Annex Canada

Canada is having trouble financing its armed forces, which have sunk to a low ebb. Maybe this is a good thing. A few companies of Marines on rotation back from Iraq or Afghanistan could come back through Ottawa and take over Canada with little or no opposition. The French-Canadians would of course surrender immediately and most of Western Canada would breathe a huge sigh of relief. We'd be connected by land to Alaska and would gain enormous reserves of oil, gas, nickel, uranium and fish. And we'd never have to worry about ice supplies. Disney could build "Polar Bear Land" and give the Indians and Eskimos jobs. The only big problem would be the health care bureaucrats and other freeloaders who would have to be retrained to be productive. Best of all, we'd have a lifetime supply of native comedians. Who's going to stop us? France?!

Kerry AWOL in the War on Terror
Kerry has been attacking President Bush for being "AWOL" thirty years ago by serving in the National Guard. Yet Kerry himself has been AWOL for years in the war on terror. "Serving" in the Senate carries with it an obligation to fight for your country. What has Kerry done in the last twenty years to make the world safe from terrorism? He voted against the First Gulf War. When this position drew hostile fire, Kerry turned tail and ran, voting last year for the Second Gulf War. Then, when he saw that wasn't the best political position to garner the Democratic nomination, he surrendered to the French and voted against follow-up funding for the troops in Iraq. In his twenty years in the Senate, he was AWOL repeatedly when his vote was needed to support intelligence funding and many weapon systems which could have convinced the terrorists that we were serious about defeating them. But then, of course, we would also have to have had a President who would fight for the country and not just for his right to seduce interns without penalty.

Tactics on yag marriage

A lot of debate is going on about how to deal with the political side of yag "marriage". Should there be a constitutional amendment to define marriage as "the union between one man and one woman"? Will activist judges find a right in the Constitution for yags to get married to people of their own sex? Even though straights will not have this right? Or would they? Hmm. Anyway. The politicians would be best advised to try to get the proponents of yag marriage to fight for a constitutional amendment establishing such a right, as I advocated before. So maybe the first step is not the "Defense of Marriage Act" but a finding that such a major change in the constitutional powers must come through an amendment process. So then all the arguments can be channeled into a decades-long amendment fight, like the ERA struggle in the '70s that was overtaken by evolutionary change. Then Bush can say he was leaving the decision to the people and not have to come out for or against the concept. That always makes politicians happy. All the activists, advocates and "progressives" will have a huge battle to engage in that will safely divert their energies. So they'll be happy. And they'll lose. Which will make me happy.

Fish or foul or yag?

The hubbub about gay marriage licenses being handed out like - well, like condoms at a high school - in San Francisco, couldn't help but remind me of the Monty Python skit about the fellow who comes in to a county office to renew his fish license. Remember? John Cleese says, "No, you can't have a fish license. We only license dogs." So Eric Idle, I think, shows him a paper which appears to say "Fish license". Cleese objects that he has crossed out the word "Dog" and put in the word "Fish". Similarly, in SF, apparently homosexuals have been altering standard marriage licenses. They've crossed out the words "Bride" and "Groom" and replaced them with "Applicant 1" and "Applicant 2" !! Or "Spouse for Life" or something as absurd. Parody is dead. Nothing remains to mock that hasn't been mocked by its own self. And of course, this is not supposed to affect in any way the nature of heterosexual marriage. Somehow "Here comes the Applicant 2" doesn't have quite the cachet of "Here comes the Bride".

Say, why is it these counter-culture "yags" = reverse gay, because they're not = are so into getting official sanction for their relationships? I thought they were going to overthrow old forms, not squeeze themselves into them like a bearded middleaged "Applicant 2" squeezing his paunch into a wedding gown? I guess the only consolation is that a family whose children all became yags would cease to exist.

Update: WorldNetDaily has more.

The Love Conundrum
This whole gay marriage thing is really getting me bothered. It should be put up to a constitutional amendment process, for the simple reason that no one in his right mind could contend that the Federal Constitution, or that of any state, authorized the state to make laws about marriage as a "right" - or a privilege - pertaining to any arrangement other than that between one man and one woman. Does anyone seriously maintain any other position? Oh, that's right. Some of us nutty objectivists do say the state shouldn't have any power over marriage or - especially - love, since IT'S NOT MENTIONED IN ANY CONSTITUTION!!! This power has been extracted from constitutions by courts, who have also inferred other nutty powers. Taxation of income and female suffrage and ending slavery required amendments because the court system found that they were contrary to the constitution as written. Does anyone sincerely think the idea of gay "marriage" would survive the constitutional amendment process?

How would such an amendment read? How could it logically exclude polygamy, incest, even pedophilia? If the ground of a relationship legalized by state action is that the participants love each other, shouldn't that factor be subject to proof? How can people prove they love each other? Nowadays, a man and a woman do not have to prove they love each other in order to get married. They DO have to prove, if challenged, that they are man and woman, not man and frog or woman and Beast. But that's the only requirement. So how about it? What's the legally sufficient proof of love? PET scan results?

Why no second attack?
Charles Krauthammer puts together some reasons why Al Qaeda has not attacked the US again after 9/11. He leaves out one. Maybe Al Qaeda expected the US to fall apart and appease them, as Clinton did after the first WTC attack, Khobar Towers and the USS Cole. When their attack led only to the toppling of the Taliban and Saddam, they may have said to themselves, "Hmm, guess we won't do that again! Not with that W guy in there!" Bin Laden probably has a better idea than most Americans of what can happen to him if he makes the US under George W. Bush any angrier than it already is. Better to go attack Australians in Bali and even Saudis than risk full extirpation. He'll bide his time until Kerry gets in and is thinking more of interns than protecting America.

Let us hippies speak!
I've been listening with some bemusement to John Kerry claiming that he is a "patriot" because he volunteered to go to VietNam and then protested against the war when he got back. Well, I don't feel the same way now, but back in the Sixties, I was thoroughly against the war. I wouldn't ever have harassed troops coming back from VietNam, especially if they were draftees, but I hated - yes, hated - anyone who went voluntarily. Now that Kerry is claiming political capital because he went and fought - and also because he protested - I can't believeanyone is taking him seriously. If you absolutely positively couldn't get out of the draft and felt you must volunteer to get a commission or for whatever reason - like running for President in thirty years - the only morally correct thing you could do, short of going to Canada, would be to get a place in the National Guard and show up as little as possible. So Bush was the real moral patriot.
And why is any of this relevant now, when all the services are one hundred percent volunteer? And when so many of us feel strongly that America should not be ruled by Osama bin Laden, isn't the situation a little bit different?

Marriage every which way
Now that a Massachusetts "court" has "ruled" that the legislature must allow gay marriage - and what exactly gives them the legitimate power to dictate to the legislature in this way? - it has become clear that marriage rights are now open to all. If you are a man, why must you be "gay" in order to marry another man, to get benefits or dower rights or hospital visitation or whatever? Aren't the courts going to need a definition of "gay" to determine whether two men are allowed to marry by the new laws? What is that definition, anyway? Are you gay if you say you're gay? That didn't work for the Philadelphia firefighters who claimed to be minorities on the basis of a great-grandmother they asserted was part Negro. They were subject to a judicial examination of their bloodlines worthy of Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. So we'll doubtless need a national certification agency to investigate, examine and analyze those who claim to have a certain habit of mind that matches the legal definition of "homosexual". Oh, Joy. More work for lawyers, psychiatrists and philosophers. Will a "couple" have to prove a certain level of "love" to get a license? How exactly would that concept be quantified? I really love cole slaw. I expect it to be my constant companion until my Creator claims me. Oh, I may stray in the direction of potato salad now and again, once I get off this Atkins kick, but if a psychologist put me in a darkened room and flashed pictures of food on a screen and measured my pupillary dilation, I'm sure good old slaw would always produce a reaction reaching the legal minimum.

Evil Bread
Going back on Atkins and getting the good old energy boost and clear thinking, I ruminate on the evil of bread. Man used to eat mostly meat, before agriculture. After agriculture came along, the tribe of Man grew in numbers, but only the nobles had a good supply of meat. The peasants ate carbohydrates, dooming them to stupidity and inertia. Now that capitalism has made it possible to supply everyone with cheap meat, a new utopia awaits. Everyone can have the mind of a Charlemagne, a Caesar. Carnivores have always ruled. Now we can all rule ourselves. The only necessity is the exposure once and for all of the evil of starches and sugars. The FDA should stop harassing smokers and start rooting out the real evil - carbohydrates. Only by utterly eliminating the temptations of fresh-baked bread, steaming pasta and twinkling jellie candies will we achieve our real potential as men.

Clark is as Dean was
As the eternally fascinating NH primary draws closer, Dean looks weaker and weaker. In the latest poll on Real Clear Politics, he's in third place, with Clark and Edwards jostling each other to take over second. Clark is what Dean was: the "unknown quantity" that all the Bush-haters - meaning, nowadays, every Democrat except Joe Lieberman - hope will prove to be the silver bullet to stop Bush. Many Dems don't see John Kerry as having staying power, especially in the South. As the outlines of Clark become clearer, though, it's apparent there's something monstrous hidden behind his four stars and deer-in-the-headlights stare. If with Clinton there was nothing there except naked lust for power, with Clark there's nothing there at all. His handlers have apparently told him to deny saying everything he ever said that contradicts the position he wants to take in any particular situation. And then counterattack, like a good general. If Clinton was the first black president, Clark would be, in the infinitesimally possible event that he makes it, the first president with no grasp on reality at all.

If Dean comes in third or worse in NH, he's done. The combination of a rejuvenated Kerry and homeboy Edwards in South Carolina will doom him there. General Clark has to pull rank on Lieutenant Kerry at every opportunity and I don't think that will work. Regular soldiers don't like Generals. Grunts outnumber brass. And his general buddies wouldn't vote for him to save their souls. So who's left? The Clintons? Maybe (pleasepleaseplease!) their support of Napoleon XIV will be the beginning of their political decline. Think about what Kerry and Ted Kennedy will do with the Democrat Party apparatus if Kerry becomes the nominee. Doesn't look too good for McAuliffe and the Beelzebubbas. But it's all good for Bush, so far.

Wes Clark and New Hampshire taxes
I heard - no link, sorry - that Wes Clark has been saying to New Hampshire voters that their problems - which he of course promises to solve - can be traced to the fact that New Hampshire has no sales or income taxes. Has no one told him that New Hampshire politics are based on not having a sales or income taxes? I lived in NH for decades and saw many Dem candidates shrivel up and die when they appeared to be advocating more taxes. Even Jeanne Shaheen, the former Dem governor, carefully avoided trying to push sales and income taxes. For one thing, if a sales tax were imposed, the border communities would immediately lose millions of dollars of sales to Taxachusetts consumers. This includes massive liquor store sales on Route 93 from state liquor stores that would lose both profits and liquor taxes for the state. An income tax would mean fewer Mass. workers living in southern NH and paying the increasing property taxes. And of course the infamous 8% (or is it more now?) rooms and meals tax would still be in place, soaking tourists. For Newhampshiremen, taxes are something tourists pay so they can keep their money where it belongs. Clark's tin ear strikes again.

Unopposed
Well, it's happened. Here it is October 1, 2004, and the Democrats have decided not to put up a candidate to oppose President Bush in the November election. Oh, there are a few nutcase fringies out there, like the totally discredited Wesley Clark, who, after admitting that he had participated directly in creating the war plans for invading Iraq, only to disavow all knowledge of them. He is polling at less than one percent in what's left of the polls. It's been a bad summer for the pollsters. Every credible Democratic candidate self-destructed in one way or another before the Democratic Convention in Boston. On the coldest day in August in thirty-seven years, the convention broke up in fistfights over whether global warming or a new ice age was the bigger threat to the world's oppressed.

Still waiting
Drudgereport has broken a story about Wesley Clark that may just torpedo his candidacy below the waterline. It simply points out that Clark was an enthusiastic advocate of the invasion of Iraq in testimony before a Congressional committee not long before the war, and just before most of the Democrats voted for it. I keep checking, though, and none of the big media outlets have picked up on the glaring inconsistencies of Clark's statements about the war since, especially his repeated declarations that he was "always" against the war. This is psycho territory. Maybe the big boys want to make sure the transcripts are accurate before they run with the story. Or maybe - just maybe - they are reflexively covering for a Democratic candidate they think may have a better chance than Dean of beating Bush. Which is damning with faint praise, anyway!

Just tryin' to get through the territory
In Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, Robert Urich plays a cowboy who's strung up by a sheriff played by Robert Duvall. He had been riding with a couple of psychotic killers. He pleaded that he wasn't part of the gang, he never did anything bad, he was "just tryin' to get through the territory". He had to ride with the bad guys for protection from Indians, starvation, other bad guys and, I guess, just to find his way.

Tennis and Democrats

So you're playing in the finals at Wimbledon. The first set goes well, but it takes a tiebreaker for you to win it 7-6. Phew. The next set you totally lose it. Your serves crash the net six ways from Sunday. Your opponent, a crafty veteran, perks up and crushes you 0-6. But you get your second wind. Perhaps the Queen smiles at you and you are inspired. At any rate, you win set 3 in another tiebreaker 7-6. Then the Queen leaves and you nosedive into another bagel job in the fourth set, 0-6. It's all tied two sets apiece, but your opponent is looking for an easy win. You glance appealingly around the crowd, hoping for any stimulus to get you going. And there she is in the sixth row waving at you, your long-lost girlfriend from Bulgaria. You thought you'd never see her again. Even though you're about done in, you must impress her. After all, she left you because she was convinced you'd never make it on the big-time tennis circuit. You pick things up and manage, just, to squeak out the winning point in a tiebreaker, 7-6. You've won! Wimbledon Champion!

Or so you think. The fans, the officials, the media agree. You get your prize money. Only your opponent doesn't think so. He stomps off the court, his face like thunder, refusing to shake hands or accept his runnerup prize. The next day he comes up to you and insists that he should have won the championship. He shows you the scoresheet. He says that because the sheet shows that he won 30 games when you won 21 and that he won many more points than you did, that he should receive the championship. You don't know what to say. He knows the rules. He's been playing by them for years. He knows that players take the rules into account in determining their strategy. For instance, a player behind by two breaks of service may let a set go and play harder in the next set, as you did. But the opponent is adamant. He calls you a thief, a liar, a dishonest player. And all the time you have played and won exactly according to the rules. And you know for certain that if your opponent were in your shoes, he would take the prize and not think about it for a second.

"Otherwise unwelcome consequences"

The Guardian, biting back its bile, has reported a speech by the "stupid frat boy" about Libya's sudden compliance with rational and civilized requirements for admitting to its development and possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, which the Left has uniformly said no Arabs ever really had and the Bushies were just lying about so they could get oil for Halliburton and blood for Jewish holiday matzohs. Funny, isn't it, how the spectacle of the great blood-thirsty warrior dragged out of a rathole by GIs inspires second thoughts on all this America-bashing? Perhaps we can send Qaddafi to Chad to be tried. I'm sure they'll be quite understanding about his treatment of their people, which after all hasn't been that different from how Semitic Muslim Arabs have treated black animist Africans for, oh, the last fifteen hundred years or so. And for their sins, they get Michael Jackson!

Keeper
Michael Crichton has made a speech (found through Colby Cosh, my favorite Alberta-blogger) to the Commonwealth Society in which he says almost everything I've ever said about the environmental movement in a few paragraphs. The point:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

The only part he leaves out is about the ozone hole - oh, and acid rain. But the idea of the "Eden Myth" I've been ranting about for decades is there in the most articulate form I can conceive of. He is, after all, a professional. And the speech confirms the context of Jurassic Park that was left out of the movie - the incomprehensible complexity of life, which Man can never control or destroy no matter what he does. Read it.

Hard day - night!
I've had a long day firing my AK-47 into the air around Tallahassee and handing out candy to the local ragamuffins and partaking liberally of non-Islamic libations to celebrate the political demise of one of history's worst tyrants. So I go to bed much more optimistic about the future course of events in the Middle East. And in the War on Terror. Think bin Laden is digging his hidey-hole a little deeper? Assuming he wasn't buried deep within a mountain months ago, which is likely.

Here's the Iranian take. The mullahs are cynical old beards, aren't they? I wonder what "Hoseyn" may have to say about them and their terroristic activities? I suppose eventually Saddam, instead of getting "the chair" will get a chair in intenational politics at some Old European university, if we make the mistake of letting him be tried by the World Court or some other such contradiction in terms. Maybe that will be his price for not telling all about Chira(q) and Schroeder and all the other appeasers. So let the Iraqis deal with him. Maybe they'll freeze him and put his body behind glass in a memorial to his victims.

Fin de parcours!
End of the road, Baby! Even LeMonde is forced to admit that the great ami of Chira(q) is done for. No more weapon sales, sales de cochons! No more twitting the US about how unrealistic and naive it is to think that Arabs can actually govern themselves in a democracy. Of course the Froggies, from whom I have liberated a car, do have to put in "soutenu d'abord par l'Occident avant d'etre diabolise" as a descriptor of Saddam. Sorry, I'm not going to go get accent marks for Frogs' sakes. And I mean. "Made into a devil"?? Maybe, just maybe some of his own actions, like KILLING MILLIONS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE may have effectively diabolized him, or made his evil clear. And another thing "Axe du Mal" doesn't quite convey the meaning of Axis of Evil. He's not just "bad". He's EVIL, darn it! Say, you don't think they're still mad about that "Axis of Weasels" thing, do you? Aww.. I'm so sympathetic.

Got him!

Even Drudge doesn't have this yet. Nor Instapundit. Saddam has been captured!! Alive, with NO resistance. The old murderer didn't even have the guts to go down fighting like his sons. He's been hiding in a hole clutching money for months, apparently. Please God let there be a public execution. Oh, after a trial, of course. The course of history has just changed. What are the Dems going to say now? Time to celebrate!!

Non-Brights
I went to this Bright site from James Randi's www.randi.org. Then I started thinking, "Hey, how's this any different from good old-fashioned revivalist Objectivism?" Then I started thinking some more, "Hey, these guys think they're so "bright", how do they explain the absence from their ranks of some darn "bright" people?" And also, I mean, how dare they say they know what "Bright" is? And they pretend that they don't mean by "Bright" what we peons call "smart". Right. This is just Mensa lite or "brite"! I thought their hero Stephen Jay Gould demolished the concept of intelligence in "The Mismeasure of Man". But OK. How tiring. I guess I actually have to read some of their stuff, maybe even an article in the Jayson Blair Times, to figure out what they mean by "Bright". Like it's worth it. The prospect's almost as enticing as reading Andrew Sullivan's books to find out how he reconciles homosexuality with a Catholicism that has been burning faggots for millennia. Like I really want to wade through hours of poufter self-deception.

But I may do that. Right now, off the top of my head, I can name Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, Voltaire, Darwin, Faraday, Plato, Kant, Socrates, Aristotle and Augustine among those whose "worldview" was not "free of supernatural or mystical deities, forces, and entities". I guess they just weren't "Bright" enough to realize that the question of the existence and efficacy of forces unknown to Man had been settled once and for all. But as I say, I haven't read Brightthought. I'll check it out.

Hitchens the iconoclast


Frontpage has an interesting if frustrating interview with Christopher Hitchens, mostly about leftists and the War on Terror. Predictably, however, Hitchens is not predictable or ordinary. Sometimes it's hard to imagine what might be going on in his head. But the spectacle is entertaining.

Patriotism and America
I've been thinking about this for a long time. Patriotism is usually defined as a deep emotional loyalty to the land where one - or one's fathers (patri) - were born. Not very many Americans go back very far in America, compared to the rest of the world. My father was born in England. But I feel a deep sense of what seems like patriotism for America. I always felt somewhat guilty about this, growing up in liberal America and spending a good deal of childhood time in liberal Europe. The Europeans especially are eager to point out the irrationality of patriotism based solely on birth. Germans died by the millions for Hitler and Russians for Stalin because of a patriotism with little justifiable ideological basis. Their sacrifices arguably led to worse results for their homelands, not better. Even the "democracies" sacrificed generations of their young men just to see empires wither away and national glory decline. So how can an American feel patriotism? Isn't it just for suckers?

Once you remove the patriotism stemming from birth, the feeling for a patch of ground where your mother and sisters and children huddle together, counting on you in the front lines to protect them from a murderous enemy, a man can only feel patriotism that stems from a superior ideology. The only possible justification for fighting and dying for your country would be if that country's ideology would make mankind in general happier and safer and more prosperous. Certainly many young men died in the Spanish Civil War and in the Cold War for that sort of ideology. I don't doubt that the feeling that led Orwell and the other Republicans to risk their lives in Catalonia in 1936 and, as it turned out, futilely, was quite different from the patriotism of a Chinese villager fighting invading Japanese in the thirties and forties of the last century. But now their collectivism has been exposed as a fraud and sham, at the cost of millions of families starved and shot and transported and worked to death with nothing to show for their lives. So how can one possibly say that the American ideology is worth dying for. Every one of those soldiers in Iraq who dies from a cowardly roadside bomb or an RPG or a fanatic suicide bomber must have been motivated to risk his life by some ideology. Perhaps most of them went just because of old-fashioned patriotism, to protect Americans from another 9-11-01, perhaps some to gain glory, to test themselves as men in the ultimate video game.

But many Americans feel a different kind of patriotism, based on the conviction that limited constitutional government really IS superior to all other forms yet tried. This ideology specifically is not based on race or religion or language. It's based on hope. Optimism is the great gift that America has for the world. Oh, I don't think most soldiers think of things in technical political terms. They just have a sense of freedom, of what economic opportunity means to people. And when they get off the plane in the Middle East and hear the all-suffocating wail of the muezzin five times a day throughout every little hamlet and big city, see peasants plowing fields behind water buffalo and living in mud houses, barely able to feed their children, they inevitably compare their own childhoods, with universal education and food and hygiene and luxuries the average Iraqi could not dream of. And they must think, yes, it's true. Freedom is better.

Aleatory automobile
The Peugeot 505 I bought for $1950 is a true adventure I felt a bit bad about buying anything French, but then I figured I was simply liberating the car from the clutches of the America-haters. Like a French woman, though, the Peugeot presents a different personality every day. Some days everything works, she smiles and hums and pleases me without my having to ask. Other days the turn signals don't work, the ABS light comes on, the cooling system overheats and the transmission seems on the verge of dropping out of the car every other second. But exerting my male mastery has so far kept her obedient, even submissive. I've learned a lot about her moods. I bring her presents, like octane booster, a tire gauge, a funnel for filling fluids. I'm sure she's going to dump me in the middle of nowhere some day, but it's been worth it so far, for those glorious sunny days when fourth gear kicks in and she zooms past everything on the highway, smooth and cool as a summer breeze. Not bad for an old gal. I wonder if it's true that French women get better as they get older. I'll have to find out! I actually found some Peugeot sites on the web, like this mailing list directory and this list of links. Could this be the start of a harem of seductive beauties from many different lands? I'm still on the lookout for an early '70s MG Midget. And I'd love an Alfa, a Lancia, an old three-cylinder Saab. Ah, so many cars, so little time and money!

More fiction
Browsing through Lou Salome's "Nietzsche", (University of Illinois Press, 1988) what should I find but ten aphorisms for writers:

Toward the Teaching of Style
1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely, "what-and-what do I wish to say and present," before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker's means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation; of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything - the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments - like gestures.
6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one's readers of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one's reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

That old Friedrich Wilhelm! He sure does set the mind a-thinking. Numbers 8 and 9 are beautifully clear and compelling, but insanely difficult to practice.

Governmentium
Just in case anyone missed Frontpagemag.com today, it has a link to a religious site that, nonetheless, offers this. As a government worker, I can testify to the scientific truth of the author's observation of governmentium, proven through many controlled experiments, all too easily reproduced in any environment on God's green earth.

Soldier of the Legion

Marshall S. Thomas has written a spectacular story which I bought and read. It's impossible not to get caught up in the action. At the end he keeps the reader in delicious suspense, agog for the sequel, which I am assured by the author is written and ready to be sent to the publisher. I can give no higher recommendation than to say that I haven't read science fiction for decades, weary of pedestrian plots and outlandish characters meant to shock as much as entertain. Legion is different. Read it.

I woke up this morning and I had myself a blog
Oh, yeah, I woke up this morning and I had myself a blo-og
The future's uncertain and the end is always - Pog??

OK so there's no good rhyme. As the proud owner of a 1987 Peugeot 505 STX, though, I think I'm justified in saying that this life takes you places you never thought you'd go. I was going to buy a brand new Kia, for the warranty. But I didn't see chaining myself to a six-year payment plan to pay ten thousand dollars for a chintzy Korean car that will be worth three thousand dollars in four years, when I'll still have six thousand dollars to pay on it. SO I went for the six-cylinder, automatic transmission, power sunroof, air-conditioned rugged if irredeemably Frankish Peugeot. Drives like a dream, it does, although those suspicious "clunks" coming from the automatic transmission should have given a wise man pause. But wise men tell no tales. No, that's dead men. Well, actually, that could apply to both, one by definition, one by prudence. Time for more coffee...

Michael Jackson and Gay Marriage

As the case against Michael Jackson gets more and more watertight, his defenders are backed into a corner. If all they had against them was a 45-year-old man sleeping in the same bed with preteen boys unrelated to him, they would still be in serious trouble. Who else, famous or not, could survive such confessed behavior? What other sane man, in this day and age, would do such a thing without thinking, "Hey, wait a minute, this could get me into real trouble"? Aren't we forced to think perhaps there was a little arrogance behind it, not just innocence? Isn't it highly probable Jackson was not thinking, "Isn't this beautiful and aren't I innocent and harmless and childlike", but "Hey, this would get most men my age in trouble, but I'm Michael Jackson. They can't touch me!" Since now letters have come out with damaging details about what was really going on in that bed, aren't his defenders now forced back into the "what's wrong with it, it's all done in the name of love?" defense? And screaming "racism!!" of course, which has already started. And which is palpably absurd when you realize that MJ has spent his whole life fleeing from blackness as he has from adulthood. The MJ Trial which looms ahead of us could have as many resonances as the OJ Trial did in the Nineties. One hopes the justice system comes off looking better. If the defense does try to defend Jackson's conduct on the grounds that even though it is illegal, it shouldn't be, we may be in for a wild ride. If homosexual conduct can go from being a ticket to jail to being a requirement for a marriage license, though, who knows what a California jury might come up with in the the way of "empathetic nullification"? The case for gay marriage stresses that homosexual attraction is love, a love just as real and just as worthy of protection by the state as heterosexual attraction. Well, then, why not the love of a 45-year old billionaire for a 12-year-old dying of cancer? Drawing the line at a particular age, as the state does with statutory rape laws, would have to be exposed as prejudiced, rigid and harsh. After all, don't laws allow underage heterosexuals to get married, with parental consent? Well, didn't MJ's kiddy victims have their parents' approval, for whatever reasons? I smell quagmire.

Gee, maybe there really are some actual men left in Britain!

From the Guardian:

Dear Mr President,

Today you arrive in my country for the first state visit by an American president for many decades, and I bid you welcome.

You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.

I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.

It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.

Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time.
Frederick Forsyth
Novelist

America as Israel

Natan Sharansky has connected Zionism and America-bashing in a particularly convincing column in Commentary (via RealClearPolitics).

No candy today, kids

Gee, what do you know? Al Qaeda attacks Arabs too! But the secretary of the "Organization of the Islamic Conference" said the attacks in Riyadh on the living quarters of foreign workers from Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan and other Arab countries "harmed the image of Muslims and Islam. " Right. Image for whom? The American Street? You guys blew that so long ago it isn't funny. So for whom are these apologists for murderers performing now? Better get those Bush t-shirts while you can!!

Good one
Never thought I'd say this in my days of fanatic military-hating during Vietnam, but I now do understand and appreciate everything the US soldiers are doing over there in Iraq. As usual, Mark Steyn says it best:

In our time, mass slaughter occurs only in places where the West refuses to act - in the Sudan or North Korea - or acts only under the contemptible and corrupting rules of UN "peacekeeping", as at Srebrenica. In Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, technological advantage changes the moral calculus: it makes war the least worst option, the moral choice. At the 11th hour of the 11th day, we should remember those who died in the Great War, but recognise that it could never be "the war to end all wars" and never should.

Huh?
Here it is 12:30 in the morning Wednesday after the polls have closed in Kentucky and Mississippi - OK, they're on Central Time and Tallahassee's on Eastern Time - and I can't get anyone to admit that Haley Barbour has actually won the MS governor's race. Not CNN, not ABC, not even Fox, which isn't as conservative as it's portrayed. It's weird. It's like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Hey, you don't think he's hiding out in the PBS studio in Tallahassee, do you?? Nah. The Dems gave up on KY pretty early, and they were ecstatic about the black beating the Jew in Philly, but do you think they had any idea that George W and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz might have helped Haley Barbour become Governor of Mississippi? When neither Clinton nor McAuliffe nor Dean nor, God help us, Kucinich, can go south of the Mason-Dixon line at the risk of their political lives and those that they're trying to help? The Dems better consider if they can win the 2004 presidential race with Philadelphia and Vermont. 'Cause that's all they've got.

Gasp!
Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle actually has a (gulp!) conservative writing for it! This guy Adam Sparks actually quotes Rush - in a Frisco paper!! Gee, maybe the Bay Area does like to be on the cutting edge! His take on the apparent shift to Republicanism in California could have come right out of the pages of the National Review. Or maybe Reason. It's becoming clear to me that Arnold is not just any old Republican. He may steal all the lifestyle issues from the Dems, leaving them with hardscrabble Hillary- and Nader-style neo-Puritanism. That doesn't win elections. The true right wing - from Buchanan to Pat Robertson - won't like it one bit, but that's also OK with me. Welcome to the rational world of Adam Sparks, Frisco!

Laser hellos
Looks like laser weapons are going to happen, and not that far in the future. Now if they can get them to the point where they can stop an RPG in mid-flight, before the soldier even knows one's been fired, and he can wear it on his helmet without knowing it's there, we've got something.

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.