Enemy Sues for Peace

"We do not mind offering you a long-term truce with fair conditions that we adhere to," he said.

All the rest is piffle.

This is, indeed, London
This is London has a cranky article about a TV interview with Christopher Lee which includes this somewhat interesting reference to another guest on the referenced program:

The former Coventry City footballer and BBC sports presenter stunned the nation in 1991 by announcing on the show that he was the Son of God.

Wearing a turquoise shell suit, he warned that Britain would be destroyed by floods and earthquakes.

Icke, 53, has not mellowed in the intervening years.

He believes the world is run by 12ft lizards and claims the September 11 attacks and the London bombings are part of a global conspiracy.

Dressed this time in a sober black suit, he told Wogan that Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush are puppets of a sinister network which controls all of our lives.

Next he'll be saying George Bush IS a twelve-foot lizard. Or is it Rove??

If I were a cynic
Niall Ferguson's speculating again, but perhaps not so wildly:

This [wasted diplomatic effort by the EU3] gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India, was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Teheran.

My Vodkapundit comment on the potential nuclear standoff between Iran and Israel:

If I were a cynic I might say the elimination of Iran by Israel and Israel by Iran would solve the two most obstinate problems in the Middle East today. IF I were a cynic.

Boy, I'm glad I'm not a cynic. What a depressing state of mind.

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Pronouncing and denouncing

Samizdata had an interesting thread called "Abolish the Welfare State and restore some Respect":

In the decades before the Welfare State, you depended on the people around you - like landlords, employers, neighbours, etc., above all on your own family - for whatever goodies you managed to get your hands on, and bad behaviour towards these people was punishable, and was punished, with loss of goodies.

And as one gets older, one accumulates pomposity like a coating of moss, so I thought I'd share some:

A society prospers or declines depending on how the majority treats the violent and amoral fraction that always exists. As in the Islamic world and among American blacks, most people are good and honorable, but the violent criminals are too often condoned. US welfare reform in the Nineties had an immediate beneficial effect. Those in the British working class who don't wish to put up with the amoral fraction need support from their government and their culture (I almost said "their betters" naughty me!) instead of the "don't be a troglodyte - anything goes!" mentality that prevails today.

Vodkapundit had a post bloviating about the Chinese discovery of everywhere:

Now the BBC reports a story which, if true, could prove Zheng really did beat Columbus:

A map due to be unveiled in Beijing and London next week may lend weight to a theory a Chinese admiral discovered America before Christopher Columbus.

The map, which shows North and South America, apparently states that it is a 1763 copy of another map made in 1418.

There's just one little problem. The map is an obvious forgery.

I've been daydreaming about this since the days of the Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation. I'm not seriously interested:

One problem I had with "1421" was its claim that the shorelines had changed tremendously since because of global warming. I don't think so.
This goes back to the whole controversy about the Piri Reis map - also "copied from ancient charts" - in that case portolans. Fascinating speculation, but, as VS says, irrelevant to actual history. When we discover Atlantis buried under the Antarctic ice, I may re-read Velikovsky.

Happy conundrum

I'm not too worried about Iran, despite thoughts like this from Stephen Green and his ilk:

If a EU crackdown is attempted, Iran will (credibly) threaten to lob a couple nukes at some target of national interest. The EU cannot credibly respond to such a threat- they lack the capacity.

Should that day come, "I told you so" just won't cut it.

Comment on Vodkapundit:

How do you support an intifada with long-range missiles? The point of insurgencies has always been that they have no center of power to retaliate against. The second Iran gets unequivocally tied to any terrorist movement, Rumsfeld sighs with relief. And if they're not so tied, how can they threaten anyone on the terrorists' behalf?

And I updated thusly: "And when Rumsfeld sighs with relief, many people die!" ah, so true.

MLK day
Ah, Martin Luther King Day! The day every year when I meditate on the good things that African-Americans have brought to American civilization and especially the benefits their history and culture have bestowed on me personally.

Links
This post on Captain's Quarters brings Nicholas deB Katzenbach back to mind:

Now Katzenbach wants America to disavow wiretaps altogether and cynically uses King Day to stump for that position. However, the two situations hardly prove analogous. Today we face an enemy that has already killed thousands of Americans in a sneak attack, using our open communications networks to stage and time the attacks for maximum effectiveness. In order to stop the next attack, we need to have the ability to grab data from those phone sets that have connections to al-Qaeda based on evidence and testimony -- and to do it quickly. The calls that get intercepted cross international boundaries, so domestic calls still require (and get) warrants. The numbers come from captured phones and computer equipment directly tied to terrorists. Under those circumstances, the use of warrantless wiretaps makes sense and has prevented attacks on America, according to one Senator who participated in the briefing sessions from the NSA program.

What is going on this weekend? Cronkite levitates creakily from the edge of the grave:

We had an opportunity to say to the world and Iraqis after the hurricane disaster that Mother Nature has not treated us well and we find ourselves missing the amount of money it takes to help these poor people out of their homeless situation and rebuild some of our most important cities in the United States," he said. "Therefore, we are going to have to bring our troops home."

Right. The hurricane means we should stop fighting terrorists and just forget about 9/11. And no one has put any money into New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hell, more money has been ripped off down there than we spent in Iraq all last year. How many stupidities can Walter pack into one paragraph? I guess he WAS there but he ain't any more. Now NdeBK has to comment on the wiretapping scenario. Why someone might think there was a plan here. A plan to beat Bush about the head and shoulders with implications of needless wiretapping and bigotry. And someone like me might even remember a link between Nicky K and people like Ramzi Clark, PR genius and defender of a certain oppressed totalitarian baby-murderer. A link they share with me. From right around the same time NickyK was contemplating wiretapping MLK - just to teach J. Edgar Hoover a lesson, of course. Say no more.

Tax Blather
Found this thread on Samizdata about living other places, always a favorite topic of mine. This comment:

I thought Americans don't work abroad much because they remain liable for US taxes as well as the local taxes...?

Posted by Ron at January 16, 2006 01:19 PM

started me off on a somewhat ignorant blather/comment:

I believe that for US expatriates foreign tax paid can be offset against US tax due. I'm not even sure that foreign source income is counted. And I suspect British tax, at least, would be more than applicable US tax, although that may just be latent Anglophobism! Perhaps someone with actual expertise can untangle the situation.

I really shouldn't pontificate about important stuff like taxes when I haven't really got a clue, just some notions from talking with Flea about US taxes for expatriates. But I'm just a risk-taker from the word "go".
I do intend to live in Turkey when I retire, so I suppose I should inquire about the tax I will be paying on my Social Security and Florida State Pension payments, assuming I ever get anything from those sources, after the Great Nuclear Exchange with Turkmenistan in 2012. And the more imminent and likely disaster of the Great Pension and Alimony Robbery of 2006 by Miss Maloney.

Enjoying a somewhat sybaritic weekend, I ran across some thoughts on Noodlefood about decimalization and this memory floated up:

As a nine-year old, back in the Fifties, I was enrolled in a British school after having lived in Florida for years. My first test was addition and subtraction of pounds, shillings and pence. And I loved it! Much more interesting than dollars and cents. The added complications of florins and guineas and half-crowns and farthings just made it all seem more human and connected to centuries of fascinating if somewhat bloody history. Because of the prevalence of computers today, decimal currencies are not needed to make calculations easier. Back to the guinea, halfpenny and crown!

They say as you grow older the past comes back more vividly. I can remember the ledger in which I did the calculations for the headmaster, in his office, to see if I was qualified to go into St. George's in Mill Hill. Can't remember his name, but I sure do remember the cane he always carried, which Haynesworth became uncomfortably familiar with every week or so.

Lost comment
Made this comment somewhere, plunked it into my blogger account, saved the post in draft, now I can't remember which blog I was commenting on. Probably Protein Wisdom, but could have been several. Don't feel like rummaging around in people's archives, which one might call blogattics. So here it is ex vacuo:

So, if we go into Iran, is there really any way to make absolutely sure that the libs, after the conquest, cannot sanely say, “They never really had WMDs! Again! They were only ... joking! That’s it! You idiot rednecks don’t know enough about Persian culture to know that when a Persian says “Nuclear Death to Israel” he really means, “Don’t invade us! We don’t really have nukes. And we HATE AlQaeda!”
”
Nah. They’ll say it anyway. But after all this they will really look silly

(For some reason I'm getting weird question-mark-type thingies instead of quote marks in the blog itself. Changing the encoding doesn't appear to help. Maybe this is a Safari idiosyncrasy. Or am I doing something wrong?)

And in this vein, I noticed that Congressman "Scratchy" Murtha and Walter "If I'm not there You Are Not There" Cronkite are trying to take credit for the progress being made in Iraq by proclaiming that we'll have to withdraw all our troops in the next year. Their implication is that Bush never intended to withdraw, he wanted to stay forever, for the oil, don't you know, and the brave standing-up by stand-up guys like Soros and Dean is making him withdraw his terroristic Imperial stormtroopers. Boy does Rove have an easy target now. Cackle!

Slashdot has an interesting thread: Mathematics Skills More in Demand Than Ever about the future of careers that stress math skills. They link to a Business Week article about the future of math. I especially liked this Slashdot comment:

I've always liked math. And, in the past decade, there has been much evidence pointing toward math being a primary component in a better lifestyle. It didn't fully hit me until I was a freshman in college and my computer science courses started crossing paths with my linear algebra courses.

But even in grade school, there was evidence that those in control of mathematics sat a bit higher on the food chain. For instance, I got into an argument with my dad (an independent concrete pourer) when I was in eighth grade. He wanted to build a base for a grain silo and needed to know how many cubic yards of cement was needed. So he was having a hard time computing this. I told him it was (as we all know) pi*radius^2. After much debate, I gave him a piece of graph paper and a compass and told him to draw it and estimate the number of squares. I don't look down on my dad, he just never had an education like I was privileged to have.

And so I slowly started to realize that mathematics were the underlying principle to everything. Maybe you've seen the motion picture Pi and remember the part where the main character has a revelation that everything can be described by math. In my opinion, he was dead right.

Of course,with my IQ obsession, it struck me that the stress on math skills in hiring was pretty close to using IQ for hiring, a tactic that's become absolutely verboten in recent years. So instead of saying, "I need a guy with at least a 140 IQ", why not say, "Quantitative skills at a high level are essential to job performance." Might work out to the same thing. And it would also show the asininity of this quote from the Business Week article, saying that part of the solution is:

...engaging more girls and ethnic minorities in math...

Right. Anyone who thinks girls and minorities who have the needed quantitative skills have been shut out of the job market because of discrimination just hasn't been listening or thinking for the last fifty years.

Mulling over the Mullahs
this thread on The Adventures of Chester is mind-boggling (hey, "boggling" is an acronym of "blogging"! Mind-blogging. Now there's a scary thought!)
The speculation on whether Iran has or soon will have a nuke and what to do about it is as addictive as guessing who will win the Superbowl. And since the ordinary guy knows far less about the offense and defense in Tehran than in Indianapolis or Seattle, anything goes. It's at least a three-sided game, with Israel having slightly different interests and goals. And the presence of our troops in Iraq can be seen as a plus or a minus, a strategic counter or a vulnerability. One thing seems clear. It's a good thing we've gained a lot of knowledge about the Middle East recently, and cleared ourselves some tactical room. It would not be a good thing to go into Iran cold, with Saddam on one side and the Taliban on the other. As I've frequently commented, it's at least possible that if Iran does get the bomb, their thinking will concentrate on their own demise. And they'd better be sure that if they don't have a nuke or an advanced nuke program, they make sure everyone knows they don't and they can prove it. Bluffing didn't work out too well for Saddam. Nor did relying on the French or the UN or the EU. Reality is setting in for the Islamic nutcake side, in the person of George W. Bush. I hate some aspects of the Republican administration. But I am awful glad in this conjunction of terror and stupidity that I don't have John Kerry or Al Gore in the White House. Submandave says it well:

"From a political perspective, *everything* argues against US military action of any but the briefest, most limited variety."

Everything except the foreign policy track record of the man currently in the White House, and a good thing at that. Like him or not, I fail to see how anyone can discount that he does not make empty rhetorical threats against others when it comes to national security and the GWOT. This is one reason I'm sure he's not said a lot directly opposed to Iran's regime. Over the past five years he has established more credibility that the US will follow through on its stated policy than any other president since probably Truman. I think this is especially important in these times. Like many on this thread, I believe that if Bush views the Iranian nuclear potential as a large enough threat he will first clearly declare it as such, give Iran notice that we cannot allow them to attain that capability and then, if nothing changes, follow through to do his best to prevent it from happening.

Bouncy violin

Now there's two words you won't see together too often. But I do have that problem. I'm just starting out playing my violin again after thirty years of procrastination. And I am having a terrible time getting the bow to stay on the strings. It bounces all over the place, making spurious notes and not playing when I want it to. I'm sure it's all a matter of technique and finger strength, which will come in time. But it would be nice to run across a shortcut. I suspect my rosin, the bow, the strings, everything. But I will press on. Already after ten days of playing I feel I'm better and I get real satisfaction from the music. Only the neighbors are less than pleased.

Thinking yourself poor
Noodlefood has a thought or two about poverty and relative deprivation:

So over the next few years, any reasonably well-off American will be expected to feel guilty about the great new gap between "the haves" and "the have-nots" -- where "the haves" are magically blessed with high speed wireless, while "the have-nots" must suffer with the all the slow pains of dial-up. Please, let me get out my world's smallest violin: I'll play a tune or two.

I just got dial-up after having no internet for months. However before that I had broadband for a while. That memory makes me empathetic. And how again is it that the poor will raise themselves out of poverty once they get daily immediate access to Drudge and porn and gambling sites? So I had to gently remind everyone of the ground-breaking Speirs theory of poverty:

Seems to me that once survival level has been achieved, advance toward a better life depends heavily on cognitive ability, that is, IQ. Those left in "poverty" feel accurately that they haven't got much chance to get rich, which they feel would make them happier, because they see that those who achieve more are smarter and more disciplined than they are. And what government program can confer intelligence and discipline? There are ways and means to overachieve, but most people never figure them out.

And that makes sense, right? Poor in IQ terms means, as we have seen, less ability to figure things out.

OT: Just figured out what was wrong with my state bureaucracy office building: no beer machine. How long, oh, Lord, how long??

Dangerous charms

Boy, Nigeria has problems:

A king-elect in a community in Delta State has been arrested and detained by the police for being in possession of two pump action guns, while the regent of the community was also nabbed with an AK 47 rifle, a pump action and dangerous charms.(emphasis added)

Not only do they elect their kings (how exactly does that work?) but their regents have come-hither smiles and winning ways that could be fatal. Or maybe they're talking about voodoo charms - but hey, why do you need anything more after you've got the AK-47 and the shotgun? That's the mojo with the most.
There should be a band with that name: "The Dangerous Charms" appearing tonight with the Bangles.

What, me fret?

Those silly Samizdatistas are all upset about Iran getting a nuclear weapon or two:

Iran made another step forwards towards its long held goal of obtaining nuclear weapons yesterday by restarting its uranium enrichment program.

While Iran's long term strategic goal is quite possibly insane, it must be conceded from a Realpolitik perspective that Iran is playing a very strong hand, and their tactical moves are precise and well executed.
... I personally am very pessimistic about these developments.

But the way I see it, using one's one and only available nuke to waken the sleeping Israeli nuclear tiger is not just insane but impractical. Israel's small. They might miss and hit Damascus or Cairo. Oops. They know this, so I don't fret:

It's not easy, but I'm relatively unworried about the Iranians having a bomb. Pakistan has a bomb. Musharaff could qualify as a "Jew hating fruitloop." India has a bomb. China has a bomb. Is Ahmadinejihadi really THAT into big-time suicide bombing? And for the foreseeable future Israel will have many more bombs than Iran. Which means not just bye-bye Tehran but adieu to the Islamic and especially Arab world in general if the mullahs push the big red button. Assad and Mubarak and the Saudis haven't given any signs of being particularly avid for Paradise quite yet. Maybe they've absorbed the lesson of Star Trek:

Q - Why are there no Muslims on Star Trek?
A - Because it's set in the future.

England continues to carry on
I found this post on Samizdata with reference to the further misadventures of Bliar:

He wants to introduce new laws to regulate anti-social, yobbish behaviour and introduce training (this is not a joke) for particularly wayward parents.
...It may amaze some readers to think that Blair was once thought of as a highly intelligent politician back in the mid-1990s, and there is no doubt that to this day, he remains - on tactics at least - one of the most astute political figures of modern times. In terms of his grasp of human nature, however, he presents a pitiable sight as he grasps for that "eye-catching" gesture.

So I had to kick in this:

Since none of these program proposals have ever worked to actually reduce crime, is it nuts to suspect their real object is to tighten the screws on the innocent law-abider? Just like cameras and gun bans and smoking bans and "congestion charges" and drug laws, they don't attack the actual problem, that's too hard. They just keep making things worse for the average man trying to enjoy life. And the screams of protest are cited to support the delusion that "something's being done". And, just coincidentally of course, they set in place the machinery of a truly repressive state.

This Chronicle article (From Arts and Letters Daily) I found interesting because it's about the detractor of Margaret Mead's, a woman whose reputation needed serious detracting from:

Freeman was convinced that Mead had been duped into believing that Samoa was a sexual Shangri-La. He laid out his argument in two books: Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Westview Press, 1999).

But then I found this:

People with a narcissistic-personality disorder are generally arrogant, exploitative, and unempathetic, while exhibiting a grandiose sense of self-importance, observes Mr. Caton. They are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success or brilliance, and they believe that they are "special" and can be understood only by other special people.

Now who does that remind me of? And I note that the article finds no logical basis on which to attack Freeman's analysis of Mead, only the imputation of nuttiness. Well, for liberals, that's usually as much as they can manage and they think that's plenty. Unfortunately, they're sometimes right. But not always.