Pour (de)courager les autres
IF this proves to be true, Khalid not-so-chic should be publicly executed, with as much mercy shown as he showed to Daniel Pearl. Several recent stories have rattled on about how Al Qaeda members have been killed or captured because of information given by Khalid. Perhaps now we see why he's been so cooperative. He's trying to weasel out of the electric chair. I don't care how much information he's given us, he still needs to die as publicly as possible, with his death connected directly to Daniel Pearl's. There will be other hostages taken in this war. The hostage takers need to have a lot to think about before they resolve to kill any more Americans.

Loud Austrians
Interesting article about the German reaction to Schwarzenegger's victory:

"simple remedies from loud Austrians who enthrall the masses"

Case in point
Why do I bother to blog, when articles like this say what I was meaning to say, but better? Well, maybe they don't get every nuance of meaning. Well, maybe actually they just reinforce the importance of me writing to clarify and expand on what they are saying. Hey, that's why I blog! So I had to add a lavalicious comment:

The fact that Arnold didn't have to go through a primary may have allowed us a look beneath the ossified structures of politics as usual to see what's percolating down there. We didn't have to wait for the every-four-years programmed volcano to erupt. The recall exposed the tectonic forces deep underground. To carry the metaphor to ridiculous lengths, two possibilities emerge: 1) the pressure has been relieved and the next primary season will reinforce the existing order or 2) the rift in the rocky shield has loosed a demon from far within the earth that will change everything forever. I know which one I hope it is.

Nostradamus had nothing on me!
Gee, did I call it or what? The blogosphere is alive with the sound of hoo-hoo hooing. Victory is sweet, sweeter than defeat. And I'm a sworn-in lawyer now too, all ready to go to work bringing in immigrants or keeping them out, whichever pays more. Say, you don't think the Governator needs a lawyer or two? Do they have any in Kali-furnia? Had a great feast with my family yesterday. Escargots and duck and chocolate. That's it, I can die now. There's still champagne, of course. Maybe I'll wait until New Year's to really celebrate.

I've noticed some comment here and there that Arnie means more than just more (R)s in 2004. Perhaps this is the start of a true sea change. Maybe Ventura was the John the Baptist (Isn't Ventura in Kali-furnia?) and the Savior who throws the money-changers out of the temple will be a true barbarian, beholden to no civilized party, who destroys, Samson-like, the pillars of the fossilized two-party structure we've all been voting for like good little lemmings for our whole lives. Er, not me. Haven't voted since Carter didn't carry through with zero-based budgeting. This speculation is not ripe enough for Conundrumization yet. I'll wait until the day before final victory.

Put a fork in him, vater!
A conundrum prediction - Schwarzenegger for Fuhrer! er, Governor! It doesn't look like the LA Times blowing its cover completely, visits from BJ and the support of labor is going to keep Gray-out in power. Is this a major development or what? Imagine if a recall had been possible in 1998 and the Repubs had gone all out to root BJ out of the White House? It wouldn't have worked. But of course Ahnold wouldn't have been running on the replacement ballot. That's a question I haven't seen answered. If (R)nold hadn't been running on the replacement ballot, would support for the recall stand up? Ah, I anticipate. We'll address that tomorrow, probably, after I get sworn in as a supporter of the Florida and Federal Constitutions.

Puzzled
I've been wondering for a while now why in the world Bush has announced his intention to go to the UN to seek some sort of resolution about the reconstruction of Iraq. The answer may have just come to me. Last week, the members of the Arab League, in a move hardly reported at all, accepted the delegate from the new Iraqi "occupation" government to attend a meeting in Cairo. When you think of it, that was a sign of astonishing progress, when everyone from the Guardian to the New York Times to Howard Dean is trying to paint Bush's Iraq after-effort as a "'quagmire" and a "miserable failure". Now maybe going to the UN is a prelude to asking the UN to accept a delegate from the new government to sit in Saddam's government's chair at the General Assembly. What a demonstration that would be to the whole world that things have changed in Baghdad for good and all. Would France and Germany and the other knee-jerk anti-American forces accept such a thing? How could they not, when the Arabs themselves have acknowledged the reality of the new government? At least it wouldn't be a fraud and a preposterous insult to have THIS Iraqi government sit on the Human Rights subcommittee.

Still Waiting
For my bar certification, that is. I assume if there were a problem, Florida would have notified me. Sigh. Maybe next week I'll hear something. New Hampshire hasn't got back to me yet, either. But they will. The good news today is that a whole week has gone by with no US military deaths in Iraq. Still think this is Vietnam, anyone? I can't hear you!? I don't think there was a week without a death in Nam for ten years. Just hope it continues for a while. After this is all over, we'll have quite a cadre of fighters trained in overturning and modernizing Arab and other Islamic cultures. Could come in handy. Darn, I hope I can find the URL to that Berlusconi interview the other day. What a guy! Who would think a European could have an actual brain AND guts! The Qaddafi quote is worth tracking it down. Off I go a-Googling.

Update

Got it. And there's another, more impressionistic piece in the same Spectator. Che uomo!! OK, so they go a bit far: "Balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire"?? Somebody's forgetting he's a reporter, not a novelist. Fizzy dog, indeed.

Came back from California on Wednesday night. Still trying to digest impressions. Are impressions edible? Still, they need to be chewed over, tasted slowly and carefully. Saw Bush's speech tonight. Looks like he's staying the course in World War Four, as they're calling it.

Heh.

ILK

Yes, indeed, the Saddamites and the Assadites and the Nasserites and the Mubarakites for that matter are of the same ILK as AlQaeda. They are indeed ilkalicious. That's as much as we need to know. For being of the same ilk, they will act and think and be as one with the enemies of freedom and capitalism and science and thought itself. And they are all enemies of America. Which for me just happens to be my home and my identity and the one ideology which, needing perfection, is worth the effort. So tremble, those of the ilk. Your days are numbered and the number is not large.

This excellent article properly identifies Islam as a Christian heresy. (!) It also raises Ayn Rand's point that everything is guided by philosophy. And it points out that all cultures are based on religions. Multiculturalism as practiced in America today, then, is shown to be based on wrong perceptions. The new idea that everyone should come to America and keep the culture they had at home just doesn't work. For America is itself a culture, the greatest and most liberating in the history of man. To expect an Arab Muslim to come to America, to keep all the tenets of his original culture, based on Islam, and to subscribe to the philosophical tenets of American life is to expect something as impossible as that he should be a devout Muslim and a practicing Communist at the same time. Multiculturalism is the denial of America and capitalism as a new and real and worthwhile philosophy. It is therefore an attack on America as surely as the 9/11/2001 attacks were.

The realization of this basic opposition between other cultures and America's way of life requires realization that some cultures, some philosophies, even some religions, are wrong. I'll wait for the horrified gasps to die down and repeat that in another way: America's way of life has been shown to be appropriate for American circumstances. Any changes to our way of life have to prove themselves in the same way our existing cultural philosophy has: by making life better and more free. This is not always a clear standard, I admit. A fervent Islamist may say that he doesn't need or want three VCRs, a car and whisky on tap. He's satisfied with a prayer rug, a copy of the Koran and a crust of bread every day or so. Fine. He can have those things. But he cannot come to America and demand that we should all accept that standard of living, on pain of death. If he insists, violently, I cannot put it better than a lieutenant colonel in the Army put it when talking to Iraqi whiners: Obey your country's laws or we will hunt you down and we will kill you.

Finally
Boy, am I glad that Rachel Lucas finally made it out of undergraduate school and bought a house. Now if she would only get married already and have a few kids, she could join Lileks in kid hell and learn what never sleeping is really like. What was she doing all those years that made it so hard to get a BA at thirty-one or whatever she is? I shouldn't ask. I was a few years late myself, but at least I don't have any dogs. Now my kids are older and I can do interesting things like get behind Arnold. I'm taking the kids out to California for my nephew's wedding - supposedly - right in the middle of the recall campaign. As a confirmed political junkie, I'm looking forward to attending an Arnold rally in Frisco. I was walking through Goodwill looking, as I always do, for books, and what should fall off the shelves into my hands but "Arnold, the Education of a Bodybuilder", from 1975 or so, giving all the details, with many pictures, of Schwarzenegger's incredibly driven and disciplined march to fame and glory. This guy never does anything unless he thinks he can win. He's been like that since the age of 15. You know what else is weird? The last time I went on a trip anywhere was December of 2000, when I went to the Middle East. And that was right in the middle of the last interesting election campaign, the Bush-Gore idiocy. I found out the results on the steps of the Egyptian Museum just off Midan al-Tahrir in Cairo. Some of the locals, realizing I was American, asked me, "Are you for Al-Gore or Al-Bush??" So, trying not to laugh, I said Bush and this guy said, "He won, sir!", pointing to a newspaper that had just come out. Made my day. Little did I realize how important it would turn out to be. Heck, I didn't even vote. Shame on me. Gee, if I had voted, Bush would have won outright? Right? Right! But for Arnold I might actually vote.

Ayn Rand, Victor Hugo and gay marriage
In her introduction to "93", Ayn Rand says:

Have you ever wondered what they felt, those first men of the Renaissance, when - emerging from the long nightmare of the Middle Ages, having seen nothing but the deformed monstrosities and gargoyles of Medieval art as the only reflection of man's soul - they took a new, free, unobstructed look at the world and rediscovered the statues of Greek gods, forgotten under piles of rubble?

Well, if you have, you know what it was like to be 21 in 1969, as I was. Everything old was passé. Everything new was either sanpaku or groovy. And I really thought I knew which was which. But now I'm 55. And there's too much new stuff, darn it. Gary Coleman and Schwarzenegger are running for governor of California. And I can't figure out if that's groovy or plain nuts. And gay "marriage" is just plain nuts. Oh, I know. I've bantered back and forth with Andrew Sullivan about this. He thinks two men are the same as a man and a woman. OK. Or, rather, what are you talking about? Sometimes I think the difference between those who think obviously that two men have the "right" to set up housekeeping with the full sanction of the state and the support of the taxpayers, with the IRS pointing a gun at working men to get them to contribute to these two freaks who think one of them is a woman or close enough so it doesn't matter. And I start to wonder. Am I nuts? Is there really after all no difference at all between men and women? Between two men who want health insurance and a man and a woman who want to join the line of descent from Adam and Caesar and Alexander and DaVinci and Buonarotti and produce descendants to enrich the history of man on earth? Is that an ignoble ambition, to contribute to the legend of humanity? Is it just the same as two men or two women who want to spend their lives having counterfeit sex and deluding themselves into thinking they're ENTITLED to other people's money?
A thousand years from now who will remember the gay marriages? But a descendant of 3003 can follow the records back, can see who gave birth to whom, who nurtured whom, whether they did a good or lousy job. How? By whether their descendants survived and prospered. And every "couple" who rejected history and the future will be rejected by them.

Bush saves Eden
President Bush's much-decried war against terror and terrorists has saved Eden. The former residence of Adam and Eve is being restored by water redirected from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers after decades of conscious destruction by the Ba'athist thugocracy:

Return of the water had an immediate effect on the people whom the war had freed. They are fishing again from boats that had not floated for years. Water seems to hold the promise of reviving an old way of life. One young man, looking into the muddy brown stream, told a New York Times reporter in April, "It is like looking into the face of God."

No word on whether Cain's descendants will claim the "right of return" to their former "homeland" from which they were expelled by the Great Imperialist God of Zion. But wait a minute. That would be everyone. From one guy. And wait another minute. How did that happen, anyway?
But of course the Christian Science Monitor, represented by a former CBS sneerer, Richard C. Hottelet, cannot stand to say anything good about our Christian president, so they throw in this gratuitous slap at the end:

Meeting this need will demand the farsighted, imaginative, persuasive diplomacy that the United States, having propelled itself into Iraq, has not shown for years.

That doesn't even make any sense. "having propelled itself (and what exactly does THAT mean?)into Iraq" doesn't go with "has not shown for years". Yegads, these liberals can't even express their bankrupt ideas in clear sentences. Hottelet must have left CBS for senility.

????
Something's going on. Or, rather, not happening. And the thing that's not happening is American soldiers dying, yeah, I know, just for a day or two but call me crazy but I think maybe the reason every time I log in to FoxNews or CNN and do not see a headline such as "Two GIs die" or "Three Americans killed" and start thinking depressively about the families in North Carolina or Oregon or Michigan or Texas is that a sea-change has washed over Iraq. The "dead-enders" - maybe - are dead. The jihadists have been rejected by their paradise. And by the way, what ever happened to that bin Laden guy? Hey!! September 11 two years on is coming up! Let's go, Osama! Will the day of your death or execution be a holiday for all of Islam? Color me skeptical.

Evidence
Looks like Saddam has confirmed what many in the America-hating West have refused to concede - that Uday and Qusay were indeed slain last week in a gunfight showdown with the shadowy Task Force 20. So those who wouldn't believe our generals and government officials have to accept the truth now that a bloody dictator has - perhaps inadvertently - made it clear to the meanest bitterest pomo collectivist that his two bloody sons are no more.

Makes you wonder though. When Saddam is dead, whose word will the blind and deaf and dumb accept? Idi Amin's? (He's only in a coma, you know, not dead yet) or Qaddafi's? Or Castro's? Kim Jong Mentally Ill? Why is it the left will only listen to those who never told the truth in their lives?

The light dawns!

And for those of you who don't understand the Middle East, don't miss this quote from the article:

"Saddam is nobody these days. He has no power, no army, no friends, what can he do now?" asked Kahtan Muhhamad.

If only George H. W. Bush had understood this, we might have been spared the last twelve years and how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children would now be above ground who are NOT???!!!

Denti-topia
Next time you have a toothache, think about this story about dentistry in the UK

Oh, but it's OK. The treatment is "free". And like all "free" treatment, its availablity is not determined by how much it's worth to you, the patient, but by how much some bureaucrat thinks you should have it. But why would Wales need 40 more dentists? Isn't the government running things, making sure there are always enough resources so each man has what he needs, at the expense of those who have productive ability?

The Anarchy of Democracy
Democracy at its best is nearly anarchy. No one is really in charge except the idea that no one's in charge. And now in Iraq, the beginnings of this delicious chaos appear:

But a few yards away other, humbler political parties have also set up stall, evidence of Iraq's initial burst of political activism since the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Around the corner is the office of a Shia group, the Society of Honourable Scholars of Najaf. The Iraqi National Accord Movement, the Al-Wafaq Islamic Movement and the Royal Democratic Alliance can all be found nearby.

They are among a rash of political parties that has erupted in recent months as Iraqis revel in the style, if not the substance, of political freedom.

But, pace the Telegraph, I believe the substance is there too. For it is not really the spirit of compromise that's at the heart of democracy, it's fierce partisanship, a free market in the truth. The only restraint that a real democracy can stomach is swift and effective punishment of physical violence. But that is necessary. The reaction of the average Iraqi to the deaths of Uday and Qusay may be the first sign that the consensus against physical violence has been reached, or at least that the society is a lot closer than it's been in - well - forever. The balance of power among Kurds, Shi'ites, Sunnis and even those remaining Ba'athists and Communists who agree to renounce violence will assure a mighty interesting political scene in Iraq for some time. And no more mass graves, people shredders, fat lions and palaces.

Too easy
Sometimes this blogging thing is just too easy. In an article that may be referred to for decades to show everybody how wacky the 00's were, New York is apparently opening a high school for the otherly sexed. So, OK, I have to ask: What's the entrance exam going to be? Show tunes or hairstyles? HA! And I don't want to know about the hazing. It's just not RIGHT. And that dress code, well, deary, he should have known those tights didn't go with those heels!!? It's right there in shocking pink! Say, is there a privacy policy, or can we make sure that Pat and Jan and Leslie really are the same - uh - kind of thing? Wouldn't want any diversity in these classrooms. How long before some dirty young male cuts his hair short and puts on blue jeans and a leather jacket and pretends to be a girl, just to get next to someone else who may after all have been pretending as well! Chromosome testing for everyone in the cafeteria!!! Say, didn't the Marquis de Sade do all this a long long time ago? And without any public money?

Lance-d again
Looks like the Froggies' little bicycle tour is going to be won by an American again, for the fifth year in a row, much like their wars. And this American only has one testicle, which is, of course, one more than any male in France has. The German almost got him in the time trial, but slipped and fell in the typical French lousy weather, which reportedly surrendered as it saw an American approaching. The only other rider ever to win five Tours de France was Miguel Indurain, who was, needless to say, also not a Frenchman. And Eddie Merckxxxxxxxx won a few too. Let me see - was he French? Hey, whaddyou know, non! Belgique. But the American did not ask the UN for permission before winning and had no allies from Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco and Andorra, so obviously his victory was bought and paid for by Dick Cheney's oil company.

Rant-alicious!
Listening to Rush just now, I couldn't believe how he tore into a liberal caller. It was a classic rant, righteous and to the point and articulate beyond belief! Sometimes he really hits it. I think he's been much better lately, in the last year or so, than in the previous ten years or more I've been listening to him. Maybe he'll have a transcript up on the website. It needs to be used and used and used again until the electrons wear out. There's a campaign coming up!

Australians take Henderson Field
Is this a headline from 1943? No, today. But it's not the pesky Nips the Aussies and their allies are up against. Seems as if the Solomon Islanders have given up on the cargo cult and decided to help themselves to each others' goods. It's just spooky, having heard tales from my father about his service in the Army Air Corps in New Caledonia, where he was commissioned, Woodlark and Guadalcanal. Something about training with broomsticks because they didn't have enough rifles, with the Japanese a couple of hundred miles away. And, yes, he flew in B-17s from Henderson Field, after a few thousand Marines and other GIs had died taking it out of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Couldn't happen to a nicer psychotic dork
The execrable Gray Davis will have to face a recall election. Unfortunately, it looks to Drudge like The Terminator has got other fish to fry. Like it matters in the People's Republic of California, where everyone's a Democrat and the budget regularly sets aside larger sums than the entire gross national products of Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil for the care and feeding of illegal immigrants from - Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil. But just maybe it'll keep the Democrats busy and Davis, terminal loose cannon that he is, in extremis, may say some things about his fellow Dems that will come in handy in next year's dustup. Davis is not the kind to go down quietly like Torricelli, even after the ritual visit from the Clinton Political Death Squad. Could be fun, folks.

Iraq and Vietnam
So, it looks like we have a little progress on the anti-Ba'athist front. With all the comparing to Vietnam that's been going around lately, I thought I'd speculate what the war in Vietnam would have been like if we had had the same kind of success there that we've had in Iraq. Let's see. Treating Kuwait as South Vietnam, a Republican president in 1962 would have driven Ho Chi Minh's armies out of South Vietnam in 100 hours. He would have stopped short of invading North Vietnam and then had twelve years of relative peace, accompanied by air patrols over two-thirds of North Vietnam, while Ho defied UN resolution after UN resolution, then in 1969, kicked out UN inspectors. The Democrat president who had taken over in 1964 threatened, blustered and sent cruise missiles, but did nothing effective after he survived being impeached for lying to a grand jury. In 1974 Ho would have defied yet another UN resolution ordering him to turn over weapons of mass destruction and, under a Republican president elected in 1972, we would have invaded. In three weeks, Hanoi and Haiphong would have fallen and we would have had several divisions on the Chinese border, supported by complete air superiority. For a few more weeks, the Vietminh would have conducted a guerrilla campaign, almost managing to kill one GI a day, until, in late 1974, we had killed General Giap and Ho's son (did he have one?) and were hot on the trail of Ho. If we manage to snag Saddam soon, which seems likely, the parallel to Vietnam would reveal that we took Ho Chi Minh into custody and made possible a democratic transition. The differences? Oh, yeah. Iraq has more people than North Vietnam, far more resources and was supposed to have the entire support of the Arab world. Sure. Vietnam=Iraq. If only.

Update
Looks like Austin Bay has been reading Conundrum:

Because Vietnam was no Iraq. As a military pal recently said to me, if Vietnam were Iraq, the United States would have occupied Hanoi, killed or dispersed the Politburo and utterly destroyed the North Vietnamese Army. Laos and Cambodia would not have served as sanctuaries for communist troops and supplies. (Syria understands this difference.) Southerners from Saigon would be part of a new national council in the process of drawing up a democratic constitution.

That's the minute answer -- America won a big military victory, and did so quickly.

or great minds think alike. There's a bit more, though, if you want to push the analogy. What if the Viet Minh (or Cong) had, in about 1970, flown airplanes into the not-yet-built Twin Towers - ok the Empire State Building and Pentagon? Would the bombing of Haiphong and Hanoi have seemed so unjustified then? Would the antiwar demos have abated a bit? Remember, Muhammad Ali said "I ain't got nothing against no Viet Cong." But just maybe he would have had if the Vietnam "conflict" only were truly more similar to the anti-Ba'athist and anti-terrorist war.

Blowin' in the Wind? - Not!
Too bad, Greenie-weenies! The idea of getting free power from the wind is provably insufficient for a modern industrial economy. But feel free to go back to the days before heating and airconditioning and washing machines and refrigerators and dishwashers and electric stoves and water heaters. Let's see, who would it be that would draw water, carry wood, wash clothes by hand, shop every day? Women and servants? Oh, excuse me, I guess that's OK, then.

Trust the Scots
The Scotsman, not a reliably rightist paper, appears to have the goods on the BBC. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. Trust the Caledonians to press the attack home when others won't. (Full disclosure: I'm a son of a son of Arran) Maybe the Blair/Raines fiasco in New Amsterdam emboldened the media critics - led by everyone's friend "The Sun" - to plunge the long knives in. Odd how things turn around so fast. Ideally, for libertarian/objectivist objectives, the scandal about David Kelly's suicide will start the BBC down a slippery slope to well-deserved oblivion and put the Kibosh on Blair's Clintonite Labour Party as well. Imagine having to pay the government to even HAVE a TV!! Bad enough here in the United States of Free America we are forced on penalty of imprisonment to pay for a channel which hardly any of those who pay voluntarily watch. Now if I only trusted Ian Duncan Smith to be a choice, rather than an echo....

Life its own self
I love the dawn chorus. I love the silhouette of trees against the sky at dusk. I've been seeing a lot of both lately. It's hot in Tallahassee, hot and muggy and full of life, unfortunately including live mosquitoes. It's a month after summer solstice now, the days have shortened somewhat, but not enough to cool them off. That won't happen until, probably, November. So I've one-third of July, August, September and October to crouch frightened by lightning storms, stock up on candles and flashlight batteries for the inevitable ouragon. Only no hurricanes ever hit. I've been in Florida thirteen years now and none of the dozens of threatening cyclic monsters have found me, punished me for my presuming boldness. Check that, sixteen years, counting three when I was little, in Tampa in the fifties. A monstrous hurricane hit Tampa when we were vacationing up North (Carol? 1954?) And then when we came south for the winter of school and work, another hit New England right where we had been. Another girl's name, before hurricanes lost their sex, became hermaphroditic, before the NOAA or Congress or whoever spit in the wind and tried to make everyone believe women were no worse than men. Hah!!

What's not said
I'm tempted to fly off the handle about any unelected (OK, so I don't even like the elected ones) tyrannical bureaucrats messing with things they don't understand, but I realize I don't know enough about this situation at the Bureau of Land Management to argue effectively. I do wonder, however, why the unelected bureaucrat and possible tyrant who has been given so much power over palaeontologists and their fascinating work doesn't have a degree in some field related to her work. The article says she is a "graduate of the University of California at Berkeley" but doesn't mention what her degree is in. Therefore, I think I'm justified in assuming her degree isn't in archeology or palaeontology. Surely the writer would have mentioned it if it were. The softball tactic of saying she had a fossil collection when she was eight years old just doesn't cut it. It's what's not said that convinces me. In fact, why don't they have someone with an advanced degree in fossil-ology determining the disposition of scientific research in one of the most important areas of fossil research in the world? What a joke. Perhaps the worst part is this:

The current standard mandates "you do more than collect cool bones," Bryant said. You also must have a scientific approach to the research, called a research design, and a plan to communicate the results of the research to the public.
"The public owns that resource and needs to get something back from it," she said.

Oh, I see. The "public" owns the bones. They put so much into those bones, they have to "get something back". Now I'm seeing the light. If any scientist wants to actually go out and find the bones, unearth them and study them, he has to get past Laurie and her oh-so-scientific determination of whether his research is going to benefit the "public". And how exactly does she help anyone get out there and do the hard work of science? And what right does she have to get in the way of science? No, not what power, what RIGHT?? 'Cause if she's half the bitch about it the article makes her out to be, a lot of bones are going to be sitting in the ground, doing nobody any good, for another few hundred million years. Good work, Laurie. I don't know what the "public" would do without people like you out there protecting us.

Happiness
A clear sky is the absence of clouds

Rewriting history - and ignoring it
Liberals would have you believe that there's no evidence of cooperation between Osama and Saddam, that no one ever thought of such a thing before the invasion of Iraq. The whole idea was just cobbled up as a lame justification for "getting" Saddam for oil or revenge for his assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush. Oh, yeah? Front Page Mag found:

... hundreds of articles. Here are condensed summaries of some of the more relevant ones. I wonder why no one is talking about these articles and links today.

It's not much of a mystery. The left forgets everything it doesn't want to think about and denies everything it wishes weren't true, until it convinces itself of the truth of its worldview, which by its nature has to be based on delusion. Look at the comments attacking the writer of the article for being anonymous. It's a list of articles, for God's sake, it can be checked out quite easily using Nexis or Google. Why does it matter if the author's name is on it? The articles either were written or they weren't, they either did raise the possibility and probability of cooperation between Saddam and Osama or they didn't. This isn't something that's a matter of opinion. Why does it matter who compiled the list? It's a breath of fresh air, though, to see things the way they really were. All the big lies the conventional media pound into one's head tend to make one wonder.

Smoking gun - er - letter:

Halfway down the middle column is written: ''Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.''

Why do I have the feeling a lot more stuff like this is going to come out about Saddam pretty soon? There's no political reason for Bush to release every piece of information that has come out of Iraq. No reason at all not to keep it and make sure it's correct, unless some reporter gets wind of it. And knowing something the Osamas and Saddams of the world don't know you know could come in handy. The opponents aren't going to believe anything the administration trots out anyway, so it's better to keep cool and release the confirmed, fully utilized information after the Democrat dwarves have had ample opportunity to make idiots of themselves. Not that they need much help. This political poker session could be one of the most artistically executed ever. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of Democrats. I just wish I trusted the Republicans to stay away from collectivist domestic policy. I know. Dream on.

I agree ...
OK, last Coulter post for now, I promise. This article in Newsmax.com does the best job I've seen yet of refuting Coulter's - and McCarthy's - critics. I still find it a little hard to believe that I now believe Joe McCarthy, when for decades I thought of him as the Antichrist. I demonstrated against the Vietnam war and for socialism, I blush to admit. I took it for granted that the HUAC and McCarthy's Senate committees were Star Chambers picking on innocent lefties, destroying lives in order to get power. I never could see, somehow, that Communist spies did harm the United States and the cause of Freedom. I mean, after all, Nixon, the other Antichrist, was on McCarthy's side. It is clear to me now, though, that the prevalence of Communists around the centers of power in the US in the late Forties did cause immense injury to our country's interests.
Just imagine if the Rosenbergs and Hiss and the like had not given atomic secrets to the Russians, because they had been stopped by people like Joe McCarthy. Just imagine if the Russians had not had atomic weapons at the time of the Korean War. The North Koreans, with their newly empowered Chinese and Russian supporters just might not have dared to cross the Thirty-Eighth parallel into South Korea. What if Truman had been able to allow - if he would have - MacArthur to use atomic weapons on the Red Army with no fear of retaliation? The Chinese would never have dared attack, since they would obviously have been told of the possibility. Then there would have been no Korean War. Tens of thousands of US soldiers would not have died, and hundreds of thousands of Korean and Chinese. Even if the nuclear standoff had only been postponed by a few years, that might have been enough time for the South Korean economy to develop to the point where it could defend itself.
But no. Thanks to the socialist traitors, a bloody stalemate was the best we could do. And the Communists discovered something about Truman. He would not push back beyond a certain point. As Coulter mentions, it's not a coincidence that the Korean armistice talks started when it was clear Eisenhower was to be President. It's also not a coincidence that the Communists started pushing again, in Laos and then Vietnam, when another Democrat, Kennedy, came into office and was succeeded by Johnson, who was pushing Socialism at home as forcefully as he was lackadaisically allowing it to gain ground abroad. Then when Nixon came into office in 1969, peace talks happened. Coincidence?
Democratic Presidents are all liberals. And they employ people like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White and Dean Rusk and Dean Acheson and Walt Whitman Rostow - and Eugene V. (named for Eugene V. Debs) Rostow. Meaning traitors. I agree also with Coulter on this. Saddam knew Clinton wouldn't attack him for real. Perhaps the only benefit of having eight years of Clinton was that it lulled Saddam into a false sense of security. But the price for that lack of preparation was 9/11. And thousands of dead Iraqis as well.

More Coulter-mania
I'm still ticked off at the way "conservatives" like Sullivan and Reynolds and the Wall Street Journal are excoriating Ann Coulter's effective and generally true and needed comments on fifty years of liberal perfidy. The Curmudgeon (emeritus) appears to agree. Can you think of any time when "mainstream" Democrats attacked their own hatemongers, such as Michael Moore? Does Jonathan Alter apologize for Moore's lies? Does Lieberman or Daschle tut-tut about Carville's and Sidney Blumenthal's outrageous, false and stupid stereotypical attacks on President Bush?
I can't think of a single instance where a Democratic columnist or media guru has admitted that Chomsky, Said and the assorted Palestinian apologists have gone too far in criticizing Israel. I haven't heard anyone except "conservatives" criticize the various European idiots whose wacko theories about 9/11 are the toast of the "idiotarian" left. Your average Democrat just snickers in his sleeve and enjoys the spectacle of conservatives rising to the bait Moore and company throw out with no thought at all to whether it's true or civil. The notion of being civil to their ideological enemies hasn't ever existed in the liberal consciousness. Coulter should not be protected from having any purposely false statements or any outrages she may have committed pointed out - although I don't see any in her latest book. But she should not be attacked just to show the Left that Conservatives are really moderates. That's telling them that we will stop pointing out their warts when we start to become effective and noticed. That's nuts.

Update
Thank you, Mr. Horowitz! I knew the criticism of Coulter was off the mark. Maybe a wave of backlash will inspire examination of the double standard the Dem-libs have been getting away with for decades. And maybe someday we'll actually see a Democrat admit the lefties have been wrong about some other things, like, say, global warming, acid rain, the "ozone hole", Malthus, Marx, Mao and matrimony!

I'm for Coulter
I finished Ann Coulter's book TREASON the other day. It's great. I don't know why Sullivan and Mean Mr. Mustard are criticizing it so much. Why is it those on the libertarian right get all nervous and indignant when someone effectively attacks the noxious left? Coulter makes a lot of great points and obviously ticks off the Democrats and many "centrists". So what's not to like? I've been trying to get the following comment onto Mean Mr. M., but comments don't seem to be working so well.

I must disagree. Andrew Sullivan today compares Coulter to Michael Moore. As I emailed to Sullivan, these criticisms ignore the fact that Coulter is basically correct. Most liberals do hate America or, at the very least, tend to agree with America-haters more than those who support freedom. And McCarthy HAS been demonized with a half-century of lies and insults. So where's the "extremism"? Rabinowitz's column has precious few facts. It just repeats the liberal mantra, "Of course, everyone knows McCarthy was a monster". Coulter points out that what "everyone knows" might not be true. The "moderate" attack on Coulter only makes me think she must be even more right than she sounds.

I also emailed Sullivan. Just the fact that people are actually debating whether McCarthy is really a monster makes my day, week, whatever.

Not unexpected
Perhaps it's early yet, but the popularity of gay marriage in Canada is about what I thought it would be - below the radar. It never made any sense. The only problem I have with the Kay column is that it doesn't specifically enough condemn the betrayal of principle that laws permitting gay marriage represent. And for what? The civil union approach isn't any better. It still is mostly useful for horning in on government benefits meant for real families with real children, a traditional if in my view illegitimate subsidy. But why is it a surprise that few gay "couples" want to go through an embarrassing and meaningless ceremony? Given the level of promiscuity among gay men, especially, allowing the necessity of providing such a "right" borders on hallucination. I've often thought the whole gay marriage movement was just another way of attacking heterosexual marriage. The attempt to prove that traditional marriage is just a vehicle to oppress women and indoctrinate children has been a constant theme of the left for forty years now. Maybe gay marriage, though, will be the step too far that derails the entire movement. One can dream.

Misha's good tonight, in't he?
Get yer "yeah, yeah, yeah!!"'s out for the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler's clearest explanation yet of just exactly why Thatcher and Reagan should have statues in every capital of Europe. And why Michael Moore should be met everywhere he goes by the ghosts of the victims of socialism. Or at least their surviving relatives. Great comments, too.

Another straw in the wind? "May" be so.
Love to see scientists come up with yet another theory of what causes global temperature changes. I especially grok the way so many scientists use "may" when they're talking about theories that have been used to enforce idiotic governmental regulations that cost business billions of dollars and millions of jobs:

Veizer remains concerned about the possible "use and abuse" of his latest work in the bitter international debate over the Kyoto accord. As he did in 2000, he emphasized that unprecedented CO2 emissions in modern times may eventually "overtake" cosmic rays as a chief factor in climate change and perhaps even justify "pre-emptive" measures to protect the environment.

I also wonder why he finds it necessary to insert the weasel word "potentially" in this statement:

More specifically, the authors assert that the long-term "warming effect of CO2" is "potentially lower" than generally thought. They say the carbon dioxide factor would appear to have a maximum impact of 1.9 C on sea temperatures rather than the 5.5 projected in certain worst-case scenarios.

Makes you wonder what the margin of error is in these findings, why it wasn't stated and whether the variability was within it. But, as Ayn Rand says, "blank out". At least he comes out with this fairly straightforward statement:

"Atmospheric levels of CO2 are commonly assumed to be a main driver of global climate," the authors state. "Independent empirical evidence suggests that the galactic cosmic ray flux (CRF) is linked to climate variability. We find that at least 66 per cent of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy."

Another oddity: these articles on "dissident" statements about climate theory both come from far-flung outposts of the Anglosphere: New Zealand and Saskatchewan. Where's Scientific American when news is breaking? Hugging its cherished lies?

It's official - the Sun did it
As far as I'm concerned, I now have all the evidence I need that the sun is responsible for whatever global warming may have happened and global cooling, too, for that matter. I was especially impressed by this titbit:

More recently, the instrument record taken from ground-based weather stations over the past 140 years show two periods of warming from 1910 to 1940 and from 1980 to 1998.

I mean, there's no way at all that carbon dioxide production was causing global warming from 1910 to 1940, then stopped causing it from 1940 to 1980, then started again. Either this guy's totally wrong or the multi-billions of dollars and mountains of blather and guilt spread around about global warming are TOTALLY USELESS!

So, take that, Chicken Little! Not, I predict, that these facts will have any effect on the Gaia-hypothesis self-loathing productivity-fearing wussies out there.

'Tis good to be the King!
The blogosphere is agog over a statement by Dick Gephardt, as reported by Misha here - and be sure not to miss the 106 and still counting comments. I haven't read all the comments - and won't - so I don't know if anyone has mentioned a possible implication of D.G.'s policy that a sitting president should be able, by executive order, to counteract anything "bad" that the Supreme Court might do. Say, didn't the Supreme Court do something all right-thinking liberals considered VERY BAD in December 2000 when they ruled that the Florida recount had to stop, therefore handing the presidency to a real grown-up man for the first time in eight years? I believe the slogan the Left use is "Seelected, not Eelected!" or something just as euphonious. So what if Gephardt had been president, which could have been possible, since he's been running for president since at least 1984 to my personal knowledge, since that's when I shook hands with him on the New Hampshire campaign trail? How would he have neutralized the evil of the evil fascist right-wing court? Of course! He could have just signed an executive order designating Gore as president! Then when Gore's eight years were up, he could just designate Hillary, if he were still alive which would be unlikely. No more need for silly elections or campaigns - they're so environmentally wasteful and we do want to save the Earth, don't we? It's in the balance, you know. And, say, what's with that two term restriction, anyway? Gephardt could just do away with that with a "stroke of the pen, law of the land, cool!" And then there's that annoying Congress nonsense. Boy, will Dick be glad to get out of that place. What a sinkhole of depravity and Republicans. It's executive order time! And, say, isn't that Monica walking across the street? Well, she does know the way over here to the White House and no one can disobey an executive order....

Looks promising
Things may be heating up in Iran. It's always hard to tell from possibly sensationalized news reports what's really going on and how much support it has throughout the country. The classic example of that is the Tien an Men Square demo in China in 1989 (was it really that long ago??), which seemed to be so overwhelming but was not supported by enough of the real people to make much of a difference. It mainly served to identify the troublemakers. Every one else was concerned about his rice bowl. I thought, however, that this last bit was especially telling:

This week's demonstrators have also called for the resignation of President Khatami, accusing him of not pushing hard enough for democratic reforms.
Khatami does not have the support of the hard-liners who control the judiciary, the security forces and other unelected bodies. But the hard-liners do not enjoy popular support, leaving the two sides of government in a stalemate.

At least the students aren't appealing to Khatami and attacking only the mullahs. They know that those who promise "democratic reforms" for years and never deliver are not their friends. Khatami is either insincere or ineffective. Either way he needs to go so the mullahs will be exposed. And now every one knows it. Controlling the security forces wasn't, in the end, enough to keep the Shah in power. And the mullahs know that, too.

Update
La lutte continue. The "worst street demonstrations since the 1979 revolution" should really be "the best demonstrations since well before the 1979 revolution." Since before Mossadegh, one hopes. And that's the real question. Say the students conquer, what kind of regime will they install? What is their vision, their ideal? The Statue of Liberty? Or something more subtle, unexpected - Bob Dylan, perhaps???

Yeah! Huh? How come?
Tony Blankley nails it in this WashTimes op-ed. I am so relieved. I now firmly believe the whole WMD thing will blow over and have zero political traction before the humidity drops below 100% in Tallahassee again, which should happen, if I'm lucky, about November 1. Hey, maybe I can use that as an excuse to stop blogging until Thanksgiving.

I hate apologies
I wish bloggers wouldn't apologize about not blogging, usually with disgusting details of their latest illness or lurid boasting about their wild weekend or honeymoon. If you don't have anything to blog about, don't blinking blog! Sure, I wish everyone in blogdom whom I read regularly would post every five minutes, but it ain't gonna happen and it's probably just as well. So go to Brazil with the housemaid for a week. Contract monkeypox and have a horrendous car accident. Just don't tell me about it as an excuse for not blogging.

Last Times story I'll ever read?
To read the inside story about the resignation of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, I actually went to the NY Times website. I may never do that again, without going through another site. I just don't get my first-rank news from the Times website. Their obvious bias makes it so irritating that I have no reason to go there unless someone else says they saw some good reporting there. In other words, I no longer rely on the Times to put good stories in their paper. They do some good reporting. Virginia Postrel insists that the Times-bashing has hurt some good people. But I can't trust them. So if Instapundit or Sullivan or DenBeste or Lileks or someone else I trust links to them, even Drudge, I will look at the article. But the paper has lost its primary position as not just a news source but a fount of judgment about what IS news.

What WAS he thinking?
Or was he thinking at all? Let's see. You have outstanding warrants. You're late for your plane. But at least you haven't called attention to yourself. So what do you do? Sure. Call in a bomb threat so you won't miss your plane. It's a once-every-two-weeks overseas flight, right? Nope. A shuttle. And your excuse is what? So what happens?

The man was held on outstanding, unrelated criminal charges and (is) being questioned by the FBI

You were expecting maybe flowers? Heck, why not just saunter up to the counter and ask, "Hey, has that plane I called in the bomb threat on been brought back to the gate yet? I'm ready to go now." Also, "the suspect was not immediately identified". Which makes suspicious me suspect his name has got an "al-" something in it. But that's just me.

Wolfowitz wows 'em
This is more than "interesting" (via Instapundit). It could be a world-historical moment. I've been reading Tom Paine lately. The feeling of 1778 and 1779 is not so far from what I'm feeling today.

Beware!
Al Qaeda has threatened Norway. But the descendants of Vikings are of course not worried, although they've certainly been in the appeaser camp. There is another menace which does seem to have them anxious and depressed, though. Their dogs are too fat. It's obviously Bush's fault. Somehow.

Outlived his usefulness
Maybe it's premature, but I suddenly find myself less than interested in whether W gets reelected in 2004. The policies I approve of have been implemented and locked in pretty well. Tax cuts, effective war on terrorism, spiking class war rhetoric, they're all important to me and they've all been acted on by the W folks. They can't really retreat from them now. Unfortunately, on some other issues W has sounded and acted more like a statist than some of the Democrats. These include the drug war, the "environment"{ptah!} minimum wage laws, regulation of business, welfare and corporate welfare. For the rest of his tenure, I fear that W will push the parts of the Republican program that I disagree with. My problem is that the Democrats are no better on any of these topics than the Republicans are and are worse on most. So my fallback position is to hope for gridlock, with one party pushing measures I disagree with and the other party blocking such measures only because they don't go far enough. For instance, what is the likelihood that W will try to reduce the influence of the EPA and OSHA, which are handcuffing American business? What are the chances of drug legalization? What effective political force can be seen to push effective reform of immigration laws to keep criminals and terrorists out but to let anyone who is willing to work in, with no welfare guarantees to bring in more freeloaders? The Republicans want to keep everyone out. Pat Buchanan and the labor union Democrats want to keep everyone out, too, but to protect "American" jobs, as though jobs belonged to people. Democrats want to let everyone in who will vote Democratic, but they can't be trusted to effectively keep criminals and terrorists out. Perhaps the only hope is that if, as looks likely, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate grow larger in 2004 on the coattails of a triumphal W, government spending in general can be cut back following traditional Republican fiscal principles - smaller government and a bigger private economy. But given the record under Reagan and Bush 41, I'm not going to be holding my breath. Looks like I'm not going to be voting again in 2004.

Truth from Tehran
Whoever thought that Abu Mazen, the supposed new head of the Palestinian Authority, was out from under the authority of the pig Arafat (ptah!) should read what the Iranians have to say:

"Arafat is at the top of the (Palestinian) Authority. He's the man to whom we refer, regardless of the American or Israeli view of him," Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, said in an interview with Egypt's semi-official Al-Mussawar weekly.

Did anyone really doubt this? Why is such a public statement not more widely reported? Hello, LGF?

Update
Albawaba has the report too. And it reports Abu Mazen is to meet with Hamas. To "try to convince Hamas to stop carrying out attacks against Israel." Of course. Just like Arafat would do and has done so many times in the past. Just because when they switch to Arabic they congratulate Hamas on the number of Israeli civilians they kill doesn't mean their statements in English were insincere. Does it?

Undoing Clinton
It will take at least four years to undo the damage Clinton and his fools did to US prestige and effectiveness abroad, especially on the terrorism front. Louis Freeh should know and now he is laying out just some of the evidence. Isn't there a treason indictment in here somewhere? Patience. Clinton's victims, including those of Waco, Ruby Ridge, Mogadishu, Khobar Towers, the SS Cole, 9/11/2001, can't be brought back to life, but steps can be taken to make sure nothing like his disastrous eight years happens again.

Said unsaid
Frontpagemag.com has an interesting commentary by actual professors at the University of Washington on the sad career of Edward Said, the pseudo-Palestinian comparative lit guru at Columbia who just can't stop lying. But after all, as with Michael Moore, Chomsky and the other monsters of the pomo left, it isn't the lies that count, it's the amount of money people will pay to hear you say them over and over again. I'm just amazed that professors at a US college are still allowed to think. Or students. It will be a great day when Sharon is invited to Baghdad to sign a peace treaty. Maybe Said can think up a lie or two to explain why that really won't happen and when it does happen, it didn't really happen because the intellectual elite refused to acknowledge that it happened. As for the unity of the Palestinian people against the colonialist oppressors, I think I see a straw in the wind blowing from Baghdad. And from Lebanon. Yes, I love Little Green Footballs.

Agree
This analysis of Al Qaeda's latest "soft-target" attacks seems spot on. When I see something I agree with, I link to it so people who read this blog will know it's saying something that is very much like what I would have said if I had gotten it down first. I simply copy the URL, paste it into my blog and then the readers can go to it right from here and read it for themselves. It's as logical and easy as, say, pulling your chair towards a table. (Both via Tim Blair)

Update
This article from National Review Online sets out the "soft-target" thesis clearly. I agree particularly with this part of the analysis.

One theory is that these attacks were undertaken by freelancers-al Qaeda cells that are acting without central direction or without any overriding strategy. That would certainly account for their apparent self-destructiveness by choosing targets in countries where they have bases or at least government tolerance. But if this is true, it only further emphasizes that the organization's leadership is unable to exert overall strategic control, or perhaps even communicate with its operatives.

That's one problem with the "insulated cells" feature of any secret terror organization. It means you can't organize more than one attack at a time in widely separated areas without either exposing the hierarchy to detection or letting members of the cells communicate with each other. Just the fact that the Saudi regime now admits that it has a terrorist problem is a major advance in the war on terror.

Zapp!!
Lightning hit my house last Friday, so I've been net-deprived for a whole weekend. Lost a TV, DVD player, three computers, a cable modem, a network router and, oddly, a clothes dryer. And I had a major gout attack, so I spent a lot of time sleeping. Which ticks me off. I've been on a certain gout medicine for like six years now and it never works without making me terminally sleepy. Haven't the evil drug companies come up with something better for what is after all an ancient disorder? I should be able to plug a wire into a jack on my hip and send a signal to the gout-affected joint that will dissolve the uric acid crystals that cause the insanely intense pain. But no. I have to take weird chemicals and wait for two hours and slog around like a zombie for the rest of the day. Not fun. And now I have to buy all this stuff. It's one way to get new computers, I guess. Wish I could afford a Titanium laptop from Apple.

Soiez effrayé, soiez très effrayé!!
Looks like Rummy is on the trail of the Frog turncoats who sold out their NATO partners for a mess of pâte. The evidence will come out sooner or later. And the best thing is there isn't a dang thing they can do about it. Somebody should be watching for reservations on flights from Paris to North Korea or maybe Iran, although I'm not sure either surviving member of the Axis of Evil wants to play host to the leader of the Axis of Weasels. Trial lawyers representing the families of Americans killed in Iraq should be petitioning courts everywhere to freeze French assets in anticipation of litigation.

Shock and awe, indeed!
The seismic shift in the Middle East was so great that it apparently reached all the way to New Hampshire. As a New Hampshireman for many years - I went to prep school, college and law school there - I have to say it's a bit of a shock to realize that the next time I head up through Franconia Notch the Old Man won't be there looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, maybe it's like the Olympics in ancient times. When a resident of a Greek city-state won in the Olympics, the people of the town tore down the walls to say, we don't need them any more since we have a great champion to protect us. So George W's butt-kicking of the Taliban and then Saddam must have convinced the Almighty that his particular protection was no longer necessary for the USA. But what will replace the Old Man as New Hampshire's symbol? A mall? A tourist from Taxachusetts rendered penniless? At least we've still got "Live Free or Die".

Dirty Canadians!
So it's capitalism that pollutes the environment, eh? The Canadians in their socialist glory apparently have a little problem with pumping poisons into their - and America's - air. Say, you don't think it could be prosperity, brought on by that nasty capitalism, that allows people to clean up whatever messes they make, do you? Nah. The Russians and Chinese have always put pristine cleanliness ahead of materialist values such as production of limousines for the elites. Haven't they? The story didn't even mention the "greenhouse gases" that must be churned out by "the largest single air polluter in North America." But wait a minute. Didn't Canada sign the Kyoto Accords? And nasty old US didn't? And yet:

Murphy reports that a recent study found that while air pollution is on the decline in the U.S., it's on the rise in Canada.

I'm confused.

About time
Plans to pull US troops out of Germany seem to be real. Considering that I first went to Germany at the age of three when my father was assigned to Wiesbaden as part of the occupying force and that in a couple of months I will become an official senior citizen, this action is coming not a moment too soon. And aren't we all sad at the prospect of not being able to funnel billions of US taxpayers' dollars into the German economy any more? Maybe Poland or Bulgaria won't betray us the next time we need support in the War on Terror. It's odd. I used to see announcements like this and figure, "Sure, like that's going to happen." But ever since W came to power, I hear and I believe. It sure is good to have someone in the White House whom I can trust to do what he says he will, even if I don't always agree with the "compassionate" (ick!) side of his agenda.

Unpredicted consequences
None of the US media seem to have picked up on this story from Britain about the shocking results in local council elections. One might have expected that the glorious results in the Iraq war would have given a boost to Labour prospects, since Blair is the Labour leader. Quite the contrary. The Tories gained hundreds of seats, and even the third party Liberal Democrats gained many more seats than expected. The fourth party British National Party, described as "right wing", known informally as "British Nazi Party", gained significantly, mostly at the expense of Labour. The gains were so significant that Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative leader, "guaranteed" that the Tories would win the next general election. BBC, of course, emphasized the Labour gains in Wales and the BBC's roundup of how the papers in Britain treated the election emphasized that all parties had some gains in various places. The BBC refuses to recognize what looks to me like a (an? or is that too self-consciously Anglophile?) historic victory for the Tories.
So why did the Conservatives gain so much, when the leader of Labour is just coming off a huge foreign policy coup? First, the Tories were much more solidly behind the liberation campaign than the Labour Party. The split in Labour was gaping. And the traitor Galloway is a Labourite. Those stories could not fail to have been lost on the electorate. Of course these were local council elections, so something must have been going on at the grass roots, too. Perhaps the locals are just finally fed up with closet - and not-so-hidden - Socialism. Maybe it was the in-town tax in London that showed the electorate where Labour was heading, maybe the proliferation of cameras everywhere, maybe Blair's fondness for the Euro and the Continent, when the French and Germans turned out to be less than staunch when it came time to act on Iraq. Labour must have been seen as the party of big government, favoring encroachment on traditional British freedoms. Whatever the reason, a political turning point seems to have been passed. Years from now we may look back on the liberation of Iraq as the event that triggered many much-needed changes. We may have escaped dystopia by the skin of our teeth.

Having a bit of a tough slog
I'm being besieged on all sides over on Light of Reason. I've taken a bit of a provocative stance on homosexuality and the hounds are in full cry. Here's the stance:

I don't know how to say this gently, so I'll just say it. I simply don't comprehend how you can say:

In order to gain the toleration of someone like Santorum, I would have to go back to the view I had of being gay in the 1960s: that it is something fundamentally wrong about me, that I should never act on it, and that I should do absolutely anything to try to change it. If that's not an attack on who I am as a person, then what on earth would be?

You have obviously considered that homosexuality may be wrong and rejected that view. But haven't people with other sexual proclivities said exactly the same thing about their "disorders", however obviously mad they may be? I know that one doesn't just trust one's own reason about a matter. That's not reasonable. You may, after all, be wrong. The social judgment about the harmfulness of homosexuality may be changing in the West, but in many cultures across the globe it's not. The climate may be becoming even more repressive with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And even in the West, many, like Santorum, doubt the wisdom of "tolerating" anything and everything. I just don't understand how you, as an Objectivist, can be so sure, just because of your deep feelings that homosexuality is "part of you as a person", that practicing homosexuality is moral or advisable. Feelings are no basis for behavior. Is the prevalence of promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse and misery among homosexuals due only to "repression" or is it something inherent in what, again, brutally, may be seen as imitation heterosexuality?
For what could be more inherent in what it means to be a man than to function as a man with a woman? And how could failure or inability - however seemingly 'hardwired' - to function as a man be anything but destructive to mental balance? And to think and act as though rejection of one's genetic role as a man should and will incur no psychological costs is simply to deny reality. You are not a "person", infinitely malleable and undefined. You are a man.

And here's my comment at the (present) end of the onslaught:

Hmm. "Stupid" "homophobe" "baffled" "must get out more" "want Wahhabism to take over the world" I'm taking notes so I can improve myself. I wonder if I'll ever be right. I think I am right about the misery that is homosexuality, though not because of some "oppression" by the "straight" tyranny we live under, but by its very nature.
It's odd to hear Objectivists defending priestly celibacy and saying people just ARE one way or another, that they can't control their behavior. Sounds like victimology to me. Because it's behavior we're talking about here, not skin color or gender. I don't think I have a "solution" for homosexuality, any more than I have one for shyness or alcoholism or child abuse or murder. I'm just trying to define what Rand meant by "man qua man". Thanks, all, I think I might be a little closer. By the way, yes, Sean, I do know there are women who behave homosexually, but I have long ago given up trying to understand how women's minds work.

I'm not a troll, really I'm not. I can control my commenting behavior any time I want. The opinions I have I don't just take out of the air. I have been sharing them with Andrew Sullivan, too. I think he's getting a little exasperated at how dense I'm being about how homosexuality is just fine and just like any other kind of sexuality. But wait, wasn't that Santorum's point, in part at least? That sexuality is controlled by the state because it's bad, and homosexuailty is just like the other kinds of bad sexuality? He may be wrong but he's at least consistent. And who would deny that sex is, after hunger and thirst, the strongest drive we have? And how do laws get made except by taking the pulse of the people? My whole point is really that one needs to take a much closer look at behavior before pronouncing it as beyond criticism like skin color or gender. Point made. How come I can't stop? How about this: having second thoughts about the wisdom of social legitimation of homosexuality is not an attack on a man but on his behavior. Could that be more obvious? But, wait, again, didn't Santorum say that too? Uh-oh, I'm becoming a gay-basher.

The Lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Now that Iraq has been delivered from the hands of the Ba’athists and most of the killing and dying and destruction has stopped, we can step back and consider what we know that we didn’t know on March 20th.

First, we know that Saddam was a paper tiger. As most, but certainly not all, military analysts had predicted, his Russian arms and rigid military hierarchy just plain didn’t work. The only part of his apparatus that surprised US military thinkers was the Fedayeen Saddam, a good part of whom turned out to be foreign terrorists. Their tactics, reminiscent of Stalin’s political police in their brutality and utter disregard for the lives of soldiers and civilians, managed to kill a small number of US troops and may have slowed down the advance to Baghdad, if only by a few days.

And we know that the Iraqi people were not deprived by sanctions or US bombing, but by Saddam. The contrasts between Saddam’s palaces and the starving people, especially in the South, prove beyond a doubt that UN oversight of the Oil-for-Food Program was, typically, non-existent and that Saddam never gave a moment’s thought to his people’s well-being, especially if they were Sunnis or Kurds. It’s important to remember how much traction the “sanctions are killing children” lies got before the war and to look around and hear the deafening silence now.

We also know that Saddam was running Terror Central. The boxes of documents we’ve uncovered will provide ammunition for years to keep the lid on terror organizations around the globe. The Left will never admit it, but the victory over Saddam was crucial to the War on Terror. The links to AlQaeda seem indisputable. The wackos among us even think links to Timothy McVeigh may surface. It's a euphoric time. The Weapons of Mass Destruction still are proving elusive, but I have a feeling they will turn up, too. After all, as I've seen a couple of places on the blogosphere, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why did he fight? He could have just laid out the disposition of the WMD that were documented after the Gulf War and probably survived the muted outcry about the Al Samoud missiles that had longer ranges than allowed. He was temporizing and resisting the inspectors for a reason. And to those who say, well, why didn't he use them in extremis then?, I say that he may very well have tried to but could find no one to carry out his orders. Or he shifted them to Syria or to Tikrit or Western Iraq at the last moment, hoping to conduct a fighting retreat and got caught by surprise, perhaps killed, when his armies folded. I will admit that exact scenario is cloudy right now. But we're still learning.

We know France, Germany and Russia are not reliable allies. Britain is. I don’t know why there hasn’t been more publicity about the overwhelming evidence of Russian double-dealing and outright hostility to US goals in Iraq. They supplied weapons, trained Iraqis and diverted intelligence. France and Germany did many of the same things, but Russia’s behavior seems, so far, to have topped them both. France seems to be taking all the heat at the moment, but I have a feeling Russia’s turn will come. I feel Putin is frozen in fear, knowing more will be revealed that will deepsix friendly relations with the US for a long time. He's almost totally dependent on IMF loans right now and cannot survive politically - perhaps physically - if the US blackballs him. The Russian arms salesmen are putting a brave face on the arms situation, touting the performance of their Cornett (sp?) anti-tank system. They don't seem to realize that's like waving a red flag to George W.

And that's another thing we know. George W. is a mensch. Sure he garbles words a bit, smiles at perhaps not quite the right time. But he means what he says and now the whole world knows it and knows the US armed forces are solidly behind his every word. That's an inestimable advantage and a huge change from Clinton. US citizens will feel safer anywhere they go. Governments around the world will respect our flag and our passports because they will know they mean something. And governments will look at the UN and know there's no "there" there. The there's in Washington, not New York. I am overcome with how different, how exactly opposite all these new bits of knowledge are from the predictions of the antiwar crowd. It's almost like war meets antiwar and peace results. A real peace this time, a just peace, a true victory.

Haiku time
Loud cars
Hippos bellow
"This river has crocodiles"

Paperwork
Leaves catch in my hair
Time for a fire

Lunchtime
The wildebeest dragged down
Lions line up

Israel as Islam in microcosm
Another tidbit I picked up from Lewis: Israel is a real puzzle, an infuriating, inexplicable conundrum for Muslim intellectuals. For millennia, since the Diaspora in about 70 A.D, Jews have lived in the Middle East and other lands that in the seventh through tenth centuries became Islamic. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many more came to live in the Middle East and North Africa. The status of the Jew was laid out in the Koran, along with that of other unbelievers. They were generally tolerated, although nowhere did they have as many or as secure rights as Muslims. Jews continued to live alongside Muslims until the establishment of Israel in 1948. Then, most were expelled from Islamic lands like Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Libya, among many others. This movement of over a million Jews can be seen as the mirror image of the Palestinian "Naqba", when, for whatever reasons (I'm not getting into all that!) many Arabs who had lived in what is now Israel left. Other Jews, of course, came from Europe to Israel.
The frustrating fact for the Arab intellectual is that when the Jews who for millennia had lived in the Islamic world came to Israel, they prospered on the whole as well as the Jews from the West. And even the over a million Arabs who stayed in Israel did much better than their brethren who left and went to UN-sponsored terrorist nests in the West Bank and Gaza or to other Islamic lands. So it isn't contact with Islam, growing up in an Islamic society, race or religion that makes Islam so poor compared to the shining city on a hill that, despite the best efforts of the terrorists, Israel has become. It's not being in the Middle East, or being persecuted by the West - who was more persecuted than the Jews by Europeans? Judaism had been regarded with "contempt", Lewis says, by the Islamic world, even though the faith followed and provided much of the tradition of Islam. It just wasn't as developed as Mohammedanism. Mohammed as the "last prophet" had gone beyond Moses, Abraham and especially Jesus and had brought religion to its final perfection. So why then does the Islamic world seem powerless today? In Israel the West and the East had met and successfully synthesized a powerful and wealthy society, based on a religion chastised by Mohammed as imperfect! Why could the same process not work in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq? Perhaps it can. Perhaps the Islamic world's mistake is in not taking Israel as an example rather than a reproach. We in the US should not be hesitant to play the role of the new Mongols, shaking things up and allowing the consideration of such heretical ideas as religious equality, capitalism, and separation of church and state if that intervention can bring the Islamic world to a better place. No guarantees!

What's going right
I just finished reading Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong?", a survey of the relative decline of the Muslim world. What a time to read such a book! I'm reminded that the border between present-day Iraq and Iran was for centuries the border between the Arab caliphate and the Persian world. Baghdad, at least until the last time it was conquered, in 1258, was the outpost, marking the extent of Islamic power to the rest of the world. With the conquest by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the later expansion by the Turks into the Persian and Arab lands, Baghdad became less important. Looking through Muslim eyes, a conquest of Baghdad can be expected to have consequences. Also looking through Muslim, and especially fanatical Muslim eyes, the toppling of the statues of Saddam takes on an importance not much remarked on in the West. The modern, quasi-Fascist regimes of Saddam in Iraq, the Assads in Syria, Pahlevi in Iran and, to a lesser extent, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, have been blamed for much of the weakness of the modern Islamic world, especially after the cataclysmic losses to Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and the continuing failure of the Palestinians to push the Jews into the sea. In classic Islam, statues were forbidden. Even portraits were not considered kosher (ha!), although, as Lewis points out, that stricture was much ignored, especially by the Ottomans. Few Americans realize how much modernization was attempted by the authoritarian Islamic regimes and how much these measures, such as the education of women and the introduction of infidel science, were resented in the Muslim world. The Iranian revolution in 1979 gave us a clue. The Shi'ite resurgence in Karbala and Najaf last week is another sign of that deeply conservative strain. So, to topple a statue is not just a rejection of the regime of Saddam, who did after all have a Koran written in his own blood. It's also a rejection of Westernism and infidel ideas such as statues. The discovery of pornographic paintings and liquor in Saddam's henchmen's hideaways would have reinforced this impression. To hear the Shi'ites cry "Down with Saddam" and then in the next breath, "Down with America" seems to say the least ungrateful. But it's perfectly consistent. The fall of Saddam is a gift of Allah, a conquest over modernity and the infidel. It is not surprising that Allah used the Americans and the British to accomplish this. Didn't he use the infidel Mongols in 1258 to sweep aside the Persians? Did not this conquest lead to the expansion of Islam? Looking from Isfahan and Qom, it might seem that the tide has turned against the Sunni, thanks to the M1A1 and GPS-guided bombing. It's a funny world.

Muhammad-envy
OK, so I've just read Bernard Lewis's "The Middle East' and think I know all about it. And I've had a bit of Pusser's rum, which let's face it most of the British mariners who in the sixteen hundreds landing at Byzantium had also had. And heard the muezzin and seen the mosaics. But I think Tommy Franks and Rumsfeld and W. and even Chalabi himself have perhaps a case of envy of the Prophet. For who could have foreseen this, one year ago? Who could have imagined, as Zappa said of Kansas, who could have conceived of the freak-out, as Zappa said of creamcheese, and here we are in Najaf and Karbala and Mosul and Baghdad itself, the home of the caliphs? This is history, folks, history of the American sort, revenge of the Yankee kind, millions for defense but not one cent for oil.

Randi on a roll
James Randi has a great website. His current weekly journal is a corker - astrology, numerology, witchcraft, atheism, Pepys - how can he hit so many of my hot buttons at once? Read. My only difference with Randi - other than that his name is just one character away from Ayn Rand's - an obvious clue that he's sub-etherically connected to her spirit - is that he leaves no room at all for the influence of the unknown. Maybe that's what makes me an agnostic rather than an atheist. I don't pretend to know for sure that there is not and could never be a God as conceived by the religionists, even Vernon Howard. I would consider it a tragedy if the question were uncontrovertibly resolved one way or the other, since that would spell the end of inquiry. But I do know for sure Uri Geller cannot bend spoons with his mind.

Stop, go, honk
Can't believe this NY Times article where they say that without working traffic lights, Baghdad is in chaos. I've never been to Baghdad, but in Cairo, no one pays any attention to traffic lights, unless there's an armed guard standing at the intersection, which there hardly ever is. They just steam right through, standing on their horns, merging wildly with whoever is coming from whatever other direction. The concept of obeying a traffic regulation when there are no immediate consequences is foreign to the Arab world. But these same people will voluntarily refrain from even having a drink of water all day in Ramadan because the Koran is interpreted to say they have to. Maybe it's because traffic lights are a Western innovation, or because if you can't depend on Allah to protect you from dying in a traffic accident, what's the use of all that praying and refraining anyway?

Complete victory?
Well, maybe not completely, totally, utterly, incontrovertibly, but pretty darn close. Abbu Abbas has been captured - in Baghdad! And over 100 prisoners have been released from Saddam's Security Police HQ in Baghdad. And I passed the bar exam! Quite efficiently, I might add. So a good day was had by me.

Yes/No
I get my Florida bar exam results tomorrow. Thumbs up or thumbs down. I am somewhat miffed to think that a few words on a piece of paper will determine how I spend the next three and a half months, either setting up my future or going back over mountains of material to be ready for the July 29 exam. This powerless feeling may be good therapy, though. And in either case I'll have to wait a few more months to be vetted by the background screening, which seems to be on a par with that accorded candidates for CIA cryptology slots. I never want to get myself in this situation again. Now that I no longer own a car, I am a bit freer. I no longer am chained to auto insurance and loan payments. Now if I can divest myself of my debts, my house, my job, perhaps I can taste freedom, more, pace Janis Joplin, than "nothing left to lose" but certainly including that concept.

Update
The big day is here, and of course the web page listing the results of the exam is unreachable. I've been watching with interest my reactions in these last hours. I never realized how profoundly physical nervousness is. I am periodically flooded with adrenalin, producing "butterflies in the stomach" and shaky hands and mental confusion. As Vernon Howard instructs, I do not try to repress these feelings, just observe them with interest. They are much more widespread and intense than I had ever noticed before, once you really look at them. I don't like them. I want to be free of such feelings forever. The fear complex will go away, so VH teaches, just by letting it have free rein and not seeing it as a failing, thereby giving it power. It's making me nearly sick to my stomach. But I know it's false, artificial. So I can do anything I want. I can wait for the letter, which should come tomorrow, or go to the web site any time I want. I don't have to let my fear programming, product of my conditioned self, dictate my actions. Either outcome is equally tolerable. In fact, I have come up with good reasons why failing may even be better. I would be forced to study the law intensively for another three months, therefore becoming more learned and, presumably, competent. The other path of the future, passing and being certified, is less certain, perhaps, therefore, more nerve-wracking. But that could also be interesting, as it's a second chance to do what I didn't do when I passed the New Hampshire bar in 1985, that is, create a satisfying legal career. I'll be back with the full results and my conditioned self's reactions whenever I can get them. Hey, it's different from the war news!

Tehran thinks again
The Iranian regime - why is it whenever I see that word, I subconsciously put "change" after it? - seems to be wasting no time looking at its bread and determining which side has the butter :
"Now that the ruling ayatollahs have realised the danger that looms over their head, that this American Administration is serious in its menaces, they try to get out of the pit in which they had plunged themselves", commented Mr. Ahmad Ahrar, a seasoned political analyst.
You don't think their stance could have been affected by remembering that the most modern tanks they have are Russian T-72s? Yes, those same T-72s that in the "vaunted elite" Iraqi Republican Guards' hands never landed a single shot on any of the US tanks and were wiped out to the number of nearly 800? That consideration could concentrate one's attention. As well as the thought that the new democratic government in Baghdad may eventually acquire some Abrams and Bradleys and some real military training and the esprit de corps that democracy can inspire. You have to admit, however, that the Persians have a talent for realpolitik:
"Our ideology is flexible. We can choose our interests on the basis of Islam. Still, to put the country in jeopardy on the ground that we are acting on an Islamic basis is not at all Islamic", he said, noting that Iran's stance of distancing itself from the US is "political rather than religious".
As Reynolds would say, "heh!". (Has he copyrighted that yet?)

Appointment in Samarrah
The wonderful news of the freeing of most of the prisoners of war who had been captured in the 507th Maintenance Group's contretemps in Iraq was made more interesting by the fact that it occurred near Samarrah, a name that has certain connections:

Appointment in Samarra


A merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the market.
The servant returned, trembling and frightened. The
servant told the merchant, "I was jostled in the market,
turned around, and saw Death.

"Death made a threatening gesture, and I fled in terror.
May I please borrow your horse? I can leave Baghdad
and ride to Samarra, where Death will not find me."

The master lent his horse to the servant, who rode away,
to Samarra.

Later the merchant went to the market, and saw Death in
the crowd. "Why did you threaten my servant?" He asked.

Death replied,"I did not threaten your servant. It was
merely that I was surprised to see him here in Baghdad,
for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."


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December 2002


And it has been used as an analogy by a famous writer. Perhaps it's another case of an oracle being misinterpreted. It may be the collectivists who came to grief at Samarra.

Lies and delusions
Just when I thought the Guardian might have been coming out of its anti-Bush hysteria, it prints a tissue of lies and insults and denials of reality that stagger even me. At some point one finds it impossible to believe that anyone can honestly think this way. The wishing away of the pictures of liberation in Baghdad in this screed becomes more than an emotional response, it appears as an intentional weapon to strike back at anyone who could possibly think Bush and the American military could ever anywhere do anything right. And it refutes itself, just as the leftists yesterday, so I heard (can't find the link) compared the toppling of Saddam's statues to the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan. Huh? Sometimes I just have to accept that people are speaking an entirely different language from the one that I use to describe reality. And they're doing it with evil intent. As far as I'm concerned, they can go join Saddam in his sewer and wait for the MOAB to come visit. Look at this idiocy:

Not even the smallest part of the anti-war argument rested on any illusion that a broken-backed third world regime could win a set-piece military confrontation with the most technologically advanced fighting force in history

Has this writer even been watching the news? Saddam was not defeated in a "set piece military confrontation". He was defeated because his fighters would not fight and because hardly any of his citizens respected him. Only foreign mercenaries stood up to the US military and their intent seems to have been more like that of a suicide bomber than a soldier. Notice also his equation of democracy with the UN. And how many members of the UN are democracies? Not a majority, not even on the Security Council. Certainly not on the Disarmament and Anti-Proliferation committees. And in how many countries has the UN effectively installed democracy? Hint: it's a whole number between -1 and +1. In many ways it's good for one's enemies to be blind and embittered. It's useful to be the only ones able to see the truth. But it's frustrating that some actual human being can live with a brain so screwed up as Seumas Milne's. Unfortunately, some of the same kind of cementheads run entire countries.

Where's my oil?
We all know this war was fought only for the Iraqis' oil, right? So, when am I going to get my share? It's going to be great, not having to go down to the gas station any more. But wait a minute, where am I going to put it? Saddam had the second-largest proved reserves in the world. I must be due for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of gallons. Guess I'll have to put in one of those underground tanks.

The Nothing-but-spin Zone
The Iranians are as shocked as most other Middle Easterners about the victory for freedom in Iraq. But they've adopted immediately a bizarre set of conspiracy theories. Conveniently, these theories explain that Islamic armed might was not defeated by the armed might of the US. The armed forces were sold out by the leaders of Iraq, whom the Iranians have several hundred thousand reasons to hate. If the army had not been "stabbed in the back", the despised Satanic Crusaders wouldn't have stood a chance. This is convenient for Iran because it defuses criticism of armies like those of Iran. The Iranian army would not do any better against the US Army and Marines than the Vaunted Elite Republican Guard did. But the sellout theory allows the Iranians to keep living in their dream world.

I shoulda known
I should have known there was a reason why the great victory for freedom in Iraq is really a bad thing. I also should have known the Guardian would enlighten me. Of course. Anything that makes Arab intellectuals feel depressed has got to be a disaster, eventually. I mean, those intellectuals have called every turn in the history of the Middle East, right? The fall of Israel in 1967. The triumph of socialism in the world, vindicating the collectivism of generations of Arab intellectuals. The quagmire in Afghanistan. And now the fierce resistance of the oh-so-nationalistic Iraqis defending their bloody monster of a leader and his fiend-children. Well, I suppose sooner or later Arab intellectuals have to be right about something. But I won't hold my breath.