

Mark Steyn: Jacko, Sanford and weirdness | governor, state, bubble, sanford, one - Opinion - OCRegis

2009-06-28T10:17:00.000-04:00

Leave it to Steyn to figure out how the whole Gov. Sanford fiasco relates to small government:

Mark Steyn: Jacko, Sanford and weirdness | governor, state, bubble, sanford, one - Opinion - OCRegis

But a more basic question is: Why does the minimally empowered executive of a midsize state with no particular national prominence need to be in "the bubble" in the first place?
Evidently he is. Much of the charade involved in the scandal arose from the need to throw off his "security detail": The Chevy Suburban pulling up outside the Governor's Mansion, Sanford casually tossing his running shoes, a pair of green shorts and a sleeping bag in the back, turning off the GPS locator… Although staffers kept up his ghostwritten tweet of the day on Twitter, by Monday state senators were revealing that they hadn't heard from the Governor since Thursday.
And we can't have that, can we?
...Even Charles Krauthammer on Fox News professed to be concerned at a governor wandering off incommunicado. What would happen if there was a hurricane or a terrorist attack on South Carolina? Well, I'd imagine that state agencies would muddle through to one degree of competence or another, and that the physical presence of the governor would make absolutely zero difference – any more than, on the day, George Pataki made a difference to New York's response to 9/11 (good) or Kathleen Blanco to Louisiana's response to Katrina (abysmal and embarrassing, but deriving from the state's broader political culture rather than anything Gov. Blanco did or didn't do on the big day). In a republic of limited government, the governor, two-thirds of the state legislature and the heads of every regulatory agency should be able to go "hiking the Appalachian Trail" for a lot longer than five days, and nobody would notice.
Instead, we have the governor of South Carolina resorting to subterfuge worthy of one of those Mitteleuropean operettas where the Ruritanian princess disguises herself as a scullery maid to leave the castle by the back gate for an assignation with a dashing if impoverished hussar garbed as a stable lad.

And you know what? He's totally right. Because we think that the Government should take care of us, we frightened when a Governor walks off for a few days. Nobody should be that important.

SPECIAL PREVIEW: The Abandonment of Democracy

2009-06-28T10:11:00.000-04:00

Foreign policy expert Joshua Muravchik pens a devastating critique of the administration's abandonment of democracy promotion.

SPECIAL PREVIEW: The Abandonment of Democracy

The other reason why Obama’s tack cannot be understood merely by his impulse to be unlike Bush is that his disinterest in democracy and human rights is global. The idea of promoting these values did not originate with Bush but with Carter and Reagan, reinforced by Bill Clinton. Bush’s innovation was to apply this to the Middle East, which heretofore largely had been exempted. Repealing Bush’s legacy would have meant turning the clock back on America’s Middle East policy. But Obama scaled back democracy efforts not only there; he did it everywhere.

Thus for example, Clinton, on a first state visit to China, told reporters she would not say much about human rights or Tibet because “our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.” Amnesty International declared it was “shocked and extremely disappointed” by her words. Unfazed, Clinton moved on to Russia, where she glibly presented its dictator, Vladimir Putin, with a toy “reset button” even while the string of unsolved murders of independent journalists that has marked his reign continued to lengthen.

To be sure, China and Russia are powerful countries with which Washington must do business across a range of issues, and because of their importance, all U.S. administrations have been guilty of unevenness in lobbying them to respect human rights. However, the Obama administration has downplayed human rights not only with the likes of Beijing and Moscow but also with weak countries whose governments have no leverage over America.

For example, Clinton ordered a review of U.S. sanctions against the military dictatorship of Burma because they haven’t “influenced the Burmese government.” This softening may have emboldened that junta to place opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on trial in May after having been content to keep her under house arrest most of the last eighteen years. The government of Sudan is even weaker and more of an international pariah than Burma’s, but the Obama administration also let it be known that it was considering easing Bush-era sanctions applied against Khartoum in response to the campaign of murder and rape in Darfur. According to the Washington Post:

Many human rights activists have been shocked at the administration’s apparent willingness to consider easing sanctions on Burma and Sudan. The Obama presidential campaign was scornful of Bush’s handling of the killings in Sudan’s Darfur region, which Bush labeled as genocide, but since taking office, the administration has been caught flat-footed by Sudan’s recent ousting of international humanitarian organizations.

While it is hard to see any diplomatic benefit in soft-pedaling human rights in Burma and Sudan, neither has Obama anything to gain politically by easing up on regimes that are reviled by Americans from Left to Right. Even so ardent an admirer of the President as columnist E. J. Dionne, the first to discern an “Obama Doctrine” in foreign policy, confesses to “qualms” about “the relatively short shrift” this doctrine “has so far given to concerns over human rights and democracy.”

So from George W. Bush's second inaugural

"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

to the Obama administration's

"Let’s put ideology aside. That is so yesterday."

YAY! We're all Realists now!

GAY ROBOT PENGUINS!

2009-04-23T07:16:00.002-04:00

Ok, we're not sure if they're programmed to be gay. But we're sure that the geniuses that created these bionic creations could make 'em that way if they really wanted.

The bionic penguins can twist and turn almost as gracefully as their living counterparts because of the flexible glass fibre rods that control their heads. The fibres are arranged around the side of each penguin's head, while motors inside the body pull on one or more of them to twist the penguin's neck in any direction and guide the swimmer... [The design] has been adapted by Festo to make a flexible, trunk-like arm with a gripper on the end for use in industrial applications. The arm can twist up to 90° in any direction, giving it an unrivalled degree of dexterity.

Ahoy! The Rundown on the Whole Pirate Thing...

2009-04-14T14:46:00.003-04:00

First off, can someone tell The Kid what the FUCK Donald Payne was doing in Somalia? Christ, only in NJ.

Second, we'd like to give the Captain and crew of the Maersk Alabama a big Idiom thumbs up. Why? Because the most important, yet little noted, element of this entire drama has been that the Captain and crew did not sit idly by and leave themselves to the tender mercies of sea-borne thugs.

No, they ACTED. The crew of the Maersk Alabama repelled the initial attack with fire hoses. When the pirates returned a day later and successfully boarded the ship, the crew beat them back and actually captured one of them. Unfortunately, the Captain had been taken hostage and the pirates dragged hims back to a lifeboat and fled the scene. The crew tried to bargain for the Captain by exchanging the prisoner for him, but the pirates refused to release him after they got their man back. (Who would thought pirates would be so untrustworthy?)

But even though Captain Richard Phillips allowed himself to be taken to spare his crew, he did not passively succumb to his captors' will either. Once the USS Bainbridge showed up on the scene, Phillips threw himself overboard from the lifeboat in order to give the guys on the destroyer a chance to send the pirates to Davy Jones' Locker. TWICE.

Luckily by the second time, the go order had been given from DC, allowing navy SEALs to air out 3 of the 4 pirates.

What made this captain and crew different from the dozens of other ships raided in the past year? How are they differentiated from the 200 sailors still being held maritime scum?

It can be summed up in one sentence. They are Americans.

They acted in the truest American way. When faced with danger, they did not submissively abandon themselves to their fate. They stood up and decided to act. Perhaps they would be successful, perhaps they would be killed – but they would live or die as free men. As befits every American.

In this they are kindred spirits with those who stood up and acted on United 93. They too decided to live, and die, as free men.

So hats off to the Captain and crew of the Maersk Alabama. May your actions these past few days, against the first pirates to dare attack an American flagged vessel since Stephen Decatur cleaned the Bey of Algiers' clock 200 years ago, put all outlaws on notice that they approach Americans at their own peril.

Of course, like all tribal primitives, the pirates vow revenge.

"Every country will be treated the way it treats us. In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying," Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding a Greek ship anchored in the Somali town of Gaan

Yeah, we're quaking Abdullahi...

"From now on, if we capture foreign ships and their respective countries try to attack us, we will kill them (the hostages)," Jamac Habeb, a 30-year-old pirate, told the Associated Press from one of Somalia's piracy hubs, Eyl. "(U.S. forces have) become our No. 1 enemy." [...]

You know, having the U.S. as your #1 enemy – is a real DANGEROUS situation to be in Habeb. It seems as if Eyl is overdue for a tourist visit from some special operators.

Which brings up, what to do about this situation? Because as Steyn notes, we can be expecting a lot more of this.

Once upon a time we killed and captured pirates. Today, it’s all more complicated. The attorney general, Eric Holder, has declined to say whether the kidnappers of the American captain will be “brought to justice” by the U.S. “I’m not sure exactly what would happen next,” declares the chief law-enforcement official of the world’s superpower. But some things we can say for certain. Obviously, if the United States Navy hanged some eyepatched peglegged blackguard from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would rise to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals, and the network talking-heads would argue that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause, and judges would rule that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

John Keegan counsels a merciless campaign by the naval powers of the world to exterminate the vermin.

The problem is that not even the U.S. Navy can handle this. Because the pirates are not after cargo, but rather they are a sea-borne kidnapping ring. Back in the day, pirate vessels were large Men O' War, which had to be resupplied in ports and could be hunted down and sunk. These days, pirates pilot small fishing boats and claim their quarry with AK-47's and RPG's. The sea is just too big, and there are too many small boats out there to effectively police the situation.

The other idea? Arm the boats themselves. Kid Various sees a burgeoning market for Blackwater types, as Arthur Herman notes.

Crews of cargo vessels that enter Somali waters need to be trained to fight back (reports are that the crew and captain of Maersk Alabama all had anti-terrorist and anti-piracy training). If they need to shoot, let 'em shoot. If we have to bring in lawyers to alter international treaties, let them be changed to protect our ships and crews, not those who attack them.

An even more sensible idea is security contractors rotating among ships in dangerous waters as suggested by Steve Schippert. Hop on in the upper part of the Red Sea, hop off in Kenya.

The specific logistics for maximum efficiency can be a challenge, but the basics here are pretty simple - at least on paper. There is no need for the contracted maritime security team to be aboard the vessel outside demonstrated high-risk zones. That, currently, is the float around the Horn of Africa. It is surely possible to coordinate embark and debark points at the ends of that leg of a particular ship's journey. This can happen at a port of call or, most efficiently, via scheduled smaller craft along the way.

The US military has a presence in Djibouti, which can serve as a safe staging point for security teams before the vessel steams toward the Suez Canal. At the opposite end, the United States may assist the contracting organizations in coordinating cooperation with Kenya and a similar use of shoreline military installations for the same staging area purposes. Likewise, for ships steaming eastward, the United States can assist in gaining staging accommodations in Gulf States such as Oman or the United Arab Emirates. Yemen, while logical on a map, would surely be an untenable risky endeavor for such use.

Outfit the security teams with .50 cals and rocket launchers. Any ship getting too close get a warning, and then gets lit up.

Of course some people are a bit squeamish about dispensing justice on the high seas.

Journalist Bret Stephens asks “Why Don’t We Hang Pirates Anymore?” (op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, 25 November 2008). His answers:

No controlling legal authority, providing a basis on which to fight, capture, try, and punish pirates.
International law (e.g., the Law of the Sea Convention) makes action against pirates difficult.
UN authorization is necessary for most effective actions against pirates, such as attacking their bases.

All of these things are true, but they secondary factors (discussed in the next chapter). The vast majority of articles about piracy concentrate on these minor things. This post will attempt a clearer and more comprehensive explanation.

But the reality is that until we adopt the policy below - we can expect more and more of this nonsense. That which is rewarded gets repeated...

Book Review

2009-04-12T14:53:00.002-04:00

Thomas Barnett is a genuine grand strategist. His two previous books, “The Pentagon's New Map” and “A Blueprint for Action” have demonstrated that he is someone to be listened to in the world of post September 11 strategic thinking.

Central to his thesis is the concept that the main challenge facing the world in the 21st century will be integrating the areas of the globe that he calls the “non-integrating gap” with the “core.” This is also focus of this book, however he explicitly begins to outline what the post-Bush era will need in this regard.

I have to say that I agree with many of his precepts, including the notion that what we fundamentally lack is not a big war force, the military that he calls the Leviathan force, but rather what he calls a “SysAdmin” force. A military/civilian structure to fight irregular wars, perform stability ops and nation build.

This is currently at the heart of the Pentagon debates over what our force structure should look like in the next 10 years. Should we be gearing up for war with potential peer competitor like China? I agree with Barnett that this scenario is ludicrous and is damaging to the United States' needs in the post-September 11 strategic environment. Similarly, I agree that post September 11 strategy has been too focused on *political reform.* Specifically, spreading democratic institutions.

Barnett has a lot of interesting things to say and should be listened to very carefully. However I do disagree with him in several areas. I think he goes wrong fundamentally when he begins to argue that it is not political reform that is needed, but rather economic reform. That the gap countries need to be integrated in to the globalization system and that the U.S. and other core nations should focus on a strategy that looks to increase the linkages and communications flows necessary for that economic system to flourish.

I absolutely agree with Barnett that the most important strategic challenge facing the United States is integrating the gap with the core. I also agree that this is mostly an economic function. I essentially buy that what is needed is for the gap countries to become successful and to develop the linkages and communication necessary to develop the networks allow for that economic success. But where I think he goes wrong is that this economic integration must be preceded by *cultural* change. The inhabitants of the gap, what I would call traditional societies, want to keep their traditional culture and also be successful. *This is impossible.* They cannot be successful and retain the elements of their traditional culture that retard that growth.

Therefore, although I agree with Barnett's eventual end state goals, I think he is missing the cultural forest for the economic trees. Barnett is too dismissive of the role of culture in this regard. He thinks that with the establishment of the connectivity and the networks from the modern world into the pre-modern that economic success will follow, but in reality it is necessary for the traditional culture to begin to change first. Otherwise, the build out of that connectivity will fail. This does not mean the traditional culture must change all at once. However you *must* start an actual path to liberalization. And that liberalization cannot be economic without first engendering some cultural liberalization.

I also think that Barnett is too dismissive of the concept of a nuclear terror strike and its second order effects. Barnett seems to think that a nuclear strike is not likely at all and that we spend way too much time and effort on the issues surrounding this fear. I'm not so sanguine. Anyone who dismisses the significant possibility of a nuclear strike by the traditional culture on an American city is simply suffering a failure of imagination.

And more so is ignoring the second order effects. He is correct in that United States is the most successful political, monetary and cultural union in history of the planet. He is also correct in noting that we are exporting the system to the rest of the world and have been for two centuries. But there's no reason that a society has to continually move forward. Societies can also move backward. If Barnett thinks that we made rash mistakes in the aftermath of September 11, he will be absolutely horrified at the steps the United States takes after New York is destroyed in a nuclear terror strike. We will destroy, or rather we will disassemble, the connectivity and the networks which are so crucial to our success, which Barnett focuses on as the great engine of progress.

And that is where the critical problem lies. Barnett is more sanguine about this eventuality not only because he sees it as unlikely, but he has great faith in the ability of the American system/the globalization system to integrate traditional cultures. After all this is what we've been doing for the past 200 years. He notes, very perceptively, that we fought a very similar war to the one that we are fighting now in the mid-to late 19th century integrating the American West into the American system. After World War II we integrated about a third of the world into the system. Our record of success stands for itself.

The problem I see is that Barnett thinks we have all the time in the world for the gap countries to integrate with the core. The prospect of a nuclear terror strike on New York hinges on that assumption. I agree with Barnett that the connectivity and integration that he seeks is mostly a “pull” function. A demand side function. But I'm not convinced that we have so much time that we can ignore the need for a bit of a “push” function from our side.

The fact is that we are in a race to integrate the traditional culture into our system before it can do us so great damage that we ourselves dismantle that system. This is not idle speculation. The Realist has always thought that liberalization, be political, economic or cultural, will come in its own time. And Realist that I was, I bought this argument. After September 11, I came more around to the Neoconservative point of view. There are millions of people in this world who feel that their traditional culture is under threat of extinction, and actually they are *correct.* What's more, hundreds of thousands of them are willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to destroy that threat to their way of life. Given such realities, the fact that we cannot rely on any moral restraint on the part of our adversaries, we must seek to integrate the gap into the core as quickly as possible by any means available. We simply do not know how much time we have left.

For a look at Barnett's power point show (doesn't everyone have one these days?) take a look below:

Also take a listen to his series of interviews with Hugh Hewitt

They Say That LIke It's A Bad Thing!

2009-01-12T10:43:00.003-05:00

"Battered By Israel, Hamas Faces Tough Choice"

And just to remind us all who we are dealing with:

But Hamas, which seized control of Gaza after a unity government with rival Fatah fell apart in 2007, is operating in a hemmed-in landscape tattered by airstrikes and limned with smoke and suspicion. Days and nights are spent attempting to outmaneuver Israeli forces and to control Fatah sympathizers or alleged collaborators, scores of whom are under house arrest or have been systematically shot in the legs. Hamas fighters recently stormed an Internet cafe in Deir al Balah and hauled away a man accused of spying.

Nice...

Requiem for a Catwoman

2008-12-26T03:04:00.004-05:00

Holy crap! Eartha Kitt is DEAD.

Meeewow!

We're Living in the Future!

2008-12-26T02:38:00.002-05:00

More good news on Resveratrol! ^{via technut news}

"After six months, resveratrol essentially prevented most of the negative effects of the high calorie diet in mice," said Rafael de Cabo, Ph.D., the study's other co-senior investigator from the National Institute on Aging's Laboratory of Experimental Gerontology, Aging, Metabolism, and Nutrition Unit. "There is a lot of work ahead that will help us better understand resveratrol's roles and the best applications for it."

Important because it gives greater evidence to the fact that there may be a single gene expression (using SIRT1) that greatly affects the aging process. Kid Various plans on remaining forever young! FASTER PLEASE!

Life Imitates Futurama

2008-12-26T01:45:00.000-05:00

HO! HO! HO!

We Love Newt

2008-12-24T08:07:00.001-05:00

He's a true idea guy:

Famous during his speakership for the bionic speed with which he devised policy proposals, Gingrich is even more prolific these days with a BlackBerry in tow. He constantly thumbs out messages to a list of congressional Republicans, linking to an article recently read or a thought that just came to him.

“He has 10 ideas an hour, and six of them may be brilliant, two may be decent, and two you don’t agree with,” says Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

Looking ahead to the new Democratic-dominated Congress, Ryan sees Gingrich's role in the party only expanding.

“We need to go to leaders who have demonstrated ability to put together big movements for our party,” he says.

But, despite the fact that he can play a big role in shaping the intellectual direction of the party (and lord knows we need big ideas now more than ever) please Mr. Speaker, don;t run for anything!

I, For One, Will Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

2008-12-24T07:58:00.002-05:00

If science fiction has taught Kid Various anything, it's taught him that no matter how remarkably convenient it is to have a robot servant, this can only end badly:

A methodology known as genetic programming (GP) is “the trick” that makes it all possible. GP is an automated programming methodology inspired by natural evolution that is used to evolve computer programs. Evolving computer programs means the logic developed by the system can be anything that can be expressed by a computer program. That basically means anything. Robots need descriptions of things they are supposed to do and they figure out how to do them. GP itself is not an approach exclusive to robotic behavior. It has been applied to a variety of problems, some already yielding commercial successes. An example well-known to scientists in the field was the development of invention machines that had created two new patentable inventions by 2002. The potential for “thinking robots” goes well beyond developing their own actions.

DESTROY ALL HUMANS!!!

A Festivus for the Rest of Us

2008-12-23T02:01:00.001-05:00

"As I rained blows down upon him, I realized, there must be a better way..."

- Frank Costanza

I gotta lotta problems with you people...

Oh That's Just Joe!

2008-12-22T01:40:00.002-05:00

[MAINSTREAM MEDIA] Move along! Move along! Nothing to see here...

Joe Biden’s response on the constitutional role of the Vice Presidency is so riddled with error that it is difficult to know where to start. He said, “The idea, he [Vice President Cheney] doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the Vice President. That’s the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch.” Biden, who has been a member of the Senate for decades, doesn’t know that Article I of the Constitution defines the legislative powers of the federal government. It delineates and limits Congressional authority, and does not speak to Executive functions.

Article II of the Constitution sets out the President’s executive authority. Guess what, Joe? The Vice President is mentioned in both Articles. Article II provides that the Vice President shall serve “together with” the President and thus establishes the Office of the Vice President. But Article I names the Vice President as President of the Senate, which makes him both the Presiding Officer and the tie breaking vote in the Senate. He is not a Senator (thus, for instance, not entitled to constitutional speech or debate immunity), but he is an Officer of the Senate.

Of course, if Sarah Palin had said it...

Cyber Pearl Harbor!

2008-12-21T05:38:00.002-05:00

And how to avoid it.

Frankly, what Kid Various suggests is that Congress grant him (really more his tech savvy friends) letters of marque and reprisal.

That way if the Russians try to bring our systems down we can be on the offensive in no time and lay a cyber-broadside into their lines. And the government has deniability.

This is essentially what the Chinese and Russians are doing already.

NYT Comes Through With the Pithy Say It All Graphic

2008-12-21T05:34:00.002-05:00

Pretty good visual summary of what the government has spent/committed since September, actually.

Just to give this perspective...

The entire cost of operation in the Iraq Theater; $576bn over five years.

Why Don't We Just Kill Ourselves Now?

2008-12-21T05:32:00.002-05:00

Super cheerful roundup of post from Fabius Maximus on the origins and likely endings of the present financial crisis.

Be warned, its deep and informative. But it ain't pretty.

We're Living in the Future!

2008-12-21T05:30:00.003-05:00

More great brain computer interface stuff.

An electrode implanted into the brain of a man who is unable to move or communicate has enabled him to use a speech synthesizer to produce vowel sounds as he thinks them.
The work could one day help similar patients to produce whole sentences using signals from their brains, say the researchers.

Locked-in syndrome scares the piss out of Kid Various. Luckily, in the future he may be able to sound out on a synthesizer: K-I-L-L-M-E

The Worst Society EVER (Except For All The Others)

2008-12-07T02:50:00.002-05:00

Well what were you expecting in George W. Bush's AmeriKKKa?

The horrific story of the latest adventure conducted by the religion of peace in Bombay riveted the public’s attention to such an extent that one of the most egregious violations of political freedom in a Western democracy has, at least on this side of the Atlantic, gone almost without comment. I mean the sudden arrest in London last week of of Damian Green, a conservative MP and Shadow Minister for Immigration, who was seized by anti-terrorist personnel from the Metropolitan police, held for questioning for 9 hours, and whose private papers and computer files in his home and office in the House of Commons were confiscated. The Honorable Member’s offense? Embarrassing Gordon Brown’s government. How did he do this? By revealing in debate on the floor of the House of Commons and in various lapses, failures, and dirty-little-secrets about the government’s immigration policy, e.g.,

Oh wait - this was in the U.K.! Where they have anti-terror laws that, like the rest of Europe, make the Patriot Act look like kindergarten rules.

Kid Various has been lectured by Euros on the emerging fascist national security state in the USA and finds it ironic, as the Europeans are, by any tangible measure, demonstrably less free than any American.

You Heard It Here First

2008-12-07T02:42:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago we noted that under an Obama Administration you would soon be seeing headlines like "E.U. Says Some Torture "OK""

And so it begins...

Rollback on Torture? Not So Easy for Obama

Barack Obama won the White House with a firm promise to put an end to what critics called the Bush Administration's use of torture on terror suspects. But as the President-elect prepares to take office, his team is quickly learning that even on such a seemingly black-and-white issue, effecting change in Washington is never as simple as it sounds on the campaign trail.

We eagerly await the "Homeless Enjoy Outdoor Lifestyle, Study Says" headline...

It's the Ideology

2008-11-29T11:11:00.001-05:00

Steyn points out that whether the Bombay attacks were perpetrated by AQ, LET, the ISI doesn't matter much. Because they are symptoms, not the cause. Likewise, worrying about whether Iraq or Afghanistan is the "right war" is pointless, because again, we are dealing with the symptoms, not the ultimate cause.

It's missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the
"Deccan Mujahideen" or the ISI or al-Qaida or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That's a
reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so
successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ
to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect
across the planet in a million different ways. It's not the Cold War, with a
small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no
membership cards, only an ideology. That's what has radicalized hitherto
moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian 'stans to
Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional
nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the
global jihad.

Thankful

2008-11-27T04:14:00.001-05:00

I have a wonderful life.

Some of that is attributable to my own decisions and work. More of it is attributable to the good decisions of my parents and their hard work. As it is also attributable to the decisions made by my grandparents and their hard work. And for these I am thankful.

But the one decision to which I most owe my incredible life, was the decision made by my great-grandparents to get on the boat. Because without the opportunity afforded by this great nation, all of the hard work and life decisions made by our subsequent generations would have come to naught.

I am so grateful to have been born an American.

I am so thankful to be a citizen of this incredible country which affords its people opportunities for a magnificent life that are unknown in other corners of the globe, indeed, have been unimagined for the scope of human history. I give thanks for this amazing society, that has abandoned the comfort of barbaric tribalism for the opportunity made possible by individual freedom. I give thanks for this society, so improbable in its creation, so fragile, who's continued existence, let alone dominance, is far from assured.

On this day, and every day, I give thanks to America. And all who would protect her from the wolves prowling in the outer darkness.

The Palace

2008-11-26T10:19:00.000-05:00

Mr. Democracy writes:

I just took a last stroll around the Embassy grounds. The Palace. For five years off and on, I've been roaming its gaudy marble hallways. When I first got to Iraq, there was no concertina wire, 20 foot high concrete barriers or reinforced air lock guarded by surly Central Americans. I can remember when I would saunter up to one of the two specialists standing at the wrought iron gate, flip my RTI ID at them (not even a government issue!) and wander on in. I remember those ridiculous giant Saddam heads perched on each of the four outside towers, and Saddam's chair in the “rocket room.” Afternoons by the pool. Lattes at the Greenbean. War is hell. I saw President Bush give thanks to the State Department employees for their work there – on the same day I witnessed Saddam in the dock, observing his trial for an afternoon.

So much has changed over five years. I think of all the people I've seen come and go over time. A few even, who did not return home.

The war is ending. By the time I return to Baghdad, the Palace will once again be under the control of Iraqis. Everyone will have moved to the new Embassy down on Al Kindi Street. I'll probably never roam those halls again. I've not had a normal life. But I've witnessed some amazing things.

Five years.

Who would have thought it would last so long?

Who would have thought it'd ever end?

Virtual Financial Meltdown

2008-11-25T11:32:00.003-05:00

One day flying high, the next, Kid Various is sleeping under a virtual bridge. But 40% interest seemed like such a good deal!!!

Now We Know Why Television Is Called A "Medium"

2008-11-25T11:03:00.002-05:00

Because nothing on it is rare or well done...

From the classic Saturday morning cartoon "The All New Adventures of Mighty Mouse."

God bless youtube.

This Is SO wrong

2008-11-25T10:33:00.002-05:00

FOX eliminates Saturday morning cartoons for infomercials.

After terminating a deal with 4Kids, an independent producer of children’s programming, the Fox network closed down its Saturday morning block of cartoons on Monday, and became the first major broadcast network to agree to sell a part of its schedule to producers of infomercials.
Fox executives said that children’s programming was simply no longer viable on network television — mainly because of competition from cable channels.

Goddamn! Some of Kid Various' fondest memories of childhood emanate from spending 5 hours in front of the TV on Saturday mornings watching Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo, the Superfriends, Land of the Lost, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Grape Ape, Hong Kong Phooey, Magilla Gorilla, Underdog, etc. etc. etc.

The highlight of his week. That welcome respite from the drudgery of school. When the weekend was new and you had two whole days stretched out before you. Kid Various can sing the whole preamble to the Constitution because of Saturday morning cartoons!

As the years went by, and most cartoons became less and less humorous entertainment and more and more extended toy commercials (we're talking to YOU G.I. Joe!) there were still nuggets of great art out there. Kid Various spent his young adult Saturdays gleefully recovering from alcohol poisoning with The All New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, Pinky & The Brain, Batman: The Animated Series.

Alas, it is all going away. And with it, another piece of our common culture.

We weep for the children who will wake up on those bright Saturday mornings of freedom - to greeted by the Thigh-Master^TM.

We're Living in the Future!

2008-11-24T12:21:00.002-05:00

We've got ray guns! F'ing ray guns! TOP THAT YOU SAVAGE MOTHERFUCKERS!

The deployed ray gun (or “directed-energy weapon”, in the tedious jargon that military men seem compelled to use to describe technology) is known as Zeus. It is not designed to kill. Rather, its purpose is to allow you to remain at a safe distance when you detonate unexploded ordnance, such as the homemade roadside bombs that plague foreign troops in Iraq.

This task now calls for explosives. In practice, that often means using a rocket-propelled grenade, so as not to expose troops to snipers. But rockets are expensive, and sometimes miss their targets. Zeus is effective at a distance of 300 metres, and a laser beam, unlike a rocket, always goes exactly where you point it.

So we got ray guns and we're going to live for a thousand years. (And have extraordinarily fit mice.)

In labs across the country, researchers are developing several new drugs that target the cellular engines called mitochondria. The first, resveratrol, is already in clinical trials for diabetes. It could be on the market in four years and used off-label as an all-purpose longevity enhancer. Other drugs promise to be more potent and refined. They might even be cheap.

"It's going to revolutionize western medicine," said Doug Wallace, a pioneer of mitochondrial medicine at the University of California at Irvine. "All the things that are common for an aging society, and nobody worried about when they died of infectious disease," he said, could be treated.

The future is gonna be great.

Sapere Aude!

2008-11-24T12:10:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson ostendo sum nonnullus incommoditas verum

9. As I wrote earlier, the shrill Left is increasingly far more vicious these days than the conservative fringe, and about like the crude Right of the 1950s. Why? I am not exactly sure, other than the generic notion that utopians often believe that their anointed ends justify brutal means. Maybe it is that the Right already had its Reformation when Buckley and others purged the extremists--the Birchers, the neo-Confederates, racialists, the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracists, anti-Semites, and assorted nuts.--from the conservative ranks in a way the Left has never done with the 1960s radicals that now reappear in the form of Michael Moore, Bill Ayers, Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, the Daily Kos, etc. Not many Democrats excommunicated Moveon.org for its General Betray-Us ad. Most lined up to see the premier of Moore's mythodrama. Barack Obama could subsidize a Rev. Wright or email a post-9/11 Bill Ayers in a way no conservative would even dare speak to a David Duke or Timothy McVeigh--and what Wright said was not all that different from what Duke spouts. What separated Ayers from McVeigh was chance; had the stars aligned, the Weathermen would have killed hundreds as they planned.

10. The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

The Jews Great Contribution to Civilization

2008-11-24T11:34:00.001-05:00

The other day, Kid Various saw a jalapeno bagel. That is...so...wrong.

When my family first moved to Larchmont, N.Y., in 1946, my father had a feeling that the neighbors living behind us were Jewish. In those days, you didn't broadcast your religion, so he devised a plan that would reveal their cultural background. We would go to the Bronx and bring back some bagels. If our neighbors knew what the rolls were, they were Jewish. If they stared at them in bewilderment, we would know they were not. To my father's delight, as soon as our neighbors saw the bagels, they recognized them. Nowadays, dad's devious plan to determine a neighbor's religion wouldn't work. After all, who doesn't know what a bagel is? But what are the origins of this once-mysterious bread, and what happened between 1946 and today that turned the bagel into a trans-cultural and all-American breakfast bun?

Heads Are Exploding

2008-11-24T10:28:00.001-05:00

If more sane statements like this come from the mouths of Obama cabinet appointees we may have a shot at getting through this after all.

In a 2002 CNN interview, Eric Holder delivered this answer, which will have the Hope 'n' Changers' heads spinning:

One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.

It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.

Know The Difference!

2008-11-24T10:24:00.003-05:00

AHAHAHAHAHA.

That was the funniest episode ever...

Well This Is Hopeful

2008-11-22T23:26:00.000-05:00

And we wish President Obama well in this

Barack Obama isn't even President yet, and he's already angering some of his most devoted followers on the party's left wing. This is the mark of what could be a very successful presidency.

"With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head," wrote David Sirota on the popular liberal blog OpenLeft, decrying the serial betrayals of Obama and the congressional Democratic majority. The Democratic Party, he wrote, has "faced no real retribution" for its manifold heresies, something that Sirota believes he and his band of angry bloggers must change. "We better understand why this happened," he fumed.

Allow me to provide an answer. You don't matter.

ARRRR!

2008-11-22T23:15:00.005-05:00

This so Kid Various' next career

Washington's frustration could well be echoed today in the face of escalating assaults by pirates from Somalia. Over 90 such attacks have occurred this year alone -- a three-fold increase since 2007 -- resulting in the capture of 14 ships and 250 of their crew members. Among their prizes, the pirates have seized a Ukrainian freighter crammed with Soviet-made battle tanks and, most recently, the tanker Sirius Star with $100 million worth of Saudi crude in its holds. These shipments are now being held off the Somali coast where the pirates are bargaining for their return.

Oren gives the right prescription. We have to crush these idiots. They don't even have any sense of style. No parrots, eye-patches, no NOTHING.

Piracy is a scourge, but we are down with being snatched by some guy with a hook for a hand who swings aboard our vessel on a rope. That's at least, you know, cool. He may be a criminal, but at least he's putting some effort into it. We refuse to be taken hostage by a bunch of raggedy-ass Somalis who look like they just escaped from a Sally Struthers commercial.

Happy VI Day

2008-11-22T08:31:00.002-05:00

Today is VI Day (Victory in Iraq Day)

We won. The Iraq War is over.

I declare November 22, 2008 to be "Victory in Iraq Day." (Hereafter known as "VI Day.")

By every measure, The United States and coalition forces have conclusively defeated all enemies in Iraq, pacified the country, deposed the previous regime, successfully helped to establish a new functioning democratic government, and suppressed any lingering insurgencies. The war has come to an end. And we won.

There aren't going to be any parades. No signing ceremony on the deck of the U.S.S Missouri. No widespread acknowledgement.

But it is important that this be acknowledged. We have won the Battle for Iraq. And passed one of the great tests we will face in the prosecution of the Long War.

Mr. Democracy, currently in Baghdad, writes:

There's a momentous event about to happen here. It may seem almost inane, but the excitement is in the air here. We are about to see the end of the Green Zone as we know it.

I have been in Iraq for 49 months, and for much of that time, the Green Zone in the Karkh District (downtown Baghdad) has been my world. With the signing of the SOFA, and the move of U.S. personnel to the new Embassy - all this will be going away December 31.

This bubble, this small facsimile of the western world, this fortress, is opening up. Iraqis are getting their downtown back. It's a sight to behold.

You could say that June 30, 2004 was the de jure transfer of sovereignty. December 31, 2008 is the de facto transfer. Iraq has finally become a normal country.

This is going to make our lives more difficult here. We'll be dealing with a fully sovereign nation just like any other. There will be difficulties as both sides learn to deal with the new situation. But ultimately, this is a good thing.

I spend most of my time in Ramadi now. In January 2007, it was an active war zone. In November 2008, I can walk down the street without body armor. Life is returning to normal in Ramadi, and with the signing of the SOFA, it will become completely normal. No more giant MRAPs careening down the streets. No more military intrusion into the lives of Iraqis (unless specifically requested by the Iraqi government.) Our movements will be more constrained. But we will also have more access to the outside world. Hell in Al Asad, they are hiring Iraqis to work on the base just like we did in 2003 before they started blowing themselves up in DFAC's. Soon, Iraqis will never want American bases to leave because their economies will be too dependent on them!

Barring some total collapse precipitated by a complete withdrawal, we've won this battle. We made our saving throw and stuck it out, allowing us against all odds to win. It was much more a near run thing than it ever should have been, but we've won.

Well spoken Mr. Democracy!

History will eventually record the courage of George W. Bush, who ignored the whining of the modern day Copperheads and had the temerity to choose victory:

Imagine life as an Iraqi in Baghdad or Ramadi or even Fallujah or Najaf or Baquba and all points between had President Bush relented to common popular domestic and international wisdom, opinion and sentiment and left the Iraqi people to the wolves among them, only to abandon them by "ending it," executing an "honorable withdrawal," or "redeploying" our forces. Our defeat would have been theirs ten-fold. Ask one.

Our current narrative-defining trifecta of media, political elite, and academia will surely not credit George W. Bush with achieving victory in Iraq while they are afforded the more palatable option of crediting a President Barack H. Obama with a draw-down of forces. But it is with certainty afforded by said trifecta's predictability that without President George W. Bush's steadfast determination and leadership, the events, discussion and reporting surrounding Iraq today would be horrific in nature.

The audacity of victory. You have to want it.

Ironically, this has likely helped his successor, Barack Obama. yet that is of secondary importance. What is important is that we have won this battle in the Long War.

Yet both leaders are likely to see benefit from the agreement. If a broadly based Iraqi government emerges as American troops withdraw, Bush's Iraq policy will demand and deserve a major historical reassessment. And the SOFA should allow President Obama to reinterpret his campaign pledges on Iraq in a more responsible manner -- giving deference to the best military advice during the next three years and avoiding destabilizing actions.

The success of the surge has achieved some extraordinary things -- not only the possibility of peace in Iraq but also a convergence in American politics. Bush's and Obama's modified positions on Iraq are quite close. Both leaders have accepted a responsible, gradual withdrawal and the possibility of leaving behind success instead of failure.

But it needs to be said that the Battle for Iraq was only one battle in a larger war, but as Douglas Stone says, people need to be reminded that it was the right battle, in the right place, at the right time.

It needs to be said: It was smart to go to war in Iraq; it was courageous to go to war; but most of all -- even though there are few things as horrific as war -- it was necessary to go to war against Iraq. Had we not gone to war against Iraq in 2003, we almost certainly would have done so there or in another Arab country at another time, and all in less advantageous circumstances.
Iraq was the right time, right place, right war.

We had to go to war, because the only sure way to ensure our national security is to drain the swamp of terrorism: to finally begin the process of wrenching the Arab world from a culture of backwardness, oppression and hatred toward the West.

We cannot slacken. We cannot rest. We have to continue to prosecute the Long War to transform this area from a desert of despotism to an oasis of freedom. Our security depends on it.

But for right now, we can crack open a beer and toast our success, and remember the costs of the right war, in the right place at the right time.

How Obama Got Elected

2008-11-21T13:54:00.004-05:00

Kid Various isn't really upset by this. The point of it is to demonstrate that Obama voters are uninformed. Which is undoubtedly true. But all voters are uninformed. The actual percentage of the electorate that knows any in depth information about candidates in any election is vanishingly small. What we know is how a candidate makes us feel. We don't vote based on a rational calculation. We vote based on emotion.

But what does upset Kid Various about this video, and its attendant Zogby poll, is it demonstrates how much the media was in the tank for Obama. The MSM made it easy to get a negative impression of McCain/Palin (especially Palin) and very, very difficult to get negative impression of Obama. Thus, the frames for making that emotive choice were rigged from the very beginning.

Not surprising as it happens to Republicans in every election. But this was one was exceptionally bad.

That "Obama! Obama!" chant is fascistically creepy though...

Nebraksa Repeals Law of Unintended Consequences

2008-11-21T13:34:00.003-05:00

[NELSON] HA-HA!

This is a good example of the importance of legislative drafting skills.

Nebraska just amended its "safe haven" law which allowed people to drop off a child at a hospital with no questions asked. Generally, this is to protect unwanted newborns, but the Nebraska law failed to give an upper limit on age.

On Tuesday, a 15-year-old girl was left at a hospital in Hall County, in the central part of the state. Last week, a 14-year-old boy and his 17-year-old sister were dropped off at an Omaha hospital; the girl ran away from the hospital. Earlier in the week, a father flew in from Miami, Florida, to leave his teenage son at a hospital, officials also said.

"Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska," Heineman told CNN. "Think of what you are saying. You are saying you no longer support them. You no longer love them."

Uh, well yeah. That's sort of the point.

Of course, Kid various thinks abortion should be retroactive to the age of seven anyway, so none of this is surprising. It just confirms his suspicion that children are monsters and given half the chance, a good percentage of parents would try to "give them back."

Which is why you can't make a law that allows them to do it!

They Told Me If George W. Bush Was Elected We Could Kiss Freedom of Speech Good-bye

2008-11-21T13:17:00.002-05:00

Oh wait... 8 years of Bush and you can still say whatever you want on the Internet! Too bad that's going away!

Holy Crap!

2008-11-21T08:57:00.002-05:00

Holy crap! Where's that knife? Kid Various is gonna go give himself a vasectomy right now!

As an example, according to the 2004 National Scruples and Lies Survey (which polled 5,000 women in the United Kingdom), 42% of women claimed they would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, regardless of the wishes of their partners.

Yeah, What's With That?

2008-11-21T08:41:00.002-05:00

When Kid Various heard about this is made him uneasy as well:

There is nothing wrong with the substance of this regulation. Experience is showing it is needed. But it is very wrong to delegate these powers to unelected, international institutions with no political accountability.

We have a Securities and Exchange Commission appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, both of whom are elected by the American people. It is with the SEC, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that financial accountability must take place.

The European Union achieved this massive subrogation of American sovereignty the way it usually does, by negotiation, gradual bureaucratic encroachment, and without asking the voters if they approve. What's more, Bush appears to have gone down without a fight, saving his debating time for arguing against the protectionism that France's Nicolas Sarkozy was pushing. By giving Bush a seeming victory on a moratorium against protectionism for one year, Sarkozy was able to slip over his massive scheme for taking over the supervision of the U.S. economy.

All kinds of political agendas are advancing under the cover of response to the global financial crisis. Where Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism by regulating it, Bush, to say nothing of Obama, has given the government control over our major financial and insurance institutions. And it isn't even our government! The power has now been transferred to the international community, led by the socialists in the European Union.

The one thing he can say is at least it can be abrogated at any time. Although once it becomes institutionalized that will be about as likely as matter appearing randomly out of the quantum vacuum.

Good To Know

2008-11-21T08:37:00.002-05:00

We're all just random fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. Can you all just dispense with the jihad crap now so we can back to sleep?

Matter is built on flaky foundations. Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.

The researchers simulated the frantic activity that goes on inside protons and neutrons. These particles provide almost all the mass of ordinary matter.